The unequivocal beauty of Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor, D. 940, a piece for 4 hands, in this case, two hands belonging to Murray Perahia and the other two belonging to Radu Lupu.

Peter Filkins’ poem, “Soundboard” (from Paris Review archives)—

Soundboard

When Archie told me the incredible story
of Lady Margaret’s piano, an Obermeier plucked
from a forgotten warehouse in bombed-out Berlin,
then secretly carted off, scarfed up by the Allies
and loaded onto a plane, delivered to Ireland
only to end up the elaborate inlaid soundboard
holding Peg’s ashtray, her snooker of gin,

simply amazed, I couldn’t stop thinking
of Pasternak’s piano tossed from a window,
workmen at his dacha deeming it worthless
decades after his death, and the poem he wrote
that warned his lover, “The shivering piano
will discompose you … Death is in the air.
One opens up one’s veins much like a window.”

“Self-help discourse has tended to reproduce the split in romance ideology that we have been developing: valorizing the promise of love and the mutual obligations of lovers, it presumes that problems in love must be solved by way of internal adjustment, to make certain that its conventional forms can remain and keep sustaining the signs of utopian intimacy. Individuals are told that: the normative ideolo-gies and institutions of intimacy can work for them, but men and women are different species who will never experience the intimate other’s desire in the same language or with the same intensity; there are ‘rules’ of seduction and for the maintenance of the intimate other which should be followed, but about which it is bad to be explicit; romantic intimacy is an addiction that stimulates weakness and stunts growth, and yet is central to maturity; sex should be central, but not too central to love; the norms of propriety and responsibility that organize conventional lives are right, decent, and possible, but also boring, violent, and incomplete; and, within reason, anyone should get what she wants. This includes conventional norms about sexual practice itself: as discussions about sex have become more publicly available, it would seem that more varied practices have been normalized over the course of the twentieth century. Yet remaining remarkably stable has been the ideology that sex must seem natural: heterosexuality seems to require that any pedagogy between lovers must take place away from the sex itself, so that the image of the sex act as an expressive act of an unambivalent individual can be preserved. This form of hypocrisy is, currently, conventional to sex. Generally this ideology is addressed to women, who are deemed responsible for maintaining the emotional comfort of everyone in their sphere: but the unstated presumption in much self-help culture is that heterosexual intimacy is constantly in crisis and that its survival is crucial for the survival of life as we know it (a claim which is not false, but which of course does not tell the whole story of how desires are served by the reproduction of heterosexuality as a norm that gets called Nature).”

— Lauren Berlant, Desire / Love

An excerpt from “How to Seduce a Woman”, as published on the website, Masculine Mindset

“Myth is thus the Real of logos: the foreign intruder, impossible to get rid of, impossible to remain fully within. Therein resides the lesson of Adorno's and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment: Enlightenment always already “contaminates” the naive immediacy of the mythical. Enlightenment itself is mythical, i.e. its own grounding gesture repeats the mythical operation. And what is “postmodernity” if not the ultimate defeat of the Enlightenment in its very triumph: when the dialectic of Enlightenment reaches its apogee, the dynamic, rootless postindustrial society directly generates its own myth..”

— Slavoj Žižek, “Love Without Mercy” (2001)

I am by essence clean and pure.
I am pure because I am clean.
I am clean because I am pure.

– Antonin Artaud, “I Hate and Renounce as a Coward Every So-Called Sensate Being”

A poem about libation that never uses the noun, libation?

Who desired your downfall, o liqueur / I obey perhaps the soothsayer / Buried deep in the heart of my heart
Thinking blood while pouring wine

— Paul Valery, second stanza of “Vin perdu”

8
CATHERINE MALABOU: …. the closing words of Socrates lecture are: ‘Bid farewell to the political arena and its procedures,’ exhorting the young people abandoned by their fathers to withdraw for this very reason from that which caused their abandonment. Cynicism appears to be the most radical form of taking leave. A departure that - I'll say it again - is not a departing from politics, but from its ‘arena.’ A farewell to dynasty, a farewell to arche, to microcosm, caste, oligarchy - in a word, as we shall see, it is a farewell to government.

MICHEL FOUCAULT: What is the relationship between the fact of being subject in a relation of power and a subject through which, for which, and regarding which the truth is manifested? What is this double sense of the word 'subject,' subject in a relation of power, subject in a manifestation of truth?

A playful “translation” of John Gower’s summary of the Phyllis and Aristotle as it appears in Book 8 of Gower’s Apollonius of Tyre. The question being posed is whether logic or syllogism can save the wise man from his desires.

Aristotle’s Downward Dog

There, too, do I see Aristotle
Whom that Grecian queen so
Bridled that he is ridden into
Our own under a syllogism
That forgot its own logic
And made no art of its practice
In the life which excluded
The living. What he concluded
to be was deeded to his downfall.

R. Murray Schafer, the firmaments of the soundscape as expressed in the relationship between sound waves and light waves. . . The Doppler effect was first described in Doppler's Liber das Farbige Licht de Doppelsterne, where it was applied to light waves by analogy, after first discovering this effect in sound. The galloping of horses, the flight of a bumblebee: two Doppler effects found in nature, uncreated by humans.

[Phyllis near the window, talking to young Alexander the Great about his tutor, Aristotle.]

PHYLLIS: He tells you these things about himself, not me. Watch and you’ll see. Tomorrow I will ride him through the garden of his delight.

ALEXANDER: Impossible. He is not like the King, who sacrifices wisdom to the necessities of power. The philosopher knows better.

PHYLLIS: Of course. He knows best, but this will not stop him. Knowing the good has never stopped a mind from chasing the bad. As for me, I want nothing to do with the old sage. What I want is to win the game he’s staged. If I am inferior by nature, I will ride my superior with pleasure.

ALEXANDER: Who should the prince believe? The woman who thinks wisdom is fraudulent—- or the sage who warns me that such a woman can charm the intellect off the throne of the head?

PHYLLIS: If you want to account for the particle, you will see particles. If you prefer to imagine the wave, you will see waves. But the light is the light, regardless.

ALEXANDER: Not regardless.

PHYLLIS: Go ahead then— regard less.

“A love plot would, then, represent a desire for a life of unconflictedness, where the aggression inherent in intimacy is not lived as violence and submission to the discipline of institutional propriety or as the disavowals of true love, but as something less congealed into an identity or a promise, perhaps a mix of curiosity, attach- ment, and passion. But as long as the normative narrative and institutionalized forms of sexual life organize identity for people, these longings mainly get lived as a desire for love to obliterate the wildness of the unconscious, confirm the futurity of a known self, and dissolve the enigmas that marks one’s lovers.”

— Lauren Berlant, ibid.

Jan Sadeler (after Bartholomeus Spranger,) Phyllis and Aristotle, engraving, 16th century