The world is stuffed with public philistines and private romantics, and also people who are one or the other at different times of day, but never simultaneously. Integrating the concrete, the practical and the meaningful is impossible if one wishes to protect meaning from the “defilement” of explicit language, or if one has no persistent sense of meaning at all, nor any expectation that meaning ought to exist (which is already a sense of meaning).

Anyone who wishes to integrate the concrete, the practical and the meaningful will find himself caught in a strange kind of cross-fire between philistines and romantics, sympathizing with aspects of both, but disagreeing with the one point where the two sides vehemently agree: that communion is neither possible nor desirable.

Holy crap, Walter Benjamin was a completely lazy, useless man. From Hannah Arendt’s introduction to Illuminations:

Viewed from the outside, it was the position of the free-lance writer who lives by his pen; however, as only Max Rychner seems to have observed, he did so in a “peculiar way,” for “his publications were anything but frequent” and “it was never quite clear … to what extent he was able to draw upon other resources.” Rychner’s suspicions were justified in every respect. Not only were “other resources” at his disposal prior to his emigration, but behind the facade of free-lance writing he led the considerably freer, albeit constantly endangered, life of an homme de lettres whose home was a library that had been gathered with extreme care but was by no means intended as a working tool; it consisted of treasures whose value, as Benjamin often repeated, was proved by the fact that he had not read them — a library, then, which was guaranteed not to be useful or at the service of any profession. Such an existence was something unknown in Germany, and almost equally unknown was the occupation which Benjamin, only because he had to make a living, derived from it: not the occupation of a literary historian and scholar with the requisite number of fat tomes to his credit, but that of a critic and essayist who regarded even the essay form as too vulgarly extensive and would have preferred the aphorism if he had not been paid by the line. He was certainly not unaware of the fact that his professional ambitions were directed at something that simply did not exist in Germany, where, despite Lichtenberg, Lessing, Schiegel, Heine, and Nietzsche, aphorisms have never been appreciated and people have usually thought of criticism as something disreputably subversive which might be enjoyed — if at all — only in the cultural section of a newspaper. It was no accident that Benjamin chose the French language for expressing this ambition: … “The goal I set for myself … is to be regarded as the foremost critic of German literature. The trouble is that for more than fifty years literary criticism in Germany has not been considered a serious genre. To create a place in criticism for oneself means to re-create it as a genre”)

… One could say that Benjamin did not prepare for anything but the “profession” of a private collector and totally independent scholar, what was then called Privatgelehrter. Under the circumstances of the time his studies, which he had begun before the First World War, could have ended only with a university career, but unbaptized Jews were still barred from such a career, as they were from any career in the civil service. Such Jews were permitted a Habilitation and at most could attain the rank of an unpaid Extraordinarius; it was a career which presupposed rather than provided an assured income. The doctorate which Benjamin decided to take only “out of consideration for my family” and his subsequent attempt at Habilitation were intended as the basis for his family’s readiness to place such an income at his disposal.

This situation changed abruptly after the war: the inflation had impoverished, even dispossessed, large numbers of the bourgeoisie, and in the Weimar Republic a university career was open even to unbaptized Jews. The unhappy story of the Habilitation shows clearly how little Benjamin took these altered circumstances into account and how greatly he continued to be dominated by prewar ideas in all financial matters. For from the outset the Habilitation had only been intended to call his father “to order” by supplying “evidence of public recognition” (Briefe I, 293) and to make him grant his son, who was in his thirties at that time, an income that was adequate and, one should add, commensurate with his social standing. At no time, not even when he had already come close to the Communists, did he doubt that despite his chronic conflicts with his parents he was entitled to such a subvention and that their demand that he “work for a living” was “unspeakable”. When his father said later that he could not or would not increase the monthly stipend he was paying anyway, even if his son achieved the Habilitation, this naturally removed the basis of Benjamin’s entire undertaking. Until his parents’ death in 1930, Benjamin was able to solve the problem of his livelihood by moving back into the parental home, living there first with his family (he had a wife and a son), and after his separation — which came soon enough — by himself. (He was not divorced until 1930.) It is evident that this arrangement caused him a great deal of suffering, but it is just as evident that in all probability he never seriously considered another solution. It is also striking that despite his permanent financial trouble he managed throughout these years constantly to enlarge his library. His one attempt to deny himself this expensive passion — he visited the great auction houses the way others frequent gambling casinos — and his resolution even to sell something “in an emergency” ended with his feeling obliged to “deaden the pain of this readiness” by making fresh purchases; and his one demonstrable attempt to free himself from financial dependence on his family ended with the proposal that his father immediately give him “funds enabling me to buy an interest in a secondhand bookstore”. This is the only gainful employment that Benjamin ever considered. Nothing came of it, of course.

