Wednesday, November 7, 2018

We go home now ix





It is a tempting response to the
Provincetown photographs of Joel
Meyerowitz, which have been seen
here before, to adjust their re-
production to suppress an ambient
haze, where of course the quality
of their light is the whole point.

Not just the light, but the haze,
itself. "Greedy boy," as Smiley
teased Lacon and the Minister,
when they leapt at intelligence,
"you hounded Control out, and you
let Karla in." The suppression of
uncertainty is to color, as the
critic Jed Perl remarks in his es-
say on Delacroix just now, in The 
New York Review of Books, a clari-
fication more in tune with the au-
thoritarian, than the authoritative.



It remains as wonderfully im-
pulsive to identify the facts
of one political election as
responses to another, as it
had been to reckon with the
latter by dismissing its lav-
ish haze. This temptation, so
widely shared as to have crept
even into comment here, invoked
the sense of reality in a grop-
ing more for prestige than for
authenticity. Yesterday, the 
legislative district in which
I reside managed to replace in
office a card carrying savage
of the casuist Far Right, with
a retired female operative of
the CIA. We have color today
for which we prayed, and haze.




             When we warn people not to pit their wills
             against the greater power of the historical
             situation, which they cannot alter, or can-
             not alter in the manner they desire, what
             we mean is not that we know facts and laws
             which we obey, but that we do not; that we
             are aware, beyond the facts to which the po-
             tential reformers point, of a dark mass of
             factors whose general drift we perceive but
             whose precise interrelations we cannot for-
             mulate, and that any attempt to behave as if
             only the clear 'top level' factors were sig-
             nificant or crucial, ignoring the hinterland,
             will lead to frustration of the intended re-
             forms, perhaps to unexpected disaster.



Take away the haze, take away
the hinterland. We see, reform
has been chastened enough, be-
fore its eyes, to respect the
haze of a historical situation.

Le Carré, Perl, Isaiah Berlin.
As Johnson said of Taliesin, 
He has developed the arrange-
ments of secrets of space. I
call it the hieratic aspects
of architecture, the proces-
sional aspects .. the essence
of architecture. Play itself.











ii  Robert Frank

Sir Isaiah Berlin
The Sense of Reality
  Studies in Ideas 
  and their History
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
1997©








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