The Sileni of Alcibiades are back to preach the art of love

"Socrates was chained to a wife, and by what a filthy accident he himself paid for this blot on philosophy, in order that others thereafter might be made more cautious by his example. Jerome thus mentions this affair, writing about Socrates in his first book against Jovinianus: "Once when he was withstanding a storm of reproaches which Xantippe was hurling at him from an upper story, he was suddenly drenched with foul slops; wiping his head, he said only, 'I knew there would be a shower after all that thunder." - abelard in historia calamitatum

I disagree with Abelard, I think it is a great thing that Socrates was married. pff, Abelard. Heretic.

Erasmus (my patron saint) is all over Socrates' wife - in the affirming sense, you naughty kids. Socrates' wife adds to his credibility. But here's my question - the paragraphs come straight out of the 12th Century from Abelard's autobiography. Note the passion, note the sense of suffering under the passion and his low estimation of something that enthralled him. What's not right with Abelard and Heloise's relationship?

NOW there dwelt in that same city of Paris a certain young girl named Heloise, the neice of a canon who was called Fulbert.

Thus, utterly aflame with my passion for this maiden, I sought to discover means whereby I might have daily and familiar speech with her, thereby the more easily to win her consent. For this purpose I persuaded the girl's uncle, with the aid of some of his friends to take me into his household ... by his own earnest entreaties he fell in with my desires beyond anything I had dared to hope, opening the way for my love; for he entrusted her wholly to my guidance, begging me to give her instruction whensoever I might be free from the duties of my school, no matter whether by day or by night, and to punish her sternly if ever I should find her negligent of her tasks.

We were united first in the dwelling that sheltered our love, and then in the hearts that burned with it. Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love, and learning held out to us the secret opportunities that our passion craved. Our speech was more of love than of the books which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words. Our hands sought less the book than each other's bosoms -- love drew our eyes together far more than the lesson drew them to the pages of our text. In order that there might be no suspicion, there were, indeed, sometimes blows, but love gave them, not anger; they were the marks, not of wrath, but of a tenderness surpassing the most fragrant balm in sweetness. What followed? No degree in love's progress was left untried by our passion, and if love itself could imagine any wonder as yet unknown, we discovered it. And our inexperience of such delights made us all the more ardent in our pursuit of them, so that our thirst for one another was still unquenched.

In measure as this passionate rapture absorbed me more and more, I devoted ever less time to philosophy and to the work of the school. Indeed it became loathsome to me to go to the school or to linger there; the labour, moreover, was very burdensome, since my nights were vigils of love and my days of study. My lecturing became utterly careless and lukewarm; I did nothing because of inspiration, but everything merely as a matter of habit. I had become nothing more than a reciter of my former discoveries, and though I still wrote poems, they dealt with love, not with the secrets of philosophy. Of these songs you yourself well know how some have become widely known and have been sung in many lands, chiefly, methinks, by those who delighted in the things of this world. As for the sorrow, the groans, the lamentations of my students when they perceived the preoccupation, nay, rather the chaos, of my mind, it is hard even to imagine them.

a soundtrack to life

Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet - Gavin Bryars - If you haven't heard it, perhaps you ought to, but i won't say that you must. But read this:

"The door of the recording room opened on to one of the large painting studios and I left the tape copying, with the door open, while I went to have a cup of coffee. When I came back I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping." - Gavin Bryars' writeup on how this came about.

What I'd never noticed before is his comment on the unpredictability of the tape loop of the man singing:
"I noticed, too, that the first section of the song - 13 bars in length - formed an effective loop which repeated in a slightly unpredictable way." I wonder what he means by that.

SImon turner - hymn for thatcher - Much like Gavin Bryars, which i had heard a couple of years ago. This tune I heard for the first time yesterday. it describes an overwhelming dillema which culminates in a moment with a woman who, though in the company of her own privacy, disgustedly she realizes that she's allowed herself to be penetrated by music that betrays what she has convinced herself of as pure hogwash. angered at herself for being caught unawares, she tries to drown the music - she tries to move on. but it does not let her go easily.

When bombs are dearer than a home

"the B-2 stealth bomber, cost over $1 billion per unit to produce, and are armed with ordinates like the GBU-15 (guided bomb unit), which costs $245,000 per unit" - Just read this in an article on migration and human security.

America could feed an entire African country off of a military plane and one bomb.

Northrop Frye on Democracy as Open [Source] Myth

the following quotes come from Frye. They resonated within me.

"you don't need to be Freud to see that you cycle around your childhood your whole life"

"you can only really teach by parable"

"the book is the world's most patient medium"

"the educational attitude is a militant one"

Frye then goes on to speak about freedom and responsibility, which i'll paraphrase - dipping his ideas, fondue style, into my subjective understanding.

The more freedom we have, the more we need to be responsible for what we do. This is why people crave for authority. Submitting oneself to an authority, Frye says, allows the individual to be the machine he is comfortable being. Frye says the public conception of a machine is one that says the machine is not self-defeating, it can do its thing without anxiety. Just so, the individual casts on to authority the fears of having to wrestle self-defeating anxieties of having freedom.

It is in his application of mythology to an understanding of how the world works today that Frye's concern about the machine man really bares fruit. He notes the difference between open and closed mythologies. Closed mythology is the authoritarian imposition of ideas on the individual - it is the means by which an authority governments. Open mythology, however, is fashioned democratically - formed in the individual. Words and the stories that colour the definitions for "freedom" and "liberty" come from within the individual in a democracy.

I don't know, but I think I'm starting to sense a strong and violent devotion among people to the maintainers of the status-quo, to the rule of the security state. I do not think that the security state is a positive development. A democratic closing to violent potentialities means that the individual, with his now limited freedoms, has less of himself to be responsible for.

Instead of internally being formed by the tyranny of infinite possibilities (rule of freedom), the individual in the security state is fashioned by an externally imposed limitation on being (rule of man). Certainly, I can sit here and think of what it must be like to have infinite possibilities, but it's a demotivating exercise since it is such a reminder that I am so far away from being - I feel dead and the thought of endless possibilities I know is futile.

Uh oh, it's gone. It just walked away. The Point just up and left. Don't worry, I'm sure it will return.

Erica and I are going to watch the English Patient tonight.