Or I on

A cycle of matter that smatters of matters that matter (to me)

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true self.—William James

While I can think of many causes of my human failure, lack of faith in my true self is not on the list. Your true self might be like Socrates’, a private, divine, unimpeachable inner voice telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. Or like Descartes’ substance, whose entire essence or nature is that of thinking, dependent on nothing other than God. Or Hegel’s, a product of society and culture, synonymous with knowledge, equated with truth, manifested as history and the community as a whole. Or Nietzsche’s “mighty commander”, an “ever-listening, ever-seeking unknown sage”. Mine, however, is a lazy, no-good, lying son of a bitch. And a bully. And a chump. I wouldn’t put faith in it as far as I could throw up. He—of course it’s a “he”—has nothing to say and never stops saying it. He never thinks about what he thinks, and he never thinks about what other people think, beyond what he thinks they think about what he thinks. He kills every conversation with his bloviating bullshit. He never looks anyone in the eyes. He never looks in the mirror. He doesn’t brush his teeth. He leaves the seat up. Every shirt he owns has food stains and drool down the front. He drinks from the carton. He can’t draw, he doesn’t “get” poetry, he’s never made a loaf of bread. He can’t sew. He can’t juggle. He listens to shit music. He watches Netflix. He prefers pictures of paintings to paintings. He hates brushstrokes, he wants everything smooth. He hates originals of all kinds. He sees nothing he knows nothing he doesn’t share he has no grace he has no South he can’t read he can’t even punctuate properly. Sentences are beyond him. He couldn’t construct a decent paragraph to save his life.

There he is (↓), the man with the man bag looking up in the air, saying something, gesticulating, flailing his arms about. He is not a man, actually, he is a god, but a god cast out of heaven for his sins, which are legion. I won’t get into them here.

Sorry for the fuzziness. It’s a detail of a painting. And sorry for putting a picture of a painting here in the first place. I know, it’s bad for business: the more visual noise, I’m told, the more likely readers are going to skim, click and scroll off somewhere else. Just the same, like I said, this is him. Or a facsimile thereof. Hephaestus. The god of artisans, blacksmiths, carpenters, craftsmen, fire, metallurgy, metalworking, sculpture and volcanoes. Aphrodite’s ex.

Yup.

We, the rest of us, know this god-man smithy dude inside out. We’ve known him since he first showed up in the playground, or wherever it was, all smug, all superior, all up in your face about everything. He’s even stupider now than he was then. Not because he is older. We’re all older. Because he is lazier. Because he only reads headlines, if he reads at all. Because he buys into this and he buys into that. He can barely count anymore. He can’t read a map. He has no idea where he is half the time.

At his touch things go bad, words go blind, thoughts go black. It tires you out.

Still, he’s my true self, I must defend him, right? To the last breath, we are told. To the last syllable. To the end of recorded time. To this, to here, to now.

Fuck that. Enough is enough. It’s time to cancel his ass.

Okay. We’ve successfully lost even more of you by now. Those who are still with us, do you mind if we talk about the weather? Do you see the mountain and the lighthouse? Do they exist? Sorry. The lighthouse—the eye of the night—is in the bottom right corner. Do you see how above it, the morning sun, just now rising, is reflected in the clouds? What are clouds? You know what clouds are. Visible masses of condensed vapour floating in the air, usually high above the ground.

But what are they for? Do you know?

A cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of small water droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the air. These form as a result of saturation of the air when it is cooled to its dew point, or when it gains enough moisture (usually in the form of water vapour) from an adjacent source to raise the dew point to the ambient temperature.

Yes, but what are they for? And what is the point of the dew point? If you don’t know just say so. Don’t be like him. Be like me. Be like us.

The dew point of a given body of air is the temperature to which it must be cooled to become saturated with water vapour. This temperature depends on the pressure and water content of the air. When the air is cooled below the dew point, its moisture capacity is reduced, and airborne water vapour will condense to form liquid water known as dew. When this occurs through the air's contact with a colder surface, dew will form on that surface.

The dew point is affected by the air's humidity. The more moisture the air contains, the higher its dew point.

Yes, yes, but what is it for? And what are clouds for?

They are not for anything.

