This … quality also means that enchantment is impervious to the workings of the will, untouchable by the commands and petitions of our ordinary waking consciousness:
“Because no one is in charge, enchantment is wild, unbiddable. That inconvenient truth means that although it can be invited, it cannot be created, commanded, or managed.” (Curry)
[…]
All true enchantment may be just this — an ongoing encounter with the mystery of the other, which can never be possessed in words or ideas, only held in wonder. (Popova)
Le secret du maître est de savoir reconnaître la distance entre la matière enseignée et le sujet à instruire, la distance aussi entre apprendre et comprendre. (Ranciere)
Aaron Neville, How Could I Help But Love You. Written Naomi Neville. 1967.
When you hold me close Honey, you’re the most Baby, you set my soul on fire Ever since I met you Honey, I had to get you You have been my one desire
How could I help but love you With a love so true You send cold chills down my spine If we would ever part It wouldn’t be your fault Yeah, it would be all mine
If you would ever leave me Honey, it sure would grieve me Baby, it would break my heart But I won’t let that worry me This love will always be It was meant right from the start
Cicero’s life and thought are a testament to the idea of probabilia: we should be confident in our beliefs, but never certain (Massimo Pigliucci for aeon)
The Academic Skeptics called their school the New Academy, to distinguish it from the Old one started by Plato. Arcesilaus and Carneades – the great sceptics of the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE – had pushed Plato’s and Socrates’ dialogical method toward a radical conclusion: we are unlikely to achieve certainty, because human knowledge comes from our senses and from reason, both of which are fallible.
Crucially, they did not conclude that we should therefore believe nothing whatsoever. Carneades introduced the concept of the pithanon (a Greek word) – the persuasive, the plausible – as the proper standard for action. Cicero translated the word into Latin as probabile (plural probabilia, from which we get the English ‘probable’) and built his whole epistemology on it.
Cicero’s own formulation is plain. In the Academica, he separates his school from the dogmatists in a single sentence: others declare that certain things are settled and fixed, whereas ‘we hold many things to be probabilia, which we can easily follow but can scarcely affirm.’ Follow easily, affirm rarely. The entire method is encapsulated by that asymmetry.
[…]
… on a personal scale, Cicero’s epistemology is an argument against the seductions of fixed identity. The person who has ‘found their truth’ and stopped questioning is not wise; they have surrendered to what Simone de Beauvoir, in The Prime of Life (1960), called ‘that conscious venture into lunacy known as a “philosophical system”,’ from which its adherents derive an obsessional attitude endowing their tentative patterns with universal insight and applicability. The well-examined life is one of continuous calibration and revision: strong-enough commitments to act with integrity, loose enough to update when the evidence changes.
Primary is pleased to present Of Ivory and Flesh, a solo exhibition by Luna Palazzolo-Daboul.
“The house, even more than the landscape, is a ‘psychic state,’ and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy,” the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his seminal book The Poetics of Space (1957).[2] Bachelard’s phenomenological approach shifted the understanding of architecture away from pure physics and geometry to embodiment, perception, and psychological resonance. Despite drawing on Jung’s theory of archetypes, Bachelard believed that it was not psychology but rather poetic images that reached the deepest layers of the human unconscious. His influential theory, centered on the inner “house of dream-memory,” on space as a vehicle for poiesis (from the Greek phrase meaning “to bring into being”), established a dialogical correspondence between concrete forms and subjective experience.
Bachelard’s theory of poetic image, which, as he argued, gave form to the past’s imprint on the human psyche not by literally reproducing it but by making it reverberate anew in the body, finds a meaningful counterpart in the work of Berlin-based, Georgian-born artist Thea Djordjadze.
… shame requires actual communities to function. (New Yorker)
… the denigration of one’s pathological interests is thus tantamount to removing barriers to acting well. (aeon)
The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another. (James Baldwin)
Only temporary peril—another Thursday. Blood remains primarily inside my body. The scream of the animal is for attention. Abruptly my shadow reminds me I am human, in the room, though the darkness I make on the walls could be mistaken for storm. The coulisses of trees endure, despite my failures to see them as more than symbol. The gray seems personal. The news, sempiternal. I am of and in an uncertain age. A coolness descends. The future.
