τῶν φυσίων αἱ μὲν πρὸς θέρος, αἱ δὲ πρὸς χειμῶνα εὖ ἢ κακῶς πεφύκασιν.

Hippocrates: some people (natures) are more inclined toward Summer, others toward Winter. (x)

What did Isaac Newton do for entertainment? Question arises because of my anecdotal observation that the “smart people” of today, though paying homage to it, don’t seem particularly interested in high culture. (Interested in Star Trek, genre fiction, folk music, not in opera or poetry.) And so the question becomes — thinking here of smart people as being people with an aptitude for advanced math or logic — did smart people ever like high culture. What for example did Isaac Newton enjoy?

Glancing over a catalogue of his library, I’m reminded that for many people, then and today, their first and primary exposure to literary matters is through religion, but I didn’t see any indication of what he might have read during his leisure time. Perhaps it is a mistake to identify what I am calling “smart people” with what I would call “cultured people” (and perhaps “cultured people” are simply “rich people”, though I don’t have anecdotal data on that. Also, perhaps high culture is simply passed, and in a Democratic age, the most cultured are those who have looked most deeply into popular culture — Rock critics.)

THE PREFACE

………. The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

……….The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

………..Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

………..There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

………..The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

………..The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

………..All art is quite useless.
OSCAR WILDE [@Gutenberg]

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 always 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)… the whiteness of the whale, the disorder of the stack…

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.)

I harpooned this “white whale” with these “two harpoons”, my left and right hands, and set it to rites in the dish sink, with the “spume well a-flowin”; yet the ghastly agglomerate of dish and utensil –a green-tinged potato chip projecting from some unfinished quiche– has endured, immitigable in memory, swimming free.

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m …… r
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.v v iR v v

At the Louvre, looking at what random things a search for Delacroix brings up….

Palette ayant appartenu à Delacroix, (2), (3),  Secrétaire de Delacroix. among images: Paysage Afrique du Nord. (Enjoy the sequestration of that.)

Hippocrates 4.72 / English. “Ὁκόσοισιν οὖρα διαφανέα λευκὰ, πονηρά: μάλιστα δὲ ἐν τοῖσι φρενιτικοῖσιν ἐπιφαίνεται.”

(φρενιτικοῖσιν=phrenitis.) White clear urine is bad, and especially appears in those with phrenitis.

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…)