Showing posts with label wisdom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wisdom. Show all posts

Monday, January 9, 2012

Zwicky, Woolf and metaphor

It is curious to find so much Wittgenstein in Wisdom and Metaphor - but no Woolf.

Whatever you may think of Virginia Woolf choosing to name Miss Briscoe 'Lily', we do have (following the heavy-handed "virginal" for "Miss Brisk")
"as the night wore on, white lights parted the curtains"
which, in the 'white' for the 'dark', we have a metaphor perhaps stronger than the Haas bowl of dead bees.

Consider Lady Ki No Washika, "No".  The Graeme Wilson translation is as follows:

It’s not because I’m now too old,
More wizened than you guess.. 
If I say no, it’s only
Because I fear that yes
Would bring me nothing, in the end,
But a fiercer loneliness.
as a counter-part to the Haas.

Woolf: "a serious stare from eyes of unparalleled depth"

What was the Woolf's view of that other painting, the one by Courbet?

わしか

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor

Jan Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor does not cite Gaston Bachelard's closing observations on metaphor in his Psychoanalysis of Fire.  For that matter, Bachelard is not mentioned in her Lyric Philosophy.

I hold no brief for Bachelard, but his Poetics of Space is cited by way of an epigram to one of her books of poetry ...

I think of these two large books as bound note cards otherwise well-suited to electronic editions in an annotation-friendly ebook viewer or reader.