Customer story: his Thanksgiving Day dinner at Cracker Barrel. Customer comment: every time I see a construction site, I can’t believe I’m not still at it. Customer destination: brother and sister off to try out dad’s new pizza convection oven. Customer’s arms’ position: seemed to indicate he was thinking and not reading. Customer cleared throat, customer expressed that she couldn’t eat bread, customer expressed that he thought he was a decent cook, making two dishes from his country very well. Customer’s movie recommendation: Paris Blues. Reason customer gave for apologetically asking attendant to hurry up with the sandwich: she’d “really mismanaged her time today.”

Customer: there were only a few ships that went back and forth from Hawaii in those days, and he not only knew them, but knew and enjoyed all the stock footage of them in movies from that period, and that’s why he would be leaving here early and watching the not very good movie on Turner Classic Movies at 3.00 PM today. To see the stock footage of one of those ships.

Yonaguni was the westernmost isle of Japan and near Taiwan. Transnistria was a contested region between Moldova and Ukraine. Ukraine was the largest country by land area in Europe. I had the idea that a popular cookbook could be arranged on the basis of Aristotle’s Four Causes (on the cover a weird medieval style picture of a prone and satyr-like Aristotle, prostrate across a pentagram, with piping hot dishes balanced on each of his feet and hands): ingredient (material cause) recipe (efficient cause) presentation (formal cause) satisfaction of appetite (final cause). (Wasn’t sure whether to say Taste or Nutrition was the final cause and thus felt satisfaction of appetite embraced both. If one had an appetite for the nutritious one couldn’t be satisfied by the delicious, could one? But actually I wasn’t so sure about that — and so let’s cancel the book).

Looked up Paul Dirac, British physicist. Remembered painful phone conversation I’d had with my elderly father about how to reset the password to his Amazon account, a near exact repetition of the previous day’s painful conversation on the same topic, which caused me to stare off and rub my chin, because in a way that’s what I’d wanted this book “book” to be, an excruciatingly laborious account. (To what good? “Montaigne by way of Beckett,” I had said, but why? Groping aimlessly through pieces of knowledge as if through physical objects and landscapes — staring idly at the under carriage of a bicycle, but in fiction — but arriving at not firm opinions but a voice that firmly states the opinions it holds strongly, a voice desirous of “capturing life.”) And remembered that opera about the telephone…

To have an interior platonic monologue don’t you need also to have an interior platonic Socrates, a first among equals among the voices of the mind, one who has already thought these issues through? (I.e., Plato’s dialogues are actually his monologues, in a certain sense, written after he’s conceived his idea, whereas our monologues represent the stage before having that crystallizing idea, the stage when our mind is a quarreling turbulent crowd of equal notions, which may never find such a one…? ) You don’t have a point.

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enfrentamientos armados —

Q: why did women live longer than us? (a) they nagging us (b) they take better care of themselves than we do: particular with what they eat, go to checkups (c) it’s biological, they are built tougher, they do child birth.

My bagel? said customer. (Had had to go down to get one so it was taking longer than usual — sorry.) My mocha? said customer (well, I’d forgotten, but there were mitigating circumstances, and I would have soon remembered.) My cookie? said customer. Yes, sorry, yes, no excuse for that one — I forgot your cookie and I’m sorry.

Customer had been enjoying reading Plato but wanted to try something different, what would attendant recommend? Beyond Good and Evil.

Customer had finally finished arranging her new house but didn’t know if a grad student who worked for the Salvation Army was making enough to be a reliable tenant of her rental. Customer, by a freak chance, had found an old showerhead while cleaning out a closet the very week that her current showerhead began to malfunction.

Paper scrap in shade of decorative bush. Rock nestled in dent of transparent large Mcdonald’s cup. That certain situations will require certain precise words like ‘nestled’ — From ‘nested’ perhaps? (Look up etymology of that.) (Do other situations not call up the same need for precision?)

