The Doors of Perception

Someone was asking me about Huxley’s mescalin essay (based on the entry Huxley earlier) and so I managed to find it and reproduce a part of it below (not to be followed, the following for me reads like Dr Jekyll on a high, but then again Huxley loved Poe and translated many of his works):

The change which actually took place in that world was in no sense revolutionary. Half an hour after swallowing the drug I became aware of a slow dance of golden lights. A little later there were sumptuous red surfaces swelling and expanding from bright nodes of energy that vibrated with a continuously changing, patterned life. At another time the closing of my eyes revealed a complex of gray structures, within which pale bluish spheres kept emerging into intense solidity and, having emerged, would slide noiselessly upwards, out of sight. But at no time were there faces or forms of men or animals. I saw no landscapes, no enormous spaces, no magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings, nothing remotely like a drama or a parable. The other world to which mescalin admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective universe was relatively unimportant.

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers-a full-blown Belie of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal’s base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

“Is it agreeable?” somebody asked. (During this Part of the experiment, all conversations were recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of what was said.)

“Neither agreeable nor disagreeable,” I answered. “it just is.”

Istigkeit – wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? “Is-ness.” The Being of Platonic philosophy – except that Plate seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were – a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.

A little bit of prawn

My Tempura is obsessed about shopping bags! Sometimes I think she loves shopping more than me…

Success!!

She gets to the items…and there is a mysterious present from Milly Walker!!~~

Aw… there’s a little pink furball pen to compete with her! And a Cirkus pink case I was so obsessed with when I first saw it at Kikki.k, a present from JRV. LOVE.

Lets go join the circus.

She is bored now, and high on CatnipSD. Very Huxley.

Super Mario on Violin

This guy is so adorable! I can’t tell where he’s from though! Irving, If he is japanese he would meet my dream of having a japanese violinist, no? Hee.

ps: Who exactly is Princess Peach?

Little straw hats

I love hats, and was so pleased to find this little bow hat to add to my collection!

 Because life simply is.
It is indeed sweet to be mad.

Chalk and ghost – TLP

“Your problem,” the doctor began, laying down his stethoscope “Is in being too real.”

The carriage clock on his desk chimed nine. “Your heart-aches, the dreams, memory loss, the peculiar sensation of moths in your lungs can all be attributed to this cause.”

I pinched my cheeks, rolling my tounge around the cavern of mouth. That couldn’t be right, I had been trying so hard not to exist. I had read all the right sort of books, while eating, walking, waiting for the train. I had changed my name at least three times in the last week. I had thought in the third person and past tense. I had even memorised The Jabberwocky until I could recite it backwards.

“A healthy girl of your age,” he continued, I wasn’t listening “ought to be no more real than a silk slip or a corn husk.”

My shoes felt too big all of a sudden. I was gripped by the fear that perhaps I had tried too hard. Tulle, ice, spectacles, fog.. I was forgetting something.

“Not to worry,” his bony hands scrawled something illegible on a yellow pad.

Windows, raindrops, crystal, plastic wrap.. oh, that was it. I had gone through to the other side, like cordial through a gauze sleeve. In unbecoming, I was nothing, and through nothing you can see everything. Everything, more bright and bold and painful than a gasp.

“Take three in the morning and two with your afternoon tea.” the doctor handed over the script.

I thanked him, turned, and walked through the wall.

An Affair to Remember

I want desperately to watch this with you, Irving! But you have probably watched this two-three times. Nevertheless, please let me bring your ego for a walk and to watch this with you all over again.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) – Bio by Bernard Howells

Charles Baudelaire – one of my favourites and faithful followers to my blogs know I quote him often. Found this luscious biography on him specifically on his works (I am tired with those that write on their relationships and mistresses and babies and blindness, those are sometimes best reserved for Marilyn Monroe!) and I think Howells writes awfully well especially on his ideal of ‘pure poetry’.

