Depression.  Partly my normal temperament, partly unrelenting work-related stress, partly deep aesthetic dissatisfaction with almost every aspect of contemporary art production, including the so-called digital revolution's creation of an inverse relationship between the size of one's audience and the ability to earn a living from one's creative work.  To quote Bill Watterson,  "Anyone can publish now, and there are no restrictions of taste, approach or subject matter. The gatekeepers are gone, so the prospect for new and different voices is exciting. Or at least it will be if anyone reads them. And it will be even more exciting if anyone pays for them. It’s hard to charge admission without a gate."

Self-medicating with 25m pool, R.E. Allen's Dialogues of Plato (Yale UP) and big loving grey cat.

"This demand for a standard is of the essence of Socratic dialectic, which is directed not merely toward abstract understanding, but toward the right ordering of life.  The aim is to grasp the principles of that order, and to be able to identify them in concrete cases.  The Republic claims that it is important to know what is holy and what is just and what is virtuous, because on that knowledge depends the conduct of a life.  In the Charmides, the young Charmides is said to be most temperate; but without knowing what temperance is, he will have no advantage from its presence in his life -- this to a man who later became one of the Thirty Tyrants.  If the aim of dialectic is to define a Form, the practical aim is the discernment of form in things.  Forms are to moral matters what scales are to weight and yardsticks to length -- a basis for sufficient decision." (Allen, "Comment on The Euthyphro," Dialogues, Vol. 1)

Those desert plant pictures? Discernments of forms in things.
- posted by cjb @ 10:07 PM