Ethics, Book III, prop 39. Scholia. (Edwin Curley translation.) “Further, this affect, by which a man is so disposed that he does not will what he wills, and wills what he does not will, is called Timidity, which is therefore nothing but fear insofar as a man is disposed by it to avoid an evil he judges to be future by encountering a lesser evil (see Prop 28). But if the evil he is timid toward is Shame, then the timidity is called a Sense of shame. Finally, if the desire to avoid a future evil is restrained by a Timidity regarding another evil, so that he does not know what he would rather do, then the Fear is called Consternation, particularly if each evil he fears is of the greatest.”

Delacroix: other people are able to occupy themselves productively while waiting for inspiration to come, but I can only sit around and be bored.

Dimanche 13 juin. “Tant que l’inspiration n’y est pas, je m’ennuie. Il y a des gens qui, pour échapper à l’ennui, savent se donner une tâche et l’accomplir.” (x)

Not the focus of this essay, but interesting to me, it puts forward that Conrad’s political conservatism is to be understood not as something Old World and Deeply European (which, whatever that may mean, I suppose I’d assumed) but as that of an immigrant to England from Central Europe, anxious to prove he belonged, a framework I’d not thought of at all.

Idea that the political problems of our time are of an essentially non-political nature, and that only people of the opposite faction are able to see the imbecility and inefficacy of our own faction’s political attempts to solve it.

That’s different from the Trump-Dylan-thought that conservatives are responding to a cultural problem through politics while liberals, not seeing a cultural problem, are responding to problems of politics through legislation.

(The Trump-Dylan-thought is that populism from the right is subverting political institutions while populism from the left is subverting cultural institutions — Dylan winning the Nobel prize.)

It is also a different thought from what seems straight-forwardly the case reading the news, that Republicans are to blame. This would be a truly both-sidist view, not to suggest such a thing is inherently desirable, which proposes the total impenetrability of seeing through a political lens what has created the problem in politics. The person on the left can easily see the imbecility of having Trump for a President, for example, but is totally incapable of seeing its own imbecility, whatever that might be, with respect to this most central problem.

As to what sort of problem this “most central problem” might be –a problem that creates the appearance of being political but admits of no direct political solution– it could be literally the drinking water, an environmental issue, a philosophical problem, race… the most likely suspect would be Technology, and all of its ramifications to trade and social media and income distribution … while an outside of the box example, not perhaps unrelated to that, would be infantilization: that we know for some reason we are lesser figures than our parents, lacking gravitas and stature and what have you; and they of their parents, and so on; and in some effort to arrest this progress of diminishment, we embrace politics, feel intensely we must “change the world..”

But maybe the fever has broken. And that period between Reagan and Trump, between the Republican Revolution and the storming of the capitol, so aggravating and incomprehensible to those who lived them, is finally over. Without having really resolved anything, we’ve just moved on.

Customer said newly purchased running shoes, while heavier, had more support. Customer said Vietnamese diacritical marks indicated raising or lowering of pitch, while another mark signaled an abruptness to the word’s pronunciation — phhhht! (System devised by French monks.)

Customer said it was good to have gotten his exercise out of the way early. Customer said that, exercising in the heat, you limit the benefit of your cardiovascular work out. (Body expends so much energy cooling down.) Customer ordered small cap with whole milk on way to get hair done. Precise rectilineal angles characterized the thighs and crotches of the two seated men. Customer “must have been teacher”: had left behind multiple corrected tests. Customer observed that he was drinking water from a Styrofoam cup and drinking coffee from a treated paper cup, which were at odds with his expressed environmental views. Customer said political canvassing was definitely outside her comfort zone yet was glad they’d managed to flip the seat.

Dust pile on the tile floor became “more and more obnoxious” to attendant (“Pilus interruptus” diagnosed wherein the attendant has swept refuse into a pile but has been prevented from sweeping it up. There it lies in the center of the floor, among so many steps, this way and that, of unrealizing customers.)