Charles Baudelaire is chiefly known as the author of Les Fleurs du mal (1857, 1861) The Flowers of Evil) and of a collection of experimental prose poems, Le Spleen de Paris (1869; Paris Spleen). But he is also important as a critic of painting and, to a much lesser extent, of literature and music. The essays on art are usually published under the collective title Curiosités esthétiques (Aesthetic curiosities), those on literature and music under the title L’Art romantique (Romantic art; a title not chosen by Baudelaire). The Salon de 1846 (Salon of 1846) first established his reputation as a writer and aesthete, and he is now judged one of the greatest art critics of 19th-century France. Over the last 50 years his critical essays have come to be considered an extension of his creative work because of the insights they provide into his aesthetics as a poet. The best exhibit the qualities one might expect of a poet—imaginative and emotional investment in his subject, allusive intellectual density, sensuous evocativeness—in keeping with Baudelaire’s conviction that the only aesthetics worthy of the name are a posteriori, the subsequent analysis of a richly sensuous lived experience, and not a matter of “principles” or abstract preconceptions about the beautiful. We can see this exemplified in “Richard Wagner et ‘Tannhäuser’ a Paris” (1861; Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris). Baudelaire’s musical experience was limited, but a concert of excerpts from Wagner’s music and the premiere of Tannhäuser in Paris in 1861 produced an overwhelming impression, evoked in the essay in terms of the poetic theory of correspondances (mystical correspondences) or synesthesia (in this case, sound suggesting qualities of light and color). Baudelaire referred to experience of this kind— sensation carried in the imagination to a point of almost preternatural intensity—as le surnaturalisme (supernaturalism). Wagner was to Baudelaire in music what Delacroix had been 15 years earlier in painting. A series of essays on drugs, published together under the title Les Paradis artificiels (1860; Artificial Paradise), explore similar states of heightened consciousness produced by alcohol, hashish, and opium, but Baudelaire’s celebration of their poetic effects is counterbalanced by his condemnation of drugs in terms of irresponsibility, delusion, and moral disintegration.

The literary criticism does not have quite the same intensity, though Baudelaire’s passion for Delacroix and Wagner was matched by his enthusiasm for Poe, whom he translated extensively. Poe provided not so much the revelation of a new experience as the confirmation of a theory of poetry toward which Baudelaire’s own intuition was guiding him. His most important collection of essays on literature, Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains (1861; Reflections on some of my contemporaries), was commissioned as a series of prefatory essays for an anthology of French poetry produced by Eugène Crépet. Many of the poets discussed would now be considered minor and do not engage Baudelaire’s imagination in the same way as music or painting, the essays on Gautier and Hugo being exceptions. In these essays, Baudelaire, reflecting on the work of his contemporaries and thinking back over his own best poetry, comes closest to formulating his own ideal of a “pure poetry.”

The “Salon”—a critical account of the annual exhibition of contemporary painting held in Paris—became, in the wake of Diderot, an essay subgenre in the 19th century. They were commissioned by leading Parisian papers and journals and often published separately as brochures. They were often written by established or avant-garde writers (Musset, Heine, Champfleury) and were typical of the cross-fertilization between literature and the fine arts that was a feature of the intense artistic life of Paris from the Constitutional Monarchy onward. The aim in the first place was to offer an intellectual tour of the paintings on view and to act as a guide and stimulus to bourgeois buyers.

Baudelaire’s first Salon in 1845 follows this format. A year later, electrified by his recent acquaintance with Delacroix, Baudelaire wrote the Salon de 1846 and transformed the genre from a catalogue with commentary into an essay in high aesthetics. The Salon de 1846 is intellectually taut in its construction and polemically committed. In it Baudelaire states his own convictions as an artist at the outset of his career and promotes the genius of Delacroix, seen as the representative of the Romantic movement in France. Much of the essay turns on the distinction and opposition of color (Delacroix) and line (Ingres).

Line artificially separates objects and parts of objects from each other and creates stable conceptual identities; color blurs distinctions, including the distinction between subject (the viewer) and object (the viewed) and tends toward a poetic state of coalescence. The opposition of Delacroix and Ingres, as the two main rival representatives of contemporary French painting, is repeated in the text Baudelaire devoted to the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855, which is perhaps more interesting in the brief glimpses it affords of the impact of non-European art (for example Chinese art) on Baudelaire’s sensibility. The Exposition made Baudelaire aware of the narrowness of the controversies (e.g. Romantic versus neoclassical) that were still feeding artistic debate in France.

Two essays on caricature, “Quelques caricaturistes français” (1857; Some French caricaturists)and “Quelques caricaturistes étrangers” (1857; Some foreign caricaturists), prefaced by a short metaphysical theory of the comic, “De l’essence du rire” (1855; The essence of laughter), show a Baudelaire fascinated by the moral suggestiveness of this genre, which he refused to consider as minor. On the contrary, caricature exhibits, in quintessential form, the processes of simplification and expressive generalization (what Baudelaire calls “idealization”) common to all the visual arts.