In view of the realities of the Germany of the twenties and of Benjamin’s awareness that he would never be able to make a living with his pen — “there are places in which I can earn a minimum and places in which I can live on a minimum, but there is no place where I can do both” (Briefe II, 563) — his whole attitude may strike one as unpardonably irresponsible. Yet it was anything but a case of irresponsibility. It is reasonable to assume that it is just as hard for rich people grown poor to believe in their poverty as it is for poor people turned rich to believe in their wealth; the former seem carried away by a recklessness of which they are totally unaware, the latter seem possessed by a stinginess which actually is nothing but the old ingrained fear of what the next day may bring.

Moreover, in his attitude to financial problems Benjamin was by no means an isolated case. If anything, his outlook was typical of an entire generation of German-Jewish intellectuals, although probably no one else fared so badly with it. Its basis was the mentality of the fathers, successful businessmen who did not think too highly of their own achievements and whose dream it was that their sons were destined for higher things. It was the secularized version of the ancient Jewish belief that those who “learn” — the Torah or the Talmud, that is, God’s Law — were the true elite of the people and should not be bothered with so vulgar an occupation as making money or working for it. This is not to say that in this generation there were no father-son conflicts; on the contrary, the literature of the time is full of them, and if Freud had lived and carried on his inquiries in a country and language other than the German-Jewish milieu which supplied his patients, we might never have heard of an Oedipus complex. But as a rule these conflicts were resolved by the sons’ laying claim to being geniuses, or, in the case of the numerous Communists from well-to-do homes, to being devoted to the welfare of mankind — in any case, to aspiring to things higher than making money — and the fathers were more than willing to grant that this was a valid excuse for not making a living. Where such claims were not made or recognized, catastrophe was just around the corner. Benjamin was a case in point: his father never recognized his claims, and their relations were extraordinarily bad. Another such case was Kafka, who — possibly because he really was something like a genius — was quite free of the genius mania of his environment, never claimed to be a genius, and ensured his financial independence by taking an ordinary job at the Prague workmen’s compensation office. (His relations with his father were of course equally bad, but for different reasons.) And still, no sooner had Kafka taken this position than he saw in it a “running start for suicides,” as though he were obeying an order that says “You have to earn your grave.”

…

Today the homme de lettres strikes us as a rather harmless, marginal figure, as though he were actually to be equated with the figure of the Privatgelehrter that has always had a touch of the comic. Benjamin, who felt so close to French that the language became for him a “sort of alibi” (Brife II, 505) for his existence, probably knew about the homme de lettres’s origins in prerevolutionary France as well as about his extraordinary career in the French Revolution. In contrast to the later writers and literati, the “ecrivains et litterateurs” as even Larousse defines the hommes de lettres, these men, though they did live in the world of the written and printed word and were, above all, surrounded by books, were neither obliged nor willing to write and read professionally, in order to earn a living. Unlike the class of the intellectuals, who offer their services either to the state as experts, specialists, and officials, or to society for diversion and instruction, the hommes de lettres always strove to keep aloof from both the state and society. Their material existence was based on income without work, and their intellectual attitude rested upon their resolute refusal to be integrated politically or socially. On the basis of this dual independence they could afford that attitude of superior disdain which gave rise to La Rochefoucauld’s contemptuous insights into human behavior, the worldly wisdom of Montaigne, the aphoristic trenchancy of Pascal’s thought, the boldness and open-mindedness of Montesquieu’s political reflections. It cannot be my task here to discuss the circumstances which eventually turned the hommes de lettres into revolutionaries in the eighteenth century nor the way in which their successors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries split into the class of the “cultured” on the one hand and of the professional revolutionaries on the other. I mention this historical background only because in Benjamin the element of culture combined in such a unique way with the element of the revolutionary and rebellious. It was as though shortly before its disappearance the figure of the homme de lettres was destined to show itself once more in the fullness of its possibilities, although — or, possibly, because — it had lost its material basis in such a catastrophic way, so that the purely intellectual passion which makes this figure so lovable might unfold in all its most telling and impressive possibilities.