By this point, most readers aren’t seeing any of this. They have stopped skimming and scanning. They have moved on. Too bad Herman Melville didn’t know this. Maybe he wouldn’t have gone on so much. Maybe he would have had more success. Maybe he wouldn’t have been such a dick to his family. No matter. “It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life.” That’s what he would have called it. But do you see the lady (↑) leaning on what looks like a cumulonimbus raincloud? It’s not a raincloud per se, it is vapour sent by the gods, and a pictorial solution. The lady is Diana. She is the goddess of the moon and the hunt, and the patroness of the countryside and the crossroads. You can tell by her quiver and bow. And the crescent moon on her head. How would you describe her expression? Hard to say, right? Also, why is she standing on a storm cloud, or on a volume of vapour that looks like a storm cloud, posed the way she is and looking the way she is, and what is she looking at?

She is looking at what the two men below (↓)—also my true selves—are looking at. But unlike them, she is not shocked by what she sees.

Have you heard of the water cycle? It’s a biogeochemical cycle, a cycle of matter—this is where part of my subtitle comes from—in which the universal solvent, water, the inorganic compound of hydrogen and oxygen (H₂O), and one of the four elements in ancient and medieval philosophy and astrology, evaporates from land and oceans to form clouds, and then falls back to Earth as rain, snow, mist or fog. Some of it seeps into the ground and is sucked up by plants and other beings; some runs off the surface into lakes and rivers; some flows into rivers and gets dumped into the ocean.

There is beauty in this, but I am not communicating it, not connecting with it in a way that will ever move you. There is poetry in this, but I am not entering into its flow. Because, I think, I have become deaf to it. Blind to it. Not because of my lack of faith in my true self. Because my true self is Hephaestus, whom the Romans called Vulcan. The lame one, who thinks everyone is stupid, naive, pretentious or dangerous. He is failing me. Or I am failing him. And we are both flailing.

This young man (↑) is Cedalion, Hephaestus’s slave. Perhaps my even truer self. Some say he was not Hephaestus’s slave but his mentor, who taught him smithcraft. Sophocles wrote a satire called Cedalion, but only a handful of fragments survive, none of which shed light on this. They are:

Indeed my limbs have somewhat given way through panic!

I gain no notion from your words, no more than a white paling from a whitened stone!

Whatever may be forthcoming, the universe is a dream-shadow.

We pass on to the wells and watering places to wash the corpse.

There is a fifth fragment consisting of two words. I cannot find it.

No matter.

It is time to see the bigger picture. The whole picture.

The Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, by Nicolas Poussin. Painted in Rome sometime between 1658 and 1664. It’s been in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1924. My son has been in New York since late June. Orion is later Poussin—he died in 1665—his hand trembles and his eyes are failing. The blind painting the blind—for this is a painting about blindness, and a painting of blindness. Who sees what? Who sees the blinking eye of the lighthouse, and the glimpse of gold on the morning clouds? Who sees everything? The composition is more intuitive than mathematical, more imaginative than geometric. It’s a bit of a failure, I suppose. This, I hold, is what is so attractive, what draws our eyes and minds and souls to it. That and the trees, or rather the absence of the trees, the stumps: our view of the scene, a sylvan hilltop overlooking a verdant valley, the sea far off on the horizon, captured at the moment of the first rays of the sun, is afforded by the nonattendance of three oaks that have been torn out of the foreground; only the stumps remain, the stumps stand thick round the clearing, the trunks snapped off at the ground and carried away by storm—not the impending one but an older, forgotten storm. Where are the trees? Dragged behind a woodcutter’s horse? Or hurled out of view by Orion, the massive giant we now see, Homer’s “hunter of shadows, himself a shade” now eyeless, stumbling blindly through blackening clouds toward the rising sun.

The torn-out trees, why were they growing there in the first place? Why put them there only to tear them out and toss them aside? All these stumps in Poussin. In Diogenes with his Cup—there at least the logs are still present, lying on the ground, waiting to be used. In American landscapes, stumps express the arrival of civilization. Here?

The tree furthest to the right would have hidden this giant. Yet it is gone, and we can see him. A scarab dangles from his hip, next to a long cylinder of brass or leather with a sharp curved blade at one end. He carries a bow in his right hand. His left hand gropes out in front of him, toward his destination, the uttermost east, where the healing power of the sun awaits. When he sees the sun, he has been told by the “shrewd, crafty” Hephaestus, the “club-footed artificer”, he will see anew.