Construction worker turned arm to get heavy shovel load over dumpster edge; edge of woman’s hair whipped chin as she turned suddenly to see her dog had stopped; bug hit me on the side of the face like a stone or acorn might have, that hard, flew off. Bird lands in front of my path and I stop and it stops. It takes longer than we both expect for him to realize I am not what he supposed, then he darts off. Superficial resemblance between early stage dementia patients and English as second language students — in both cases perfunctory conversations posing no difficulty (hi how are you) but asking slightly more complicateδ questions (what do you have planned today?), or questions which call for a non-rote answer, can result in complete confusion. Question: does the dementia patient (taking dementia as something homogenous, which it isn’t) not have access to memory or not have access to language or not have access to either? White woman: scratching interior of right knee. Black woman: raising, with pinching fingers, mask that had slid down. Was that a blond woman with a pony tail ahead? It was a tall senior white male with close-cropped white hair and an off-white baton projecting upward from his backpack, perhaps the handle of a tennis racket. (Racquet with ‘cq’  is alternate spelling.)

Pedestrian raises leg and leans down to swat something on the exterior of his calf. When I look in that direction again, some half a minute a later, before the light has turned, he does it again, the same spot. “Getting very small in yourself”: maybe it means “my ideas are no larger than my perceptions”, or maybe it means “I am no more than my feelings, which are my true physical extremities.” (My physical extremities were to my feelings as the block my house was on was to my house or no: as the block my house was on was to me inside the house.) Or maybe it means, “literature can give you ideas about glory like physical combat can inspire ideas of glory but like with physical combat there actually is no glory: there is walking around a room with a pen.” “The phrase seems to suggest humility, without suggesting obeisance, when I say it,” etc.

September 6, 2022

Now this was The Summs Position that was absolutely guaranteed to induce sleep, — though as a matter of fact, he had a hard time remembering just now how it went. Certainly it didn’t help his memory of the position that every time he assumed it he was drifting off to sleep! Well, almost every time.

It was definitely a stomach-down position and one thing that was extremely important was that you have the big toe of your left foot hanging just off the right corner of the bed with your right arm under the pillow. The problem was, what to do with the left arm and right leg? Was the right leg bent at the knee? Was the left arm like this or like this? He must have figured it out, whatever it was, because the next thing he knew he was awake in some completely different position. He had fallen into a deep sleep!

It must be admitted that, even without the application of mystical techniques such as this one, Summs did not have a great deal of difficulty falling asleep. The question was, could he help this friend Kara who’d been having such difficulties in this regard lately.

“Get on your stomach,” he said, and she did. “This bed is sized perfectly for you,” he said, having made a camera lens of his fingers — “all the energies are coming out from the corners just as they should. Now I want you to move your left leg so that the big toe is just hanging off the bed. It’s like the opposite of a lightning rod there. Sending the lightning out. Good.”

“What should I do with my other leg?” “Let’s not worry about that one just yet. What are you doing with the hand under the pillow? I want you to have the palm face downward on the bed with your fingers spread, as if you were absorbing the bed’s energy, if that’s comfortable. Otherwise a loose fist will work just fine….(Some energy we take from the bed, other energy we release into it. Try to keep this in mind.)”

After repositioning her right leg and left arm in various ways, the young sleepless woman, who would try anything, even the advice of her weirdo pal Summs, remained vexingly awake. But after Summs left her, vowing to refine his technique, she flopped onto her back and not only slept as she had not slept in weeks but never again had any trouble sleeping, which was how she became a believer in the miraculous powers of Summs.

In fact, hearing her story, Summs too almost came to believe in it — even he almost came to believe in his power!

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Now this was The Summs Position that was absolutely guaranteed to induce sleep, — though as a matter of fact, he had a hard time remembering just now how it went. Certainly it didn’t help his memory of the position that every time he assumed it he was drifting off to sleep! Well, almost every time.

It was definitely a stomach-down position and one thing that was extremely important was that you have the big toe of your left foot hanging just off the right corner of the bed with your right arm under the pillow. The problem was, what to do with the left arm and right leg? Was the right leg bent at the knee? Was the left arm like this or like this? He must have figured it out, whatever it was, because the next thing he knew he was awake in some completely different position. He had fallen into a deep sleep!

It must be admitted that, even without the application of mystical techniques such as this one, Summs did not have a great deal of difficulty falling asleep. The question was, could he help this friend Kara who’d been having such difficulties in this regard lately.

“Get on your stomach,” he said, and she did. “This bed is sized perfectly for you,” he said, having made a camera lens of his fingers — “all the energies are coming out from the corners just as they should. Now I want you to move your left leg so that the big toe is just hanging off the bed. It’s like the opposite of a lightning rod there. Sending the lightning out. Good.”

