This afternoon, after my Contracts II exam, I met with Fausto Holban. Fausto is leaving for Italy soon, and is lending me his slide projector while he is away. Kodak has stopped producing slide film, and recently Fuji, now the sole producer, announced a 20% price increase in the film. I never got to shoot Kodakchrome, having missed my chance by about half-a-year (I started shooting film around this time last year– May 04, 2011). I regret not having had my time with that film’s palette of colors, so I hope Fuji will keep slide film around. If not, then I will shoot it until it’s gone. In any case– until today– my only memories of seeing slides projected are from my earliest years in Italy– the first half of the 1990′s– before moving to New York. I’ll skip over the Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation criticism of sharing photographs on Facebook (as now almost everyone does). What I will say is that, in comparison, seeing slides come to life is magical. You are there, in the dark, where the light comes to life again through the actual, physical negative that was in your camera, with you, when you took the photograph.

These, though, are not my photographs. Fausto and I happened across a strange little suitcase of sorts, among some things that were to be thrown out. Inside, in three different drawers, we found about 250 Kodachrome slides. One of the drawers seems to cover photographs taken at Niagara Falls in 1949, the other two, Bermuda in 1950. I’ve only taken a quick look. They seem well executed though, both in composition and in exposure– in other words, by someone who seemed to know what he was doing.

Some of the slides are labeled– location, year, and the name of the photographer: E.L. Wilson. A quick Google search seems to point to a man born on December 19, 1920. Arkansas. That would have made Wilson eighteen around the outbreak of WWII– and indeed one gravestone indicates that he served as a Private First Class in the First Infantry Division. I haven’t found any service records– he could have served in Italy, even D-Day. A later photograph shows him with Billie Jean Stobaugh. From what I can tell, she’s the woman in the first photograph. Eight years his junior. In 1949, Wilson was twenty-nine; in 1950, travelling in Bermuda with Stobaugh, he was thirty, she was twenty-two. The records I found, though, don’t have the two of them married. Stobaugh married a Martin. She died in 1995. Wilson died in 1966.

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you; the question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more, and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
(Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 341, “The Greatest Weight”).

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
(Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 276, “For the New Year”).

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it would become a universal law.
(Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, II)

I wrote the following in the autumn of 2005. It could use some clarity, both in the writing and in the point. Almost seven years have passed, but I still think that the general idea is valid, and maybe useful. It is something I would like to elaborate on one day, if I will ever have the time.

Nietzsche’s Eternal Return as a Semi-Ethical Concept
While not necessarily a complete ethical or moral system, Nietzsche does provide a method for self-evaluation of a person’s actions, decisions, and life. The concept of Eternal Return places a demand on a person’s conscience and functions in a manner similar to Kant’s Categorical Imperative. Both serve as methods, rules or evaluative systems for sorting out and judging actions, decisions, and life. The basis for evaluation is the question: “Do you will this once more and countless times more?” which, for Nietzsche, ought to be answered with a “Yes” – with a doctrine of Amor Fati. Nietzsche, however, differs from Kant and other philosophers in that the system is purely subjective and leaves the normative responsibility in the hands of the individual.

“‘When Hercules,’ says the moralist, ‘had arrived at that part of his youth in which young men commonly choose for themselves, and show, by the result of their choice, whether they will, through the succeeding stages of their lives, enter into and walk in the path of virtue or that of vice, he went out into a solitary place fit for contemplation, there to consider with himself which of those two paths he should pursue.’”
(Xenophon, The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates).

“Better go down upon your marrow bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.”
(Yeats, Adam’s Curse).

“Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.”
(Evans, Photography).

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;
and home to the mother.

You making haste, haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it
stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the
thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there
are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught — they say –
God, when he walked on earth.
(Jeffers, Shine, Perishing Republic).

“Jeffers also tends to apostrophize his countrymen as they blunder toward a comfortable destruction. Even in the midst of the Great Depression, Jeffers insists in ‘Shine, Republic’ that prosperity is the enemy of freedom. He begins by invoking the timeless qualities of tree, sky, water, and rock, which he associates with Western civilization’s ‘love of freedom.’ Like Yeats’s Romantic Ireland, Jeffers’s ideal America needs marrow, not money: ‘Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry, and often requires blood for its fuel.’ Jeffers does not believe that America can supply such blood for the torch of freedom indefinitely. Wealth and power will corrupt America, as they have corrupted every other society, but at least we can ‘keep the tradition [and] conserve the forms’ for a time. Always a master at providing cold comfort, Jeffers ends the poem by suggesting that our decline may provide a useful negative example for the future: ‘The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge their love of freedom with contempt for luxury.’
(Gilbert Allen, Jeffers and Yeats).

“Love is civilization’s miracle. Among savages and barbarians only physical love of the coarsest kind exists. And modesty protects love by imagination, and so gives it the chance to survive…. As for the purpose of modesty, it is the mother of love; that is enough to justify it. Its mechanism is extremely simple. The heart becomes filled with shame instead of with desire. Desire is thus inhibited, and desire is what leads to deeds.”
(Stendhal, Love).

“Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines.”
(Foucault, Discipline and Punish).

“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought…. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.”
(Rawls, A Theory of Justice).

