Cant resist your smile

In a third successive unrelated reading, Immanuel Kant scores a mention.

The book is Angus Trumble’s highly diverting ‘A Brief History of the Smile’ (2004) which discusses many intriguing topics around the central question: what is a smile?

For instance, is it a mating call or just a default position and how does it work and what does it mean?

Trumble notes that Kant is depicted as smiling on the frontispiece of his 1796 book ‘A Critique of Judgement’.

Kant is in illustrious company, ‘Smile’ also goes on to discuss such luminaries as Sid Vicious, AC/DC, Aristotle, Boccaccio, Camus, Grover Cleveland, Darwin, Disraeli, Elizabeth I, WC Fields, Tipper Gore, Ulysses Grant, hippies, Thomas Jefferson, da Vinci, Moses, Ozzy Osbourne, Walter Scott, Bon Scott, La Gioconda, Elizabeth Taylor and Margaret Thatcher.

Trumble is a Melburnian and was a curator of European Art at the gallery of South Australia. He joined the brain drain by hightailing it to the US where he is now the curator of Painting & Culture at the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

Finalities
I’m writing for the aged of the ages.
The old that that are not quite dead.
Those who have the wisdom of the pages and the era.
Night recedes from darkness and calibrating kind words
Shut doors, entrailed floors rife with sin
Missed the months of mindless love
Plants succoured by unnatural rain
Whether it becomes me to paint my nails
Or plant them in the hands of the wagon
Redemption from the schooner line
Tinpot predictions at ten past nine
Lord’s witness protection schematic
Kitchen soot and plainflour attic
Bamboo grove peniscillinslim
Hardwork fetish professional crim
Dipped in inarticulate honey
Foolish with someone else’s money
Possession rate is middling poor
But enthusiastic prepared for golden dig
Lumbering like blind venetian moor
Sucking blacklanding loading rig
My destiny is drilled in remnants of cold fatigue
Short icebergs traipse in the green sun
Collapsed moments don’t darken matter
Remind me of a time twenty billion years ago
Before time was brought to bear
Tealeaf condiments of the bushido code
Chessman tanks, freshman ranks
freely fermenting in the motherlode
Cheesecake cutters, mothers dementing
Concrete canyons dipped in union
Capital rattlers soundblasted communion
Carpet sideburns of a tulip lake
Chandeliers kingcrimson delicate fake
In the depth of my eyes I’m delivering feeling
Muddled translation and halflost meaning
Coffeeblast in triptych of reality
Tales of hoffmen feudal fatality
Losing my spiritual flatulence
In a playden of opiate opulence
Carted away on sylvan ambulance
Can’t stand fashion’s smoking ambience
Embers only entrance mirror marvels
Lost brother’s secret parlance of scalpels
Spread muckwise by sunblemished saints
Raked up by the church of the latterday taints
As the grammar queen’s sentence constabulary
Erects speed cameras around your vocabulary
Sockseated in the pantheon of nations
Throned in platform shoes cross stations
Tintinabulating campanologists hammer
While queasy half-fed vergers stammer
Ancient laws and prejudice dominates
Eighty percent approval common denominates
Seatbelt fastened at the tone
May the force be without the security zone
Airmarshalls, sniffer sheriffs and deputy dogs
Gather on magnolia street with raining frogs
Tipper and Tippi, Skipper and Chippy
Seek slender tender skinny dipping sickie
Slick one slide slim
Paratroopers light up in oil
Nigerian fry in puddles of inflammable black
Whitecollars euphemise in upturned sack
Dazzling infomercial death slay per view
Worlds collide on air in mulligatawny stew
Cabinet fates incurred all too soon
Caustic lives shambling to ruin
Thylacine dancers on the soap-o-matic
Ultraviolet mice click on syncopatic
Words on other worlds icecap
Penguin guano farms antarctic licetrap
Listening, glistening for alien wireless
Prisoners cells contort with virus
Magi floating on twenty camels
Packet steamers on canals untrammelled
While death came quickly for Jimi and Janet
Me? I’m slowly sliding off the planet

Kantian Cant

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) popped up in two pieces of writing Woolly Days was reading concurrently on the beach at Bribie Island.

One is an internet discourse on the difference between ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’, the other is Stephen Hawkings Brief History of Time.

The two are widely different in scope but both invoke Kant. Immanuel Kant was born in Konigsberg, East Prussia in 1724.

His major emphasis was on discovering the nature and limitations of our learning means. In this he followed the same philosophical line as Locke and Hume.

His key role was to focus on the contribution of the knower to knowledge. As well as ‘Pure Reason’, his other main works were ‘ A Critique of Practical Reason and ‘A Critique of Judgement’.

He died in 1804 and is buried in Konigsberg. His tomb was one of the structures in the town to survive the Russian takeover (what is now Kaliningrad) in 1945.

Near his tomb is the following inscription from Pure Reason:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and perseveringly my thinking engages itself with them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

The heavens and morality are of the essence in Woolly Days' sandy readings.

The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy discusses the difference between ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’.

In essence knowledge gained a priori is gained independently of experience whereas a posteriori knowledge must be experienced. It goes on to explain the similarities between these distinctions and those that distinguish analysis from synthesis.

Kant originated the distinction in Pure Reason. In it he says a proposition is analytic if the predicate concept is contained within the concept but is synthetic if the predicate ‘amplifies’ or ‘adds to’ the concept.

In Hawkings Brief History (1987) he discusses whether the universe has a beginning in time and this question too is studied in Pure Reason. According to Hawkings, Kant calls the question an ‘antinomy’ (ie a contradiction) of pure reason because he felt there were equally compelling reasons for believing the thesis that the universe had a beginning and also its antithesis that it had always existed.

Both of Kant’s arguments, according to Hawkings, are based on the same underlying assumption that time continues back forever regardless of whether the universe does so. However St Augustine knew this not to be true. “Time was a property of the universe God created and did not exist before the beginning of the universe.”

Pause. Store. Recall.
Let this be my prayer wheel.
How will we find heart peace
Taking solace from powerful gods
Humbled by the scope of universal dilemma
Distracted by its own hungry moments
Unnerved by the sting of consequence
Unhinged by the powderkeg of intention
Unleashing demons into the mix
Multiplying viral forms attacking at random
Be strong but be sure
Ask yourself again
Am I right or just righteous?
Did all your dreams evaporate with the concrete?
Do you prefer the darker road?
Giving vent to your pessimism
Creating new shadowed realities
Dumbed down crushed finalities
Let them go
See them disappear
And watch and listen to the trees in the breeze
Whispering continuously
Proclaiming still life with photosynthesis
The only one we know

Critique of pure cant

The Noumenon, the 'thing-in-itself' is not an object of our sensible intuition.

Sensible enough, though hardly intuitive. Immy Kant usually knew what he was talking about though John Gray gives him a right old serve in "Straw Dogs" for his hopeless humanism.

We are all ever so 'umbly in Uriah's grip of Mad Kowtow disease.

Like flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods.

Shallow words
Countries out there warn me
I see a sign marked “Plenipotentiary”
its a word with lots of potential
pre-played jaguar shaped saxophones
shouts and bounces on a landless moon
10,000 words or more are a heinous condemnation
Of the largest exaggeration in the Southern Hemisphere
Less inclined to believe me
Hoarding billboard ancient scores
Settled by the football fieldmarshalls
Klaxon jugs spill overboarding pass
stiffest upper lips quiver in mustachioed bribery
Sangfroid in the cabin dance asks
where is Buffalo or Rome?
Spittle on the Picadilly line
Laissez-faire come home