Vapours billow across the canvas, wreathing his head—we can’t see his face, we can’t see the empty sockets of his eyes.

Had this first tree and the tree to its left not been removed, we would not now see Diana on the billowing vapour over the giant’s head, elbow resting on a cloud, bow on her hip and a quiver of arrows at her shoulder, looking down and, I think, looking bored.

The third tree’s destruction imparts a view of the two men obscured in the cloud’s shadow in the detail above. They are mere bystanders, “pictorial solutions” as mentioned above, “placeholders”, and they are frightened and about to take flight. Unlike Hephaestus: he is closer and in immediate danger of being trampled by the blinded giant, yet he stays his ground, gesticulating at his slave, trying to communicate.

He and the Cedalion are not running away from the giant, they are guiding him toward the healing light of day.

Orion was born from a bull’s hide pissed on by three gods and buried in the earth for a year. He is the commingling of water (Poseidon), air (Zeus), and sun (Apollo). Those clouds that wreathe his face are symbols of the moon’s power—Diana’s power—gathering the mists and vapours of the earth and turning them into rain.

Why is the giant here? Because of his blindness, yes. And because of his crimes.

First, he who could walk on water, walked the waves to the island of Chios, where he got drunk and sexually assaulted the king’s daughter. The king, with the help of Dionysius, took out his lights. Orion then stumbled to Lemnos, to the blacksmith forge of Hephaestus. The smith-god gave him his slave, Cedalion, who stands on the giant’s shoulders pointing the way, or asking it of his master, who is standing on the ground at the giant’s feet.

Natalis Comes, whose Mythologiae sive Explicationum fabularum libri decem (1568) was a source for Poussin’s painting:

... through the combined power of these three Gods arises the stuff of wind, rain and thunder that is called Orion. Since the subtler part of the water which is rarefied rests on the surface it is said that Orion had learned from his father Poseidon how to walk on the water. When this rarefied matter spreads and diffuses into the air, it is described as Orion having come to Chios, which derives its name from “diffusion” (for chrein, which means to diffuse). And that he further attempted to violate Aerope and was expelled from that region and deprived of his lights—this is because this matter must pass right through the air and ascend to the highest spheres and when the matter is diffused throughout that sphere it somehow feels the power of fire languishing. For anything that is moved with a motion not of its own loses its power which diminishes as it proceeds.

Second, because of Diana. The hunting giant always loved the goddess of the hunt. But he also boasted that he would kill all the animals of the world. And then he tried to rape her.

They say that he was later killed by Diana's arrows for having dared to touch her—because as soon as the vapours have ascended to the highest stratum of the air so that they appear to us as touching the moon or the sun, the power of the moon gathers them up and converts them into rains and storms thus overthrowing them with her arrows and sending them downwards; for the power of the moon works like the ferment that brings about these processes. Finally, they say that Orion was killed and transformed into a celestial constellation.—Natalis Comes, Mythologiae sive Explicationum fabularum libri decem

The water cycle, powered by the terrestrial and the celestial. The constant flow on, above and below the surfaces of the world. The total mass of water, ever moving, changing form, from freshwater rivers to saltwater oceans to airwater atmosphere, from liquid to ice to cloud, evaporating, condensing, transpiring, precipitating, seeping, running off, flowing underground. In one form or another, it is always the same; you can put your foot in it as many times as you like. It is the water that the dinosaurs drank, in which Socrates’s hemlock was steeped and Jesus was baptised. It’s the water in your beer can. It’s the water in all our cells, in all our selves.

As when the ocean's waves up-welling 
Course above their cavernous dwelling 
Hid beneath the water-floor, 
Hurried by the sea-borne sway 
Of Threician breezes they 
Roll up from the regions under,
Black and dark, the leeward shore, 
And the beaten beaches' thunder 
Answer to the roar. 
--Sophocles

Thanks for reading. Please hit the buttons—like, comment, share, subscribe—and follow through. Then hit the beaches and enjoy these last days of summer, and this last picture of a painting by Poussin (↓):

Diogenes, who, having given up all worldly goods, throws away his last possession, a drinking bowl, when he sees the young man next to him kneeling at the stream, drinking water from cupped hands.

This is my true self. And these are my cupped hands.

Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Diogenes, c. 1647