up my idiosyncrasies | Richibi's Weblog

the judgment of richibi

___________

at the end of a long overdue visit to
a friend’s home the other night, she
asked me, did you notice their facial
skin, which of us do you think had
the best complexion, you can be
honest, she insisted

we had intended to watch the finals
of a voice competition we’d both
been following, over a glass of
wine, or two, each, when a friend
called, from, essentially, the door,
with a second friend in tow on their
way to a concert in the city

the friend of the friend, a lovely,
effervescent woman, from Poland
originally, with a story to tell of
growing up behind the Iron
Curtain, was also a beautician in
a spa she runs in a nearby resort
city

the first friend, equally effervescent,
had been telling my own friend of the
intervening events since last they’d
met, while I lapped up, more or less
by default, this other alternate Soviet
reality, perfumed as it was irresistibly
throughout with the friend’s
friend’s mellifluous Polish accent

I hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever
to skin quality apart from accepting
a spa courtesy card for my mother, who
would, naturally, be interested

my dearest dear, I answered, I am
not going anywhere near that one,
look what happened to Paris when
he fell into that trap

what happened, she asked

the Trojan War, I answered

the Trojan War, she asked

Paris was the son of Priam and Hecuba,
king and queen of Troy, I explained, he,
one of its princes, he’d been awarded
Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta,
by Aphrodite, goddess of love, he’d
chosen Aphrodite to be the most
beautiful among the goddesses, that
was her prize

but let me step back a little, I
interrupted, you need more context

Eris, goddess of discord, had not been
invited to the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis, I recounted, he a Greek hero,
she a sea nymph, parents both later to
Achilles, hero at Troy, slain, incidentally,
by that very Paris, you can read all about
it in the “Iliad“, I highly recommended

during the festivities, Eris tosses a
golden apple among the assembled
divinities, which reads

“to the fairest”

you can hear the stirrings of the much
later Sleeping Beauty, incidentally, in
this earliest of tellings, reconfigured
from the original myth

Athena, Aphrodite and Hera, all assume
they are meant to receive the apple, and
ask Zeus, father and husband, to decide

you’ll have to get someone else to touch
that one, he replies, much as I did

and delegates the task, with the help
of Hermes, the messenger god, to the
the guileless Paris, son of Priam and
Hecuba, Trojan king and queen, as I
said, he, Paris, prince

Paris was tending sheep on Mount Ida
when, fatefully, by a spring, the nubile
goddesses appeared vaunting their
unadorned splendours, stark, flagrant,
manifest, to the musical accompaniment
of the Graces, Faith, Hope and Charity,
also the Horae, the Hours, goddesses
of the seasons, maidens all in complicit
attendance

Paris, mere mortal, would never have
stood a chance

but to sweeten, nevertheless, the
deal, were it not yet sufficiently sweet,
Hera promises Paris Europe and Asia
should he choose her, Athena,
conquest in war, Aphrodite, goddess
of love, was set to give him the most
beautiful woman in the world

Paris opts for Aphrodite, and is
awarded Helen, the face that
launched the thousand proverbial
ships, the wife, not incidentally,
and completely inconveniently, of
the King of Sparta, Menelaus, who
attacks thereupon Troy with his
brother, Agamemnon, and their
allied legions, to reclaim
Menelaus’, whether abducted, or
indeed unfaithful, wife, no one
has ever conclusively determined,
Paris having been Paris

no one won

no one survived but Odysseus,
but that’s another story

I walked home shortly afterwards,
crossed my own Aegean, ten or
eleven blocks back, red lights,
nighttime traffic, watched the voice
competition I’d taped in any case at
home, whooped it up along with my
favourite contestants, drank to my
narrow miss, had gotten away, I
considered, with the equivalent of
Europe and Asia, if only in my
mind

beauty might be in the eye of the
beholder, I surmised, but it can
have its thorny indeed
consequences

Richard

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November 12, 2016

“Medea” – Euripides

“Medea“ (1898)

Alphonse Mucha

____________

catching up on my Greek tragedies
for a course I’m following online, I
happened upon this marvel

