Frame a shot like Sven Nykvist

Write prose as precise, spare and emphatic as Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson or J.M. Coetzee

As open to polyphony as Dostoevsky

Find joy in servitude like Bach

Mourn like Jeremiah

As useful as a pen, or a trowel.

313 is a:

prime

palindromic number

happy prime

and the first palindromic happy prime.

The implications are indeed staggering.

‘”In this image [the lightning bolt], we find a dramatic portrayal of Eliade’s “dialectic of the sacred”—the coincidentia oppositorum in which the profane and the sacred achieve simultaneity of form. Eliade explains the dialectic of the sacred as the “manifestation of the sacred in material things.” One of his great interpreters, Thomas J. J. Altizer, refers to it as an ambiguous, even “paradoxical mode of being which is at once both inside and outside of time.” In Youth, the question at stake is the relationship between historical time and transcendent, mythological time, and the role of memory in mediating this dialectic of the sacred in our modern, secular world—a world where, Eliade claims, the sacred is “repressed.” “

Apparently Eliade removed himself from ‘historical time’ as much as possible, rarely reading newspapers, remaining apolitical. I think this brings up a significant problem. It is not the problem of scholarship or study as opposed to the active life, at least not directly. I think it is the problem of how one engages the ideas which one finds most pressing, those which are convulsive and demanding. If history has led to a suppression of the sacred, does history itself subsume the sacred by necessity, or is it simply in our epoch? Can attention to the present moment in its historical place be legitimate archeology, or distraction? I am also not clear if the disjunctive is inclusive or exclusive. The answer might be both, although I do not see how it could be neither. It also seems that one can affirm attention (immersion?) in historical time as Eliade has it without making history itself immanent.

J.M. Coetzee has this to say about Bach’s music:

“In Bach nothing is obscure, no single step is so miraculous as to surpass imitation. Yet when the chain of sounds is realized in time, the building process ceases at a certain moment to be the mere linking of units; the units cohere as a higher-order object in a way that I can only describe by analogy as the incarnation of ideas of exposition, complication, and resolution that are more general than music. Bach thinks in music. Music thinks itself in Bach.” (What is a Classic?)

The last line is difficult and complex. How can Bach think in music, much less the reverse? The Ciaconna from Partita n. 2 is absolute abstraction, iterated and reiterated to the breaking, both of the violin and the structural limitations of the music. I think the substance of Coetzee’s claim is that Bach figures music by using music itself. Vivaldi’s birds of spring, Bruch’s Scottish mist, Chopin’s rain and Tchaikovsky’s Russian triumph all speak with music of other things, and not to their discredit. But Bach writes music which seeks only to understand itself, the cascading notes comment and reinterpret only the ones which came before and function only to provide the structure of what will come after.

What is most shocking is the beauty. To our minds prone to conflate mathematics and mechanics we are surprised to find feeling amidst such theoretical, indifferent sounding equations. Yet the thing which strikes me most about this piece (and many others) is the sense that Bach’s carving at the joints of musical theory brought him to something quite concrete. Is it Music, and so Coetzee is right, Music thinks itself in Bach simply because they met, and now think of each other? I don’t know. The piece strains, either against itself or against something else. I am inclined to think that if the piece was straining against itself, Bach would have left it unfinished, the continuous return to theme and complication of pattern without an end. Its completion suggests something different, that the strain was not against something, but for something. If Bach did not arrive at Music at the end of his search, he did find a place to rest this staggering weight of ideas. And that is the mystery, the frame in which such music sits.

this is carsten in alaska, signing off.

my fellow kayakers had a goodbye dinner for me last night, and i have a total of 3 days left on the lake. mr. dylan is spinning on the record player, but its all about traveling places, and not staying in any one place. byrne and i are watching double features, all of this can only mean one thing…

its time to leave alaska. yep, thats right folks, the time is coming close, when the lower 48 has got to have to take me back. the key is getting there.

we have two revival shows of the liliputian puppet sideshow this friday. psychoanalysis after the apocalypse is coming around for another go. my coffee is ready. one of these days, the mug is going to finish up cracking, but not yet.

it can only mean I have to be at work in half an hour, and need to go eat breakfast. A lot has happened since I last posted, the puppet show, various bears eating salmon not 15 feet from my kayak, and so on. I am fighting the good(?) fight with the biola financial aid department which just makes me all the more envious of those of you who have graduated.

and finally, before i go get breakfast, i should say that a few days a go, laura veirs came on and made me lose count while i was closing up the store. thought you should know.

off to the races.

Lets see, since I last posted, I have been to Canada for the first time, all the way up to the Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon. The best part about this was finding bread and cheese to make a man weep. Truly, I nearly did. Real German Volkhorn brot and bauern brot and oh me oh my. Also some great Guyere cheese that reminds one what cheese can be, if one is in the know. All in all, I spent fifty dollars on bread and cheese, along with some good honey and these amazing dutch waffle cookies which are not easy to find, and I usually have to have someone fetch them for me from amsterdam.

I also have seen my first brown bear. I was paddling along happily with a group on Wednesday when 600-700 pound brown bear came out of the alder not fifteen feet from my kayak. He didn’t seem terribly interested in me, or any one else however. He would look our direction, turn, and amble along ever so peacefully, as if we didn’t know he could catch up to our kayaks pretty easily if he so desired. There is something frightening about 700 pounds that can move like sprinter. I was counting myself lucky it wasn’t a sow with her cubs. Then we might have gotten charged. Which is a whole different blog post entirely. I expect more and more bear sightings this next week, considering the salmon are running in high numbers this next week.

Right, I must shower and breakfast myself. I put far to much cayanne pepper in my tea last night, in an attempt to shock my system out of being sick. It had the affect of making my throat feel like its been sanded and chalked.

oh, and I also went to the very last midnight selling of harry potter. but that is a post all on its own. havn’t touched the book yet.

Its been rainy the past few days, till yesterday it began to clear up, and today was as blue a sky day as it could be. I’ve been working everyday since sunday, out on the lake eight to ten hours at a time, with yesterday’s thirteen being the capstone. I come home drained most days, and need to have several cups of tea before I am worth anything. I think Byrne is starting to get annoyed that I’m falling asleep during most things that arn’t ‘open water’ or ‘irreversible.’ No work till noon tommorow, which is the best news I’ve heard all week.

We had three trips today, but I didn’t need to go out on the second one. The cotton wood was blowing across the lake, like snow in the middle of summer, so I took out a kayak and paddled out by myself and found a little patch of beach on the side of the lake which has the waterfalls. I managed to get my kayak up on the sand and clammbered out, yelling hello to make sure that any bears in the area heard me and weren’t suprised. I clambered around on the waterfall and laughed at cotton wood till I had to turn back, and lead the next trip. Mostly, I tried to see. The only draw back to this was that the wind had come up by the time I headed back, so I had to contend with some choppy waters. But that is fun all in itself.

In a bizarre situation, the first trip I took out had a biola grad in its midst and turns out the whole family has their feet firmly in Biola, with one daughter an alum, and another having considered Biola but declined, but was debate partners with Danielle Howe in highschool. Rebecca Nations, if any one knows her. It was very, very weird.

Byrne is in bed and the clouds have come up and I am going to walk on the beach. I keep waking up with my hands hurting and stiff, and it worries me. There better be nothing permanent.

Time is a quixotic archeologist, and the things he decides to unearth, dust off, and set up for display are always suprising.