(Attendant the worried shopkeeper of the movie, not the hero of the movie, and so must have his eyes out for the hero. Of these people he encountered, who was the hero?)

Back Windows — these were museum display cases — the telephone box or transformer among the trees and the wires that came out of it, suffused with embalming daylight.

Customer’s focus interrupted by removal, swift and unannounced, of the napkin that lay by his mouse pad.

Being Haunted by The Unlikely

Curiosity: why did attendant feel his thought that the customer, who’d left behind him multiple corrected tests must have been a teacher, was a stupid thought? Response to query: because he supposed the smart person would say, he was obviously a teacher. To the attendant, not as daft as he could seem but testing around the middle of the pack, the improbable always had a 50 percent chance of occurring. It loomed large before him that you could imagine some reason a non-teacher would leave behind corrected school tests.

Attendant now quite in interested in this, which could be even a larger problem for customers, this problem of being haunted by the unlikely . . . Why would a customer not think that, for example, a surgery’s ninety-five percent success rate would be worth trying to ease his crippling pain? Because he thinks there is a ninety percent chance that he’ll be among the five percent, for whom it doesn’t work, and a pretty good chance he’ll be among the one percent who die. (And if you dig into who the five percent are, certain customers might not be wrong about that.) Conversely the same customer might think nothing of dropping fifty dollars on a dietary supplement, which has no chance of working, on the outside chance that it just might, that it “at least can’t hurt.”

(Chance Sweepings)

over that art/ Which you say adds to nature, is an art/ That nature makes …

An excerpt from the Theophrastus book “Characters”, this concerns the dissimulating character [Perseus] [English]. “Hearing something he pretends not to, and claims not to have seen what he’s seen; and having previously agreed now doesn’t recall… “:

καὶ ἀκούσας τι μὴ προσποιεῖσθαι, καὶ ἰδὼν φῆσαι μὴ ἑορακέναι, καὶ ὁμολογήσας μὴ μεμνῆσθαι: καὶ τὰ μὲν σκέψασθαι φάσκειν, τὰ δὲ οὐκ εἰδέναι, τὰ δὲ θαυμάζειν, τὰ δ᾽ ἤδη ποτὲ καὶ αὐτὸς οὕτως διαλογίσασθαι. καὶ τὸ ὅλον δεινὸς τῷ τοιούτῳ τρόπῳ τοῦ λόγου χρῆσθαι: ‘οὐ πιστεύω᾽, ‘οὐχ ὑπολαμβάνω᾽, ‘ἐκπλήττομαι᾽ καὶ ‘λέγεις αὐτὸν ἕτερον γεγονέναι: καὶ μὴν οὐ ταῦτα πρὸς ἐμὲ διεξῄει᾽, ‘παράδοξόν μοι τὸ πρᾶγμα᾽, ‘ἄλλῳ τινὶ λέγε᾽, ‘ὅπως δὲ σοὶ ἀπιστήσω ἢ ἐκείνου καταγνῶ, ἀποροῦμαι᾽, ‘ἀλλ᾽ ὅρα, μὴ σὺ θᾶττον πιστεύεισ᾽.

Action: let go of keys
Immediately followed by: sound of keys on flagstone
Picture: splayed out keys beside still right root
Realization: hole in pocket
Remembrance: there was a hole in this pocket.
Quietly exclamatory iamb or spondee: “That’s right.”

Suddenly the sky, like we’ve not seen before, is everywhere and expansive, yet answered and subdued by the thundering road, even with the traffic light. Horizon cut. (underpass at left below with woods.) pride and laughter Dedicatory placard. Chain fence and guard rails (we laugh out of denial, out of refusal, goodbye you are ridiculous) guardrails and sidewalks on each side of the purely functional unadorned hulking bridge, which has a bird’s nest in one of its street lamp’s casement openings. Over the moat of where I was as at each moment I am