Medea, by Euripides, was written
in 431 BCE, the next significant
playwright in world history was
Shakespeare, the Dark Ages had
been “Dark” indeed, it took a
Renaissance, in fact a new
flowering of Greek and Roman
arts and institutions to get us
moving forward again, you’ll
notice how much of Euripides
there is in Shakespeare, not to
mention in the French Classicists,
Racine and Corneille

none of these, incidentally, have
yet been equalled, never mind
surpassed, except by maybe
Anton Checkov, the superb
Russian playwright

Zoe Caldwell won the 1982 Tony
Award for best actress for her
incarnation of Medea, she was
up against Katharine Hepburn
and Geraldine Page, no less,
among other distinguished
luminaries, this is, in other
words, no ordinary performance,
watch her turn a mere script,
however incandescent, into a
set of spoken arias worthy of
the most celebrated divas

everyone else in the play is also
strong, excellent, impeccable

note the application of the three
unities, of time, place, and action,
there is no set change, everything
takes place within 24 hours,
according to the dictates of the
very plot, the action surrounds
the expulsion from Corinth of
Medea and her two, and Jason’s,
sons, the restrictions of the form
put the tension, the drama, utterly
in the hands of the poet, the
success of the work depends not
on stunts, special effects, but on
words, poetry

Aristotle says in his “Poetics“,
section I, part VI, “The Spectacle has, indeed, an
emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts,
it is the least artistic, and connected least with the
art of poetry. … Besides, the production of
spectacular effects depends more on the art
of the stage machinist than on that of the poet.”

the three unities have no room,
therefore, for “Spectacle“, their
product must be reflections of
the poet’s humanity, heart,
straight through, if s/he can,
to ours

Richard

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October 30, 2016

what is poetry

“The Poetess“ (1940)

Joan Miró

_____

when Aristotle “proceeds to declare the
parameters of “Poetry” for the ages“, his
definitions of the various poetic
“manner[s] or mode[s] of imitation”
have already been established, his
categorizations are not unlike Darwin’s
categorizations of the species during
a much later age, Aristotle was a natural
scientist much more than he was our
notion of an abstract philosopher, he
traded in facts rather than in the
esoteric musings that Plato, for
instance, pursued, Virtue, Justice,
the Good, his conclusions were more
verifiable

Kant, incidentally, is also famous for
following a similar form of investigation
as he attempted, nearly, for most,
inscrutably, to categorize the elements
of our faculty of understanding

a side story

Kant had stated that at birth we already
have within our perceptual framework
implicit understanding of space and
time, these are not learned through
experience but are already
incorporated within us, he said

many years ago, coming out of a
week-long coma, not knowing where
I was but alone, at that point even
just my consciousness, cause my
body, were it there, would’ve been
under the immaculate white sheets
I could see that would’ve been
shielding my legs

I looked around, could gather motes
upon rays of light that were entering
from what appeared to be a window
on the right, behind sheer white
curtains stirred by a soft breeze,
whirling the shimmering particles
alive in the light before me like
miniature spinning galaxies moving
at the pace of their own infinity

there was no sound

white walls around me stood utterly
still in the purview of my perception,
a door, also white, stood opposite
me on the opposite wall

where am I, I wondered, could this
be heaven, an afterlife, I might’ve
died, I thought, marvelling, no fear,
regret, nothing other than curiosity,
absorption, fascination

I tried to answer my question, where
am I, two dimensions, I figured
after having watched Terence Stamp
exiled by Marlon Brando to a flat
intergalactic window pane in
“Superman“, I hadn’t excluded this
eventuality, however ingloriously
transcendental, as a possible
outcome, I might be in a world with
only two dimensions, height and
width, no depth yet without more
investigation, experience

ergo, Kant, I concluded, was wrong,
our knowledge of space is not inborn
but a product of time and thought like
everything else

later, the white door on the far wall
opened, and a nurse walked in, also,
incidentally, in incandescent white,
and I understood I was alive

Aristotle suggested that our original
double instincts towards poetry were
our propensity to imitate, children
imitating their parents’ even
idiosyncratic mannerisms, for
instance

and rhythm, repetition, preludes to
order, coherence

those two

poetry, I read, is expression
reflecting the heartbeat, essentially,
in all its myriad representations

