The Human Scale

I consider it quite a blessing to have grown up and more basically have been living in a village for most of my life.

The spire and not a very huge one has always been the tallest building.

Thus it came to be when I was living in the city some buildings, especially the recent ones growing ever taller into the sky, seemed like giants lurking over the city and its streets of houses.

Imagine that.

PS: Barnadine's Straw

On yet another level it would be incredibly cruel to create a character, to breathe life into him, simply for the singular purpose of having his head.

Maybe, just maybe a comment on some Calvinist believes.

Barnadine's Straw

Even such a great juggler of fates like Shakespeare is sometimes not able to have his characters enact their destined fate.

Like Michael Pennington points out in his lecture "Barnadine's Straw: The Devil in Shakespeare's Detail", Shakespeare is unable to have Barnadine executed instead of  Claudio in Measure for Measure. Barnadine simply refuses to play along and Shakespeare has to come up with a different solution, or rather head.

Headstrong ;)!

There's Less Will in Will

or why prefer Shakespeare to Goethe, although I'm German.

The thing that really turns me off regarding Goethe is that he is very verbose in his plays. Probably because he wants to show off his artistry, thereby displaying his Kunstwille/ artistic will. Once I sat down to watch an unshortened performance of Faust II and after just a few minutes into Helen's unabbreviated lamentations about Menelaus' intentions, I wished that he would kill her immediately.

In contrast I once attended an unshortened performance of Hamlet, that lasted from 5pm until almost 11 pm including two intervals. And I was as alert at the end as at the beginning and everything just fell in place.

In Shakespeare everything flows quite naturally,  whereas in Goethe one also senses the enormous endeavour, his artistic will.

I wonder if being too verbose in order to be not misunderstood is a German trait.

A year ago I had a discussion about a book, "Er ist wieder da", featuring a resurrected Adolf Hitler - btw a wonderful satire that is so good that it scared me. My disputant, who did not like it at all, was complaining about the fact that it had to be Hitler who came back to comment on present-day Germany and not somebody like Immanuel Kant. I retorted that if somebody ventured to copy Kant's style it could never be a satire and people would grow pretty tired reading his style. His view that even Kant must take a breath every once a while, I could not share. Maybe there's the rub, some people never seem to breathe at all ;).

Only applies to Shakespeare ;)!

Alertness

"Readiness is all...Let be." - William Shakespeare, Hamlet

 

Draw(!)-ing

Immediacy

Regarding yesterday's post and Henri Cartier-Bresson's view I begin to wonder if it is just one side of whatever coin.

For drawing has also got an immediacy, especially since the medium is less technical than in the case of  photography, where one needs a camera, a device to assist the eye.

There are maybe two different aspects of immediacy and reflection.

On the one side the immediacy of the eye supported by the camera, on the other hand the immediacy of the stroke, the hand.

On the one hand the fact that one depends on the camera and the film (and as far as I know perception and the brain are always a little bit behind the actual moment), on the other the whole process of drawing, which certainly takes more time than to push the release.

Photography and Painting/ Drawing

- a comparison -

Photography is for me the spontaneous impulse of perpetual visual attention, that captures the instant and its eternity.

Drawing gathers through its line, what the conscience has conceived of this instant.

The photo is an immediate act, the drawing is a meditation.

Henri Cartier-Bresson


I wish it was as easy as it sounds, but then if I think about it neither sounds pretty easy to achieve.

There is sometimes a lot I see, but to get to the essence is pretty hard, especially if it's only a line, a stroke it depends upon.