§ 11 The writings of the humanists are full of surprises. What is a humanist? Convention has it that ahumanist is a man versed in the knowledge of ancient languages, which is superficially correct. But thiskind word conceals, beneath a smile, the finest irony. A humanist, from the Latinhumanus, is not only apoliceman, but also a politician:umên-istêsis also a singer of love, a trouvère. The links betweentroubadourism and Platonism are undeniable. The Greekplastônikoscharacterises an inventor, a finder(trouvère)and a mystifier. Platonic love is therefore one and the same with chivalric love, namelyjobelin, fromkobalein, “to deceive” or “deception”. Love,emmor(readamor), frommenuô, isenvelopment, seduction.“Qui ne sait celer*ne sait aimer” (“Whoever does not know how tosealdoesnot know how to love”), say the Arrests d’amour § 13. Let us now go back a few centuries and recall the troubling quarrel of Father Jean Hardouin, a renowned professor at the Collège de Clermont (now Louis le Grand), who argued that the poems of Virgil and Horace were false. Nowadays, revelations of this kind go unnoticed or unappreciated: the mind is elsewhere. But it was a tempestuous time, and opinion was divided into two bellicose camps; the camp of the bold Jesuit included prominent figures in the Church […]
The sequence is exactly as it takes place on my iPhone as snaped by my nieces’ boyfriend in the beginning of December 2019. He was referring to me as the Grim for the Grim Reaper and none of us had yet heard of the Bluestones yet. Shortly thereafter across the street PC Richards, Long Islands electronics giant and highest profile billionaire due to his incessant advertising for over twenty years backed over his wife in his driveway and killed her on the eve of Christmas. That’s when things got Grim. The Truth About Jack Heart In A Dream Within a Dream Edgar Allan Poe asks, “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” (1) David Lynch’s Twin Peaks the Return imagines “we are like the dreamer who dreams then lives inside the dream.” It then asks, “but who is the dreamer?” (2) In the Those Who Would Arouse Leviathan I wrote: “what I think and do becomes songs and pop culture and what is pop culture and songs become what I think and do. I do not know if I am the reflection or the image.” When I gave the manuscript to Christopher Hayden, General Michael Hayden’s […]