Wonder if Twain intended with his autobiography something along the same lines as Lyn Hejinian in “My Life”. — Twain expressed the wish to juxtapose anecdotes from his life without any regard for the arrow of time — so that an episode from his young life might follow one from his later years without need of explanatory remarks, the need for the contrast being obvious thematically — Maybe the same with Hejinian but broken down beyond anecdotes — instead of her life broken into anecdotes and contrasted, broken into sentences and contrasted — (and with more regard for the prejudice of the present, in which all this documentation occurs, than maybe Twain). Sentences of youth against sentences of middle age but the same person and same ordinary days.

From the Autobiography (does not ‘My Life’ seem a radical implementation of this proposed “form and method?”):

“I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies when it is published, after my death, and I also intend that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method — a form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along like contact of flint with steel. Moreover, this autobiography of mine does not select from my life its showy episodes, but deals merely in the common experiences which go to make up the life of the average human being, and the narrative must interest the average human being because these episodes are of a sort which he is familiar with in his own life, and in which he sees his own life reflected and set down in print. …” Mark Twain

……………………………………………………………; only in
the world I fill up a place, which may be better
supplied when I have made it empty.

(Orlando, As You Like It )

I have just conjugated aprender –in the present indicative, in the perfect and imperfect indicative, in the future and the conditional, in the subjunctive present and imperfect– all more or less with the right endings– but with the wrong stem– with two p’s — apprender, like the French– the right endings, the wrong root! I reflect. (In other words, the one aspect which all of those tenses of those two moods share and have the same I have gotten wrong). This is so typical, I reflect: “my failure, when it isn’t over-ambitiousness, largely consists in not getting the easiest part right. I will then of course try to say that the easiest part doesn’t count.”

Inattention in the midst of the conjugation of ‘soy’ — soy eres es […] somos sois son— when entered that region between es and somos, between singular and plural, left column and right, I got up and wandered off toward the bathroom –I didn’t go into it, didn’t use it, but was just thinking of various things– and now sitting back down I was able to make the transition and get back to it. My getting up and walking around seemed related to a “hump” between the singular and plural persons.

favorite conjugation thought of (present subjunctive of ser) the English speaker sees “The Sea” sees “The Seas” sees two Irish names “Seamus”, “Sean”, and finally one that reminds us that this is after all Spanish, after all just morphology, a conjugation, (and of the Greek dative feminine plural) “Seais”.

[Politics, 4.9.]

Thoughts as long (or short, even very short) pins stuck into “the voodoo doll of the brain”– (oneself is that which is symbolized by the brain doll)– “my brain is the doll of me” — “my brain is the doll of my body.”

Alternatively, it is the brain that is the witch doctor and the consciousness that is the doll, but it is a living doll. The witch doctor thinks it’s hurting or helping what resembles the doll, but in fact it is hurting or helping the doll.

[It is reality that is the witchdoctor, the brain that is the doll, oneself whom the witchdoctor antagonizes by these means]

La formación de Patricia es uno de los fenómenos que ha dejado boquiabiertos a los expertos…..boquiabiertos [*]

His surviving writings all show a certain lack of passion […] According to ancient writers, he was respected as an able and thorough, though somewhat dull historiographer… Ephorus

“Ce n’est pas parce que les autres sont morts que notre affection pour eux s’affaiblit, c’est parce que nous mourons nous-mêmes.” [Albertine Disparue, 221, Proust]. Moncrieff. Conjugation: mourir.

Summertime, J.M. Coetzee. “You know the word disembodied? This man was disembodied. He was divorced from his body. To him, the body was like one of those wooden puppets that you move with strings. You pull this string and the left arm moves, you pull that string and the right leg moves. And the real self sits up above, where you cannot see him, like the puppet-master pulling the strings.

“Now this man comes to me, to the mistress of the dance. Show me how to dance! he implores. So I show him, show him how we move in the dance. So, I say to him —move your feet so and then so. And he listens and tells himself, Aha, she means pull the red string followed by the blue string! — Turn your shoulder so, I say to him, and he tells himself, Aha, she means pull the green string!

“But that is not how you dance! That is not how you dance! Dance is incarnation. In dance it is not the puppet-master in the head that leads and the body that follows, it is the body itself that leads, the body with its soul, its body-soul. Because the body knows! It knows! When the body feels the rhythm inside it, it does not need to think. That is how we are if we are human. That is why the wooden puppet cannot dance. The wood has no soul. The wood cannot feel rhythm.”

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Though there is no direct mention of Beckett’s film Film in Ginsberg’s poem Today (Collected Poems, pp.345), the poem does mention both Beckett and Buster Keaton, who were not otherwise known to associate with each other, and seems to have been written around the same time (July 21, 1964). The poem preceding Today in The Collected Poems (from June of ’64), I Am a Victim of Telephone (*), also mentions Keaton, as does 1966’s To D.A. Levy, which says in part: “Buster Keaton died today”.