My assumption tends to be that the arts and Yankee capitalism work somewhat at cross-purposes (if they are not out and out hostile to each other along the lines of what you find in Gaddis’s J R); so it is utterly remarkable to me, and something I need to ponder seriously on, that Charles Ives not only succeeded in becoming rich selling Life Insurance, but was a true believer that Life Insurance was something essentially good for humanity. Here is something Charles Ives really thought, according to Jan Swafford (pp.217):

There was not a service I could render to my fellow man that was more important than the business of life insurance.

The paragraph preceding the one in which that sentence is found gives a bit more detail:

Time and again Ives preaches his essential points. Life insurance is a natural step in social evolution, a humanistic and scientific response to fundamental needs. Buying insurance has become a basic responsibility of the head of a family. Teaching men, most of them innately good and reasonable, to fulfill that responsibility is a matter of presenting them with a few easily comprehensible facts. Spreading that responsibility in society is an indispensable part of progress toward a better and more prosperous community. Insurance “is an integral part of social evolution, an organism that has not been thrown on society, but which society has evolved.” In another paper:”Without going far in the field of metaphysics, an insurance idealist might hold that life insurance is altruism scientifically organized, or perhaps commercialized, accepting the term as more of a paradox than a contradiction. A practical insurance man will say that life insurance has a certain influence on the moral and economic development of a country.” If life insurance were abolished “Mankind in general would be thrown backward into a state of mind that would not be far from … the middle ages. Civilization … would have to adjust itself to many medieval standards, for Life Insurances has become not only a vital part of civilization but a civilizer itself.

I suppose what I find interesting here is that the artist himself seems so well-aligned with American commerce, while his art remains so counter to it — that his insurance products should be directed toward the ‘average man’ while his music was seemingly not. Certainly, Ives’s music does not present the listener with “a few easily comprehnsible facts.”

(Occurs to me Kafka also worked in Insurance, and at around the same time, though in that case he was working for a state-run program, which, if I recall, insured workers against workplace accidents.)

I thought that, the better to kick off my new life of virtue, I’d better write a hymn to virtue itself. Why, you might ask, to virtue itself? Why not simply write a hymn to virtue? The answer is essentially (I can’t go into all the ins and outs just now) that it just sounds tougher. Virtue, sure — but why not virtue itself — The whole deal!

“Virtue is being wise,” I begin, “virtue is loving being wise. Like some people love a particular person, like another person will fall into raptures when they hear a certain song, that’s how the virtuous person feels as he’s treading the paths of pure wisdom! You can imagine how dejected this lover feels when he’s being false and foolish!”

You will tell me that is not a bad start for a hymn, with which I concur completely, with one caveate: that this hymn, I don’t imagine, is the sort you’ll find on your popular music stations of today, howsoever wonderful it may be in all other imaginable respects. For one thing, it doesn’t have a rocking beat (except for the rocking beat of pure goodness!); for another thing it doesn’t come with a flashy video (unless you consider Reality a good enough video for you!); nor is there a faddish dance associated with this song (saving those dance steps required for the performance of good and noble deeds!). But enough of this. Now we want to hear more of the hymn.

“Virtue is moderation! Virtue is courage! Virtue is gazing at a point you can’t fully make out and yet must!!” (I admit that with this last remark I embarked on some original research, giving vent to an idea I’ve had recently that is actually pretty weird: that when I try and gaze upward to a point actually located behind my eyes and within my head I’m striving to attain to virtue, albeit in a curious way.) “Virtue is a sense of urgency! Virtue is a sense of stillness! An urgency to do and not to do! Why should any time be wasted? Why should any of life be spared from being bent upon life’s purpose? Always always always virtue!”

It may pain the reader-enthusiast of my work to know I was half-tempted not to commit to paper this song. This from the fear, the nagging fear I have had, that I might render ridiculous, through my Hymn, the very thing I mean so earnestly to exalt by it. But the stakes, in this case, were too exceedingly high; for just as a lullaby may bring many a child to sleep, I had hopes –and I think quite reasonably– that with this, my own hymn, I would bring many a person, and myself too, to virtue. But enough of this nonsense. Let us hear more of the song we love:

“Virtue: not being a phony. Virtue: remaining oneself under pressure, under scrutiny (for what have we to fear?) Virtue: which begins with self-respect. Always always self-respect! always always virtue!”

Hippocrates 2.43 / english

τῶν ἀπαγχομένων καὶ καταλυομένων, μηδέπω δὲ τεθνηκότων, οὐκ ἀναφέρουσιν, οἷσιν ἂν ἀφρὸς ᾖ περὶ τὸ στόμα.

