Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

This historiography of sincere forgers is so strange that it is worth considering for a moment. We will see that if we pursue the problem of the forger, it becomes impossible to distinguish between the imaginary and the real. (P. Veyne, Did the Greeks believe in their Myths?, Chicago, 1988, p.103) || Merton unterscheidet behavioristisch unter sozialen "Abweichlern" folgendermaßen: Kreative (innovation), Aufsässige (rebellion), Überangepaßte (ritualism) und Sonderlinge (retreatism), eine Unterscheidung also, der unsere Typologie von Künstler, Revolutionär, Karrierist und Wahnsinnigem analog ist. (M. Schneider, Die kranke schöne Seele der Revolution, Frankfurt/Main, Syndikat, 1980, fn.9, p.261) || There is a story that the greatest scholar of Antiquity, Didymus, who had written more books than he could remember, became angry one day when someone told him a historical anecdote that in Didymus' opinion had no foundation. He relented when he was shown one of his own works in which the tale was said to be true. (P. Veyne, Did the Greeks believe in their Myths?, p.110) || Merton distinguishes between social "deviants" in the following way: innovative, rebellious, excessively conforming (ritualism), and misfits (retreatism). (M. Schneider, ibid., my transl.) || One of Choueiri's favorite cautionary tales is of an experiment conducted during the First World War, in which a tinny Victrola recording and an operatic soprano were cloaked in darkness at Carnegie Hall: the auditors were unable to tell one from the other. The audience's will to hear perfect sound mattered as much as the perception of the sound heard.(A. Gopnik, "Music to your ears", in The New Yorker, January 28, p34) || Und bringt nicht die "Agentur" der gesellschaftlichen Konformität gerade vier Prototypen bürgerlicher Existenz hervor, die in der Kinderstube eher die Subversion der Gesellschaft durch artistische Regelbeherrschung gelehrt worden sind: den Künstler, den Karrieristen, den Wahnsinngen und den Revolutionär? - And isn't it the "agency" of social conformity that brings forth the very four prototypes of bourgeois identity which during their bringing-up were taught the subversion of society by means of artistic control of the rules: the artist, the careerist, the mad, and the revolutionary? (M. Schneider, p.10, transl. mine) || Trying to decide whether to major in psychology or art history, I had gone to his office to see what he thought. He squinted and lowered his head: "Is this a hard choice for you?" Yes! I cried. "Oh," he said, springing back up cheerfully. "In that case, it doesn't matter. If it's a hard decision, then there's always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good in its way. Hard choices are always unimportant." (A. Gopnik, "Music to your ears", p.35)

