I may have inadvertently struck upon my writing ideal — the ideal state in which to write– which is to bring oneself first to the point of actually crying with boredom. This is the state one needs to be in, weeping, blubbering with the tedium one has faced and has yet to face; perhaps there is a universal application.

The idea of dealing with, as opposed to alleviating boredom, has been inherent to Modernism from the start, I think, but most recently and forcefully appeared in Wallace’s novels –there, almost as an ethic.

Infinite Jest shows how trying to alleviate boredom –through distraction– if taken to its logical end, must result in boredom of another sort — in addiction. While the posthumous novel (its name not arising just now) shows the heroism involved in superhuman focus upon the tedious. Not a winking and nodding involvement but a wholehearted plunge into the dull, an acknowledgement of the deep seriousness of dull things….

Boredom is seeming death while distraction is the real thing, I want to say.

Imagine everything that tears are to compassion. Bring that same power to boredom and perhaps we will have achieved our “breakthrough.”

s.ag.i
ingsi. sad
Maryopthami
rrida bashitru Mar
gUAr dnnelS o-da
.BubbsalnB bb..
..Bub.ooBubb….
an g in es
\The See’r siron sa \The See’r
b……………\ yof Eg b……………\
r…………..\ a bas r…………..\
otttttttttt\ S o ttttttttt\ot
The See’r The See’rThe See’rThe See’rThe See’r………
b……………\….n………pC B
r…………..\….e …….bse
otttttttttt\ttttt…..eNol

*

The one after that I mistranslated too. Looked up whether ‘hand’ could take the plural. I looked up the Greek also for the phrase I had seen translated as “wind eggs” at the end of the Theaetetus. In the Greek word, which I can’t remember now, I saw evidence of “wind” but nothing at all that suggested the idea of “eggs”. Yet I couldn’t recall the Greek word for eggs.

I was struck by the conclusion of the Theaetetus: in the end we are better people for realizing we don’t know much of anything. Not the same but a similar feeling on reading this one section of The Pale King recently — Wallace portraying some young men realizing that people are cool are not necessarily people of value. People realizing that intelligence exists and they don’t have it. (Reading this seemed to melt away some of my own unintelligence. And unintelligence –strangely, as I think the Theatetus brings up– has to do with presuming one’s own intelligence — that one, simply by virtue of being one’s extraordinary self, knows everything already more or less well enough.)

Maybe part of the pleasure of reading a book is that of of having a part of one’s intelligence melted away — and the reason this is a pleasure is that, at the same time, it’s understood — that this has not actually been intelligence. This has been some imposter intelligence you’ve been cozening, all this while.

.
What if the combination of democracy and capitalism is given to increasing individuals’ sense of self importance? (That is, to the vast majority of individuals). Democracy giving the feeling to people: they are somebody. Capital giving to people the idea: they have no one.

38. eng.
καὶ ὅκου ἔνι τοῦ σώματος ἱδρὼς, ἐνταῦθα φράζει τὴν νοῦσον.

“Where are the Republicans who know in their heart the president is giving away the store to Vladimir Putin?” Schumer said on Capitol Hill. “The best people to check him are not Democrats but his fellow Republicans.” […] This echoes Adam Schiff from some weeks earlier telling Congressional Republicans to “wake up and do their jobs.”… “This is not oversight, this is collaboration” … It appears that only Republicans can make this right, and they –can’t, won’t; are befuddled or supine; defiant and indifferent; don’t know how to / kinda like him.

*

Asking myself what literature can do in political crises, I think mainly of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as being literary responses to political crises: that, insofar as literature has a place in American democracy, it is embodied now in the writings of the U.S. Supreme Court. (Though of course oratory can be literary –the Funeral Oration, the Gettysburg Address– and the court itself has developed, in the last couple decades, a less literary, more “news watching” feel.) (This is to say, I suppose, that I think of literature as being slow to influence, but with a lasting effect; and the opposite of say advertising.)

Other than this one wonders, might a magic word be spoken? one that could bring an ax to the “frozen seas” of this nation?

Lens comes from lentil, and has also a geology-specific meaning. (I was inspired to look this up having seen it, in the geologic sense, spelled lense.)

……..………………………………………..……. A. a I
……..………………………………………..…v v ………iR
……..………………………………………...e a ……..,,,,,.v a v
……..……………………………………….. hl ……………,,,,,a i
……..………………………………………..ta ……………,,,,. A R I
……..………………………………………..e. c ……………,,,,,.v a
……..………………………………………..m.. h ……………,,,,,.i r
……..………………………………………..o… i …………….,,,,,.vair
….…………………………………………….r…. p
……..………………………………………..d….. a
……..………………………………………..r……. p
….……………………………………………..i………. e
……..………………………………………..h……….. r

e See’rThe See’he See’rT
The See’rThe SeThe See’r
b……………\….n………pC B
r…………..\….e …….bse
ot…………\…...t…..eNol
her………\….….la…rie
‘s…..\….……...Gslm
P……………..eieie
o….………..usnt
em.……….. E i
\\\……… da
umtlo(x;
Curius….
………………………………………..………….