To the left, far off, the building he saw grow gradually up, become skeletal then whole, and there, too, nearer the bridge over which that four lane county road passes, parallel again. What did he say was the problem with ambition? The problem with ambition, he had said, was that it “ran counter to one’s self-disappearance” that doesn’t sound like a problem, “is a sturdy embrace of materialism, a cultivation of the soul as a mere sense impression” –yes but that doesn’t sound– “–interrupts that process of decoction, you see, which one feels true writing is, or will one day be, to reach briefly but with chemical surety and explosiveness one’s true self.” The problem with ambition (but “was getting a haircut now and then so at odds with compassion? was wearing a collared shirt?”) let others have and win and surfeited with my loss and absence I will truly be something I will not be that shadow I thought to attain unto and

(No: it isn’t much of a bridge. What makes a bridge much is the gap it crosses over or the points it crosses between.) Pass below the one “beautiful” or natural area (found to be so) that irregular triangle between the off-ramp and the 10 lane highway, irregularly mowed (whitman like nature, van gogh like wheat.) (When they had rebuilt a nearby retaining wall they had turned this area into a parking lot for their bobcats, for their cement trucks, for their dumpsters and pickups, but a year or two later and this beloved triangle, whose legs are roads, whose waist and belt are also roads, is now how it was again, overgrown, neglected.)

Street left at end of bridge. (Decision to take most direct route, stepping off sidewalk, rather than following sidewalk a few extra feet toward ramp.) (Remark: I should make a catalogue of such shortcuts that posterity may know.) That street turns into a cul de sac where there is a realty business. Boxed flower beds are owned by County: fresh food grown for hunger program. (To say that the community on one side of the bridge is a mirror image of the community of the other side of the bridge, just as the two sides of the street on both sides of the bridge are mirror images of each other, is roughly so, I want to say, but actually at just this point is one of the pockets of difference between them, an irregularity in the glass as it were, because of the small commercial building with its small parking lot after the turn off-here, abutting the County’s vegetable beds, which formerly hosted an HVAC repair place and firestation 107, though both having been decommissioned in recent years, the latter the first of two firehouses I’m to pass.)

[STUDY OF SOUNDS]

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Suspected this of being a typo but it’s an actual name for a bear: bruin.

Three other interesting points from the article where that was found: bear spray works very well as a deterrent on bears; bear spray is a strengthened form of pepper spray, which is really made from peppers. (A standard pepper spray is about five times “hotter” than a habenero pepper, while bear spray is about three times “hotter” than your standard pepper spray.) Bear spray costs between 30 & 50 dollars for an 8-10 oz can.

Κυμαῖος πύκτην ἰδὼν πολλὰ τραύματα ἔχοντα ἠρώτα, πόθεν ἔχει ταῦτα. τοῦ δὲ είποντος· ἐκ τοῦ μύρμηκος. ἔφη· διὰ τί γὰρ χαμαί κοιμᾷ;

A Cumaen seeing a boxer with many wounds asked how he received them. Boxer said — “from the ant”. Cumaen said –” why then do you sleep on the ground?”

1. A history of the mundane is different from a diary in that it seeks to refer only to experiences that most every person has on ordinary days. Suddenly getting hit with the smell of someone doing their laundry would be an example of such an experience. Experiencing the death of a parent would not.
2. A history of the mundane differs from a novel in that it seeks to preserve the private life of its characters, rather than drawing them out.
3. A history of the mundane has events but doesn’t attempt to organize them into a plot, and doesn’t concede, without resistance, to the existence of non-mundane or dramatic events.
4. To the extent The History is a poem, it takes no interest in language or sentiment.
5. To the extent it is a sitcom, it dwells on the unentertaining or boring, as if in search of the essence of those qualities.
6. To the extent it is a work of Advanced Physics: only irreproducible experiments are allowed. Only total chaos in nature is assumed.
7. Above all, the attempt is to reveal what is going on when there is nothing going on — example, Chance Sweepings.

Pedestrian drumming soda can with fingers. Thumb and fourth finger of right hand on either side of the can top’s diameter, gripping; intervening fingers drumming on front lip (second, middle, second middle), whole can held at about waist height by a slack arm. “No sipping as he passed.”