In "The Horizon Cookbook and Illustrated History of Eating and Drinking Through the Ages," there is a startling print of a twelfth-century Irish king who, to prove himself worthy of his crown, is bathing in a vat of horse-meat soup as he chews on a long rope of blood sausage. (M. Sheraton, "Missing Links" in The New Yorker, Dec 3, 2012, p.74) || Combier is the undisputed leading expert on the Palaeolithic cultures and the Ice Age art of the Ardèche region, and Jouve is a physicist specializing in radiocarbon dating. Their article is entitled "Chauvet's cave art is not Aurignacian" (the palaeolithic culture of roughly 35,000 years ago). It is hoped that the research team working at the cave will now deign to answer critiques levelled at its scientific record, after ignoring them for years. (P.G. Bahn, "Rock of Ages" in TLS November 9, 2012, p.29) || Daß Liebe und Obsession etwas miteinander zu tun haben, ist eine Vorstellung, die breiter Zustimmung sicher sein kann. [...] das eigentlich Obsessive liegt nicht im Extrem, im Abgelegenen oder Besonderen des Sexus, sondern in der vermeintlichen Normalität der Liebe. Die kollektive Obsession verbirgt sich in der alltäglichen Zärtlichkeit [...] (C. Berthold and J. Greid, "Endlich lieben - Eine moderne Obsession", in Obsessionen. Beherrschende Gedanken im wissenschaftlichen Zeitalter, (ed.) M. Jeismann, Frankurt, Suhrkamp, 1995, p.199) || In this seventeenth-century Lenten bacchanal [Franz Hals's "Merrymakers at Shrovetide"], the comic character Hans Wurst and other revellers appear woozily besotted with drink and festively bedecked with sausage links. (M. Sheraton, "Missing Links", ibid.) || The town of Göttingen, famous for its sausages and university, belongs to the King of Hannover, and contains 999 hearths, sundry churches, a lying-in hospital, an observatory, a lock-up, a library, and a beer-cellar, where the beer is very good. [...] when I matriculated there five years ago, shortly before being rusticated, it had the same grey look, like an old head on young shoulders, and was already fully equipped with proctors, bulldogs, dissertations, thés dansants, washer-women, reference-books, roast pigeons, Guelph Orders, graduation-day coaches, blockheads, Aulic Counsellors, Judicial Counsellors, disciplinary committees, eccentrics, and many other tricks. (H. Heine, The Harz Journey, Penguin, 2006, p.33-34) || "Is all this the democratization of learning, the new mass scholarship, in which persons of average intelligence but uncommon energy are half-lured, half-driven to collect, compile, and report, without the benefit of reflection, without the incentives of a generalizing purpose, and often without the critical implement of literacy?" (J. Barzun quoted in NB in TLS November 9, 2012, p.32) || [...] und selbst die reflexiven Problembeschreibungen weisen keinen Ausweg aus der fundamentalen Aporie: auf die Liebe angewiesen zu sein und von ihr doch nie mehr als vorübergehend befriedigt zu werden. | [...] and even the reflexive descriptions of the problem do not point to an escape from the fundamental aporia: to be dependent on love, yet to be satisfied by it merely transitorily. (C. Berthold and J. Greid, "Endlich lieben - Eine moderne Obsession", ibid., p.200, transl. mine)

Nach Klügels Wörterbuch der Mathematik, fortgesetzt von Mollweide, Bd. 4. 1831, — hat Leibnitz den Ausdruck »Transcendent« in die Mathematik eingeführt und darunter verstanden quod Algebrae vires transcendit, — also alle Operationen welche durch gemeine Arithmetik und Algebra nicht zu vollziehn sind, als z.B. zu einer Zahl den Logarithmus oder umgekehrt, zu einem Bogen, rein arithmetisch, seine trigonometrischen Funktionen oder umgekehrt zu finden; überhaupt alle Probleme[,] die nur durch einen [385] ins Unendliche fortgesetzten Kalkül zu lösen sind: es scheint daß der Ausdruck etwas Unbestimmtes behält, da das Wörterbuch selbst in seinen Erklärungen schwankt. Aber der Gebrauch des Ausdrucks Transcendent im Philosophischen Sinn ist älter als im mathematischen: da er sich in Büchern, die älter sind als Leibnitz, findet: z.B. Gracian spricht von einer singolar transcendental magestad [sic!]: — — ja schon die Scholastiker nannten die allerobersten Begriffe, welche allgemeiner als die 10 Kategorien des Aristoteles sind, transcendental, und eben so Spinoza Ethica p. 112.

Schopenhauer, Handschriftlicher Nachlaß, Cogitata II

 