Approaching from far away, the future has arrived and made me ashamed of my deep debt.

ἕκαθεν γὰρ ἐπελθὼν ὁ μέλλων χρόνος
ἐμὸν καταίσχυνε βαθὺ χρέος.

< Olympian 10.6, English, Svarlien

I do see, smiled Garvey. (Bilby was somewhat disturbed by how Garvey articulated this sentence, for Garvey had laid the stress on the word ‘see’, rather than on the word ‘do’, which is where Bilby would have laid the stress were he the one to have made that comment.)[*]

slosh slash slush splash splish splosh … Most of these are imitative. Slash is from the same word as slat (slash as punctuation mark not til 1960s.)

Stomachion would I guess imply “mouth battle” but is a corruption or misspelling of ostomachion — Wikipedia:

The word Ostomachion has as its roots in the Greek Ὀστομάχιον, which means “bone-fight”, from ὀστέον (osteon), “bone” and μάχη (mache), “fight, battle, combat”. Note that the manuscripts refer to the word as “Stomachion”, an apparent corruption of the original Greek….

The word stomach does indeed come from stoma (mouth). Bone-fight somewhat suggest bone wars, which I recently came across.

Spending time with Crying of Lot 49 this summer, I find, in Pynchon’s discussion of infinitesimals, still another idea maybe comparable to “epiphany” for thinking about the origin of a work of art (though it pertains to something more than to the work of art — pertains to Time and how we should stand with respect to it).

…”dt”, God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it really was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate (pp.129)

The infinitessimal or dt is something very like Duchamp’s inframince, it occurs to me. Though where inframince concerns a very small, but ostensibly measurable, moment of time, (or perhaps it is immeasurable because no one would ever conceivably want to measure it: no one would ever measure the warmth of a recently left seat, and if they did, it wouldn’t be inframince), a dt is a moment so small it isn’t measurable, and an epiphany (though this a total projection upon Joyce**) is “a thing at the last moment of the world” (I’m quoting myself here — nothing to do with Joyce) which I guess is a little like a dt: a thing as it’s poised to vanish. Which is like Kierkegaard’s saying of the eternal that it exists in every change:

if there is, then, something eternal in a man, it must be able to exist and to be grasped within every change […] it must be said that there is something that shall always have its time, something that a man shall always do

The thinking here is extremely loose of course: yet find myself wrestling with there being some sort of correspondence to be teased out among these ideas: Kierkegaard’s “eternal”, Joyce’s “epiphany”, Schopenhauer’s “passive subject”, Duchamp’s “inframince”, haikus (the whole genre), and now Pynchon’s infinitesimals,… and we might as well throw Being & Time in as well. There’s something about these authors’ ideas of ordinariness that implies also a certain philosophy of Time, an ethic, perhaps, of how to approach it.

** Joyce seemed to want to say that epiphanies were pregnant moments in time, whereas I would like to say that all moments are pregnant in that way, if subjected to the proper chemical bath of interrogations (everything, I fancy, at the last moment of the world, would show itself to be pregnant with meaning). In any case it does at least seem clear that Joyce was speaking of moments of ordinary life, not moments of historical significance — not pregnant in that sense — when he thought of epiphany.

A friend looked askance at me when I told her the syllable account was not very important for writing English language haiku. Emboldened by her formalism, I tried to fit my initial Haiku-like observation (at the bottom of this post — the order here is from latest to earliest) into a 5-7-5 pattern, with these results:

In the red polish
of the car door, yellow words:
the space is reserved.

The red polish of
the car yields these yellow words:
the space is reserved.

In the red polish
of the car door yellow words:
this space is reserved.

In the red polish
of the car door yellow words:
“Reserved Space 13.”

In the polish of
a car door the words “reserved”
(with the space number)

In the polish of
a car door is read “reserved
space” (With the number)

In the polish of
a car door the words “reserved space”
(With the space number)

In a parked car’s door —
the mirrored words “reserved space”
(With the space number)

In a parked car’s door
reflection reads “reserved space”
(With the space number)

In the curvature of a parked car door
the reflection of a neighboring “reserved space”
(and the space number)

It’s a little interesting how the effort to dwell within formal constraints will tease out new areas of consideration in the subject: the idea of color is not at all in the original but dominant in the later drafts; the idea of a reflection in the door, important the original, has been diminished by the end. An improvement in the later drafts, I would say, is that they make implicit the idea of a parked car, which is explicit in the earlier ones; and would add that the more formalism bends one to doing that, turning the stated into the understood, the more it recommends formalism as a practice.

