Hi, Marsha V -
"He conceded that while he hoped his new book would "open a million
doors," he still had further work to do "on where exactly love fits in to
the metaphysics of quality."
Where Michael, where do you think love fits into the picture?
I'm not sure, yet. I'm just getting re-acquainted with the carburetors and
beer-can shims and such of Bob's work and the MOQ. As for pictures, I want
to say we need to transcend pictures, yet our minds sure like to make them.
I'm a Classicist-Romantic, so I'm wanting to find true synthesis. The first
order of business is to find out what exactly the MOQ is/says and where it
is. Toward that end, I'm going to one of the beginnings and trying to track
down the 1961 Quality essay and work my way forward.
Do you have an answer? Does Mary MacLane point towards that answer?
I think she did. I had the answer when I read her first words and was
dazzled with a light that hasn't dimmed in 25 years:
* * * * *
Butte, Montana,
January 13, 1901.
I OF womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and
frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary Mac Lane, for whom the world
contains not a parallel.
I am convinced of this, for I am odd.
I am distinctly original innately and in development.
I have in me a quite unusual intensity of life.
I can feel.
I have a marvelous capacity for misery and for happiness.
I am broad-minded.
I am a genius.
I am a philosopher of my own good peripatetic school.
I care neither for right nor for wrong—my conscience is nil.
My brain is a conglomeration of aggressive versatility.
I have reached a truly wonderful state of miserable morbid unhappiness.
I know myself, oh, very well.
I have attained an egotism that is rare indeed.
I have gone into the deep shadows.
All this constitutes oddity. I find, therefore, that I am quite, quite odd.
I have hunted for even the suggestion of a parallel among the several
hundred persons that I call acquaintances. But in vain. There are people and
people of varying depths and intricacies of character, but there is none to
compare with me. The young ones of my own age—if I chance to give them but a
glimpse of the real workings of my mind—can only stare at me in dazed
stupidity, uncomprehending; and the old ones of forty and fifty—for forty
and fifty are always old to nineteen—
* * * * *
It was like putting my finger into a light-socket, and it's still difficult
for me to read the words even now. There are some books that feel so
intimate that I handle them with ginger fingers. Mary's first book is one of
them. ZAMM is another. And yet I also seek to get far, far into them and
wrestle them. They're my angels.
The answer? Being a whole person, with whatever evolution has given you and
personal experience gives you. And for most of us, the love-drive is strong.
So we'd better get right with it, or we'll be wrong with it. Ultimately I
see all interesting systems of thought as extractions, unfoldings. We pull
them out of life and splay things out. The dangerous summit Phaedrus got to
was where the splayed-out system was in danger of swamping out life itself.
Once unfolded, you do stuff with them and then they get folded back into
life - or should. That which is differentiated must be reintegrated.
Since I'm going back to the beginnings, I just started looking at Plato's
"Phaedrus" again, and I had a memory. I went to a college set up by
associates of The Chairman, and it was based on the Great
Books/discussion/seminar model. I found the "Phaedrus," when time came to
read it, fascinating because it was set *outside.* I very much wanted to
bring this up in Seminar, but the Lead Tutor was strangely discomfited by my
question and wouldn't take it up.
MRB
http://www.fuguewriter.com
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