Kafka writing check out
India Locale, Minnesotan Person in glasses
“rapidly” fills it up It’s [enlarged, it] s[colorful]
its[floral and],[powerless]t h e raft
is unangered] Absolute & parbleu
Yes Way installed t[blackened jar]
& Irish p align, “minister of education”
[Razors, sponges, trowels,] a p align
Kafka writing check out, Minnesotan
Person in glasses

First thing to know is that absolutely nothing needs to be done with this writing — Of preservation, of publication, of erasure, nothing. This writing has “served its purpose.”

Second thing, if there is something to not throw out it is my logs of life at the coffee shop, which potentially have a micro-historical value. These are mainly raw and unedited on paper (in shoebox in closet), some online and crafted (Chance Sweepings), and some in an in-between state online but not publicly available (the blog called “small papers.”)

As for the rest, it is too big a mess to easily communicate a sense of. My basic writing procedure was (i) write on paper (ii) type it into a non-publicly available blog (iii) program that post to reappear sometime in the future, when I would edit it with fresh eyes; repeat that process until (iv) I gave up on it or decided it was basically alright and posted it on a publicly available blog. (And if I was really on top of things, save it to a zip disk, of which there are two lying around.)

So the publicly available material is the most finished, the hand-written least so, and the rest in between. Bottom line: you should feel free, or even obligated, to throw out all the writing you find on paper — excepting the notebooks in the shoeboxes in the closet marked “Chance.”

(Need to start over. Where was a I again.) Unfriendliness of person: “it’s not just you it’s their ambition.” Unfriendliness of person: “didn’t want to imply a sexual signal.” Unfriendliness of person: “wasn’t unfriendly, just doing own thing.” Staying in his lane. Performing a ‘Walking meditation.’ Unfriendliness of person: “matronly modesty/ genteel disdain.” Unfriendliness of person: “Covid related, though there’s never been a good case for outdoor transmission.” Friendliness of person: acknowledging you as you acknowledge them. Friendliness of person: not acknowledging you but it isn’t fraught with judgment or meaning. Friendliness of person: despite all the coldness of intrapersonal relations around here taking a risk to say hi and sounding natural. Overfriendliness of person: sex or religion believed somehow involved. Overfriendliness of person: friendliness.

Had this been a Greek myth, it would have been the magical voice of a stream I had heard, but since it was instead the suburbs, it was the magical voice of a poor drainage area, the sweet voice of the nymph who inhabits the distinctly soggy place, was what I’d encountered in my dream the previous night.

The sweet voice was exactly like dripping water –you would mistake it easily for dripping until you listened closely. The nymph thought she was alone and was speaking and singing to herself until I said some friendly words to her — she made a startled sound and I awoke. That’s how it had happened in my dream of this spot:

The wet patch just off Barton with the store in view: a large pool where the sidewalk was and the area around it too marshy to circumnavigate. “If I could only concentrate my thoughts on what I had seen in that dream I would use a better side of my mind,” I thought to myself that morning I’d had the dream, “if I could just recall the child’s voice, human but also a chorus of drips, a mystical true fairy’s voice but in my own mind, then my penchant to verbalize would be subdued, a sturdier more courageous and engaged social person would emerge…”

This dream remained like an atom in my brain and perhaps Athena-like it could grow and step forward, a better self from myself. There existed definitely a firmer and clearer seeing person within me, but I could only see that person in dreams or other such conditions.

..saltpan...
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………edirhang……..mobonneyillsuion
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enfrentamientos armados —
swin…ang…ines
gg..siron.. sd
Maryof Egyp
da bashru
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Looked up Georgiana Houghton (an unwelcome and actually shocking possibility that spiritualism and modernism might be related occurs to me while reading of her for the first time, though her paintings are only described as “abstract” here and are probably the farthest thing imaginable from abstract expressionism, for example) (*) (the intimation that modernism might be rather related to new ageism is yet quite disturbing really, enough to make one disavow)… I am struck suddenly by how completely my faith in modernism would be rocked were I to learn with certainty it had the least thing to do with spiritualism; am struck by how this is not entirely far-fetched. (Actually, it is kind of far-fetched — excepting Yeats?)

Something for me to ponder: it would be worse for me to consider that modernism was associated with astrology, say, or anything New Age, than it would were it associated with racism. (My guess would be that astrology and racism are more associated with each other than they are with modernism, that these walk the same paths, for example Nazi mystics… but I don’t know that.) Certainly, modernism is associated with anti-semitism: Pound, Eliot, various Impressionists; though it’s also true that many anti-semites were also anti-modernism (the Nazis). Also, modernism is pro-semite: Leopold Bloom. And some of the most notable modernists (as we think of them) were Jewish: Proust, Kafka.

Somehow, however, the knowledge that Picasso, say, might have been a secret spiritualist would utterly destroy the modernist project in my mind. It has to be the case (for my world view to remain intact) that Bouguereau and those people (French Academy people) were the spiritualists….

