Meinongianisms

Extra Pound Perambulates

Once as he ambled through Meinong's odd jungle,
Extra Pound encountered there a great bungle
Of two or three or five or four
Ontically unwanted objects or more,
Adding up to as much as a mungle!

Extra Pound's Mornings

Can truth be told about a fictional character:

Extra Pound considered the New York Public Library's architecture especially
offensive and thus visited the architects almost every day to shout at them.

A Missing Scrap

Exchange of Views Typical of Ms. Professor Fringemon:

Ms. Professor Fringemon states: "I can't write you a recommendation."

I ask: "Why not?"

Ms. Professor Fringemon says: "I can't trust your work."

I ask: "Why not?"

Ms. Professor Fringemon explains: "Among the thousands of paper scraps with writing on them, you missed one. Luckily, the same writing was on another scrap, which you didn't miss, so I was able to access the material myself."

Murakami as Journalist

On Monday, March 20, 1995, five members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo released the poison gas sarin on the Tokyo subway system:

"I have no physical symptoms, but psychologically there's this burden . . . . It takes positive thinking to overcome fear, otherwise you'll carry around this victim mentality forever."

Sarin is twenty-six times more deadly than cyanide, and Murakami details the story.

Milton: Books are not absolutely dead things . . .

John Milton

I borrowed from at least two different writings by Milton and at least a couple more not by Milton in composing this sonnet below, which is in the series of poems I've called the Writing Block series. In order to make this more fun, let's see which readers can find the sources to the poem below:

Not Books Alone

Also is letter not completely dead,
But in the vial of the living word
Sustained is law that oft soundeth absurd,
Provoking object that, provoking, led

To choiceless choice, for reason is but choice,
And Satan quick did grasp the naked truth,
That Eve and Adam, much to their great ruth,
Grasped naked, that reasonless meant the Voice

To excite voiced obedience: "Now choose
Life" from the Tree of Life and live by faith
Sustained through grace, or so He sayeth,

Yet still I fear can this salvation lose,
Though grace hath promised that she ever stayeth,
For gaze on Lucifer, who ever strayeth.

There it is, a sonnet in process, which might or might not be finished. I generally keep tinkering on my poems forever . . .

An idle thought

Ben in an Idle Moment

Benjamin Franklin says:

"Be always ashamed to catch thyself idle."

Nay. Be always proud that one is attentive enough to catch oneself idle!

I see, said the blind man . . .

Well-Digger Done
Cross Eyes
if
Double Image
Desired

"Well done is better than well said," said the welldigger well, his work well done.

Postmodern Postindustrial Posted Insight

Elevators and Escalators

"An elevator is more peaceful than an escalator."

Why?

The former lifts you up, whereas the latter makes the bad worse.

Sportsmanship: What They're Really Thinking?

Be Sort of Sporting

(Since You Can't Be Winning)
Google Images

You can't win 'em all . . . loser.

This attitude brought to you by Suspicious Minds™.

Love of Money: Bad Aphoristic Couplet No. 42

Golden Key
Google Images

"A golden key can open any door"
Is ever wrong about that truth, you know'r.

                             - Anonymous

Another Twisted Proverb!

Google Images

Here's a discrete bit of knowledge to keep discreetly to yourself:

Proverbial Knowledge

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

Re-memorize this, and know when the ledge is too narrow!

Update: Yes, I've edited the line.

Delingpole on the Virtue of Clarity in Poetry

James Delingpole

In the article "What you learn when you learn a poem by heart," (The Spectator, September 10, 2016), James Delingpole tells us that, "Like the writer [of the poem], you're compelled to weigh each word" and thereby clarify the poem for yourself, which is a good thing . . . except:

Alan Bennett . . . has a . . . sophisticated take on this [issue of clarity] in . . . . a 1990 Channel 4 series called Poetry In Motion and I urge you to track down a copy, because his aperçus are quite brilliant. He writes: 'An artist can be diminished by his virtues and one of [John] Betjeman's virtues is clarity. However much the reader welcomes clarity, some of the most memorable moments in poetry occur when it isn't clear what the poet is talking about. Auden has many such moments, but Betjeman never, because he is always sure, and that's the penalty of being lucid.'

Exactly! A perfectly lucid aperçu!

Proof of INYT Editing Fail

Just in case anyone doubted my accuracy, or even my veracity, here's a photo to back up yesterday's blogpost on the egregious typo of "On" for "One"!

A Woman Stands . . .

A woman stands next to a door . . .

Photo by Chance Cha, Reuters

Newsweek

Newsweek, reporting the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts in this article of April 23rd, 2014:

A woman stands next to a door inside the headquarters of Alibaba in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, April 23, 2014.

