Winter of my discontent: Winter afternoons like the heft of oppressive cathedral tunes

Notre Dame, December 8, 2010. Photographed by Remy De La Mauviniere.

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons —
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes —

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us —
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are.

(Emily Dickinson. Poem No. 258.)

When everything is gloomy and all the grass and crops buried under the snow, and Christmas has gone and it’s a new year, and there is nothing to look at or on which to work but your soul: this I find oppressive.

Like cathedral tunes calling me to examination of conscience before reconciliation, my least favorite sacrament. (And I’ve had more than most people. What’s got two thumbs and survived Last Rites? This guy.) In this world one of the things I particularly don’t like is taking stock and looking back, and that’s all a human can really do in the winter, traditionally. But that’s what I try to force myself to do with this journal, and is also the purpose for this Winter of my discontent theme to begin with. So I should stop looking for quotes or cute pictures with which to avoid being serious about it, and start actually fulfilling the task I set out for myself.

I feel like this is unrelated, but I had this revelation about tooth whitening the other day that turned my stomach — it is bleaching your bones. I know that we have many grooming rituals which are ridiculous when one takes the long view of humankind, rituals in which I readily participate such as make-up and hair teasing. But to bleach one’s teeth suddenly struck me as wrong on a deeper level.

Teeth are bones, and people bleach them so they will be more attractive. They want pretty bones. That is macabre and horrific and insane. What the fuck is the matter with people?

On the other hand, I would be a hypocrite not to admit that I guess I’d do it if I had the spare change. I want pretty bones as much as the next guy. I’m not a complicated conundrum, I’m just a shallow, uncertain mess.

Goethe Month: Theory of Colours, Day 5 — Goethe vs. Newton and a whole lot of Heisenberg with bonus Fermi hotness

A famously uncertain doc.

Goethe’s colour theory has in many ways borne fruit in art, physiology, and aesthetics. But victory — and hence, influence on the research of the following century — has been Newton’s. (60)

(Werner Heisenberg, “Bermerkungen zur Theorie der Vielfacherzeugung von Mesonen.” Die Naturwissen-schaften Vol. 39. 1952).

Heisenberg was deeply interested in Goethe’s Farbenlehre. He delivered a lecture in 1941 on the differences between Goethe’s and Newton’s color theories, in which he essentially argued that both were right but that what Goethe had done was outline very specifically and accurately the phenomenon of human perception of the spectrum, while Newton’s thrust was more toward definition and demonstration of the spectrum’s essence and proveable existence itself.

Fermi, Heisenberg, and Pauli. Fermi was such a tragic hottie. Do you think he killed himself? I kind of do.

The views Heisenberg espoused of Goethe’s experiments being valid insomuchas they are observably repeatable and scientifically sound have fortunately come to be the modern perception of Goethe’s color theory research — that Goethe was accurately exploring the definition of a physiological, human sense of color and drew credible conclusions about colors and the human eye.

Prior to a re-surge of interest in Goethe’s color theory that began in the 1930’s and was legitimized largely by Heisenberg’s lecture and writing, Goethe’s work had been suffering for most of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century under something of a cloud of suspicion due to his theory’s eclipse by Newton’s with popular physicists. In his book Goethe Contra Newton, British physicist and scholar Dr. Dennis Sepper beautifully describes the shadow of early, dichotomous criticism which hung over Goethe’s Farbenlehre and was part of a larger debate in science:

A characterological or typological trait of the poet prevents him from grasping the real essence of science. On the other hand, the scientist must, to some extent, be open to the demands of spirit, and science is fundamentally part of a grand ethical quest. Goethe’s apparent inability to grasp the essence of Newton’s science reveals the chief differences between those who cultivate imagination and human truth and those who pursue objective truth in nature.

(Sepper, Dennis L. “The Critical Dilemma.” Goethe Contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color. Cambridge: University Press, 1988. 6.)

via.

I feel like these different thrusts of firstly poetry and science, and secondly the science of physiology and psychology, faith and beauty-based, rather than a perception of a more “hard” science are completely exemplified in the above shot.

A flock of pigeons takes off from the steps of the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Istanbul.

Here is hard, natural science, pure biology, that is also poetry — a bird in flight — and all against the backdrop of human faith as symbolized by the cathedral, which is furthermore situated in one of the oldest cities in modern existence, through which millions of human feet have passed. That is one fucking deep picture of pigeons. Am I right?

That was fun. I think I’ll suss out and post up some other famous critical responses a different day.