She had the child with her, though when I say it was the child I mean it was as always only the notion of a child, hardly even an image, a wavering transparency. Seeming to see me at the window she turned and started toward the house. In her green tunic and thonged sandals she might have been striding out of Arcady to meet me. (John Banville, Eclipse, Vintage, 2000, p.211) || There is no such thing as a sense of the real. Furthermore, there is no reason -quite the contrary- for representing what is past or foreign as analogous to what is current or near. The content of myth was situated in a noble and platonic temporality, as foreign to individual experience and individual interests as are government proclamations or esoteric theories learned at school and accepted at face value. In other respects, myth was information obtained from someone else. This was the primary attitude of the Greeks toward myth; in this modality of belief they were depending on someone else's word.(P. Veyne, Did the Greeks believe in their myths? p.27) ||  "A series of questions posed to an oracle in Oxyrhynchus has been made famous by Rostovtzeff as evidence for the deepening insecurity of the time: Shall I be sold up? Am I to become a beggar? Shall I take to flight?" (Peter Brown, "A debate on the holy", The Making of Late Antiquity, Harvard University Press, 1978, p.6) || In Alexandria, a certain Thompson, from Sunderland, has written his name in letters six feet tall on the Pompey column [...] There is no way of seeing the column without seeing the name of Thompson and consequently without thinking of Thompson. The cretin has incorporated himself into the monument and perpetuates himself with it. (G. Flaubert in J. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Chicago, 2009, p.160) ||  Separating the useful and necessary from the beautiful and from enjoyment initiated a development that abandons the field to the materialism of bourgeois practice on the one hand and to the appeasement of happiness and the mind within the preserve of “culture” on the other. (H. Marcuse, Art and Liberation, (ed. D. Kellner), "The affirmative character of culture", (London: Routledge, 2007) p.83) || At times of bereavment, I have discovered, people revert to a primitive kindliness, which is manifest most obviously in the form of offerings of food. (Banville, Eclipse, p.194) || Ich hatte vor, diesen Sommer wieder einige Zeit in Marienbad zuzubringen, doch werde ich nicht eher gehen als bis Sie zurück sind. | My intention was once again to spend some time in Marienbad this summer, but I will not leave before you have returned. (JP Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, Reclam, p.571, trans. mine) || On such days, autumn is already sounding its first horn-calls, yet the summer still blithely believes it will never end. In that dreamy stillness, like the stillness in the azure distances of a stage set, all the summers back to childhood seem present; to childhood, and beyond childhood, to those Arcadian fields where memory and imagination merge. (Banville, Eclipse, p.135)

An old hermit lives in a slum and wants to teach the alphabet to the children who regularly go there to play. What makes the hermit happiest however, is when he comes to the letter P (for "Pedarsag", or "Puppy"). When a child proposes he use the word "Pelican" instead, the hermit goes to the nearby park looking for this animal he has never heard of. (Parviz Kimiavi, 1972) || Momigliano speculates that a new attitude toward documents appeared during the Late Empire and that it heralded the future method of scientifically directed history; the Augustan History and especially Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History display evidence of a "new value attached to documents." I confess that these works have left me with a rather different impression. (Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks believe in their myths? (1988: pp.12-3)) || Auch fällt es dem Menschen durchaus nicht schwer, an Wunder einer früheren Zeit zu glauben; allein einem Wunder, das heute geschieht, eine Art von Realität zu geben und es neben dem sichtbar Wirklichen als eine höhere Wirklichkeit zu verehren, dieses scheint nicht mehr im Menschen zu liegen, oder wenn es in ihm liegt, durch Erziehung ausgetrieben zu werden. Unser Jahrhundert wird daher auch immer prosaischer werden, und es wird, mit der Abnahme des Verkehrs und Glaubens an das Übersinnliche alle Poesie auch immer mehr verschwinden. - There is no difficulty for humans to believe in miracles of an earlier time; yet, to admit the reality of a miracle taking place today, and to revere it as a higher reality residing beside the visibly real, this appears no longer within the grasp of humans, or if it is within their grasp it is driven out of them by education. Our century will thus become ever more prosaic, and with the decline in conversation about and belief in the metaphysical all poetry is bound to vanish. (JP Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, Reclam, 1994, p.495, transl. mine) || "For centuries past," says Herodotus, "the Greeks have distinguished themselves from less civilized peoples by their greater awareness and lack of foolish credulity." (Veyne, p.31) || Selbst der radikale Regisseur, der entscheidende wirtschaftliche Vorgänge wie etwa die Fusion zweier Industriekonzerne darstellen wollte, könnte das nicht anders, als indem er die maßgebenden Herren im Büro, am Konferenztisch und in der Villa vorführe. Auch wenn er sie dabei als Bestien demaskierte, bliebe ihre Bestialität noch sanktioniert als die von Individuen und würde tendenziell die Bestialität des Systems entlasten, als deren Henkersknechte sie operieren. - Even a radical film director who wants to portray crucially important economic processes like the merger of two industrial concerns could only do so by showing us the dominant gentlemen in the office, at the conference table or in their mansions. Even if they were thereby revealed as savage beasts, their savagery would still be sanctioned as a quality of individual human beings in a way that would tend to obscure the savagery of the system on the behalf of which they act as murderous lackeys. (T.W. Adorno, Die Dialektik der Aufklärung, transl. mine) || ...the Greek aristocracy wavered between two attitudes toward legend: to be pragmatic and participate in popular credulity, for the people believe as docilely as they obey; or else to refuse, on their own account, a humiliating submission, which was perceived as a result of naiveté. Understanding is the first of privileges. (Veyne, p.31)

