624
That is the setting of our zero minus all sums. A species, in other words, that has
abrogated all outright affiliation. Or, as Wallace Shawn composed in his lyrical and
unsettling play The Designated Mourner, “All that endless posturing, the seriousness, the weightiness, that I was so sick sick to death of – I’d never have to do any
of it ever again.”
5
Or, in a similar guise, as bespoken by T. S. Eliot, “Irresolute and
selfish, misshapen, lame, Unable to fare forward or retreat.”
6
66.3 Both
Of course, we fondly recall those pinnacles of apparent integrity. Thales, when
asked about God is said to have deliberated (giving no certain account) “to no
effect,” a deliberate paradox that comported with his equal belief that all matter was
fluid and variable, the soul always in motion.
7
Of Mahavira’s own substantive retreat
(to Rousseau’s island of Saint-Pierre in the Lake of Bienne, as it were), namely, the
rite of sallekhana, of fasting to death. Archaeological evidence attests to inscriptions
at Sravana-Belgola, in India’s southern state of Karnataka, that indicate at least 59
cases of such Jain spiritual suicide during the seventh and eighth centuries, practiced not merely by the clergy, but by laypersons as well.
8
Porphyry, Clovius,
Erasmus Darwin, Percy Shelley (Fig. 66.2).
All of these iconic testimonies and genomic memories stir the caudal samavasarana of a Saint Francis (Fig. 66.2) and his interactions in Sassetta’s dozens of original panels of Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece, and of St. Bonaventura’s biography.
Obviously, the Van Eycks’ “The Adoration of the Lamb,” Giorgione’s “La Tempesta,”
Vermeer’s three masterpieces, “Artist in his Studio,” “Girl with Pearl Earring,” and
“View of Delft.” Each one gives us to marvel upon the intersections of our species’
paradoxical gifts for great beauty and, adjoining its core, or enshrouding it, a strange
and most unflattering madness which by every account is quintessentially a font of
specifically human contradictions. We don’t see it with hippos or magpies or even
41,000-year-old Arctic nematodes.
So great and dire a mismatch of proclivities in humans as to evoke that sudden
dizziness of elevation gain towards the obvious conclusion of Beethoven’s “Ninth,”
9
or Handel’s “Messiah.”
10
These mammoth artifacts of a 300,000-year-old human
5 The Designated Mourner, Wallace Shawn, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY 1996, Part
Two, p. 91.
6 From the conclusion of Animula, Wood Engravings by Gertrude Hermes, No. 23 of The Ariel
Poems, Faber & Faber Ltd., London 1929.
7 See The History of Philosophy, by Thomas Stanley, 2nd edition, London 1687, pp. 6–12.
8 See Jainism in Early Medieval Karnataka c.A.D. 500–1200, by Ram Bhushan Prasad Singh, With
a Foreword by Professor A. L. Basham, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1975, p. 21.
9 See Beethoven’s Ninth – A Political History, by Esteban Buch, Translated by Richard Miller, The
University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2003.
10 See Handel’s Messiah – A Celebration, by Richard Luckett, A Helen And Kurt Wolff Book,
Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1992.
66 Mismatches
That is the setting of our zero minus all sums. A species, in other words, that has
abrogated all outright affiliation. Or, as Wallace Shawn composed in his lyrical and
unsettling play The Designated Mourner, “All that endless posturing, the seriousness, the weightiness, that I was so sick sick to death of – I’d never have to do any
of it ever again.”
5
Or, in a similar guise, as bespoken by T. S. Eliot, “Irresolute and
selfish, misshapen, lame, Unable to fare forward or retreat.”
6
66.3 Both
Of course, we fondly recall those pinnacles of apparent integrity. Thales, when
asked about God is said to have deliberated (giving no certain account) “to no
effect,” a deliberate paradox that comported with his equal belief that all matter was
fluid and variable, the soul always in motion.
7
Of Mahavira’s own substantive retreat
(to Rousseau’s island of Saint-Pierre in the Lake of Bienne, as it were), namely, the
rite of sallekhana, of fasting to death. Archaeological evidence attests to inscriptions
at Sravana-Belgola, in India’s southern state of Karnataka, that indicate at least 59
cases of such Jain spiritual suicide during the seventh and eighth centuries, practiced not merely by the clergy, but by laypersons as well.
8
Porphyry, Clovius,
Erasmus Darwin, Percy Shelley (Fig. 66.2).
All of these iconic testimonies and genomic memories stir the caudal samavasarana of a Saint Francis (Fig. 66.2) and his interactions in Sassetta’s dozens of original panels of Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece, and of St. Bonaventura’s biography.
Obviously, the Van Eycks’ “The Adoration of the Lamb,” Giorgione’s “La Tempesta,”
Vermeer’s three masterpieces, “Artist in his Studio,” “Girl with Pearl Earring,” and
“View of Delft.” Each one gives us to marvel upon the intersections of our species’
paradoxical gifts for great beauty and, adjoining its core, or enshrouding it, a strange
and most unflattering madness which by every account is quintessentially a font of
specifically human contradictions. We don’t see it with hippos or magpies or even
41,000-year-old Arctic nematodes.
So great and dire a mismatch of proclivities in humans as to evoke that sudden
dizziness of elevation gain towards the obvious conclusion of Beethoven’s “Ninth,”
9
or Handel’s “Messiah.”
10
These mammoth artifacts of a 300,000-year-old human
5 The Designated Mourner, Wallace Shawn, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY 1996, Part
Two, p. 91.
6 From the conclusion of Animula, Wood Engravings by Gertrude Hermes, No. 23 of The Ariel
Poems, Faber & Faber Ltd., London 1929.
7 See The History of Philosophy, by Thomas Stanley, 2nd edition, London 1687, pp. 6–12.
8 See Jainism in Early Medieval Karnataka c.A.D. 500–1200, by Ram Bhushan Prasad Singh, With
a Foreword by Professor A. L. Basham, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1975, p. 21.
9 See Beethoven’s Ninth – A Political History, by Esteban Buch, Translated by Richard Miller, The
University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2003.
10 See Handel’s Messiah – A Celebration, by Richard Luckett, A Helen And Kurt Wolff Book,
Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 1992.
66 Mismatches