This review hit the part of my brain that loves Mark Twain.

The DeMoulin Lung Tester was a plain, serious-looking box with a nickel-plated mouthpiece and a calibrated dial on its face. Its ostensible purpose was to measure a man’s lung capacity, the bulky antecedent to today’s spirometers. Its real purpose was to measure a man’s ability to maintain his composure after being made the butt of a joke. When an unsuspecting mark blew into it, a .32 caliber blank cartridge exploded and a blast of flour hit him squarely in the face.

It is important to note: for me this is strictly third-person hilarity. This is epic humor.

Scenes are surveyed from a distance. In each one crass men do terrible shit to each other in miniature self-contained exhibitions of minor cruelty. The thought of participation has no part in it. Being there would make it less funny. There is no interior aspect, whatsoever. It is all imagined externally as a sort of conceptual sight gag.

The worse the behavior — the more it exposes the innocent depravity of human nature — the funnier it is to me. It is the pure fact that people are like this that cracks me up.

It is very possible this sense of humor is a symptom of being a bad person.

I think American culture is deeply disoriented in regard to assessing standards of living. The basics of life — having a home in a safe neighborhood in reasonable proximity to one’s work, the choice of having a one-income household, having time and energy to invest in family life and parenting or in personal interests or in reflexion — are now beyond the reach of many people. However, luxuries — such as hi-fi home and portable stereo systems, home theaters, computers, multiple luxury cars, fine food — these items are relatively cheap.

Any comparison of how the middle-class is doing now versus ten, twenty or thirty years ago that only adjusts for inflation without adjusting for the relative costs of basics and luxuries, or considering the number of hours worked per household (or better, the amount of free-time available to members of the middle-class) is barely looking at the real issue.

The crisis of the middle-class has less to do with how much money each household has, and more to do with quality and sustainability of the middle-class life.

The right understands the masses infinitely better than the left. The left believes individuals are concerned with their well-being, where the right understands very well that the masses do not care about accomplishing happiness, but only infusing their unhappiness with the maximum intensity of meaning.

*

Contrary to popular opinion, the non-viability of Marxism has nothing at all to do with the underestimating the force of greed in individuals. It has to do with an inability to grasp the fundamentally non-functionalist orientation of the ordinary person, and the degree to which most people are dominated by symbols.

*

I believe metaphysical reductionism is the root cause of political extremism. Materialistic reductionism pushes toward the hard left, and idealist reductionism (common Platonism) pushes toward hard right. And dialectics, both materialist and idealist, amplifies the effect. Dialectic promises — and in actually delivers — unexpected and unexpectable deep shifts in one’s relationship to reality, at least at the level of individual consciousness. The natural extension of real individual experience to the theoretical possibility of analogous collective experience results in what Voegelin called “metastatic expectation“.

Continue reading Bread and circuses →

The New Oxford American Dictionary says this about the usage of conviction verses persuasion:

Although it is common to see convince and persuade used interchangeably, there are distinctions in meaning that careful writers and speakers try to preserve. Convince derives from a Latin word meaning ‘conquer, overcome.’ Persuade derives from a Latin word meaning ‘advise, make appealing, sweeten.’

*

Proof convinces. Proof produces agreement through intellectual coercion. There are kinds of truth that are subject to proof, and these are objective truths. With a valid proof, to accept the premises is to accept the conclusion. One cannot resist the argument if one is intellectually decent. To reject the argument is to betray civility. With proof agreement is necessary.

But not all truths fall inside the jurisdiction of proof.

In fact, the most important truths — the ideas most significant to us, which in fact lend significance to objective truths — are outside the reach of proof’s coercive powers. They reside in the realm of freedom, where only persuasion has sway.

Appeals persuade. Appeals invite agreement. Appeals address the other as free beings, who decide out of desire, not necessity.

*

Some people covet their freedom, but lack faith that freedom is theirs regardless of what is proven to them.

They see truth as a threat to their autonomy. And so they choose intellectual indecency.

And indeed, there are many people who cannot imagine voluntary agreement, who look for proofs that support their deepest convictions. They wish to convince others that their most important truths are the only valid truth, and to make others convicts of their own beloved beliefs. They attempt to argue others into submission.