Er unterschätzte die Gefahren romantischer Naturbetrachtung - He had underestimated the dangers of the romantic contemplation of nature (Die Katarakte) || Pausanias finally writes, "When I began to write my history, I was inclined to count these legends as foolishness; but on getting as far as Arcadia I grew to hold a more thoughtful view of them, which is this: in the days of old, those Greeks who were considered wise spoke their sayings not straight out but in riddles, and so the legends about Cronos I conjectured to be one sort of Greek wisdom." (Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks believe in their myths? Chicago: 1988, p.11) || Filicide, the violent bodily climax of paternal power which Freud has hidden from view in the three-card monte of the Oedipus complex, occurs in the climactic final scenes of The Earthquake of Chili, The Foundling, and, twice, in Die Familie Schroffenstein. (Silke-Maria Weineck, "Kleist and the Resurrection of the Father" in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2003 (37:1), p.71) || When the present Duchess of Sutherland entertained Mrs. Beecher Stowe, authoress of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” with great magnificence in London to show her sympathy for the Negro slaves of the American republic — a sympathy that she prudently forgot, with her fellow-aristocrats, during the civil war, in which every “noble” English heart beat for the slave-owner — I gave in the New York Tribune the facts about the Sutherland slaves. (Epitomised in part by Carey in “The Slave Trade.” Philadelphia, 1853, pp. 203, 204.) My article was reprinted in a Scotch newspaper, and led to a pretty polemic between the latter and the sycophants of the Sutherlands. (K. Marx, Capital, Vol.1: Chapter Twenty-Seven: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land) || ...let us note only the great half-anthropological, half-cosmological analyses of Heinroth, which interpret madness as the manifestation in man of an obscure and aquatic element, a dark disorder, a moving chaos, the seed and death of all things [...] (M. Foucault, Madness and Civlization, Routledge, 1993, p.13) || Keyhole, it emerges, was made as a result of "a bunch of dreams I was having that have really been haunting me". "Melancholy dreams," he says, "where I revisit my past: dead relatives and homes that have meant a lot to me, particularly my childhood home. I can remember them far better in the dream than I can in waking hours." [...] For the past year or so, Maddin has been working on a film "seance" project called Hauntings (or Spiritismes, when it fetched up at the Pompidou in Paris earlier this year). The idea is that Maddin and his cohorts would "contact" the ghost of a lost film – William Wellman's Ladies of the Mob, for example, or Mikio Naruse's The Strength of a Moustache – and then recreate/reimagine it as if under the influence of the cosmic ectoplasm. (The Guardian) || Their most frequent reproach concerned Pasquier's habit of giving too many references to the sources he cited. This procedure, they told him, cast a "scholastic pall" ("umbre des escholes") on the book and was unbecoming in a work of history. (P. Veyne, Did the Greeks believe in their myths? Chicago: 1988, pp.5-6)

