The Singular

That is to say that we make them with the ordinary, everyday things, whatever greets us when we wake up in the morning, whatever we're hoping for. I am just recording what I see on my daily round.
---Frank Auerbach.

But Man, as immortal, is sustained by the incalculable and the un-possessed.
--Alain Badiou.

MS : to mix in the right portion (as a way of removing disproportion)mixis, miscere : promiscuous, miscellaneous. Mestizo (mixed breeding)mustang.

ML: medley, melange, meddle.

MSR or MSL (Hindi): mixed with divinity (misr)mishran: addition, a kind of mixing. Mushrik: one who adds.

Sebastian Smee on Freud:
....'not so much about "penetrating character" or illustrating personality traits; it is about the strongest possible representation of a specific human presence. And bound up in that is an understanding of other people's privacy, their essential solitude.'

" I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."

Love is never directed to this or that property of the loved one, but neither does it neglect the properties in favour of a generality: universal love; the lover wants the Loved One with all of its predicates, its being such as it is [whatever the person is is not a matter of casual indifference to their qualities, but neither is it a forgetting of those in favour of an 'essence' or 'spirit'..it is the person as a person...does one have to tear the words assunder to see that it is a question of an everlasting question: what....ever]

'The portraits do not presume to know their subjects definitively ...instead, they do something far more subversive and in the end, moving. [He] powerfully registers their unknowability. In doing so, he grants them great depth of human freedom...."when you find things very moving the desire to find out more lessens" (Freud)'

'It is as though he (Freud) has continued to paint beyond the point at which Freud (he) had achieved an adequately realistic image..a point that is somehow surplus to requirements; representation that goes beyond itself.'

Do we grow within our limits and not beyond? Is heaven a perfect, unchanging circle? ..or, is it: "verily towards thy limit, for thy limit is God"?

Absence makes the heart grow...

Agamben: Saint Thomas and Halos:

In the Kingdom of the Messiah everything will be exactly the same as it is now, except for a slight displacement....the tiny displacement does not refer to the state of things, but at their periphery, in the space of ease between every thing and itself. This means that even though perfection does not imply a real mutation it does not simply involve an external state of things, an incurable "so be it." On the contrary, the parable introduces a possibility there where everything is perfect, an "otherwise" where everything is finished forever.

The Beatitude of the chosen includes all the goods that are necessary for the perfect workings of human nature, and therefore nothing essential can be added. However, something can be added in surplus (superaddi), an "accidental reward that is not necessary for beatitude" (Aquinas) and does not alter it substantially but that simply makes it more brilliant (clarior).

The halo is this supplement added to perfection. Something like the vibration of that which is perfect, the glow at its edges.

The halo is thus the individuation of a beatitude, the becoming singular of that which is perfect...the singularity here is not a final determination of being, but an unraveling or an indetermination on its limits: a paradoxical individuation by indetermination.

The halo: a zone where possibility and reality become indistinguishable..the being that has reached its end, that has consumed all of its possibilities, thus receives as a gift a supplemental possibility.

Mixed in a new birth...this imperceptible trembling of the finite that makes its limits indeterminate and allows it to blend, to make itself 'whatever', is the tiny displacement that every thing must accomplish in the messianic world. Its beatitude is that of potentiality that comes only after the act, of matter that does not remain beneath the form, but surrounds it with a halo.'

Freud's portraits are soaked in particularity. They are full of human contradictoriness. They do not insist on one aspect of character, any one physical fact. They include as much as possible...forever feeling the contrast and inter-play between so much densely packed life and the threat, the promise, held out by the inanimate.

"I'd like to think that I had in some way caught a scene rather than composed it, so that you never questioned it...[I want my pictures] to look awkward, in the way that life is awkward"

'Freud's account of human flesh , insisting on its gravity and animality, speaks to widespread contemporary veins of pathos and abjection..it as though each sitter had suddenly learned of a disaster, and that disaster were himself.' (NYRB)