“A year later, in 1942, he was placed in command of the Second Marine Raider Battalion with the rank of lieutenant colonel, a new combat organization whose creation he influenced. The organization and discipline of the 2nd Raiders was modeled on that of the Communist Armies he had observed during his time in China…. In the military there is a sharp caste-system divide between officers and enlisted personnel, and even experienced noncommissioned officers were expected to be subservient to even the newest, greenest second lieutenant. Carlson’s experience in having gone back and forth between officer and enlisted status in both the Army and the Marine Corps convinced him that this was not in the best interests of the service. Carlson saw the Communist approach as superior. Leaders were expected to serve the unit and the fighters they led, not to be served. Responsibility, not privilege, would be the keyword for battalion leadership when the Second Raiders formed up. Using an egalitarian and team-building approach, Carlson promulgated a new way for senior NCOs to mentor junior officers and work with the officers for the betterment of the unit. Even more controversial in concept, Carlson gave his men “ethical indoctrination,” designed to “give (his men) conviction through persuasion,” describing for each man what he was fighting for and why.”
(Evans Carlson).

“As hard as outsiders have tried to subdue and “re-create” the country in their own image, Afghanistan has been able to absorb the blows of superpowers, and remain essentially the same. The interesting thing is that the people trying to change it, change more than the country does even after Herculean efforts of governments, NGO’s, and coalitions.”
(Steve McCurry, The Longest War).

“The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness.”
(Camus, The Rebel).

“When we balance the Constitutional rights of owners of property against those of the people to enjoy freedom of press and religion, as we must here, we remain mindful of the fact that the latter occupy a preferred position. As we have stated before, the right to exercise the liberties safeguarded by the First Amendment “lies at the foundation of free government by free men” and we must in all cases “weigh the circumstances and appraise… the reasons…in support of the regulation of (those) rights.” [cit.] In our view the circumstance that the property rights to the premises where the deprivation of liberty, here involved, took place, were held by others than the public, is not sufficient to justify the State’s permitting a corporation to govern a community of citizens so as to restrict their fundamental liberties and the enforcement of such restraint by the application of a State statute. Insofar as the State has attempted to impose criminal punishment on appellant for undertaking to distribute religious literature in a company town, its action cannot stand.”
(Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946)).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGO0wbRdI4Y

Hate and love are broad brushes; by their nature incapable of accuracy.

“Music makes its appearance as the last plant among all the arts which grow on the soil of a particular culture—perhaps because it is the most inward and hence arrives last, in the fall, when the culture which belongs to it is fading. Only in the art of the Dutch masters did the soul of the Christian Middle Ages attain its last vibrations: their tone architecture is the posthumous, but legitmate and equal sister of the Gothic. Only in Handel’s music did there resound what was best in the souls of Luther and those related to him, the Jewish-heroic trait that gave the Reformation a trait of greatness—the Old Testament become music, not the New. Only Mozart transformed the age of Louis XIV and the art of Racine and Claude Lorrain into ringing gold; only in the music of Beethoven and Rossini did the eighteenth century sing itself out—the century of enthusiasm, of broken ideals, and of evanescent happiness. All true, all original music, is a swan song.”
(Nietzsche, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, “A Music Without a Future”).

Every work of art is offered to the viewer as unfinished and incomplete; upon reception the viewers themselves create; they fill in the blanks left by the artist.

Beauty is not something that exists in things, but something that is perceived from them. The property of beauty does not belong to things, but is bestowed upon them. It is perception, in other words, that creates beauty– it is not found in the world, but only inspired by it. No sunset or landscape is beautiful in and of itself. We could only assume that other animals are awe-struck by the colors of a sunset, and certainly a stone would have nothing to say of a starry night’s sky. Flowers do not know or feel themselves beautiful, and the only reason they become so is through a viewer’s perceptions and judgment.

What is considered beautiful depends to a great extent on taste. Since perception is what makes a thing beautiful, though, one can say that those with finer perceptions and greater sensibilities have access to realms of beauty invisible to others.

http://vimeo.com/33065480

“Of course. What I know bores me. You know, you get into the business of commercial photography, and that’s all you do is photograph what you know. That’s what you’re hired for. And it’s very easy to make successful photographs—-it’s very easy. I’m a good craftsman and I can have this particular intention: let’s say, I want a photograph that’s going to push a certain button in an audience, to make them laugh or love, feel warm or hate or what—I know how to do this. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do that, to make successful photographs. It’s a bore. I certainly never wanted to be a photographer to bore myself. It’s no fun– life is too short.” (Gary Winogrand, ASX, INTERVIEW: “Monkeys Make the Problem More Difficult – A Collective Interview with Garry Winogrand” (1970))

The strongest passions are those ones which alloy themselves with the intellect.

Truth reveals itself through argument. Whether it is the single mind that debates with itself, or many, the journey towards a deeper understanding requires and proceeds through opposition.

Words are limited in their ability to express a state of mind. One says, “I am happy.” There are many different shades of happiness, which one is meant? And does such a simple state of mind– merely and solely “happy”– even exist? Feelings are contextual and relative and mixed– they are always a cocktail and never straight. Other arts– visual, acoustic, for example– are more expressive in this regard. Shades and combinations of colors, forms, and tones offer a better vocabulary for the language of the soul. Music uses chords– notes mixed together. Written language in comparison is a very simple instrument, capable, at best, only of melody and not harmony. “Happy”– that is a single note. Perhaps there are nuances in how that word is spoken, or with some words, the weight of multiple meanings. By and large, though, written and spoken language has not yet achieved the complexity and expressiveness of, say, even a violin.