...in the conclusion to his Philosophy of Revelation, Schelling summarized his philosophy with the theological figure of an oikonomia: “The ancient theologians distinguished between akratos theologia and oikonomia. The two belong together. It is toward this process of domestic economy (oikonomia) that we have wished to point” (Schelling, p. 325). The fact that such an engagement with economic theology has today become so improbable as to make the meaning of Schelling’s statements entirely incomprehensible to us is a sign of the decline of philosophical culture. One of the aims of the present study is to make Schelling’s statement, which has so far remained a dead letter, comprehensible again. (G. Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, Stanford, 2011: p.30) || Um Fanny zu gewinnen, bemüht er sich um die Stelle eines Lehrers für Physik und angewandte Mathematik in Prag und Linz. Er wird auch in die engere Wahl gezogen, erscheint aber aus unbekannten Gründen nicht zur Prüfung, offenbar wie auch bei späteren ähnlichen Gelegenheiten, physisch und psychisch schwer gehemmt. Infolge dieses Fehlschlages ließen die Eltern Greipl ihn, den sie als den ewigen Schulamtskandidaten ansehen mußten, wissen, daß sie keine Fortsetzung der Beziehungen zu Fanny wünschten. (J. Müller, "Einleitung" in Stifters Werke, Erster Band, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1964: p.10) || In order to win over Fanny, he tries for the position of a teacher of physics and applied mathematics in Prague and Linz. And he is among the final candidates, but for reasons unknown does not appear to the examination, apparently seriously inhibited physically and psychically, just as on later similar occasions. As a consequence of this failure, the Greipl parents, who had to see in him the eternal teacher trainee, informed him that they no longer wished for a continuance of his relationship with Fanny. (Ibid., trans. mine) || Schon 1905 war dem Verfasser bei solchen Versuchen die Schrift von Osthoff über das Suppletivwesen der indogermanischen Sprache zu Hilfe gekommen: er wies zusammenfassend nach, daß bei Adjektiven und Verben ein Wortstammwechsel in der Komparation oder Konjugation eintreten kann, nicht nur ohne daß die Vorstellung der energetischen Identität der gemeinten Eigenschaft oder Aktion darunter leidet, obwohl die formale Identität des wortgeformten Grundausdrucks wegfällt, sondern daß der Eintritt eines fremdstämmigen Ausdrucks eine Intensifikation der ursprünglichen Bedeutung bewirkt. (Aby Warburg, Einleitung. Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: link) || Already in 1905 the author was assisted in these attempts by Osthoff's work concerning the essence of suppletion of the Indogermanic language: he proved comprehensively that in adjectives and verbs a vowel stem change in the comparative or conjugation can occur, in which the representation of the energetic identity of the intended property or action is not only not diminished, despite the collapse of the formal identity of the basic word-form, but rather that the introduction of a foreign stem expression effects an intensification of the original signification (Ibid., trans. mine) 

Experimental Cinema tribute: link || Patrick Mendes' tribute: link || “He wrote me,” the narrator says, speaking of the imaginary documentarian who is supposed to not be Marker, “that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory… In the spiral of [its] titles, he saw Time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains, motionless, the eye.” (J. Hobermann, "The Lost Futures of Chris Marker", NYR Blog: link) || "...and I wondered if a memory is something you have or you've lost." (Gena Rowlands in W. Allen's Another Woman) || [...] only bearing in his cou[n]tenance euide[n]t marks of a sorowful mind supported with a weak bodie, which they perceiuing, & knowing that the violence of sorow is not at the first to be striue[n] withal: (being like a mighty beast, soner tamed with following, tha[n] ouerthrowe[n] by withsta[n]ding) they gaue way vnto it for that day & the next; neuer troubling him, either with asking questions, or finding fault with his mela[n]cholie, but rather fitting to his dolor dolorous discourses of their own & other folks misfortunes. Which speeches, thogh they had not a liuely entra[n]ce to his se[n]ces shut vp in sorow, yet like one half asleep, he toke hold of much of the matters spoken vnto him, so as a man may say, ere sorow was aware, they made his thoughts beare away something els beside his own sorow, which wrought so in him, that at le[n]gth he grew co[n]tent to mark their speeches, then to maruel at such wit in shepheardes, after to like their company, & lastly to vouchsafe confere[n]ce [...] (The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia: link) || Then be not coy, but use your time, And while ye may, go marry: For having lost but once your prime, You may for ever tarry. (Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to make much of Time) || AW's tribute: at sea: link || Condolences to Jorge's friends and family.