*

The easiest things to prove matter least.

The things that matter most are impossible to prove.

*

If we wish to come to agreement on the things that matter most to us, we will have to rethink our notions of truth, and especially how this truth is established. We will not have certainty where we most desire it. We will never compel the types of agreements we crave.

, but we must come voluntarily and we must learn to invite others to agreement. As long as we will only come to an agreement when we cannot escape agreement — that is where we’ve been argued into submission —

*

Compulsion by proof is only one mode of persuasion.

The modes of persuasion available to a person affects every aspect of his social existence. It determines the types of appeals he makes and accepts.

Splitting open an over-ripe peach I discovered the pit, broken and dry. I cut away the fragments of shell and the dessicated kernel, and ate the rest of it. It was maybe a little too sweet.

“I could conceive of another Abraham — to be sure, he would never get to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer —  an Abraham who would be prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but would be unable to bring it off because he cannot get away, being indispensable; the household needs him, there is always something or other to take care of, the house is never ready; but without having his house ready, without having something to fall back on, he cannot leave — this the Bible also realized, for it says: ‘He set his house in order.'”

Teach me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything,
To do it as for Thee.

Not rudely, as a beast,
To run into action ;
But still to make Thee prepossest,
And give it his perfection.

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye,
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.

All may of Thee partake;
Nothing can be so mean
Which with his tincture (for Thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and th’ action fine.

This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for less be told.

Yesterday one of Susan’s students, a bright and usually undramatic nine-year-old girl, walked up, stood before her, stared straight into her eyes, and with great gravity pronounced: “YOU HAVE ANCESTORS.”

Susan was startled. The girl explained, “My grandfather did that to a foreign guy once, and he fainted.”

We need a word for the practice of recalling what memory cannot possess. It should be simpler than “recalling the immemorable.”

I password-protected my blog for a week to see what would happen.

Perfection is a glorious and superficial crown placed on the head of deep rightness.

When perfection is the material of which a thing is constructed, that thing will have a hollowness that can never be filled.

*

It is true: best practices are often found in the best work. But the atomist interpretation — that this means that best work is somehow composed of best practices — is not only factually wrong, it is practically counterproductive.

Unfortunately, the atomist interpretation is not so counterproductive that its results fail entirely. And indeed, the atomist world defines success by avoidance of failure and evasion of blame. Atomism produces acceptable work, and it does so reliably and linearly.

*

The error becomes more obvious when we consider it in the realm of art. Musical best practices are certainly found in the best music — once the music has come into being. But when those best practices are the generative principle of the music, the music is dull.

There’s nothing wrong with the music. The music might even be perfect.

It’s just that there’s nothing intensely right about it.

There’s nothing to hate, but there is nothing to love.

But without some particular thing to hate, when we “can’t put our finger” on what is wrong, most people become a little flustered and ashamed and feel compelled to accept the thing as good.

*

Fact is, the best things are the best, not by virtue of  being composed of best practices, but by virtue of discovery of the right kind of being for that particular creation, and manifesting that being fully. The flawed accomplishment of this, sets the stage for removal of flaws within the limits of fidelity to the particular spirit of the creation.

*

According to Bill Callahan:

There is no love
Where there is no obstacle
And there is no love
Where there is no bramble
There is no love
On the hacked-away plateau
And there is no love
In the unerring
And there is no love
On the one true path

*

In the musical world, a muzo is someone who constructs music from best practices and reliably plays this error-free music without mistakes.

*

Musicians take risks to create what needs creation. The process produces flaws, but the process also transfigures flaws into new beauty.

Maybe the true product of art is transfiguration of flaws.

Perhaps what makes us love art is the discovery of new love for what was taken for flaw.

The doing of art enriches the world in outspiraling consecration.

*

Business grows to grow. It doesn’t know any constraints besides material self-interest. (This, by the way, is not a universal property of human beings, only the common but limited soul of the born merchant.)

But business compulsively serves demand with supply. It cannot stop itself, even if this will ultimately end its own dominance.

Business grew and overgrew art and choked it out. (By art I do not mean entertainment. Entertainment is passive. Art requires effort.)

Now business has to fill the vacuum it has created, because this vacuum is demand.

Business will have to change fundamentally to fill this demand.

