Bookplates, otherwise called book labels or Ex Libris

Bookplates, otherwise called book labels or Ex Libris (Latin for 'from the library of') have a look history. They are small, decorative labels pasted inside a book, usually on the title page, and they state the name of the owner of the book. They are a way of ensuring that if you lend the book to someone, the name of who lent it is always front and centre. It doesn't guarantee you will get the book back, but it means you are more likely to than if there was no book label in the book.

The art of designing bookplates spread across Europe in the 1500s and many famous artists designed their own bookplates.

My own interest in bookplates came in my late teens when I saw examples of designs by Aubrey Beardsley. My own designs are based on the graphic impact that he put into bookplates.

Truth Pulling Out The Tongue Of Falsehood

This is Truth pulling out the tongue of falsehood after ripping off its mask. It's companion piece is Valour defeating cowardice. The bronzes for these sculptures by Alfred Stevens are part of the Monument to the Duke Of Wellington in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. 

Personally, I think it is grotesque and horrible to show truth doing anything as violent as this. Maybe it is a reflection of the times (the 1850s) and perhaps a reflection of the military career of the Duke of Wellington. But I still think it is horrible.

How about truth teaching falsehood in a friendly way, with a smile?

My Article About Existence and Being

From NoMorePencils


Follow-up to a lecture given by Henrik Schøneberg ‘Awakening of Consciousness’. He described Sartre’s theory of existentialism – that existence precedes essence. That is, that it is only by acting, by making choices, that we give meaning to our lives. But if we bumble along without making conscious choices, then we do not realise our purpose and we do not become.

It’s a point of view. I can see how Sartre might see himself as exhorting people to wake up and realise that they must make themselves, not follow the web of established thinking. But does he accept that he too might be wrong, that the truth might lie outside his own thinking?

Heidegger

Schøneberg talked about Heidegger as being the most analytic of the existentialists, but that he ‘went too far’ when he joined the nazi party. As the song goes in Springtime For Hitler, in Mel Brooks’ The Producers, the way to get ahead is to get smart. In the words of the song: ‘Don’t be stupid, be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party’.

The philosopher, Heidegger says, is resolved ‘to understand time in terms of time,’ and not time in relation to eternity. He does not want to be involved with the Divine. Religion is an agent of modernity, and Heidegger hated modernity.

Modernity

Modernity is, he says, the process by which powerful movements based on illusion rather than reality, seek to make a paradise on Earth by running people’s lives. I cannot understand at all how Heidegger does not see the nazi party as a prime example, but he sees nazism as going back to the roots of German Being, with a capital B. It is the cure for his existential homesickness.

I kind of get it, it’s visceral and basic and beast-like, and powerful. It’e before all the ‘fancy ideas’, all the fancy rational thinking that screws us up because we think we are rational when in reality we exist before that. It gets your blood up and it makes you feel good, so it must be real.

Well, yes, maybe. That’s the appeal, but in reality the nazi were all scared witless of the guys higher up on the ladder. You can tell that from the cut of their uniforms and the swagger.

Voegelin

Moving on, I came across an article that compared and contrasted Heidegger and Eric Voegelin. Voegelin says it is ‘ridiculous to pretend that there was nothing to consciousness but the consciousness of objects of the external world.’

Well that is either self deception, metaphysics that take one further from Being as Being as meant by Heidegger and Sartre, or else Voegelin is right. Maybe.

On the one hand we have Heidegger’s ‘Being without concepts’. On the other hand we have Voegelin and humility and a sense of awe at the mere existence of existence. And why wouldn’t one want to enquire as to the ‘why’ of existence? Why is it only right to start from existence and work forward? Why wouldn’t one want to search for meaning outside of desires and passions? Voegelin asks whether man can perfect the world without God, and he answers that it is not possible and one shouldn’t try. And that is kind of like Heidegger’s opinion of modernity, so to that extent they can agree.

Man’s Search For Meaning

Does man become divorced from himself by searching for meaning? Is that it? I can see that, too, because we humans are pattern makers above all. We detect patterns, sometimes even where there are none. So we can lead ourselves up the garden path and lose ourselves in metaphysics and lose the simple truth of setting ourselves free to Become. Maybe.

I looked up Heidegger’s personal life. His Wikipedia entry describes he personal life this way:

Heidegger married Elfride Petri in 1917. Their first son, Jörg, was born in 1919. Elfride then gave birth to Hermann in 1920. Heidegger knew that he was not Hermann’s biological father but raised him as his son. Hermann’s biological father, who became godfather to his son, was family friend and doctor Friedel Caesar.

Heidegger had a long romantic relationship with Hannah Arendt and a steamy affair (over many decades) with Elisabeth Blochmann, both students of his. Arendt was Jewish, and Blochmann had one Jewish parent, making them subject to severe persecution by the Nazi authorities. He helped Blochmann emigrate from Germany before the start of World War II and resumed contact with both of them after the war.Heidegger’s letters to his wife contain information about several other affairs of his.
Voegelin, on the other hand, married and as far as I can see, had neither affairs nor divorces. I can cut all this philosophising down to size and say that Heidegger was drawn to go downwards to the brute essence, looking outward like an animal because that is what he was attracted to. Voegelin had a different temperament and looked for the Divine in the everyday. Maybe it was just a difference of temperament.

