The Perfect Insect

Question of the Day: how to reconcile Wittgenstein’s ‘what we cannot understand we must pass by in silence’ with the appalling political situation in this country?

As to Facebook and these other forms of sharing platforms, I propose we move on to other means of communication. Facebook et.al. aren’t working in our best interests, the community they claim to create is a faux community. Why not try this simple 3-step plan: 1) silence 2) feedback from silence 3) actual action, the least preferable of the 3-steps.

I’m appalled also by my disinterest. I’m disinterested in almost everything I was once interested in—the morning paper for instance, broadcast news, special sporting events like The Ryder Cup. The list goes on and on. I am, however, interested in my disinterest; that I’m interested in things an overwhelming number of people aren’t interested in, and think that if they were interested in the things I’m now disinterested in, if they’d pick up the ball I’ve dropped in other words, we’d live in a much better world.

The perfect insect: a creature you could kill easily, without remorse, that once dead was able to rise up and fly away with the understanding it would never bother anyone or anything again—a metaphor perhaps for the American version of Christianity and the innate problems it’s currently causing in the body politic.

Kant on the difference between the beautiful and the sublime: “The night is sublime while the day is beautiful.” This suggests that some mystery resides in the sublime that does not reside in the beautiful. Kant, a little later in his essay: “The sublime must always be large; the beautiful may be small.” Suddenly I have two great things to think about! I can carry these kinds of things around all day and into the night; I don’t need a backpack. I write in my little notebook: Of Kant: there was actually a time when men were thinking about the difference between the sublime and the beautiful.

Everything now, or almost everything, has something to do with plastic. Is made of plastic, is wrapped in plastic, comes in plastic, is stored in plastic, smells like plastic, tastes like plastic, looks like plastic, even the red tomatoes at the supermarket, even the navel oranges.

I’m trying to make a painting of what sleep looks like, and have come this far—sleep is made of  two shapes, a tunnel and a funnel. The colors of sleep are pale linen, light blue, gray. This is more or less along the lines of Hannah Arendt’s question: where are we when we’re thinking?

I picked up a book yesterday that I’d put down 15 years ago—Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert Richardson—and read for at least an hour. I’d forgotten that it was Emerson who wrote, the end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization, having mistakenly believed that it was Mark Twain.

Moth and Notebook, October 12, 2021.