The paper that slipped from the standing customer’s hands gave him multiple opportunities to snatch it back before it fell to the ground, where he picked it up: customer reached for it (and it slid to the side in the air, almost pendular); customer reached for it (and it bent backwards and down); customer reached for it (but it was now too low: he had the right x but wrong y); so it landed on the floor where the customer would have to stoop to pick it up (though he was by that time already almost all the way stooped.)

*

(Dissections of minutiae galore at Chance Sweepings…)

(Faulkner with rather a few negative comments about the automobile it occurs to me. Beside the preceding (1935), there is the one from A Fable (1954) quoted in Isola di Rifuti and there is one from Intruder in the Dust (1948) which I can’t find to peel from my stacks and quote from at the moment. Undoubtedly more. Colonel Sartoris’ automobile (1929) was kind of a big deal if I recall….The Reivers… Undoubtedly multiple papers about this…. in fact, just this one, William Faulkner On The Automobile As Socio-Sexual Symbol –which sounds as if it might focus on the Intruder passage– offers in just the preview a few citations from other works that concern this and incidentally makes me want to read Requiem For A Nun, which has so far eluded me.)

“The car moved; it accelerated smoothly and on its fading gearwhine it drifted down the alley, poising without actually pausing; then it swung into the Avenue, gaining speed — a machine expensive, complex, delicate and intrinsically useless, created for some obscure psychic need of the species if not the race, from the virgin resources of a continent, to be the individual muscle bones and flesh of a new and legless kind– into the empty avenue between the purple-and-yellow paper bunting caught from post to post by cryptic shields symbolic of laughter and mirth now vanished and departed.” Pylon, pp.86, Faulkner

Twin Peaks, Agent Cooper: “Gentlemen, when two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry we must always pay strict attention. Fellas, let’s make a house call.”

‘Butterfly’ which evokes neither butter nor fly; reminder to look up etymology of that, nestled in complex structure of plant and shadow at the outskirts of the unfenced yard. In the moment that I see and pass it, two strides, it spreads out its wings then folds them back.

Knees and the idea of participating in social media: these “wings of thought on the sides of the thorax of a different thought”, that I didn’t get enough sleep last night. (Such “mental insects” I think to call them, but plankton is more like, food for “the whales of thought.”) (planktic or planktonic is the adjective for plankton.) Dream that the living and dining area at home have several large stainless steel bowls full of sliced oranges. Dream that a high-star general is testifying before Congress that a certain horse can be safely transferred home from Europe. (Perhaps my mind had meant to dream “a certain force“. It may also have meant a house.)

Had woken up remembering an incident, from decades ago, in which I’d been dishonest. Next the thought occurred that we were here to strive for God’s perfection — and why didn’t I think of that more often? (Because I didn’t go to church.) Next the thought occurred that it was better to suffer wrong than to do wrong — and why didn’t I think of that more often? (Would say it was because I didn’t read Plato that much, but I actually did read Plato kind of a lot.) Why didn’t I think that what I thought and perceived was what God thought and perceived or that I and others had immortal natures?

About to cross Walter Reed to pick up a few articles at the Harris Teeter, inadvertently kicked a travel-sized tooth brush from the curbside into the curb itself with its rainwater, where it half floated, the bristles at the head splayed out with use but not discolored.

Strong sun after a rain, humidity, sunlight on the full stream; the vigorous but not torrential ripples of the creek as it flexes between the rocks (the rocks are its muscles, the banks are what it hefts, lifts; the trash and pollution is the grime it collects as it works out, its dirty shirt, litter like a sweat-filled towel on its banks.) There is an actual old shirt and landscaping glove on the rocks here.

