Forget the references to dead Greeks and Englishmen (also German space
cadets). Geary has found his way to one of the central insights of Buddhism
but has not quite reached enlightenment. To cling is to suffer. Let go. Let
go.
On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 1:50 AM Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
In Greek, "hilaros", also cognate with 'silly', means "gay". AsHeidegger notes, "silly" is one of the few instances in which an original
long e
(ee) has become shortened to i.>
Would that be in his famous examination of the difference between
Da-Silliness and Mit-Silliness?
D
Who has jumped a thread
On Friday, 15 January 2016, 1:38, "dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <
dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Geary writes: "yes, yes, yes." (Ultimately re: Helm's reference to 'the
perfect Emersonian).
For the record, in three Paul Carus lectures on Emersonian perfectionism
(cited elsewhere -- Grice also gave the Carus lectures on The conception
of
value) Cavell situates Emerson at an intersection of three crossroads: a
place:
-- where both philosophy and literature pass
-- where the two traditions of English and German philosophy shun one
another, and
-- where the cultures of America and Europe unsettle one another.
For the record, also, Cavell's exegesis of Emerson deepen our
understanding of them. But they do much more, for he offer a vision of
what life can be
and what culture can mean.
O. T. O. H., usually the right one, there is Hitchcock. In an essay on
Emersonian perfectionism, Rothberg argues that the driving force of
Hitchcock’s
work was his struggle to reconcile the dark vision of his favorite Oscar
Wilde quote,
“Each man kills the thing he loves,”
with the quintessentially American philosophy, articulated in Emerson’s
writings, that gave classical Hollywood movies of the New Deal era their
extraordinary combination of popularity and artistic seriousness.
Geary: "A thing difficult to achieve except in Beverly Hills: popularity
and artistic seriousness."
A Hitchcock thriller could be a comedy of re-marriage or a melodrama of
an
unknown woman.
Both these Hitchcockian motifs are Emersonian "genres", except for the
murderous villain and godlike author, Hitchcock, who pulls the villain’s
strings—and ours.
Because Hitchcock believes that the camera has a murderous aspect, the
question
"What if anything justifies killing?" which every Hitchcock film engages,
was for Hitchcock (if not Emerson, who never saw a Hitchcock film) a
disturbing question about art.
Tracing the trajectory of Hitchcock’s career, the essay by Rothman
discerns a progression in the films’ meditations on murder and artistic
creation.
This progression culminates in Hitchcock's "Marnie" (1964), his most
controversial film, even if the most imperfectly Emersonian, in which
Hitchcock
overcame his ambivalence and thought, wrongly, he had fully embraced the
Emersonian worldview he had always also resisted.
Reading key Emerson passages with the degree of attention he accords to
Hitchcock sequences, Rothman discovers surprising affinities between
Hitchcock’
s way of thinking cinematically and the philosophical way of thinking
Emerson’s essays exemplify.
Geary adds: "There's a further similitude: Hichcock's best films are in
black and white, as Emerson's Essays."
Rothman finds that the terms in which Emerson thought about reality,
about
our what he called "flux of moods" -- "from the maniac to the depressive
and vice versa," Geary expands -- about what it is within us that never
changes ("nothing," Geary notes) about freedom, about America, about
reading,
about writing, and about thinking are remarkably pertinent to our
experience
of films and to thinking and writing about them.
"It is a pity that Emerson disliked cinema," Geary notes.
Rothman also reflects on the implicatures of this discovery, not only for
Hitchcock scholarship but also for film criticism in general. It also
helps
reading Emerson's Essays which most find "dead boring".
Cheers,
Speranza
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