Richard

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October 25, 2016

“To One Who Loved Not Poetry” – Sappho

“In The Days Of Sappho“ (1904)

John William Godward

_________

if I digressed towards “Tragedy” in my
most recent chat about poetry, I perhaps
blurred the fact that there were several
kinds of poetry Aristotle was speaking
about, but that all had the essential
elements of both rhythm and
representation, the idea that a poem
was a reproduction of something
that was not itself, a retelling

some of these rhythmic utterances
were “tragedies“, others were mere,
indeed, verses without much of an
agenda other than being the replication
of something with rhythm the poet
wanted to promote

o, what a beautiful morning, two dactyls
and a trochee, for instance, the poetic
meters that describe – ta da da, ta da da,
dah dah – the natural music of that
exclamation

and that can be a poem

here’s one of Sappho‘s, who lived
sometime between 630 and 612 BCE
to around 570 of the same, of course,
era, famous for being from the island
of Lesbos, yes, Lesbos

it is “To One Who Loved Not Poetry“

“Thou liest dead, and there will be no memory left behind
Of thee or thine in all the earth, for never didst thou bind
The roses of Pierian streams upon thy brow; thy doom
Is now to flit with unknown ghosts in cold and nameless gloom.”

so there, she says, I think, and all in iambic
octameter, eight times ta dah

I preferred not to use one of her more
flirtatious, therefore controversial,
utterances, for fear of skewing to
another, however compelling,
discussion

maybe next time

Richard

psst: the Pierian Spring was a spring in
Macedonia sacred to the Muses,
the source of inspiration for
science, then, as well as the arts

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October 7, 2016

what is a poet

“Flowers In a Brown Vase“ (1904)

Odilon Redon

_______

if I imagine myself to be a poet, what
is a poet, I have to ask, or, more
accurately, what do I imagine a poet
to be

cause this is a two-way street, I am
defined by the word I inhabit, but I
define the word as well, redefining
it, essentially, to fit my etymological
purpose

my moral purpose I leave to myself,
in a completely other ideological
dimension

if I can

a poet then is one who writes, paints,
composes, manifests, in a word,
creates, poems

what is a poem

a poem is where beauty and truth
combine to create harmony,
coalescence, to the point of one’s
admiration, enchantment, wonder,
enlightenment, in incremental steps
leading to very transcendence, the
feeling that something has moved
in your heart

just a bouquet of flowers will do it,
for instance

that’s what I think

Richard

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October 2, 2016

on truth

“Truth Unveiled By Time“ (1645-1652)

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

_______

a cousin once said to me about
his father, that he was as honest
as the day is long

though I didn’t say a word, this
was emphatically not my opinion

but I concluded nevertheless that,
once again, truth is in the eye of
the beholder, not, of course, truth
truth, the one we all would like to
believe must exist, but the one
which is the only one that we can
work with, our own

but what is true

no one knows but for personal
intimations, truth must be, in other
words, our individual constructions,
a kind of existential prosetry, a
consistent story we tell ourselves,
a walking shadow, a tale / told by
an idiot, according to Macbeth, full
of sound and fury, / signifying
nothing

I imagine I am a poet

imagine

Richard

psst: prosetry is poetry written in prose,
see “up my idiosyncracies – a bio“

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September 13, 2016

“The Man I Love” – George and Ira Gershwin

“Apollon” (1937)

Charles Despiau

_______

when my heart is broken, I learn the
words to torch songs, and wallow in
my misery until the poignancy of the
poetry seduces me and I revel in its
caress

for a while now I’ve been yodelling
along with Hank Williams, who,
incidentally, sings in my key, though
the accurate reach of his far-flung
notes can be tricky

but today, I inadvertently slipped into
this Sophie Tucker classic enough to
change my tune

watch this wonderful rendition of
“The Man I Love“ in a version you’ll
never forget for both its originality
and its great humanity

Richard

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September 3, 2016

” Shakespeare and Politics”- Professor Paul Cantor

“On The Waterfront. Set Design For Shakespeare’s Drama

“The Merchant Of Venice”“ (1920)