A woman standing next to a door is apparently big news in China.

Back to Havel - Ideology

Havel with Still Another Cigarette
Google Images

I'm still reflecting on Vaclav Havel's essay "The Power of the Powerless," thinking about "Living within the Truth." Consider its opposite, the mirror image of living within ideology:

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo.

Living within an ideology is thus a means of avoiding the truth that one should recognize and that exists even if unrecognized.

But how does one know that one is living within an ideology?

Havel: More on Truth

Havel with Another Cigarette

Google Images

I've been very busy these past few days and have thus not read enough of Havel's essay "The Power of the Powerless" to understand what he means by "truth," so I used a search function to locate the following:

[L]iving within the truth has more than a mere existential dimension (returning humanity to its inherent nature), or a noetic dimension (revealing reality as it is), or a moral dimension (setting an example for others). It also has an unambiguous political dimension. If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth.

As I thought - and noted in yesterday's post - Havel "seems to mean something richer than coherence and correspondence understandings" of truth.

More another time . . .

Havel on Truth

Hero with a Cigarette

Google Images

In his essay "The Power of the Powerless," Havel asks toward the end of part seven, "How does the power of truth operate?" He begins his answer in part eight:

INDIVIDUALS can be alienated from themselves only because there is something in them to alienate. The terrain of this violation is their authentic existence. Living the truth is thus woven directly into the texture of living a lie. It is the repressed alternative, the authentic aim to which living a lie is an inauthentic response. Only against this background does living a lie make any sense: it exists because of that background. In its excusatory, chimerical rootedness in the human order, it is a response to nothing other than the human predisposition to truth. Under the orderly surface of the life of lies, therefore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims, of its hidden openness to truth.

The singular, explosive, incalculable political power of living within the truth resides in the fact that living openly within the truth has an ally, invisible to be sure, but omnipresent: this hidden sphere. It is from this sphere that life lived openly in the truth grows; it is to this sphere that it speaks, and in it that it finds understanding. This is where the potential for communication exists. But this place is hidden and therefore, from the perspective of power, very dangerous. The complex ferment that takes place within it goes on in semidarkness, and by the time it finally surfaces into the light of day as an assortment of shocking surprises to the system, it is usually too late to cover them up in the usual fashion. Thus they create a situation in which the regime is confounded, invariably causing panic and driving it to react in inappropriate ways.

One hears echoes of existentialism, but Havel differs from, for example, Sartre, in that Sartre does not bind authenticity to truth, which leads to his nihilism - though I'm no expert on Sartre and could be misinterpreting the man.

But what does Havel mean by "truth." He seems to mean something richer than coherence and correspondence understandings. I'll have to finish reading his essay and report back . . .

C. S. Lewis on Imagination and Truth

C. S. Lewis
Wikipedia

Here, in the final paragraph of Lewis's essay "Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare" (complete on pdf), is something to ruminate on:

It will have escaped no one that in such a scale of writers the poets will take the highest place; and among the poets those who have at once the tenderest care for old words and the surest instinct for the creation of new metaphors. But it must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself. I said at the outset that the truth we won by metaphor could not be greater than the truth of the metaphor itself; and we have seen since that all our truth, or all but a few fragments, is won by metaphor. And thence, I confess, it does follow that if our thinking is ever true, then the metaphors by which we think must have been good metaphors. It does follow that if those original equations, between good and light, or evil and dark, between breath and soul and all the others, were from the beginning arbitrary and fanciful -- if there is not, in fact, a kind of psycho-physical parallelism (or more) in the universe -- then all our thinking is nonsensical. And so, admittedly, the view I have taken has metaphysical implications. But so has every view.

I came across this quote by chance, and I've had time only to skim the essay, so I have nothing significant to say about this . . . but I wanted to save it for further reflection on the relation of truth to metaphor.

I can add that Lewis offers some good advice on writing a couple of pages earlier:

[H]e who would increase the meaning and decrease the meaningless verbiage in his own speech and writing, must do two things. He must become conscious of the fossilized metaphors in his words; and he must freely use new metaphors, which he creates for himself. The first depends upon knowledge, and therefore on leisure; the second depends on a certain degree of imaginative ability. The second is perhaps the more important of the two: we are never less the slaves of metaphor than when we are making metaphor, or hearing it new made.

Good advice, as I said, and connected -- as in everything Lewis wrote -- with his larger views on imagination, reason, and truth.

A Life: Fact, Fiction, Faction, Friction . . .

