for anton

This reminded me of the cover of a book on one of anton's post (can't for the life of me remember what it was). Anyway, this remains one of my favourite songs of the year (thanks Bob, for pointing me here. Danke!).

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'Extremely idle, extremely independent, both by nature and by art'
(What, was Montaigne a Kashmiri?)

'Acceptance of life, of one's self as it is'.

This is incredibly difficult-and isn't one part of life to not accept what is or even care about acceptance? Pascal on M: "He did not want to maintain anything at all."

Who is the enemy of the Muslims? Well, who isn't?! That's the question. Becomes a bit tiresome after a while (Zionsits, Hindus, Raymond, Horus, neo-colonialists, feminists, etc., etc)...

'Imagining your world from different angles, or at different scales of significance'.

But that requires flexibility, the acceptance of 'provisionally fixed points'. Not with the 'eye of the universe' (Sidgwick) , sub specie aeternitatis, but with Blake's (?) 'double vision'.

He who sees Ratio sees only himself.

'To see a dog dreaming-it must have an inner world, just like ours'. But for Descartes it has no perspective, no true experience, doesn't imagine a hare running in a field in its inner world...all there is, is the shadow of mechanical operations of the brain.

Well, if it's good enough for humans, it's good enough for dogs! And God alone knows what the status of the hare is!

But this ability/desire to see things from multiple-perspectives, isn't that disturbingly close to the post-modern? Or, if you want to go back, to cubism vs the static perspective of the Renaissance (a point made by Robert Hughes)?Does one end up with weakened capacities for 'seeing' at all? In some sense, isn't this tied in with capitalism's devaluing of 'place', "all that is solid," the very possibility of experience (E.S. Reed)? Nothing jars against our sensibilities so much as the idea of 'cosmos' or the classical or discipline.

Maybe there's something in that, the hidden affinity between Romanticism and late capitalism, but on the other hand, isn't the very definition of what it is to be human the ability to form a second opinion, revise one's views, cross out and start again? This distancing-from oneself, from nature, one's roots and home, and therefore from one's initial point of view, has always been with us, whether we cultivate it or not. The most difficult of things: 'disciplined freedom' (Sen).

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