Alexandre Benois

________

though this recommendation might seem

erudite, esoteric, indeed eccentric, if not

even improbable, I vaunt this invaluable

series to the stars, Professor Paul Cantor,

of the University of Virginia, speaking from

Harvard, however, here, shines such

glorious light on the already extraordinary

Shakespeare so as to make him the equal

of very Beethoven, poets of nearly

supernatural ability

Professor Paul Cantor views Shakespeare

through Shakespeare’s understanding of

politics, comparing his political settings –

commercial Venice, imperial Rome,

medieval and Renaissance England,

Denmark under a Christian king – to not

only shed light on those individual

political systems alive at a time when

democracy was being born, but as well

on Shakespeare’s own unexpectedly

probing philosophical insights in the

matter of governance, right up there

with John Locke and Machiavelli

who’d ‘o thunk it

the professor is engaging throughout, his

information entirely absorbing, you’ll come

out a new wo/man

the lectures are not short at an hour, twenty
minutes, I break to powder my nose, get a
a glass of wine, even answer the phone to,
of course, preferred only parties, but have
been returning addictively daily

it’s a heady indeed addiction

Richard

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August 11, 2016

to Socrates – on monotheism‏

“The Sacrifice of Isaac“ (1598)

Caravaggio

________

by very definition, the inevitable

result of monotheism, Socrates,

is war, if there is one authority it

will eventually be opposed by a

contrary, however picayune,

however trivial, opinion, see the

Protestant Reformation, see Islam,

for instance, now

after which there is disintegration

before Christianity, there were gods,

a pantheon of them symbolically

alive among the rivers, the trees,

the mountains, read Ovid for an

exhilarating description, wars were

waged for territory, not conscience

Judaism, the religion of the Jews,

evolved for their own existence a

deity, Yahweh, who was their one

god, disdainful of foreign others,

an uncharacteristic attitude among

other religions then, becoming one

of the very first monotheistic, and

consequently existentially

compromised faiths, if not the

first

the intent was to rally ideological

support among its adherents so

that they could protect the lands

of Israel and Judah, their ancestral

homes, as they would have it, a

sanctification of the territorial

principle

their Bible, the Torah, a vengeful

work, and the basis for the

Christian Old Testament,

demanded of its followers

unblinking and cruel allegiance,

the sacrifice of Isaac, for instance,

a father required to sacrifice his

own son, however might it ‘ve

been at the last minute averted by

the intercession of an angel sent

by that very Lord

Christ came along to turn the other

cheek

which didn’t last long

indeed Montesquieu, an early

philosopher of the French

Enlightenment, tells of the

King’s librarian of Chinese

texts, who had been converted

to Catholicism in China, but

who was nonplussed upon his

arrival in Christian France to find

that the French did not do onto

others as they would have them

do unto themselves, nor did they,

more catastrophically, turn the

other cheek

for that matter see what Christian

Europe did to the Americans

Christ’s own followers, once they’d

achieved political prominence, after,

admittedly, 300 years of persecution

by the prevailing Roman authorities,

set their own deity, God, on high,

indeed beyond the rivers, the

mountains, the trees into the very

ineffable, the inscrutable abstract,

and squelched any opposition for

the next thousand and some years,

the philosophical underpinnings of

which was the work of your

contemporary, Plato, Socrates, his

ideal of the Ideal

Augustine signed those recalibrated

papers with his “City of God“, it took

the Renaissance to make a dent in its

armour, and another several centuries

to declare the Christian God dead,

Time magazine in the ’60s, on the

heels of Nietzsche‘s nihilistic

pronouncement some 70 years earlier,

that God had exited history

what we are left with, Socrates, is every

wo/man for hirself, therefore the Age of

Human Rights, for better or for worse,

otherwise many of us would’ve been

guillotined, burnt at the stake, stoned

to death, by now

what do you think

I’ll bet I can tell, you think that every

wo/man owes allegiance to what s/he

believes in, even to inexorable death,

however impractical, unfortunate, or

fateful, if your exemplary life has

anything to say about it

cheers

Richard

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July 30, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – Plato‏