Existence and Being What?

Thinking back about Sartre, I guess what he does is make the break between existence and being. He thinks it is not automatic that one thinks and chooses and becomes because one exists. He does not say ‘I am and therefore I think. He says I exist and I had better get my skates on and start understanding my situation before it is too late. OK, but where to go from there? To follow one’s passions? To follow one’s desires? On what are those passions founded? What happens when the passion dries up? Is passion enough? What happens when one’s passions run up against the opposing passions of others? It all seems very lone wolf, like Hesse’s Steppenwolf.

Freud

Freud would say that ego is made whole and balanced and sane when expressed in the community of people. It cannot be made alone. If that is right, then it stands opposed to existentialism, which in Frued’s view would simply be narcissism. That is unless of course through a happy coincidence of passions, the existential person chooses to join the community of people and gain expression there. In the view of Sartre, Heidegger, and Freud it would work just as long as the community of people steer clear of metaphysics and ideologies.

That leaves me with a question. Is there even the beginning of a scale by which to measure the value of such a community? Or is the notion of ‘value’ a descent already into metaphysics and the loss of Being?

Inertia

In Euripides’ The Bacchae, the characters identified as ‘some maidens’ ask and answer the question of what is wisdom:

What else is wisdom? To stand from fear set free: To stand and wait.
In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, the narrator asks and answers what the normal state is for a man who is conscious enough to question the nature of things:

After all, the direct, legitimate, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia.
I am going to pull back a bit. I am not convinced that the next step from existence is anything active at all. Perhaps it is simply to react. It’s a thought I have had before. I have been down this road. What determines how one puts one foot in front of the other?

If it is habit then it is a terrible thing. If it is curiosity and wonder, then that’s the antithesis of boredom. Perhaps that is enough. Then there is no grand enquiry into ‘Who am I?’ There is instead an appreciation of the rhythm of the day.

In Camus’ The Outsider’, when the principal character shoots the man on the beach he says of himself:

’I knew in that moment that I had broken the balance of the day.’
Is that enough, simply to appreciate? Must we accept that we are discontented with that state, that it is not enough, or that it simply does not apply to us? Are we so deep into metaphysics that we cannot regain that Eden? It’s a problem, and not one I am going to solve today.

People's Vote March - 19 October, 2019

The weather in London was sunny for the People's March, and there were a lot of people - more than for the first march in March.

The EU flags were everywhere. A sober tone, knowing that it takes a lot to keep going in the face of Governments bent on avoiding the push for a new referendum on Britain exiting the EU.

And then it rained. We had come to a standstill, anyway. So many people were trying to get to Parliament Square that the march came to a stop.

So we stood for a little while, and some people sheltered from the rain. I took a photo of some of them. It was only when I looked at the photo on the computer that I saw that a man to the right of the frame seemed to be pointing and perhaps saying something to the man in the flat cap and glasses.

The people closest seem disturbed by what the pointing man was doing. I wonder what was going on? It was the only note of discord (if that is what is was) in the whole time Tamara and I and my daughter Madelaine were there.

And then Tamara shouted across for me to take a photo of the woman holding the placard that read Help! I’m trapped on an island run by mad people.

Madness

Madness? Yes, at some level it is madness to want to turn the country into a Neo-feudal society.

Olympics 1936-1948

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd is a book about tourists, business people, students, and diplomats who were in Germany in the 1930s.

What did they think, what did they notice? Mostly they didn’t notice much. They did little mental gymnastics to avoid characterising the rise of the Nazi state for what it was.

We all know how the black American Jesse Owens was cold-shouldered when he got Gold in the Berlin Olympics.

But a snippet about the Olympics that caught my attention was a quote by Sir Robert Vansittart, a British diplomat who was head of the British Foreign Office in Berlin in the 1930s.

After the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games he said that the stupendous cost of putting on the Games made him thankful that Britain had relinquished its claim to the next Olympiad in favour of Japan.

I didn’t think there was a 1940 Tokyo Games, and that led to me to this little trail of events:

First, the 1940 Olympic Games never happened. The Japanese pulled out in 1938 because they were otherwise engaged with the Second Sino-Japanese War that broke out in 1937.

The Games were then to go to Finland, the runners-up to the original bid. The 1940 Helsinki Games were cancelled, though, because of Finland was at war with the Soviet Union.

The 1944 Olympic Games were due to be held in London, but they were cancelled due to World War II.

So it wasn’t until 1948 that an Olympic Games was held after the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

They were held in London and they were known as the Austerity Games because Britain was nearly bankrupted by the Second World War.

Food was still rationed, and would be until 1952. Things were so bad that the Government had to issue regulations to allow the athletes at the Olympics to be fed more than twice the UK national rationing allowance.

Some countries didn’t attend the 1948 Games.
Germany and Japan were not permitted to send any athletes to the 1948 Olympics, and the Soviet Union didn’t send any athletes because of the deterioration in East-West relations.