Benoît-Louis Prévost:
Design: Legs and Feet, from Encyclopédie (1762/77)

Summer Seems Uninfluencable, Inexorable
July arrived in early June this year, bringing with it all the usual seasonal concerns. I have to relearn my coping strategies every year, for I never seem to retain their details. I lose a rhythm I must regain, like the understanding that outside work must be completed by noon or I suffer consequences. The basement stays at the same wine-cellar temperature year-round. The windows open at bedtime, before closing us in again before ten the following morning. The sounds of ceiling fans remain a constant companion. If I forget to close the window shade in front of my desk, the late afternoon sun will bake my desktop. The watering schedule seems sacred. The backyard pond finally appears to be clearing. The goldfish perform an appreciative ballet when I feed them in the late afternoon, as shadows overtake our backyard refuge. The first fires began blackening our parched landscape, and everyone seems on edge, welcoming while also dreading our most dangerous season. I can huddle through Winter and reason with Spring, but Summer seems uninfluencible, inexorable.

——

Weekly Writing Summary

This CHope Story marks the beginning of a new branch within this series. I intend to investigate the underbelly of our newly installed Ideological state, it being nearly unprecedented here, but historically common and therefore well known in nature and action.

Henry Inman: [Tah-Col-o-Quoit (Rising Cloud)], Asakiwaki/Sauk Warrior; representative of the Sauk and Fox coalition. Former Title: [Tah (sha)-col-o-quoit], Sauk and Fox Delegate (c. 1832-1834)
" … promising greatness as if from the mouth of God."
—
This CHope Story considers the case of FalseBelief when an authoritarian (or a budding one) demands that their presumed subjects must want to believe in him and his policies. A parody ensues.

Albrecht Dürer: Justice, Truth, and the Future in the Stocks before the False Judge (1526)
"These performances exhaust everyone involved."
—
This CHope Story, Opposition, finds me finding solace in acknowledging that everything eventually turns into its opposite. This means that our sorry incumbent must be his own opponent. All of us opposed to his sorry ideology have some unexpected assistance.

Hendrick ter Brugghen (signed by artist): Heraclitus (1628) Gallery Notes: The Greek sage Heraclitus was known as the crying philosopher because he mourned the folly of humankind, while his opposite, Democritus (the nearby pendant), could only laugh at it. Here, Heraclitus looks like a melancholy old man. Downcast, he leans on a terrestrial globe and gestures dismissively with his left hand, as if to say: ‘All is for nought, the world will come to nothing.’

Hendrick ter Brugghen (signed by artist): Heraclitus (1628) Gallery Notes: The Greek sage The Greek philosophers Democritus and Heraclitus were considered to be polar opposites. In contrast to the old, melancholy Heraclitus (the nearby pendant), Democritus appears as a young, laughing hedonist. He points to the distance, as though that is where the folly of mankind is found. Together, the pair of paintings conveys a moralizing message: whether you laugh or cry, the world remains incurably foolish.
" … when we're not watching closely enough to notice."
—
This CHope Story wonders who besides the barber shaves all the men in the village and other confounding questions. Our incumbent appears to explode into paradox whenever faced with doing something, producing Paradoxysms of confusion. Beware the Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions.

Weegee (Arthur Fellig): Audience Reaction (c. 1940 - c. 1950)
" … get over the idea that they'd never get another decent shave …"
—
This CHope Story finds me wondering how some people can seem so damned sure about what will happen in the future as a result of our current incumbent's ineptnesses. I wonder how they know, how they could ever achieve such Slurtenty.

Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix: A Turk Surrenders to a Greek Horseman (1856) Gallery Text In the mid-1850s, Delacroix returned to themes he had treated thirty years earlier, though with an important difference. Rather than carefully distinguish literary from historical and topical subjects, he conflated them, as in this instance. Here, he draws on Byron’s description of the giaour (a Turkish slur for non-Muslims) overcoming the Turkish pasha in his poem “The Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale” (1813). To a contemporary audience, the composition could have appeared to be an episode from the Greek War of Independence (1821–32), a romantic cause célèbre that had inspired two of Delacroix’s large canvases of the 1820s. The result is a nostalgic invention that appealed to mid-century French orientalist fantasies.
"We seem the most curious crown of creation imaginable."
—
This CHope Story, Un-American, finds me confessing, for I am clearly guilty of exercising freedoms that might no longer be present. I admit that I make one crappy peasant.

Boutet de Monvel: Un fou et un sage [A fool and a wise man] (1888)
"He might be the most significant land mass to hold office since Grover Cleveland left office."
— —
With only one week remaining in this season and this CHope series, the stories became more pointed, more focused upon what might well be the essence of this exercise: what I have been coping with and hoping for since at least the Spring Equinox. I have been coping with an Ideological intrusion rather than a policy one. I thought I was facing different policies when I encountered firmly held False Beliefs sitting in for governance. I discovered some solace in the recognition that all things eventually turn into their opposite and operate in at least an underlying Opposition to their declared purpose. The enemy opposes itself, too, and might be our unwitting ally. I acknowledged what might have been obvious, but, curiously, it wasn't until I stumbled into a humble acknowledgement: our incumbent almost always acts in paradoxes which twist reason and explanation—a confusing Paradoxysm results. I noticed, in Slurtenty, how sure and certain many seem when, like now, they face nearly absolute uncertainty. I ended this consequential writing week by publicly declaring myself Un-American, not because I've been plotting against anything, but because the traditional rights and freedoms seem to be going out of fashion, leaving me no longer well-positioned to represent what it now seems to mean to be an American. When our government starts treating free speech as if it were loose talk, we're experiencing a bout of Ideology. May this sense of hopelessness turn out to be anything but serious, and pass quickly. Thank you for following along!

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #CHope , #PureSchmaltz