The Shoe Switcheroo — the name of a simple trick I’ve developed for whenever it feels like there is only a thin filament of nerve within your knee holding the bottom part of your leg to the top part, a sensation which is often accompanied by the idea that your next step may be your last.

It is, as aforesaid, quite a simple remedy called “the old shoe switcheroo” which entails putting ones left shoe on the right foot and one’s right shoe on the left foot. Uncomfortable for your feet no doubt, and ridiculous looking, at least from above, but it makes that feeling in your leg — like thigh and calf are perilously held together by a thin thread — go away.

The advanced technique of the shoe switcheroo is also called — getting some new shoes. (We actually recommend that students skip the basic switcheroo and go directly to our advanced technique.)

Customer and I exchanged interpretations — neither quite textually based — on First Kings‘ a “still, small voice.”:

— When you needed to make a decision and had taken reasonable analysis as far as it could go, you yet needed this intuitive voice to tell you “yes do it or no do not,” according to the customer — and that was the “still small voice.”

— One was filled many voices we’ve inherited from Evolutionary Processes, said the attendant, reasonable, hysterical, fearful, trivial, but there was one voice that was not Evolved or that was first Evolved, and that was the “still, small voice.”

“Mountable curb” entered vocabulary today, though I saw no instances of such a curb, which is not at all the same, of course, as an accessibility ramp. Ought to have learned all such names and distinctions long ago. How could we hope to eat nutritiously without becoming medical doctors and having a vivid picture, made of vocabulary, of all the substances without, and of all the needs within, and of the grammar which explains how these vocabularies can and should syntactically match? Before we can actually do what we want in the world, in terms of vocabulary, we have to turn the world into vocabulary. Only then, with the brain implant there, would we eat nutritiously, for we would know it, we would see it, just as we might form a sentence with our lips.

And similarly how can I walk up an accessibility ramp without knowing it’s name? It hardly seems possible yet I do it —Thus. –or did once. Wasn’t that how Berkelee disproved the philosopher Hume, or rather, wasn’t that how the philosopher Hume disproved the philosopher Berkelee, who said the world was only the imagining of God, by stepping on a stone and saying I disprove it thus, just as I have stepped on an accessibility ramp, without knowing it’s name, as I so often do? (fine but proving what thus?) Is vocabulary the imagining of God? Is vocabulary the evolution of Sound?

“Tightened” curb radius at 36th & Abingdon recalled: this should cause turning cars to slow and reduce instances of pedestrian injury and death. Four nannies or mothers with their children in perambulators: I will step aside, into the street, to accommodate their passage through the narrowing isthmus of branches. What is this grass colored mound at the corner of the lot? Ah, how could I have forgotten, the soil samples they extracted, but how could that spot have already become covered in grass (how long ere a dirt mound grow fuzz?) and the store still standing of course, lasting and indominable, adamantine and indestructible, world’s last immortal Parthenon forever, not a Venetian mortar in sight, on a hill perhaps ten steps high.

He heard the hollow knock of the pencil as he dropped it and, scratching his head, suddenly had a sense for the proximity of his finger to his brain. He heard his fingers rake across the sheath around his skull and, contrasting that with the sound of the pencil on the paper, thought to make still more of the comparison. This paper was a white skull beneath which lay a wet red brain….

He lay back in frustration. (His brain, which he couldn’t see, but was behind him, could not reach that red brain, which he couldn’t see, but was before him. He scratched pen upon paper, finger upon scalp, then lay back in frustration.)

He said to himself  here I am but could not get ‘into’ here nor could he quite be am. (But if he wasn’t here, where was he? Was he? Was he but not here — then where?) He said to himself if I am — but am not here — am I there? (Where?) The problem had something to do with ‘all these people,’ but he couldn’t say what he meant by that. (Which people? There weren’t any people.)

This is a good day to scrupulously observe traffic safety protocols, “so I’ll not cut here across the four lanes though the four lanes are practically empty.” The four lanes and a median, a comedy troupe name. People out of work, people out of church, people out of a meal, people out of a shopping, people out of a deliveries. People are volunteering. Many people, rather than having “abstruse thoughts of self” are serving others on this day. People are serving people, people are volunteering.

Jaywalking. One needs power to change the law, one doesn’t need, for example, writing ability to change the law. (Though it needs also writing ability, if the law is written.) But maybe the law has short-circuited in places, and so you need to go carefully through it, uncrossing and reorganizing this endless corpus or nekros of text.

Legs sore. How did my legs get so sore, how did the thought of their soreness even arise, there being an infinite distance between me and my legs, so it mainly seems. People say, how can there be an infinite distance between you and your legs when you’re only four feet tall, or whatever it is, so the distance would be something less than four feet I would think, they say. The distance certainly wouldn’t be infinite. To which I respond, you people don’t know what it is to be inside a body, let alone what is to be inside of this body, where there are many disturbances, distractions, dimensions, loops, coils, strands, winding paths… There is at least one such infinite distance with in me, I aver, though it’s true it may, at times, be instantaneously bridged

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