(What was beside the crushed ribbed plastic water bottle on the sidewalk?) Two twigs. (Describe the juxtaposition of the twigs.) The blond smooth one was propped upon the dark rough one. (We were just kidding about that but) (…but were you made to think anything about this?) No I was thinking of other things at the time, the most unusual of which was of Satan’s tempting of Jesus in the desert (Huh…?) how Satan had offered Jesus all the kingdoms of earth (And…?) how did one stand with respect to that offer? Did one choose as Jesus had chosen, or did one choose as Satan had tempted, and did one act like a person who’d made that decision, or did one act like someone who’d made the opposite decision? (And…? Conclusion..?) and concluded I was a robot, in which it was difficult to locate an identity capable of making an authentic decision of any kind (Where was I?) Maybe in writing, maybe much later.

Mentally ill woman in Shirlington, backpack, shouts angrily paranoid but as it were well-thought out things at people she comes across. Today talking about how we were all “time-stamped.” She yells really loudly. First came across her around Glebe, Walter Reed soon after Pupatella had opened up. “Fuck you, Pupatella!” she had said repeatedly among some other things I didn’t get at the time.

Notes on the final chapter of Time & Western Man which concerns “the mind of Jocye”. here .

–I was very interested to see Lewis comment that Joyce’s work is personal, instead of merely autobiographical, which I’ve been thinking about but not managed to say. This might be the real legacy of Joyce –his craftsmanship being non-emulatable– that he took this endeavor a bit personally and we do even more.

–Claim that Ulysses is overcharged surface with wooden stock characters beneath. (It’s because the characters are characters that are real and personal to Joyce –indeed, are ultimately Joyce himself– that they remain ultimately so embryonic. Bloom as evidently Joyce himself as Daedalus is.) Elsewhere, Lewis seems to say the same of Picasso. These are mere craftsmen, whose figures, beneath their impressiveness, are dolls lacking life.

–Refreshing to read some negative criticism, particularly of a figure so lionized as Joyce. Not just negative: hostile. Also refreshing to see a criticism of Modernism that goes deeper than “it’s hard, it’s unreadable.” (It’s a criticism of perspective on Time, though in what sense remains obscure to me.)

–This criticism of a perspective on Time reminds me of my own fixation with Joyce’s “epiphany”, which I seemed to see in other writers also — but Lewis means something else. Speaks of Bergson.

–His insight, in the Stein section, that there is one side of the arts (artsiest) that strives very earnestly to represent itself as what another side strives to parody (most commercial). The serious repetition of Stein compared with the parodied repetitiousness of a child in Anita Loos.

(This section hit home for me in that I will often encounter, in my own writing, that I don’t know whether what I’m writing is serious or not. I’ll write something bland and neutral which, to be made at all interesting, to “work”, needs to be pushed towards Stein or toward Loos.)

(The idea of taking this personally…)

“The main characteristic of the Time-mind from the outset has been a hostility to what it calls the ‘spatializing’ process of a mind not a Time-mind. It is this ‘spatializing’ capacity and instinct that it everywhere assails.

In its place it would put the Time-view, the flux. It asks us to see everything sub specie temporis. It is the criticism of this view, the Time-view, from the position of the plastic or the visual intelligence, that I am submitting to the public in this book.”

After a little more skimming, what Lewis calls the time-mind does seem to have some similarity to what I think of as “epiphany” — seeing all time in one time, yet as a result, fixing all the more concretely one one’s own time. “All ages are contemporaneous.” (Pound)

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Idea that some of the attitudes expressed in this Sorrentino interview are fairly descriptive of what is going on in Finnegans Wake, thinking particularly of where he says: “Yeah, I think Imaginative Qualities is a novel in which I first began to see the possibilities of… Well, to simplify it: of doing anything I damn well pleased. Literally, of doing anything I damn well pleased.”

The idea is that Joyce couldn’t very well say back then that he was “doing anything he damn well pleased” with FW since there was still this idea that writing mean something and be about things, so he made up this stuff about it being a dream or what have you (although that is a legitimate point of entry into the work.)

Also descriptive of FW is where Sorrentino says, in Imaginative Qualities, “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.” (“Isolate flecks” is from W.C. Williams:

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off).

An example of such persistent imagery in FW is the dialogues that recur: Mut & Jute, Mookse and Gripes, Gracehoper and the Ondt, etc.