Miroslav Holub, Brief Thoughts on Maps

The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately,
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.

But the third day the unit came back.
Where had they been? How had they made their way?
Yes, they said, we considered ourselves
lost and waited for the end. And then one of us
found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.

The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map
and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps
but of the Pyrenees

Miroslav Holub, Brief Thoughts on Maps.

Borges on bad tangos

“… One of my friends, a professor from Paraguay, took me to his home in Texas. He said he had tangos and asked if I wanted to hear them. I said, “Yes, of course.” He played all the tangos I loathe, actually. For instance, “Flaca fane y descangallada”, “La cumparsita”… I thought to myself, “What a disgrace; these aren’t tangos, how horrible this is!” And while I was thus judging them intellectually, I felt my own tears. I was crying with emotion. That is to say, I condemned that music intellectually and yet at the same time it had touched me and I was crying…”

Chartres

Richard Powers, in the Goldbug Variations, attributes this story to the painter Ben Shahn: 

... an itinerant wanderer travelling over country roads in thirteenth century France comes across a man exhaustedly pushing a wheelbarrow full of rubble. He asks what the man is doing. "God only knows. I push these damn stones around from sunup to sundown, and in return they pay me barely enough to keep a roof over my head." Further down the road the traveller meets another man, just as exhausted, pushing another filled barrow. The second man says "I was out of work for a long time. My wife and children were starving. Now I have this. It's killing but I'm grateful for it ." Just before nightfall, the traveller meets a third exploited stone-hauler. When asked what he is doing, the fellow excitedly replies, "I'm building Chartres Cathedral."

These are ordinary things

I've learned to clip my wings

And soften my ways..

...like you'd estimate, just average.

    But evidently he does not agree...

A little parable from Franz Kafka

"...Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony..."

Anna

Just Rage

Adam Phillips, from 'The Beast in the Nursery'

"...There is a world elsewhere of fluent, uninterrupted competence; a world in which everything works ... A world in which we need never feel anger - or rather, the unbearable conflict that we use anger to abolish, to void ourselves of (we don't want to kill the person we hate most, the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones once remarked, we want to kill the person who creates in us the most intolerable conflict). There is no anger, that is to say, that is not revenge; no rage without the betrayal of an ideal, however unconscious, however exorbitant that ideal might be. In my bad temper I expose not merely my loss of control - that so much wished for transgression - but far more shamefully I expose my furtive utopianism; my horrifying, passionate ideal of, and for, myself. In other words, I am humiliated at that moment when I can no longer bear - that is, rationalize - the disparity between who I seem to be and who I want to be; when, in psychoanalytic language, the gap between my ego and my ego-ideal becomes irretrievable. The one person I can never mourn the loss of is my ideal self. Anything, even the shameful excitement of humiliation is better than that. If anger is evidence of our idealism, our self-idealization - of just how unconscious, how frantic our sense of justice is - it also reveals, by the same token, that our potential for humiliation is the root of morality. 
    It is, indeed, curious how impressed we are by being diminished; how vulnerable we always are to slight and ridicule (as though we are, somewhere, always already ironized in our own eyes; as though, from one point of view, all our claims are boasts). Nothing confirms more clearly the impossibility of amorality - our embeddedness in a moral world - than our capacity to be humiliated. That we can feel humiliated reveals how much what matters to us matters to us. Our rage is itself a commitment to something, to something preferred. Indeed, how would a person immune from, or ignorant of, humiliation know what a good life was? Our betrayals, our travesties that issue in anger, are forms of awkward, untimely revelation. It is as though our morality, as disclosed by our anger, is a kind of private madness, a secret personal religion of cherished values that we only discover, if at all, when they are violated. The virtues we can consciously formulate, and try to abide by, are, one might say, our official morality. Our unofficial, more idiosyncratic morality is only available, so to speak, through humiliation. Once you know who or what humiliates you, you know what it is about yourself that you ultimately value, that you worship. Tell me what makes you enraged - what makes you feel truly diminished - and I will tell you what you believe, what you want to believe about yourself. What, that is, you imagine you need to protect to sustain your love of life..."

from 'Cinema Paradiso'

“Once…a king gave a feast for the loveliest princesses in the realm. Now, a soldier who was standing guard saw the king’s daughter go by. She was the most beautiful of all and he fell instantly in love.
But what is a simple soldier next to the daughter of a king? At last he succeeded in meeting her, and he told her he could no longer live without her. 
The princess was so taken by the depth of his feeling that she said to the soldier, “If you can wait for 100 days and 100 nights under my balcony, at the end of it I shall be yours.”
With that the soldier went and waited one day…
two days…
then ten…
then twenty.
Each evening the princess looked out, and he never moved! In rain, in wind, in snow, he was always there! Birds shat on his head, bees stung him- but he didn’t budge.
At the end of ninety nights he had become all dry, all white. Tears streamed from his eyes. He couldn’t hold them back. He didn’t even have the strength to sleep. And all that time, the princess watched him.
At long last, it was the 99th night…
and the soldier stood up, took his chair and left.”

”What happened at the end?”

”That is the end. And don’t ask what it means. I don’t know.”

Carving vs Modelling

"… In one kind of creative experience the artist uses his art to elaborate, to expose, to fashion himself. In the other kind of experience the animating intention of the artist is to reveal something other, something separate, something aside or apart from the self; not to fuse with object, but to differentiate it. The sacramental poet, the carver, forgets himself; the erotic poet, the Promethean, the modeller, endorses himself. In one version the self is the instrument, in the other it is the obstacle… At one extreme of this strange dualistic vision there is the cult of personality, the artist as the emperor of egotism; and at the other extreme there is a cult of the object, of a world whose virtue and substance resides in the fact that it resists manipulation. Creative experience is either self-promotion or self-surrender. The moral and aesthetic question becomes: do I value something because I can make it mine, or because I can’t?…”

(From ‘Side Effects’ by Adam Phillips)

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