Kafka, Diaries, 1921. “Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate — he has little success in this — but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others; after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor. This assumes that he does not need both hands, or more hands than he has, in his struggle against despair.”

Kafka, Diaries, 1921. ” [Moses] is on the track of Canaan all his life; it is incredible that he should see the land only when on the verge of death. They dying vision of it can only be intended to illustrate how incomplete a moment is human life, incomplete because a life like this could last forever and still be nothing but a moment. Moses failed to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life.”

Diaries, 1922: “The gesture of rejection with which I was forever met did not mean: ‘I do not love you,’ but: ‘You cannot love me, much as you would like; you are unhappily in love with your love for me, but your love for me is not in love with you.’ It is consequently incorrect to say that I have known the words, ‘I love you’; I have known only the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my ‘I love you’, that is all that I have known, nothing more.”

“Your love for me is not in love with you” is so much nicer than my silly paraphrase in the title….Also: “the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my ‘I love you’.”

Proust: “On a trop dormi, on n’est plus. Le réveil est à peine senti mécaniquement, et sans conscience, comme peut l’être dans un tuyau la fermeture d’un robinet. Une vie plus inanimée que celle de la méduse succède, où l’on croirait aussi bien qu’on est tiré du fond des mers ou revenu du bagne, si seulement l’on pouvait penser quelque chose.”

Scott Moncrieff: “We have slept too long, we no longer exist. Our waking is barely felt, mechanically and without consciousness, as a water pipe might feel the turning off of a tap. A life more inanimate than that of the jellyfish follows, in which we could equally well believe that we had been drawn up from the depths of the sea or released from prison, were we but capable of thinking anything at all.”

….
….

eye
word
screen
number
power
desk lamp!

….
….
….
….

.-__.
.-|…
….Africa’s third longest. ;-_) World’s fifth largest island..
…Eμὲν οὖν οὕτως ἔχειν.–.-`.–.\καὶ δεῖ πιστεύειν: ἃ δὲ lard
stδύνειν τὸν ἥλιον ἐν.–.-` ;-_- –\νίτιδι καὶμετὰ ψόφουilla
oy σίζοντος discharg.–.-` ;-_.–._.( λάγους κατὰ σβέσιν se
barr– .τοῖς πολλο .–.-` ;-_.–.- -. \ μοίως εἴρηκεν, está
iendo las migaja .–.-` ;-_.–.- -_.. -‘) a cruzar la acera.
ταῦτα μὲν οὖ.–.-` ;-_.–.- -_.. -‘-|C i rιν ἐξ ἀκοῆς
ῖς καὶ χυδαίz – ————————-bsairν δεσμὸν ε
….ὶ τὰ σύμπg…………………………………G rτοῦ πελάγους
…ν ὑπάρχονG…………………………………..G i rθαλαττίῳ ἐο
Ποσειδ e……………………………………..zv aσίζοντος

Hippocrates, Aphorisms 22 / English:

νοσημάτων ὁκόσων ἀρχομένων, ἢν χολὴ μέλαινα ἢ ἄνω ἢ κάτω ὑπέλθῃ, θανάσιμον.

What is bile again? According to wikipedia, it is composed of:

(97–98)% water, 0.7% bile salts, 0.2% bilirubin, 0.51% fats (cholesterol, fatty acids, and lecithin), and 200 meq/l inorganic salts. The two main pigments of bile are bilirubin, which is orange–yellow, and its oxidised form biliverdin, which is green. When mixed, they are responsible for the brown color of feces.

(No kidding orange and green do make brown.) Word is from Latin but beyond that obscure.

dévergondage d’esprit:

Dimier pensait que les grandes passions étaient la source du génie ! Je pense que c’est l’imagination seule, ou bien, ce qui revient au même, cette délicatesse d’organes qui fait voir là où les autres ne voient pas, et qui fait voir d’une façon différente. Je disais même que les grandes passions jointes à l’imagination conduisent le plus souvent au dévergondage d’esprit, et Dufresne dit une chose fort juste : que ce qui faisait l’homme extraordinaire était radicalement une manière tout à fait propre à lui de voir les choses. [*]

Genius is a way of seeing, not of passionate feeling, which latter more often leads to “devrondage.” Very interesting, from the same entry: “Je remarque maintenant que mon esprit n’est jamais plus excité à produire que quand il voit une médiocre production sur un sujet qui me convient.”