Arcadia, of which countrie wee are, is but a little way hence, and euen vpon the next confines. (P. Sidney, The countess of Pembroke's Arcadia: link) || A crazy man his life he passed, But in his senses died at last. (Sancho Pansa) || […] she was forced to remember, or recordar–a word that derives from the Latin recordor, which means “to pass back through the heart.” (D. Grann, “The Yankee Commandante”, The New Yorker, May 28, 2012, p.71) || Was aber Nissen Piczenik betrifft, der ebenfalls damals unterging, so kann man nicht sagen, er sei einfach ertrunken wie die anderen. Er war vielmehr - dies kann man mit gutem Gewissen erzählen - zu den Korallen heimgekehrt, auf den Grund des Ozeans, wo der gewaltige Leviathan sich ringelt. [...] Möge er dort in Frieden ruhn, neben dem Leviathan bis zur Ankunft des Messias. || Concerning Nissen Piczenik, however, who also sunk at that time, one cannot say that he simply drowned like the others. Rather, this can be reported with a clear conscience, he returned home to the corals, to the ocean floor where lies curled up the mighty Leviathan. [...] May he rest there in peace, beside the Leviathan until the coming of the Messiah. (Joseph Roth, Leviathan, Werke 6, Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1991, p.574, trans. mine) || “When you are subjected to a policy of savagery and barbarism, you come to the conclusion that you have to reject those methods, that you have to be the first to set hatred aside, otherwise it will destroy you,” he has said. (D. Grann, “The Yankee Commandante”) || "Ah!" said Sancho weeping, "don't die, master, but take my advice and live many years; for the foolishest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die without rhyme or reason, without anybody killing him, or any hands but melancholy's making an end of him. Come, don't be lazy, but get up from your bed and let us take to the fields in shepherd's trim as we agreed. Perhaps behind some bush we shall find the lady Dulcinea disenchanted, as fine as fine can be. If it be that you are dying of vexation at having been vanquished, lay the blame on me, and say you were overthrown because I had girthed Rocinante badly; besides you must have seen in your books of chivalry that it is a common thing for knights to upset one another, and for him who is conquered today to be conqueror tomorrow." (The History of Don Quixote, Volume II., by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: link) || the Sun ru[n]ning a most eue[n] course becums an indifferent arbiter betweene the night and the day (P. Sidney, The countess of Pembroke's Arcadia)

Lebet wohl, ihr glatten Säle! Glatte Herren! glatte Frauen! Auf die Berge will ich steigen, Lachend auf euch niederschauen. || In the theatre the public sympathized with the unequal lovers and applauded the basic Enlightenment ideal that informed such works: that all people are equal. But it did not take the same view in real life. (O. Figes, Natasha's Dance, Picador: New York, 2002, p.32) || As war with the United States became imminent, it was a common perception among the royalty and politicians that the loss of Cuba would provoke widespread disorder leading to the collapse of the Restoration system. Indeed, rooms were prepared in the Vienna palace of the queen regent's cousin, the emperor of Austria, in case she had to flee from Spain. (S. Balfour, "Riot, Regeneration and Reaction: Spain the Aftermath of the 1898 Disaster" in: The Historical Journal 38:2 (1995), p.406) || An editorial in the daily, El Imparcial, argued that the cause of the problem was the inequality of the sacrifices being demanded by the government for restoring the health of the Spanish economy and it noted that the protest was taking the shape of a social war. (Balfour, 410) || Schwarze Röcke, seidne Strümpfe, Weiße höfliche Manschetten, Sanfte Reden, Embrassieren –Ach, wenn sie nur Herzen hätten!