Karl Ove Knausgaard
Photographer Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center
New York Times

Some days ago, I posted an entry on an article by Professor Eli Park Sorensen (Seoul National University) concerning 'true' and 'false' autobiography that introduced the strange, troubling case of one unusual man's 'autobiography':

Binjamin Wilkomirski's "Fragments: Memories of a Childhood 1939-1948" provides an intriguing example of this problematic[, namely, how to define the genre of autobiography]. Written from the perspective of a very young child, the text was immediately hailed by numerous critics and scholars as an exemplary Holocaust memoir upon its release in 1995. When it was demonstrated some years later that Wilkomirski's text was in fact a fabrication -- i.e. when it was proved beyond doubt that the author was not a Holocaust survivor; that he had spent the war years not in Auschwitz but in Switzerland; and that he was not even Jewish -- the author withdrew from public, and his memoir was removed from the bookshelves.

What makes this case so compelling is that Wilkomirski seemed to have been genuinely convinced of the authenticity of his story -- a tragic or tragically deluded figure, rather than a deliberate fraud. Years before writing his book, Wilkomirski had been seeing a psychiatrist with whom he managed to "recover" a series of fragmented memories that kept troubling him. Wilkomirski attempted to reconstruct these traumatic, incoherent and hazy memories by voraciously reading Holocaust memoirs and history books, as well as undertaking several research trips to Poland and Latvia; all this, he claimed, to confirm that what he vaguely remembered from his childhood was indeed real.

By the time he wrote "Fragments," Wilkomirski possessed a considerable knowledge of Holocaust history, having amassed a vast library of reference material related to the period. Retrospectively, one might say that whereas his trauma seems genuine, he discovered the wrong autobiography, someone else's life. (Eli Park Sorensen, "Fraudulent memoirs and the autobiographical pact," Korea Herald, June 16, 2013)

In effect, Wilkomirski wrote a work of fiction, thinking that he was writing an autobiography. By contrast, it seems, another writer, Karl Ove Knausgaard, has written a work of autobiography, thinking that he was writing fiction:

Book 1 of Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle" -- published in English last year -- begins with an arrestingly beautiful reflection on death which moves seamlessly into the life of a troubled child . . . . Just as Book 1 of "My Struggle" was about death and family, so too is this second volume, subtitled "A Man in Love." In it, the master theme of death remains hauntingly present, but it comes to be paired with another: birth and what precedes it. While "A Man in Love" tells of the rapture and intoxication of love, it also turns a cold and at times clinical eye on romantic ecstasy and the marital equation, relating in painstaking -- at points ­agonizing -- detail the fading of the first flush of love, the cooling and contracting of feeling.

Whereas Book 1 was concerned with childhood and adolescence, with learning what death is and what living can be, Book 2 centers on what its narrator calls "the middle of life." He is careful to point out that while his age (mid-30s to 40) reflects a chronological or probabilistic midpoint, he means the midst of life as much as its midpoint. He is not only well advanced in life, he is surrounded and at times submerged by it, with a growing family: a wife and three small children, each wonderful, each with problems, each with demands. And he is, as we all are, in the midst of life's minutiae -- from cigarette rolling to coffee drinking, diaper changing to dish washing. This wealth of hyper-realistic detail places us in the midst of a life, and gives relief to its moments of passion and despair, insight and confusion, anger and love. Not only this, however, it also presents to the reader the real struggle: how to take all this shifting, teeming minutiae and in it find, and give, meaning . . . .

[I]mmediately striking . . . is . . . the ways in which fiction is born of fact, and the question whether this is fiction at all . . . . [T]he narrator of "My Struggle" has the same name as the author and seems to have lived much the same life, to have been preoccupied by much the same concerns and to be, as . . . narrator, in search of a subject for his story, which subject turns out to be that very search . . . . Knausgaard, it appears, has not [changed a great deal -- invented or amalgamated places . . . , people . . . and events] -- and this has led to threats of legal action on the part of family members and a level of national and international attention such that a number of Norwegian companies have declared Knausgaard-free days during which debate is to be suspended in the name of some modicum of productivity. (Leland de la Durantaye, "Inside Story: Book 2 of 'My Struggle,' by Karl Ove Knausgaard," New York Times, June 21, 2013)

These two books, Wilkomirski's and Knausgaard's, are apparently opposites, yet also twins, entwined by the same two questions: is this fact, or is this fiction; is this fiction, or is this fact? Wilkomirski's memories are not his own, so the early life he constructed, and believed in, is fiction, yet the memories are filled with facts from his extensive reading of holocaust literature and are therefore in some sense factual; Knausgaard's fiction is his own life, so the fictional work he has constructed, and believed, perhaps, to be fiction, is an extensively factual account, despite its aim as fiction, and it thus perhaps qualifies as memoir, autobiography. These two books converge, subjected to scrutiny focused by the two questions, perhaps because they are not quite what they claim to be.