It’s easier to fix something that’s wrong that to envision, from scratch, something good — or the mediocre as an aid to imagination and seeing.

I did a doubletake on reading this in my Ives biography. Speaking of Yale, which Ives attended, Jan Swafford writes (pp. 105)–

“Tradition ruled college life, from the weird ratcheting Greek Cheer of the football stadium, taken from Aristophanes’ The Frogs (BREK KEK KEK KEK! KOAX! KOAX!), to the structure of student-run activities, to the ceremonies of Ivy Day and graduation.”

Joyce also quotes the Frogs’ cry on first or second page of Finnegans Wake. Could he have been thinking of Yale? (Ostrygods gaggin fishy gods…) From what I can gather from the Yale Daily News, the cheer began in the 1880’s and disappeared in the 1960’s. Ives entered Yale in 1894. Listen to this glowing account of his success there (Swafford pp.104):

Yet Ives blazed through Yale as one of the most visible and popular men on campus, finally to be singled out as one of the ‘geniuses’ of his class. In his grief and emptiness [on the recent death of his father] he directed himself outward rather than inward. The system of achieving campus success was Byzantine, but Charlie mastered it, made his connections, and sailed to glory. As he had before and would time and again in the future, he would, with little overt sign of ambition, percolate to the highest rank of whatever endeavor he involved himself in.

Note, however, that this success did not extend toward academics, and grade-wise Ives was a below-average student.

La pendule, sonnant minuit,
Ironiquement nous engage
À nous rappeler quel usage
Nous fîmes du jour qui s’enfuit:
— Aujourd’hui, date fatidique,
Vendredi, treize, nous avons,
Malgré tout ce que nous savons,
Mené le train d’un hérétique […]

Baudelaire, L’Examen de Minuit

The clock striking midnight
Ironically invites us
To call to mind what use we made
Of the day that is fleeing:
— Today, a fateful date,
Friday the thirteenth we have
In spite of everything we know
Lived the life of a heretic […]

Again, an issue I have with my shapes is that I want them to be like Kalligrams –words which, incapable of normalcy, are magnetized into arrangements– but feel stuck in the world (if not of designs) then of poems brut, which depend on their being, as it were, not their message for their force. Perhaps if I slapped a title on it, like “Receiver.” (Actually, that idea advances my thinking a little bit: because if this were more obviously a phone receiver then the implication is that what is coming out of the ear-end is “limbs of a horse” and what is going into the mouth end is also “limbs of a horse” — someone is saying, and another person repeating, the phrase “limbs of a horse” — which almost is something, evoking the conversation from which that phrase has been excerpted.)

.,…
.,…

…….a…O.,…..v v …………iR
.v v iR
..e a …..,,,,.v a v
hl……………..,,,,,a i
..Limbs. of the. horse
..e. c …………,,,,,.v a
.m h ……….,,,,,.i r
Bis .o. i v airvairBis
ournour. A. a Iournou
swin…ang…ines …………
ging..siron.. sand ……………
Maryof Egypthami ……………….
rrida bashitru Mar ………………..
gUAr dnnelS o-da …………………
ρ θ᾽258 259, (0) ……………….
ὕδ ((1))166(1);t ……………..
ατι 1545462it’s……………
λια (0)awhere Fsi………….
ρῷ 1we are but ………..
ῥέειnow, R but………
, ἀand whe A\ t…….
μw e ha ve b.……
6 φὶbeen fo Zr.
δὲ κfive ye .Aa
swin…ang…ines
..e a …..,,,,.v a v
hl……………..,,,,,a i
..Limbs. of the. horse
..e. c …………,,,,,.v a
.m h ……….,,,,,.i r
.o. i v airvair
.. A. a I