Baudelaire’s last Salon in 1859 is tightly organized around the concept of imagination, in the name of which he rejects realism as a philosophically untenable position. As a subjective idealist, he argues that we do not know nature in any objective sense; all we have are the ways in which individual imaginations totalize experience. Baudelaire’s abiding commitment to Delacroix made him hostile to Courbet and unsympathetic to the contemporary developments in French landscape painting that would lead to impressionism (he could not tolerate the erosion of compositional values). It also blinded him to the novel genius of Manet. Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863; The painter of modern life) is the fullest development of a preoccupation announced as early as the Salons of 1845 and 1846—the necessity for modern painters to find the material of their art in the reality and lifestyle of their own historical moment. A comparatively minor illustrator of worldly life, Constantin Guys, is hailed as the artist who has opened his eyes to the bizarre beauty of Second Empire Paris, its types, its fashions, and the whole new world of nightlife made possible by gas lighting. The essay was influential in creating the climate of thought and sensibility that made possible the work of artists like Toulouse- Lautrec, Degas, and, of course, Manet himself.

Music at Night by Aldous Huxley

My recent beginning reads – Martin Amis’s ‘Vintage Amis’ recommended by a friend in law class, George Orwell, Kathleen Tessaro, and Aldous Huxley amongst othera.

It was so nice to find another book lover in law class, who similarly loves Kundera and could remember intricate little details so fondly, and speaks of books at Portobello market as most precious in his time in London. In America (he did a masters in law at NYU), K also would ship back whole boxes of books at any one time back to Singapore, and reads on art history and other works. A little of him reminds me of Will, and I did forget to mention him to you Irving, but I was too occupied with your descriptions of macabre friendships and bloody porcupine shirts!  Please read Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman and do barbaric yawps with me over the rooftops over the world!

Personally, I don’t purchase books as much, as I do finish quite quickly and am quite a dilettante, moving on to the next fad to the next, and how else will I have sufficient space for my dresses and hats! But I do collect some of my favourites, like Roland Barthes, Pico Iyer, Susan Sontag, Milan Kundera, and other treasured biographies and books which have been offered as presents in my life. I do wish I was like K and could collect whole volumes of books at any one time, just like JC’s father’s amazing library of books! I think I would have to depend on my significant other to do the book collecting (so I can read them and have staircase bookshelves).  I love the most – when I find little notes of the other’s thoughts in a book, or the lost look people have whilst in the middle of a book – and I loved very much when you had Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim at your bedside Irving (for I could remember, suddenly at once, the joy I had when reading Lord Jim and following his victories and tribulations!)

Everyone knows Aldous Huxley well for ‘Brave New World’ (a must-read, together with George Orwell’s 1984) but most do not know of his other works, most of which have been censured, censored or banned at one time or another. His social satires, and his concern with spiritual and ethical matters reflected the tone and unease of the zeitgeist, captivating his readers with imaginative plots on inflicted apocalypses, both physical and emotional. His books covered a wide range of issues, and he is often known for covering issues in scope, like the accelerating arms race globally in the period of his works, the enormity of the Jewish holocaust, and the impact of rapid deforestation and deforestation. The Devils of Loudon, a compelling psychological study of sexual hysteria in 17th century France, which was subsequently turned into a successful film, appeared in 1952. Evelyn Waugh and other authors often termed Huxley as ‘the gods of their adolescence’.

Towards the end of his life however, I felt his books became much stranger and rather eclectic, containing elements of short-lived but disturbing brilliance (ie. not to be followed). Like Yeats, he acquired new followers in pursuit of the newfangled obsession with drugs and religion, and even suggested in The Doors of Perception (1954) and its sequel, Heaven and Hell (1956) that mescalin and lysergic acid were ‘drugs of unique distiction’ which should be exploited for the ‘supernaturally brilliant’ visionary experiences they offered. The Doors of Perception, in the words of David Bradshaw, is a ‘bewitching account of the inner shangri-la of the mescalin taker, where ‘there is neither work nor monotony’ but only ‘a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse’ where the ‘divine source of all existence’ is evident in a vase of flowers, and even the creases of a pair of trousers’ revealed a ‘labyrinth of endless significant complexity’. The Doors of Perception was a set text for the beat generation and the psychedelic Sixties, earning Huxley a mention on the cover of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album.

