Hemingway, Islands in the Stream (pp.69).
Thomas Hudson watched them. Swimming slowly, the four of them swam out in the green water, their bodies making shadows over the clear white sand, bodies forging along, shadows projected on the sand by the slight angle of the sun, the brown arms lifting and pushing forward, the hands slicing in, taking hold of the water and pulling it back, legs beating along steadily, heads turning for air, breathing easily and smoothly.
“Al volver del campo, almorzaré como un espartano y me pondré a trabajar, si trabajo puede llamarse reproducir en algunas cuartillas de papel todos los disparates que me han amargado la vida. El trabajo sería olvidarlos completamente.” (Altamirano, “Antonio.”)
The Altar to pity is said, in a footnote of my copy of Pausanius, probably to be the basis for the Ara Pacis, I said.
We should have Altars to Pity here, in this country, my friend said, as well as to concepts like Air, Dirt, Forethought, Rumor. No more people. Enough of that. Enough of people who did this or that. Altars to Dirt, altars to life, altars to stars, to repeated spelling errors, microbes, climate. Markers of what we don’t see that yet exists. (Perhaps Zeus is quite like The Atom, The Microbe.) Perhaps poems are all we can hope for to honor these things.
(Altars also to various other legal or latin terms, he added. I think an altar to 401ks would be good, and on the side there would be, etched in the marble, an explanation of what it was exactly, do you know? and of other financial and governmental terms and of technical existences still more obscure.)
The Body Casts The Vote
As a voter intellectually I may be decided — but there is to consider — that my body, who must actually cast the physically cast the vote, may not be decided or may decide in favor of something erratic and of something quite opposed to what I have decided.
I can’t intellectually will my vote to be cast– transfer my thought into the ballot box — and the body has a will of its own. And the will of the body, my friend added further, or what I might call One of its great wills, is that of total arbitrariness (which should be one of our altars too: Arbitrariness) — that of having decided deliberately to do one thing instead of another, but, in the event, “Doing Whatever”– either doing the opposite of what one has decided or doing what one has decided for reasons that are un-involved with, and not relevant to, and perhaps the opposite of, one’s initial decision.
Altar to Doing Whatever
Maybe the Will to Doing Whatever is not the body’s will but again attributable to oneself: it is a hatred or distrust of what one thinks, a disbelief in one’s ability to think. The thing you think is good turns out to be bad, and vice versa, and this happens again and again, this has happened so often, sowing distrust in your reasoning capacities and sowing “the will to whatever.”
There should be a god named Whatever and another called Thinks. And we should have, somewhere, for these gods, altars, said my friend. (Or even if they are only words and not gods, we should have altars made for them, altars beyond the words.)
cumplir –-desborda — decenas de miles— estruendoso “El silencio estruendoso de decenas de miles de personas caminando muy lentamente bajo la lluvia.” (*)
Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés.
Our virtues are often only our disguised vices. [*]
Germany, Piketty continued, has “no standing” to lecture other nations about debt repayment, having never paid back its own debts after both World Wars.
“However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them,” Piketty said. “The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.” [Piketty interview, from last year.]
O great vault through which I enter the store
Through which customers, countless as air,
have passed like the notes of a flute,
and sat like the lacing of a corset,
Today I also offer my salute:”
I read this passage of the Federalist Papers over and over again without being able to make any sense of it, until I realized I had no idea –or rather, had an incorrect idea– of what ‘venial’ meant (Federalist 37):
It is but just to remark in favor of the latter descriptions, that as our situation is universally admitted to be peculiarly critical, and to require indispensably that something should be done for our relief, the predetermined patron of what has been actually done may have taken his bias from the weight of these considerations, as well as from considerations of a sinister nature. The predetermined adversary, on the other hand, can have been governed by no venial motive whatever. The intentions of the first may be upright, as they may on the contrary be culpable, The views of the last cannot be upright, and must be culpable.
It means excusable, forgivable, (I had confused it with venal.)
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 