“What should I do with my other leg?” “Let’s not worry about that one just yet. What are you doing with the hand under the pillow? I want you to have the palm face downward on the bed with your fingers spread, as if you were absorbing the bed’s energy, if that’s comfortable. Otherwise a loose fist will work just fine….(Some energy we take from the bed, other energy we release into it. Try to keep this in mind.)”

After repositioning her right leg and left arm in various ways, the young sleepless woman, who would try anything, even the advice of her weirdo pal Summs, remained vexingly awake. But after Summs left her, vowing to refine his technique, she flopped onto her back and not only slept as she had not slept in weeks but never again had any trouble sleeping, which was how she became a believer in the miraculous powers of Summs.

In fact, hearing her story, Summs too almost came to believe in it — even he almost came to believe in his power!

Tried to read Rilke but a translation won’t be sufficient and I’ll never learn German (but I have to learn German) and just think — then you could read Kafka in German too. Just think, how long you’ve had your familiarity, we’ll call it, with French, that has resulted in no, shall we call it, understanding of French, and how has that improved your idea of, say, Baudelaire? (But it may have improved my idea of the French? — no.)

Do you remember when you were reading Balzac (or Flaubert or Zola) in French and had to look every blessed word up? Every word up in French, every word up in Greek, every word up in Latin, every word up in Spanish, a lot in English even, (how many times have you looked up, for instance, stanchion?) two times, three times, wiktionary, word reference, Websters, google translate, Lidell & Scott, Cunliffe, you learn nothing, you retain nothing, you look up stanchion again and again, you must like just the drudgery of it, look here and hold open two books at once why don’t you, this one opened over your knee this one opened over your chest, write it down, write it down on a card, fold and carry the card in a wallet, then you will know the true meaning of stanchion (which is a vertical pole, or framework of them, such as those you will find outside an exclusive restaurant or club, suspending a velvet rope.)

Though sometimes you will appear to have learned something, of which I would give as an instance the French word cachalot, which is sperm whale in French, you appear to have learned and retained that; the phrase, un nuit blanche, you do appear to have learned and retained, a sleepless night in French. A cynic might say you are not trying to learn anything but are attempting to appear serious while you avoid doing things that are actually serious, is it true? — how do you respond? (I respond with great emphasis it is certainly not so, but a base lie, a depraved calumny. Yet, as a concession, I’ll not undertake to learn German at this time.)

Irregular stack of dirty plates on the sink side, …. the way they were stacked something particularly displeasing… a burdensome thought “stacked” upon another burdensome thought, a “soiled” thought; the thought of the unseemly soiled plates: it is a disorderliness on top of a dirtiness, an ordinariness on top of a disorderliness, it is an inevitability upon a randomness (things were usually messed up and off in precisely this fashion)… Overcoming this revulsion (which was, again, not for the extent or degree of dirtiness, or the work it implied, but for its particular arrangement and type, and for the vague awful thought it implied) and bringing to bear upon it now my own wet dirty hands

The white “Avon anniversary plate” between two rose-colored dinner plates, (a plate of smaller diameter between two of the same diameter: why not two dirty plates of the same diameter beneath a third dirty plate of a smaller diameter?), cream cheese on the sides of the bottom-most rose-colored dinner plate (why not cream cheese on a bagel plate, a plate on which items with cream cheese are served?); soup bowl on top of the higher of the two rose plates; another rose colored plate on top of the soup bowl; and a white bagel plate upon that (something very frustrating, to the point of being maddening, about the sight of a plate on top of a bowl. I would much sooner have a bowl facing down upon a bowl that is facing up — which there can be no reason at all for and is totally absurd — than having the bottom of a plate on the top of a bowl.)

(Were there a seer or haruspicator who could read the entrails of the crumbs of that bagel plate, so to speak — what would he read into what remains on the plates — the bowls being not bowls but bowels, the utensils intestines, the sinks inverted altars– that cream cheese mingled with the soggy red roasted pepper in the corner portends a favorable conclusion to our armed conflict –. (What is the significance of the scraped-off havarti? What do I read into the presence of that isolated single bean sprout there? in the swirls of grease on the dinner plate? in the half-eaten potato chip, which is green around the edge, and stuck upward in a remnant of quiche crust?)