I think Aldous Huxley’s works will be earning a place on my bookshelf after this book, graduating to the likes of Eliot and Orwell in my personal reading loves barometer, to be read and reread again. Music at Night earns only a short mention as a ‘typically energetic and wide-ranging volume of essays’, but already I love the few which I have read. Here are some excerpts from the first essay, Tragedy and the Whole Truth:

“There were six of them, the best and bravest of the hero companions. Turning back from his post in the bows, Odysseus was in time to see them lifted, struggling, into the air, to hear their screams, the desperate repetition of his own name. The survivors could only look on, helplessly, while Scylla at the mouth of her cave devoured them, still screaming, still stretching out their hands to me in the frightful struggle. And Odysseus adds that it was the most dreadful and lamentable sight he ever saw in all his explorings of the passes of the sea. We can believe it; Homer’s brief description (the too poetical simile is a later interpolation) convinces us. Later, the danger passed, Odysseus and his men went ashore for the night, and, on the Sicilian beach, prepared their supper prepared it, says Homer, expertly. The twelfth book of the Odyssey concludes with these words: when they had satisfied their thirst and hunger, they thought of their dear companions and wept, and in the midst of their tears sleep came gently upon them. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth how rarely the older literatures ever told it! Bits of the truth, yes; every good book gives us bits of the truth, would not be a good book if it did not. But the whole truth, no. of the great writers of the past incredibly few have given us that. Homer, the Homer of the Odyssey is one of those few. Truth? you question. For example, 2+2=4? or Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837? Or light travels at the rate of 187,000 miles a second? No, obviously, you wont find much of that sort of thing in literature. The truth of which I was speaking just now is in fact no more than an acceptable verisimilitude. When the experiences recorded in a piece of literature correspond fairly closely with our own actual experiences, or with what I may call our potential experience experiences, that is to say, which we feel (as the result of a more or less explicit process of inference from known facts) that we might have had we say, inaccurately no doubt: this piece of writing is true. But this, of course, is not the whole story. The record of a case in a text-book of psychology is scientifically true, in so far as it is an accurate account of particular events. But it might also strike the reader as being true with regard to himselfthat is to say, acceptable, probable, having a correspondence with his own actual or potential experiences. But a text-book of psychology is not a work of artor only secondarily and incidentally a work of art. Mere verisimilitude, mere correspondence of experience recorded by the writer with experience remembered or imaginable by the reader, is not enough to make a work of art seem true. Good art possesses a kind of super-truthis more probable, more acceptable, more convincing than fact itself. Naturally; for the artist is endowed with a sensibility and a power of communication, a capacity to put things across, which events and the majority of people to whom events happen, do not possess. Experience teaches only the teachable, who are by no means as numerous as Mrs. Micawber’s papa’s favorite proverb would lead us to suppose.”

Another part I love, on the same point of tragedy:

“Six men, remember, have been taken and devoured before the eyes of their friends. In any other poem but the Odyssey, what would the survivors have done? They would, of course, have wept, even as Homer made them weep. But would they previously have cooked their supper, and cooked it, what more, in a masterly fashion? Would they previously have drunken and eaten to satiety? And after weeping, or actually while weeping, would they have dropped quietly off to sleep? No, they most certainly would not have done any of these things. They would simply have wept, lamenting their own misfortune and the horrible fate of their companions, and the canto would have ended tragically on their tears. Homer, however, preferred to tell the whole truth. He knew that even the most cruelly bereaved must eat; that hunger is stronger than sorrow and that its satisfaction takes precedence even of tears. He knew that experts continue to act expertly and to find satisfaction in their accomplishment, even when friends have just been eaten, even when the accomplishment is only cooking the supper. He knew that, when the belly is full (and only when the belly is full), men can afford to grieve, and that sorrow after supper is almost a luxury. And finally he knew that, even as hunger takes precedence of grief, so fatigue, supervening, cuts short its career and drowns it in a sleep all the sweeter for bringing forgetfulness of bereavement. In a word, Homer refused to treat the theme tragically. He preferred to tell the whole truth.”

On catharsis and the make-up of tragedy:

