human beings only take advantage

As I look at The Porthole again I believe that I could spend a long time going through the book page by page and listing all the variations that Spatola finds in this thwartation or resistance play. Why did Samuel Richardson write books that put him (not him but his written voice) in situations of apparent anxiety and why did he (his voice) exacerbate those situations instead of ending them? Asking, "Why did he create such a perfect character as Grandison?" might be something like the same question. You picture a man observing his voice as if he is watching a very exciting film. Spatola describes a war in which his character Guglielmo takes part on both sides at once (meaning that the name "Guglielmo" is partaking in contrary actions simultaneously in different places), torturing people, stealing horses, etc, baffling the normal expectation that an author who writes about conflict will ask you to sympathise more with one body of combatants than the other. This is a bit shocking: shouldn't he give you a position; shouldn't he find some noble rebels or reluctant army recruits or something to sympathise with? Removing a dead war-horse's shoes, the narrator 'I' also removes its "glasses, watch, ring, gold teeth, hair, and orthopedic limb." I think of Alice in Wonderland's argument for the dominance of algebraic principles in language. By insisting on the vigilant mediation of words, the Wonderland characters point towards a hypothesis of language that has been changed from a common property to a private one. As a Wonderland person you are not inevitably unhappy. You appear abrasive to others, but your privacy ensures your character. It is like having a house to live in. If Alice could handle language algebraically like the others then she would not have to worry so much about warping and stretching. She would be the manipulation of formula.

The inhabitants of Wonderland are living machines in costumes. (Is a living machine also a malfunctioning machine?) Reading the art historian T.J. Clark's 2006 book The Sight of Death I notice how often he refers to boundaries in his work; how he notes the overlapped straightnesses of the landscape in the two Poussin paintings and the outstretched arm of the fleeing individual in Landscape with Man Killed By a Snake, c. 1648. I am interested in his appreciation of the stillness this helps to create upon the canvas; and how his description of a real event, a trip to Michael Heizer's Double Negative earthwork, 1969-1970, is a lifeless sketch. The people in the car gave a "great shout" when the cutting finally comes into view, he says, a phrase so routine in British English that he can rely on it to represent nothing much. Returning to the boundaried world of the paintings he goes back into evocation again. Double Negative has not been an opportunity for thought. Eventually he comes to this idea about the intersection between the painter and the world: "The lake's level, or the balance of branches on a tree – human beings only take advantage of order already present. It is just that nature gives no such clear priority to such orders." It will be interesting to see if Heizer really goes through with the plan to shore up Double Negative with concrete.