----- Original Message -----
From: "Max Richards" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 2:24 PM
Subject: Re: "Carrying On"
What a carry-on...the challenge in this for me, but not I guess for other
quicker readers, is to get a hold on this translation of Don Juan to 'the
realm
of meanings', where Cassandra also is, blethering (or is she right again?)
about
today's overwhelming crisis. This realm, I'm guessing, exists only as the
place
of meeting of minds capable of abstracting from their contexts in cultural
history the big names with their freights of meanings. But that Cassandra is
made over a la Quant 1960s puts her back in cultural history. Foolish
Cassandra,
blind to the big moral issues Don Juan dramatizes...
'from the realm of meanings Care,
like Time, is banished.'
Big banishing - praps that's what my mind still resists, despite the poem's
brilliance.
Max
No, Cassandra is quite right - she sees as clearly now as she did "back in
the day." The difference is that now she doesn't expect to be listened to,
and at least tells herself (the word "febrile" might cast some doubt) that
she doesn't care. She's certainly having some fun out of life; she has a
"wide circle of friends" as well as a new hairdo and outfit. I'm a great
fan of early-20th-century philosophy: Bradley, McTaggart, Santayana. All
three have perverse / provocative views of Time. For Santayana the moment
of perception (which seems to some degree reciprocal between perceiver and
perceived) - the "essence" - is in some way timeless; time gets started
again once you're "outside" that moment. For Bradley time is as ambiguous
as anything else when measured against the Absolute. For McTaggart, what's
real is a universal Community of Loving Souls; he devotes a large part of
Volume I to proving that time is unreal, and his arguments seemed convincing
to Borges. My "realm of meanings," though more literary, is something like
Santayana's realm of essence and McTaggart's Community. Cassandra's
miniskirt IS stylish; style is absolute, not historical-relative, not a
matter of Saussurean differences (or loathesome Derridean differances). And
what matters for Cassandra is just that she perceives truth, not what anyone
does about it. Don Juan's case is more complex, though not necessarily more
profound. He seems - at least as we see him in the poem - more active,
still raising hell. But the last part of the poem suggests something about
his "carrying on": that it is not just tension and excitement but comfort,
"almost love." Perhaps that's its meaning. Perhaps HIS meaning is not
understanding or admitting that he wants love and commitment; perhaps
Cassandra's meaning is not admitting the heartbreak of action and
responsibility. But to put it that way is heavy-handed and moralistic.
Plato also believed in a realm of meanings from which care and time were
banished.
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