The haruspicator thinks, though as a general matter he appreciates disorder, he does not like it in the particular flavor that is represented by these plates — where the circles of all the diameters of plates conflict and are at odds, the orbit of their rims all eccentric, where a maximum of instability has been assured. The haruspicator thinks, how his annoyance with other humans and haruspicators can be as irrational and pointless as that he now feels toward these plates: if only the largest plates of that person were on the bottom, and the small toward the top, and the bowel (bowl) at the very top, and the intestines (utensils) inside the bowel (bowl) then I would not be so annoyed with that person as I now am.

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“For — later”: he is pronouncing the sounds and mouthing the words as slowly and carefully as he would write them.

“Fo-o-o-o-r”: it seems to him that the R-sound occurs in the same second and instant as the F-sound: as though a syllable were an indivisible unit, a circle with no front and no back.

“Fo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-r”: this time taking twice as long to say it.

“Fo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-r”: this time taking three or four times as long to say it.

In particular Summs could not figure out at what point the FO- sound became the OR-sound — did the O belong more to the R or the F? And when, as an experiment, he tried to say “for” with the R-sound first, he was astonished to find himself saying not ror but fur…!

Yet this was no mere idle attempt to understand the phonetic underpinnings of syllables, but a special trick he employed to motivate himself to do things he didn’t want to do. The idea behind the trick, which he called Excessive Pronunciation, was that by distorting the expression of his negative will and intention he could actually nullify or reverse the negative will or intention itself.

In the present situation, moments ago he had told himself “I’ll save folding the laundry for later,” displaying the negative will of procrastination, but now thanks to this special Will distorting technique, he was standing upright in front of the big pile, rubbing his hands together in excitement at the opportunity to fold.

People would ask him how it worked and he would say “who cares — just be happy that it does!” but so far as he could tell there were two possibilities: one was that you were making a mockery of your intentions, so that they just seemed too silly to follow, but this was a view he disfavored since it implied one’s good intentions might also be dispelled through self-ridicule. The other explanation was that, at the bottom of one’s expressions of will, was the will itself, and by pronouncing them with such painful slowness one was, in a manner of speaking, carefully untying this spiritual knot. This knot of Will you had tied from the inside with unarticulated thoughts you were now unwrapping from the outside with expressed words.

None of which of course helped him with the fact that he was not very good at folding laundry, for which he had long supposed he would need the “special trick” of having a wife. Which was a to say (he hastened to add, even in his thoughts) — a wife who was good at folding laundry and who would also be willing to fold his from time to time, perhaps in exchange for health advice or “other” services. Also, it would be good if she had a house. (Summs had not gotten in the market when he should have, it was to be admitted, and now the valuations were sky high, unless you wanted to move way out.) Of course, one couldn’t be too picky about a spouse at this time of life, but it would be good if she had a house, on top of sharing his views on politics and alternative medicine and such things.

He said again the entire phrase “for later”, this time normally, which was a bit of a relief, and laughed to see his laundry was done — folded a bit lumpily for sure — but ready to be put away, which he supposed he would do a little later.

Revolutionary Suicide. Bolted upright out of bed this morning with the thought I was a “reactionary suicide.” (Meaning, in Huey Newton’s parlance, I was being killed by my obligations; being killed by doing as was expected of me; being killed by having no moral qualms with being killed by doing the obligatory things) and toward the conclusion of the day (having in the interim read about Newton for the first time from a writer who was not Newton himself) realized he may have had his own problems in this regard, which did not and ought not neutralize, but did for the time somewhat diminish, the impact of his rhetoric and ideas . . . .

More interestingly, when I thought of those not dying our stupid obligatory addicted deaths, I thought suddenly and possibly erroneously of the person who dressed extremely well, the person who dressed with extraordinary panache, the fashionistas, as we say, as the antidote; these were the true revolutionary suicides, I suddenly believed. Not the ones with guns, with arguments, with slogans and banners and books; but snappy dressers the ones who “put it out there” everyday, while the rest of us not only did not “put it out there” very often. No, indeed, we often concealed.

Question of: which does one more passionately resist, the Federal Government, or dressing in a lively and becoming fashion?