“To make a tragedy the artist must isolate a single element out of the totality of human experience and use that exclusively as his material. Tragedy is something that is separated from the whole truth, distilled from it, so to speak, as an essence is distilled from the living flower. Tragedy is chemically pure. Hence its power to act quickly and intensely on our feelings. All chemically pure art has this power to act upon us quickly and intensely. Thus, chemically pure pornography (on the rare occasions when it happens to be written convincingly, by some one who has the gift of putting things across) is a quick-acting emotional drug of incomparably greater power than the whole truth about sensuality, or even (for many people) than the tangible and carnal reality itself. It is because of its chemical purity that tragedy so effectively performs its function of catharsis. It refines and corrects and gives a style to our emotional life, and does so swiftly, with power. Brought into contact with tragedy, the elements of our being fall, for the moment at any rate, into an ordered and beautiful pattern, as the iron filings arrange themselves under the influence of the magnet. Through all its individual variations, this pattern is always fundamentally of the same kind. From the reading or the hearing of a tragedy we rise with the feeling that our friends are exultations, agonies, and love, and man unconquerable mind; with the heroic conviction that we too would be unconquerable if subjected to the agonies, that in the midst of the agonies we too should continue to love, might even learn to exult. It is because it does these things to us that tragedy is felt to be so valuable. what are the values of wholly-truthful art? What does it do to us that seems worth doing? Let us try to discover. Wholly-truthful art overflows the limits of tragedy and shows us, if only by hints and implications, what happened before the tragic story began, what will happen after it is over, what is happening simultaneously elsewhere (and elsewhere includes all those parts of the minds and bodies of the protagonists not immediately engaged in the tragic struggle). Tragedy is an arbitrarily isolated eddy on the surface of a vast river that flows on majestically, irresistibly, around, beneath, and to either side of it. Wholly-truthful art contrives to imply the existence of the entire river as well as of the eddy. it is quite different from tragedy, even though it may contain, among other constituents, all the elements from which tragedy is made. (The same thing placed in different contexts, loses its identity and becomes, for the perceiving mind, a succession of different things.) In wholly-truthful art the agonies may be just as real, love and the unconquerable mind just as admirable, just as important, as in tragedy.”

I did feel however, his conclusion was a little weak and disappointing, and the lines he drew between tragedy and what he calls the ‘whole truth’ are not as clear. But still I appreciated that refreshing angle on tragedy, and he is a terribly charming writer! Over a smoke and him reading his essay over tea I might just have bought it all (I am a very gullible person, despite being a lawyer, and have a weakness for the Huxleys and Wildes of our world):

“Proust, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, Kafka, Hemingway – here are five obviously significant and important contemporary writers. five authors as remarkably unlike one another as they could well be. They are at one only in this: that none of them has written a pure tragedy, that all are concerned with the whole truth. I have sometimes wondered whether tragedy, as a form of art, may not be doomed. But the fact that we are still profoundly moved by the tragic masterpieces of the past that we can be moved, against our better judgment, even by the bad tragedies of the contemporary stage and film makes me think that the day of chemically pure art is not over. Tragedy happens to be passing through a period of eclipse, because all the significant writers of our age are too busy exploring the newly discovered, or re-discovered, world of the whole truth to be able to pay any attention to it. But there is no good reason to believe that this state of things will last for ever. Tragedy is too valuable to be allowed to die. There is no reason, after all, why the two kinds of literature the chemically impure and the chemically pure, the literature of the whole truth and the literature of partial truth should not exist simultaneously, each in its separate sphere. The human spirit has need of both.”

ps: Apologies for any mistakes in copying as I typed the above quite quickly and might have missed some parts of grammer, and it is my fault entirely for misrepresenting any particular section. Applies to most of the sections I share, really!

 

 

Madame Bovary

I came across these old photographs again recently, which gave me a few laughs and reminded me of the dear Italian restaurant at my doorstep (or near-ish, sort of). Do you remember Il Sorriso, dear Irving, and how it was always shut for afternoons but came alive on nights like these?

In other words, I feel like organizing a big afternoon or evening dinner party again soon to have a reckless state of mind. It feels like I have been thinking of nothing else but criminal procedure lately. I need an excuse to wear roses in my hair.

And its not every-day you get kissed by the chef himself! I was so surprised but I suppose he must have charmed many girls in his day! His daughter was taking this shot of us, no less. Yes I know Irving, you want all chefs and bakers to yourself.

What say you come to Singapore again, Irving, and we have a dinner party with cheese fondue and all our favourite things, just like the old days? I’ll bake you tiramisu if you do…

Oh, brother!

I have been obsessed about this labeler recently. I caught sight of it when I was shopping for a sharpener (no deliberate alliteration), and it was love at first sight. Imagine, being able to label all your items in the split of a few seconds! It acts as a mini printer and down black on white, black on pink, black on gold etc. and it is phenomenally quick and wonderful. It gives you borders and upside down designs and what not, but I am thrilled by the simple and have been madly labelling everything in my bag and all my law books and whatnot. Something pleases me about ruthless naming efficiency.

Brother P-Touch 90 from Brother, includes Deco Mode Formatting, available from Popular at S$39.90