Re-reading https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/08/14/darwinian-fundamentalism-an-exchange/ (an endnote for my essay a causerie ago):
This electronic “flame” begins: “At the risk of sounding grandiose, I hereby declare myself to be involved in a bitter feud with no less a personage than Stephen Jay Gould. It all started in 1990, when I reviewed his book Wonderful Life…. Gould, alas, has paid me no mind…. Savvy alpha male that he is, he refrained from getting into a gutter brawl with a scrawny marginal primate such as myself.”
Go in peace, Mr. Wright. You may declare all you want, but fighting is like the tango, and I decline. You too, Dan Dennett. I wish you no ill, and I’m sorry if I offended you both by not paying enough attention to your work—the only common theme, in the absence of any intellectual response, in their replies printed above. But as T.H. Huxley said of Richard Owen, in a parody of Dryden’s line about Alexander the Great refighting all his battles during a drunken monologue—“And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain”—life is just too short for occupying oneself with the slaying of the slain more than twice.
SJ Gould, 1997
Glenn Gould (pilfered from my old albeit embarrassing and to-be-defuncted “electronik Diary unto which…“):
The problem begins when one forgets the artificiality of it all, when one neglects to pay homage to those designations that to our minds – to our reflex senses, perhaps – make of music an analyzable commodity. The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it. And when that happens, when we forget these things, all sorts of mechanical failures begin to disrupt the function of human personality. When people who practice an art like music become captives of those positive assumptions of system, when they forget to credit that happening against negation which system is, and when they become disrespectful of the immensity of negation compared to system – then they put themselves out of reach of that replenishment of invention upon which creative ideas depend, because invention is, in fact, a cautious dipping into the negation that lies outside system from a position firmly ensconced in system.
G Gould, 1964
And N Gould D:
Although I cannot draw or paint, when I write I feel pictures intensely within. Arguments have shapes, forms, lines, tensions, structural qualities. When they aren’t right they are ugly and clumsy and don’t fit. But when they are…ah, they look and feel sublime in the mind’s eye of a waking dream. They have immaculate strength and beauty, are formidable and enduring, an architecture of the intellect.
Right now I have a half-formed landscape with rubble strewn around it… will take some struggle, beautiful agony of devotion, to build it so it soars.
N Gould D, 2018
The Goulds are verily magnificent creatures, especially the last, whom I called “Sebastian” after Johannes Sebastian Bach, for whom my greatest love is reserved.
Salisa lohavittayavikant 