.,…
.,…

“Bear’s ears” “Bears, elks, deer.” Did “deer” sound different when you said “bears, elks, deer” than when you said “bears, elk, deer” sort of thing. Something confusing me (spinning the brain) “polished by ice” (actually planed by ice) — Aveolar: Aveoli were sockets, were the teeth’s sockets, and ‘n’ was (was it an ‘n’ that was?) an aveolar consonant. Tongue against them. “R” I pronounced strangely, an unusual pitch, an unnaturally long duration “r r r r r –” in fact, a falsetto then ‘s’ which he pronounced with such emphasis –“ess”– it sounded much like “hess”, (which, whence the aspiration?) and he repeated it several times in a whisper “hess hess hess” then said (falsetto again) “r r r r r –” Trying to “feel” which parts of his mouth he was using. Or trying not to feel but be aware of what he was feeling? Which, or which? Had he used his vocal chords or not (was the consonant ‘voiced’ or ‘unvoiced’?) Had this tongue touched any part of his mouth to form the sound –and which part? Had his lips met? Kind of shocking what went on with his body to make a vowel a consonant, he thought (that is, to make a vowel sound a consonant sound) though what he was doing was also a little more complex and weirder than that, not just changing the long ‘o’ to ‘r’ but elevating the pitch as he did so — elevating, too, his lips and chin as the pitch went up, so that his head was now in a howling-at-the-moon position (o — oo– or). “Doing things Aristophanes might not have deemed alright,” was how he put it. Idea occurring: that memorizing the poem has given him a “trapdoor to reality.” There could be no true experience of reality without this kind of familiarity and knowledge of some part of it. Idea growing rapidly confusing: “but what one knew was not the poem but was knowing.” One now perceived the world with “the crown of knowing and what it is to know” on one’s head, felt the nobility one needs to see what’s real? What gave a specialist such insight was not that the whole world was contained in the one thing he had made the subject of his study, but because he knew what was demanded in truly knowing something, knew what it was to truly know something, limits of knowledge and all? Anyway, for a brief while, the words of this poem seemed like bricks of a wall he was picking up and beyond which and through which he was seeing the real world. (Though the wall reformed, the bricks snapped back quickly and sternly in space.)

La Rochefoucauld [21] —

Those who are condemned to the scaffold sometimes affect a constancy and contempt of death which is in effect the fear of facing it. So that it might be said this constancy and contempt are to their minds what the bandage is to their eyes.

“Ceux qu’on condamne au supplice affectent quelquefois une constance et un mépris de la mort qui n’est en effet que la crainte de l’envisager. De sorte qu’on peut dire que cette constance et ce mépris sont à leur esprit ce que le bandeau est à leurs yeux.”

Starting to take a close look at this book (translation Michael Roloff). Here is the interesting first paragraph, with observations:

When Joseph Bloch, a construction worker who had been a well-known soccer goalie, reported for work that morning, he was told that he was fired. At least that was how he interpreted the fact that no one except the foreman looked up from his coffee break when he appeared at the door of the construction shack, where the workers happened to be at that moment, and Blck left the building site. Out on the street he raised his arm, but the car that drove past — even though Block hadn’t been hailing a cab– was not a cab. Then he heard the sound of brakes in front of him. Bloch looked around: behind him there was a cab; its driver started swearing. Blach turned around, got in, and told the driver to take him to the Naschmarkt.

First & Second Sentences

(a.) The narrator tells us, first sentence, Bloch “was told” he was fired — doesn’t say “he learned” or “suspected” he was fired, but that he “was told” as a statement of fact.

The narrator tells us, second sentence, this was at least how Bloch had “interpreted” the situation, in which, in fact, no one had “told” him anything.

It appears, then, that what Bloch merely infers he experiences as something actually said.

(b.) The fact that Bloch’s co-workers are taking a break implies they have already been working and that Bloch has arrived late for work.

(c.) For comparison, this is the first sentence of The Trial: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”

Final Four Sentences

In the paragraph’s final four sentences a lot happens in short order: (i) Bloch raises his arm as if to hail a cab, but the car moving past is not a cab and he had not been hailing one; (ii) he hears braking in front of him, looks around, and discovers behind him a cab with a swearing driver. (iii) Bloch turns around, gets in the cab, tells the driver to take him to the Naschmarkt.

Q: Why did Bloch raise his arm if he wasn’t hailing a cab?
Q: Why, hearing the sound of brakes in front of him, does Bloch look around behind him? (Is Bloch in the street?)
Q: Who is the cab driver swearing at? At the source of the braking sound? At Bloch?
Q: What are we to make of the fact that Bloch’s raising his arm — not to hail a cab– in the presence of a car that was not a cab — resulted in him stopping and getting into a cab?
Q: Is there any parallel with soccer here?

Inanimate whose:

The inanimate whose refers to the use in English of the relative pronoun whose with non-personal antecedents, as in: “That’s the car whose alarm keeps waking us up at night.” The construction is also known as the whose inanimate, non-personal whose, and neuter whose.

The use of the inanimate whose dates from the 15th century, but since the 18th century has drawn criticism from those who consider whose to be the genitive (possessive) only of the relative pronoun who and therefore believe it should be restricted to personal antecedents. Critics of inanimate whose prefer constructions such as those using of which the, which others find clumsy or overly formal.