Incidentally, there's yet another, somewhat disturbing, if superficial, connection between the two writings -- Wilkomirski believed himself to have written a book of his experience as a victim of Nazi persecution, and the Norwegian title of Knausgaard's book is, provocatively, perhaps offensively, Min Kamp, precisely the Norwegian translation of the German title Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, both meaning "My Struggle" . . .

Eli Park Sorensen on 'True' Autobiography, Plus a Few of My Own Thoughts

Google Images

Google Images

Professor Eli Park Sorensen has written another informative literary-critical article for the Korea Herald, "Fraudulent memoirs and the autobiographical pact" (June 16, 2013). Here are the first four paragraphs:

According to the literary scholar Philippe Lejeune, autobiographical texts rest on the assumption "that there is identity of name between the author (such as he figures, by his name, on the cover), the narrator of the story, and the character who is being talked about." This constitutes what one could call "the basic grammar" of the genre of autobiography, or, as Lejeune puts it, the "autobiographical pact" established among narrator and reader.

Solid as this definition may seem, several critics have pointed out the unintended ambiguity inherent in Lejeune's definition. For what do we actually mean by "identity"? That there is a discrepancy, however infinitesimal, between the writing self and the written self goes without saying (Facebook comes to mind) -- but how large may this discrepancy be before the text ceases to be autobiographical?

One typically thinks of the autobiography as a genre of remembering. As the literary scholar Linda Anderson argues, however, the genre also promotes a narrative desire of "becoming, within the realm of the symbolic, one's own progenitor, of assuming authorship of one's life." In this perspective, autobiography involves less a process of remembering past events; rather, it constitutes an attempt to actively seek out -- and thus become -- the person I really am or ought to be, but perhaps never became. The autobiographical text thus becomes a search for the authentic life. Perhaps one could even say that this is one of the main reasons why people write autobiographies in the first place; to show the world who they really are.

If the autobiographical text simultaneously involves a process of remembering events as well as a desire to discover a self that was never fully articulated -- quite often two conflicting impulses -- it resists clear and straightforward genre definitions like the one proposed by Lejeune. On the other hand, if one cannot define -- in a clear and straightforward language -- the genre of autobiography, is it ever possible to define a fraudulent memoir, a text falsely claiming to be autobiographical?

In these four paragraphs, Professor Park sets forth two different views on autobiography, represented by two different literary scholars, Philippe Lejeune and Linda Anderson, who focus, respectively, on identity and becoming as the crucial mark of autobiography. Park takes this difference in an interesting direction concerning the 'autobiographical' memories of Binjamin Wilkomirski, a strange case that you can read about on your own, but I want to think out loud here about what one might mean by "true."

The most common default position on truth is the so-called "correspondence" theory of truth, namely, that a statement corresponds to something really existing in the world. Another theory of truth is the "coherence" theory of truth, namely, that an organized system of statements cohere logically with one another. Most of us would probably expect an autobiography to correspond to the writer's life, and we would feel deceived if some 'facts' turned out to be "fictions." We might not hold the writer to flawless coherence, however, for who among us has lived a purely rational, self-consistent life? The true story of my life -- in terms of correspondence -- would include the twists, turns, and alterations (and altercations!) that cannot fit a logically coherent scheme.

But there's a third theory of truth, what I like to call a "creation" theory of truth, namely, that truth is created. This sort of truth is not "out there" (correspondence) or "up there" (coherence), but "down here" where we create it. This something like the pragmatic view of truth in the thought of William James. On this see his writings on Pragmatism, especially "Lecture 5: Pragmatism and Common Sense," and "The Will to Believe," and if we combine both writings, we can see that William James defends a belief on the grounds that it can encourage the believer to undertake a risky action that can 'make' something true, which is possible because the universe is incomplete and lends itself to our creative forces, if we believe in ourselves -- and yeah, I need to re-read James to express this more coherently, but I believe this formulation roughly corresponds to his views. Anyway, applied to oneself, this sort of exercise in "becoming" is future oriented and can work because the future is open.

Applied to one's writing of one's own life, however, a creation theory can be problematic, for one writes about one's past, but the past is closed, and re-writing one's life to reflect what one wishes to have been -- which might also offer more coherence -- can only offend against a correspondence theory of truth if fictions are switched for facts, leaving readers deceived . . .