Owen Ransen's Blog

 I've been told, and I've found out for myself, that the best way to remember and learn things is to explain them to other people. So trying to remember the story told in this book by Frances A. Yates ... ...should fix it better in my mind. It is an interesting story. This is what happened. The (European) intellectuals of the 1500s had an idea that Hermes Trismegistus...  ... (that's the one on the left) was a great Egyptian magician who lived after the Biblical Abraham but before the Greek philosophers. Since in the 1500s everything that "ancient" was considered purer/better than the current age (whatever the current age was) Trismegistus was much admired. He lived in a Golden Age. By the way Trismegistus means "Thrice Great". Here is the wrong timeline:    Here is the correct timeline. " This huge historical error was to have amazing results, " writes Yates. The Corpus Hermeticum is an "ancient" text where Trismegistus is suppos...

 Oddly I found myself reading three books one after another and each one had a monochrome cover. The Temple by George Herbert, 1633   Breakfast At Tiffany's by Truman Capote, 1958 Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker, 1984 The only one I read to completion was Breakfast At Tiffany's , it was the only readable one. Although the Daily Mail newspaper thinks it is romantic, it is about a prostitute living off rich male admirers. The Temple is a collection of religious poems, and was interesting and moving in parts. But about 33% of the time I had no idea what he was talking about, the English language has changed so much over time. I'll continue to dip into it now and then. Very very Christian. Blood and Guts in High School I stopped reading after 20 pages, rude and crude drawings notwithstanding. It seems to be a novel of serial abuse and bad sex. It looked like the whole book would have the same tone throughout and tell the same episode again and again, so I stopped...

 I never ever explain my artworks, creations, stuff, whatever you want to call them. It reduces the scope of the work, it puts a filter in front of the viewer, it is unnecessary.  Others have put it better years ago:  The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. - Francis Bacon   Labelling takes attention away from the content . - Iris Häussler     Why embrodier what excludes commentary? An image explained is no longer an image . - E M Cioran   Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. - Susan Sontag   When looking at art, saying nothing is always better than saying something. - Ludwig Wittgenstein And I think the same goes for novels. When an author makes a book tour to promote his novel, and starts to explain origins, and says "I wrote this novel because...",  "I wanted to show...", "this character represents" and so on, all he or she is doing is ruining the magic of a work of fiction. Now the reader can...