” A man who really fights for the right, if he is to preserve his life for even a little while, must be a private citizen, not a public man.” Apology [31ε]-[32α] [English]:

καί μοι μὴ ἄχθεσθε λέγοντι τἀληθῆ: οὐ γὰρ ἔστιν ὅστις ἀνθρώπων σωθήσεται οὔτε ὑμῖν οὔτε ἄλλῳ πλήθει οὐδενὶ γνησίως ἐναντιούμενος καὶ διακωλύων πολλὰ ἄδικα καὶ παράνομα ἐν τῇ πόλει γίγνεσθαι, ἀλλ᾽ ἀναγκαῖόν ἐστι τὸν τῷ ὄντι μαχούμενον ὑπὲρ τοῦ δικαίου, καὶ εἰ μέλλει ὀλίγον χρόνον σωθήσεσθαι, ἰδιωτεύειν ἀλλὰ μὴ δημοσιεύειν.

(This makes me think, albeit a little obliquely, of H. Clinton’s criticism of B. Obama during the 2008 primary campaign, and of the difference between MLK and LBJ, which I believe, indeed, Clinton referenced: the general idea that, if you want to effect a political change, you need people working both inside –HC / LBJ– and outside –BO / MLK– the political system.)

gal: a slang pronunciation of girl, 1795. Meanwhile, seems that grave (adj.) and grave (n.) have different etymological roots, gravel too.

Pertaining to concordance. “The reader will see how the images of this book persist and reappear. That is because these things themselves are the plot. They carry all the meaning. Isolate flecks.” (Imaginative Qualities of Real Things, Gilbert Sorrentino, pp. 124)

Now while the early budders are just new,
And run in mazes of the youngest hue
About old forests

(Keats, Endymion)

This has been notable for a while, but I’m in particular surprised today by the quality of this Google translation (7/9/18):

La vaisselle plate y resplendissait sous les rayons que versait un plafond lumineux, dont de fines peintures tamisaient et adoucissaient l’éclat. (Jules Verne.)

The flatware shone under the rays of a luminous ceiling, of which fine paintings sifted and softened the brilliancy. (Google.)

La meca del cine era demasiado pequeña para el ego desbordante de estas dos leyendas (Joan Crawford y Bette Davis)… el ego desbordante

Thinking of this Robert Creeley poem, A Piece, here reproduced in full:

…………….A Piece

…………….One and
…………….One, two,
…………….Three.

Some thoughts of a searching kind about this…

The first line implies the idea of one by being the first and by having the word ‘one’ (is this “cardinal” and “ordinal”? see natural numbers) –yet implies the idea of two by containing two words.

The second line implies the idea of two with the word ‘two’, and with having two words, and by being the second, but implies the idea of one by having the word ‘one’, and implies the idea of three because the sum of its numbers (one, two) is three.

And the third line implies the idea of three with the word three, and by being the third line, and with having no other words or ideas in it but that of three, yet implies the idea of one by having only one word and by being the only line with one word.

Thus the first line implies itself and the second, the second line implies itself, the first and third, and the third line implies itself and the first.

I wonder if this would be a poem, or how it would be different as a poem from Creeley’s:

…………….One, two,
…………….Three.

Or this:

……………. 1+1,2,3

(Does this poem suggest a way in which we might find math poetical?)

What does the “one and” add to the simple idea of counting (that is, how is it different from “1 +”) and what do the line breaks add? The following rearrangement of the poem, without the line breaks, causes me to think the poem’s point is to draw attention to the difference between a single unit (“one”) and a single series (“one, two, three”):

…………….One and one, two, three.

(That is, without line breaks one is inclined to identify the second “one” with the following “two” and “three”, rather than with the first “one.” Do we know, is it important that we know, in a scientific way, the effect of line breaks on a reader?)

It occurs to me that exceptionally simple poems of this kind offer a unique opportunity for critics of poetry in that they may evaluate all, or essentially all, the possible permutations of the poem to ask if the best alternative was employed, or why the poet chose one over the other. Why not:

…………….Three,
…………….two, one
…………….and one.

(Could this version of the poem be thought of as a form of subtraction to the other’s addition?)

It occurs to me that the title suggests Creeley excerpted these lines from a larger work as an interesting “piece” of it (a “cut” like a haiku). Other alternatives: it is a “piece” in the sense of “opus”, like a musical piece; that counting implies a condition of incompleteness….