“The School Of Athens“ (1510-1511)

Raphael

_____

he sounds just like you, my friend said,

who’d bought me the works of Plato,

for C***mas maybe, or my birthday, or

maybe just because he knew I’d very

much appreciate them

we were reading him together, as is

always my inclination, his Meno

according to my calculations,

Socrates was doing most of the

talking, with Meno, a Sophist

acolyte, a school of philosophy then,

the Sophists, which claimed it could

prove anything by using the right

arguments

lawyers, of course, ensued, politicians

and rhetoric, the art of proving anything

by using the right arguments

philosophy had reached a structural,

indeed an existential, impasse, why,

they therefore wondered, philosophy

wherein it entered a phase of moral

speculation, Stoicism, Epicureanism,

Scepticism, Cynicism, and can you

blame them, theories about the

stars, the moon, the world, even

matter itself, had become so

questionable, was it fire, air, water,

atoms, at its source, who knew

I thought so too, I said, and told

him that Plato’s were the first

texts I studied in philosophy when

I entered university, that’s where I

learned to talk like that, philosophy

from the scratch, as my German

teacher would’ve said, which is to

say, from its very beginnings,

whence I could view, I figured, the

evolution of received wisdom in

Western culture

I was young then, the young have

such dreams

my father had been agnostic, ever

asking questions, though we were

being raised Catholic, my sister

and I, on account of our mother

tongue, our entire community,

having been historically linked

with that religion, and cause my

parents wanted us to be educated

in French

an existentialist crisis would

eventually follow, I intuited, as

indeed it did, so I majored in

philosophy

Socrates taught me to ask

questions, that no one had

all the answers

Plato, usurping his master’s voice,

created the paradigm for our present

version of a Divinity, and Its Paradise

there is an ideal version of any

item we might consider, he spouted,

an ideal table, for instance, exists

of which every material table is an

imperfect example

to virtue, love, beauty, truth, he

applied the same principle, which

early erudite Catholics, Augustine,

Thomas Aquinas, for instance, and

others, despite rejecting all of the

other Greek cultural achievements,

appropriated in order to bolster their

impression of God, the ideal of the

Ideal

this lasted uncontested for just

over a thousand years

for a thousand years our salvation

had been extraterrestrial,

supranatural, this, our very,

perhaps only, existence, an

imperfect reflection of somewhere

else an ideal, a mere simulacrum,

we were, a metaphor

Socrates had only asked questions,

what is virtue, what is justice, what

is beauty, truth

Plato presumed to have known the

answers

Aristotle is making a comeback,

whose method, in opposition to

his contemporaneous forebear,

was much more like Charles

Darwin‘s, working from the facts,

which proved then, and are

proving still now, to be multifarious,

diverse, astonishing, and nearly

enough to make you believe in

God/dess again, this time, however,

through the back door

or in a multiplicity, a panoply, a

very pavilion, even, of natural

deities, otherwise known as

angels, for better or for worse

God/dess bless, or angels

Richard

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Category: up my idiosyncrasies

“On The Waterfront. Set Design For Shakespeare’s Drama

“The Merchant Of Venice”“ (1920)

________

though this recommendation might seem

erudite, esoteric, indeed eccentric, if not

even improbable, I vaunt this invaluable

series to the stars, Professor Paul Cantor,

of the University of Virginia, speaking from

Harvard, however, here, shines such

glorious light on the already extraordinary

Shakespeare so as to make him the equal

of very Beethoven, poets of nearly

supernatural ability

Professor Paul Cantor views Shakespeare

through Shakespeare’s understanding of

politics, comparing his political settings –

commercial Venice, imperial Rome,

medieval and Renaissance England,

Denmark under a Christian king – to not

only shed light on those individual

political systems alive at a time when

democracy was being born, but as well

on Shakespeare’s own unexpectedly

probing philosophical insights in the

matter of governance, right up there

with John Locke and Machiavelli

who’d ‘o thunk it

the professor is engaging throughout, his

information entirely absorbing, you’ll come

out a new wo/man

it’s a heady indeed addiction