It will have to learn to transcend the functional. This will require a changing of the guard.

Business’ hardest lesson will be learning the difference between a musician and a muzo.

*

The irruption of art into business is brand.

Brand is changing because we have changed, as a culture and as individuals.

Brand began as the identifying mark. Then it became a value proposition, and later a promise. Then it became style — an association of feeling with a thing or a function.

Now it is something else. And what it is becoming is hard to talk about.

We won’t learn to talk about it until we learn to think differently.

*

An atomist couple wanted to have a baby together. They began with an inventory of best-of-breed babies. Based on their findings concluded that their baby would be assembled out of ten fingers and ten toes, two arms and two legs a torso and a sizable head. Attached to the head would be two eyes, two ears, one mouth (teeth TBD) and one nose with no more than two nostrils. The torso would be stuffed with an assortment of organs, organized according to biological best practices. Their initial budget was only enough for a small handful of baby, so they realized they needed to take a phased approach. They identified objectives — adorability, cuddlability, and scalability (a.k.a. growability) — and used these objectives to prioritize the various body parts.

*

Muzos aren’t musicians with a missing something.

Muzos are musicians with a missing everything.

A musician can grow to be as perfect as a muzo, but the perfection only honors their art, it does not make it.

A man whose meaning is rooted beyond another’s horizon of conceivability appears to be a nihilist. But to the nihilist, the other is ensnared in illusion.

Thus the worlds drawn by the pen of invective divides into the evil and the shallow. The complementary inner worlds divide into the profound and the good.

(For sure, this is nothing new, yet it always is new. This is how recall of memory-resistant ideas happens. We are permitted to repeat, with new mouths to new ears, the old words.)

To live in a philosophy is unavoidable.

To think about philosophy is not thinking philosophically.

To think out a philosophy is not thinking philosophically.

To live out one philosophy into another: that is philosophy.

Philosophers live thinking consequentially.

Philosophers — good and bad, novel and redundant — live thinking consequentially.

“It’s all a matter of height,” said the astronaut. “That horizon that surrounds you on all sides — it eventually shrinks to a circle. Higher still it reduces to a point, and then to nothing at all. Then the human dream of being like a god, without no confining horizon is finally ours. From within this chamber we look out on infinity in all directions and experience limitless vision.”

From a remote midpoint, a navigator circumspects the surrounding ocean. His eye steps along the horizon, trailing a stutter of vanishing-point stitches, sealing the seam between upper and lower waters.

Already having the answer is often failure to see the question.

Seeing no problem is more often caused by blindness than clarity.

Having no doubt is often failure to detect dubitability.

Having seen it before is often failure to see it now.

Category conceals difference behind the glare of relevance.

Being experienced can make experience past-tense.

*

I remember being struck 20ish years ago by this passage from The Media Lab by Stewart Brand:

He [Minsky] said he was trying to attract people to the Lab interested in working on constraint languages, or at least attract hackers who might grow into it. “But I don’t know whether it’s possible anymore, because good hackers are very quickly aware of their hundred-thousand-dollar value making products for people. I look for selfish people who don’t give a damn what happens in the outer world for five years. At some point you need a hero who will actually work for himself rather than make it easier for others to work. All the people who have short-range goals will be forgotten.”

All of Minsky’s examples of hard problems seemed to circle back on semantic questions, problems of meaning and cognition rather than just signal processing. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “the heuristic for making discoveries is start with a distinction that people make and argue that there are three ways rather than two. Probably all good ideas start by making a distinction, and then they usually die by stopping there and dividing everything up into those two. Information theory is interested in signal and noise. Maybe we should make a tri-stinction — signal, noise, and meaning.”

After a dinner of take-out dim sum, Minsky, who had been reading the Koran with some dismay at its violent inquiry-blunting formulae, sermonized, “Religion is a teaching machine — a little deadly loop for putting itself in your mind and keeping it there. The main concern of a religion is to stop thinking, to suppress doubt. It’s interested in solving deep problems, not in understanding them. And it’s correct in a sense, because the problems it deals with don’t have solutions, because they’re loops. ‘Who made the world?’ ‘God.’ You’re not allowed to ask, ‘Who made God?’ ”

I said, “Science feels and acts like a kind of religion a lot of the time.” Minsky had heard that one before: “Everything is similar if you’re willing to look that far out of focus. I’d watch that. Then you’ll find that black is white. Look for differences! You’re looking for similarities again. That way lies mind rot.” That lively loop has been cycling in my mind ever since.

