My husband and I are cleaning out our bedroom to do it over again after 15 years or so. (Well, yes, we are slobs, but my experience tells me these days that most people are slobs compared to what our grandparents were, so don't go self righteous on me, anybody.)
And my husband remarked on the electrical wiring in the bedroom, along the lines of "this is the most irrational wiring system I've ever seen".
The house was built in the 1960's. Its first owner was an electrician, so the guy probably did up his house with pure, amateur love (like... "amateur" has "ama" in it. Love. An amateur is somebody who truly LOVES something.). He probably had a ball putting his INDIVIDUAL imprint on HIS house, translating HIS desire into reality.
Fifty years on, his reality is a pain in the neck...
Musing on the inevitable aspect of this problem, my mind flew to all of the buildings in France that were built before electricity came on the scene...
WOW. What a casse tête, as we say here. A head buster.
HOW do you stick electricity into a building which was built during a time when NOBODY imagined that it would show up ?? (Yeah, well, thank God we are/were not such lazy louts that we dumped and demolished our old buildings over here for this reason.)
And THEN, I got thinking on Versailles, Louis XIV's little absolute monarchy dream palace...
I'm sure it must have some kind of electricity now...
And then I imagined the tomb of that (probably professional) amateur who wired Versailles.
"Here lies Jean Le Brun, who wired Versailles".
A fitting epitaph... THAT is quite an exploit.
(Geez, I'm talking a lot about tombs, and death these days, for a change, LOL.)
Morality... life is not linear, as Thai would have said. Some ideas mature faster than others, and NO "NEW" idea arrives in a vacuum, that's for sure...
You know, Toby, I am having a lot of fun with you, here on your blog.
ReplyDeleteWe get along really well, I think.
I will order the Eisenstein book in the fall, when I finish Jacques...
Way back there when you mentioned the Fisher King, were you talking about the Schubert Lied ?
Progressions and progress, progress and progressions embedded in the progression of perception, and so on, circularly. And so on.
ReplyDeleteI was talking about The Fisher King as I learned the myth way back when. From an astrologer called Liz Greene if memory servers. Here's my first blog on the matter:
http://thdrussell.blogspot.com/2009/10/fisher-king.html
Oh how we repeat ourselves. It's those damn progressions going nowhere. Ah me.
I checked on Schubert. The lied is "The Fisherman's Daughter" from a poem by Heine, in Schwangesang.
ReplyDeleteI vaguely seem to remember that the Jungians talk about the Fisher King, but I could be wrong, as I tend to invent (!!!) things...
I read your post, Toby, and I can see how well it fits in with Goethe's poem.
ReplyDeleteAnd I really like the idea of the fool's solution.
In King Lear, the fool is one of the only people to tell Lear profound truths about him that the King half listens to. The fool in "King Lear" is the poetical voice of reason in a world gone mad.
Lear regrets his fool when it's too late.
And the actors will tell you that it was customary for the fool and Cordelia to be played by one person. Theatrical tradition, it seems. I've heard, at least.
Logical...