Ars Moriendi

noxrpm:

This detail from The Lady and the Unicorn, which Y. sent me after my last post on fragments -

Fragments frankly demand your attention, but the method by which you zero in on a fragment tends toward the rhapsodically obsessive rather than the logical: you lose yourself in the process of miniaturization. This is what Sebald said of Robert Walser’s reductive prose style -

Walser’s natural inclination is for the most radical minimization and brevity… Walser shares this ambition with the Jugendstil artists, and like them, he is also prone to the opposite tendency of losing himself in arabesques.

Prone to the tendency of losing oneself in arabesques. This reminds me of Adorno’s analogy of Kierkegaard’s philosophy which I’d read in a Benjamin essay, about Adorno’s notion of Kierkegaard “vanishing” into his writing, just as a Chinese painter would vanish in a picture painted by himself. In Kierkegaard’s philosophy, according to Adorno, the self is -

something vanishing that is rescued by a process of reduction.

Seems a befitting characterization of the work of a philosopher, who, in Sickness Unto Death, claimed -

Infinitude’s despair is to lack finitude.

Not that vanishing into a minimized fragment is all self-negation and small anarchy et cetera. We in fact do this daily with or without our cognizance, vanish into various arabesques and tiniest of scenes which steal into the frames of our lives. For example, coming into work this morning on the 6 train, I spotted this Chinese father spoon-feeding his daughter some noodle soup from a thermos amidst a disapproving, frowning crowd -

- and how could I take heed of anything else swirling around this small, slurpy scene of devotion.

(Yes, that is my hand holding the bar, GPOYW)