The point Minsky is making is a great one, if you ignore his mind rot concerning similarities among religions.

“Everything is similar if you’re willing to look that far out of focus. I’d watch that. Then you’ll find that black is white. Look for differences! You’re looking for similarities again. That way lies mind rot.”

Automatic life accepts what is given it and works within what is given to accomplish its ends. “Its” ends? — what is the antecedent for this possessive pronoun? The automatic life.

An automatic life can be active or reflective.

An automatic life can be resigned and mechanical, but many are ambitious and ingenious.

What is the alternative to automatic life? It begins with an earnest question: What is the alternative to this reality I live — which I live in and live out?

*

A very vivid example of automatic life, obvious for having outside-in perspective is the Stanford Prison Experiment.

It is possible to take from this experiment a set of facts about human nature, and these facts will be true. They are sociological facts about a situation observed from a distance, that is, objectively.

However, objective truth is not true enough to help us break out of automatic life.

We must also consider the immediate experience of the participants, and ask how their own experience relates to the social dynamic we observe, which unconsciously dominates not only the participants’ behaviors, but also their attitudes, conceptions and their feelings. We must note, too, the plurality of perspectives on the same situation, and the part power distribution plays.

But this hybrid-truth synthesized from objective truth about the situation and the personal stories of “those who were there” — it is still not true enough to help us break out of automatic life.

We must link our own experience to that of each participant, so we can find with their subjective reports true subjective content (cautiously — staying aware that such connections are approximate at best, and often completely wrong).

Now we begin to enter the subjective realm. But even this is not true enough to help us break out of automatic life.

Now we must look for where we are a prisoner and guard. And we must look for where we missed moral choices, because we already knew what we were supposed to do, and just did it. We must experiment.

But even this is not true enough to help us break out of automatic life.

We must look at the worst situations in history, and recognize the probability that we might have been among the perpetrators, for the very reason that what they did was in accordance with “how things are” in past tense. Every one of these perpetrators were realists.

But even this is not enough. Now we must look at right now and ourselves, and ask ourselves: Is this order, which is working out for me, working out for those around me? Do I actually care, so long as it continues to work out for me? How are my own behaviors, attitudes, conceptions and feelings passively determined by this order? And what besides misery or sheer fear or direct force will wake me from blind incuriosity?

How do my deepest convictions on what is Real and what is Right make me a convict — and a guard?

What do I do about this? (It has no precedent!)

What ought I aim for? (There is no “going back” — it has never been!)

Now we have a beginning…

*

The automatic life acts within passivity.

The automatic life does things (active tense), but what it does is determined by what is given (passive tense). Automatic responsibility means discharging the responsibilities it is given.

To take responsibility (active tense) means to replace what is given (passive tense) with what one makes (active tense) of things. That means taking responsibility for one’s own responsibilities — determining where one cooperates and where one resists the given.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man becomes king, not for the simple fact that he sees, but exclusively because of what he can do perceptibly within a sightless world.

The king tells his subjects that they will soon hear, feel and smell an approaching herd of horses, and subsequently his subjects do hear, feel and smell according to his prediction.

But if he tells his subjects of the beauty of a sunrise, or he makes a painting of the world he sees, these utterances have no significance beyond being characteristic behaviors of a man able to prophesy the coming of horses to a silent, intangible, odorless present. They are attributes of a visionary.

Eventually the one-eyed king dies, and then later, all who knew him. The world loses its eye-witness.

People will repeat his word on sunrises. They will preserve his paintings. Thousands will line up to feel the contours of the frame and the texture of the paint, and will reverently savor the aroma of wood, paint and canvas.

Knowledge about sunrises will grow. Many new paintings will be painted. The saying and doing will be innocent, with no sense that anyone can see a difference between their products and the example they imitate.

Others will call bullshit on sunrises and paintings, and they will be mostly right.

*

Some might witness this spectacle and try to talk about it to someone else, in half-blind-half-monocular bastard language. But unlike the utterances of old one-eyed kind, this speech will have no practical value whatsoever. Who cares about a world “seen” from the “eye” of a king? Does such talk even have sense, let alone truth?