From: Ariosto Raggo <df803-AT-freenet.carleton.ca>
Subject: Re: blue
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 11:08:38 -0500 (EST)


Blue is the color of melancholy and the primary mood of the aesthete.
In the Diapsalmata blue answer the question "what is a poet? An unhappy
man who in his heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose  lips are so so
fashioned that the moans  and cries which  pass over them are
transformed into ravishing music." (pg. 19 in the anchor edition I am
using).

In the _rotation method_ and essay on social prudence the narrator says
the the principle that "all men are bores" is a negative principle of
motion, an infinite impetus towards new discoveries from out of the
repulsion brought on by bores. For me I see a sort of hunger for space
out of a sense of crisis and catastrophe, a search for utopia which was
characteristic of the Baroque age.

If boredom is emptiness and the search for diversions, says the
narrator, then pantheism is it's opposite as fullness. Pantheism tends
to go with ease, idleness, and enjoyment.

The "change of field" is an endless movement that comes to no rest.
This the narrator does not seek but the "change of crop and the mode of
cultivation" which gives us "the principle of limitation".

I find this interesting because here we seem to have not the indulgence
in ever new things but an intensification that i would see as bringing
about events as the dialectical opposite of the new. It is the true
source of invention like death or ascesis: "the more you limit
yourself, the more fertile you become in invention. A prisoner in
solitary confinement for life becomes very inventive, and a spider may
furnish him with much entertainment." The results achieves by the search
for events is *intensive* rather than *extensive*.

The intensive may have a tragic dimension that displaces the utopian,
extensive hunger for space. A conquest of the inner life rather than
worldly existence so to speak.

A



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