William Carter in his Marcel Proust, A Life (pp. 797) quoting from a Proust personal letter, written to his publisher a year before his death:

“‘Others… enjoy the entire universe. I can no longer move, speak, think, or simply enjoy the well-being of not suffering. Thus, expulsed from myself, so to speak, I seek refuge in my books, which I touch, being unable to read them, and I have for them the wariness of the burrowing wasp.’ Like the wasp, and ‘deprived of everything, my only care is to give my [books], through their absorption by other minds, the expansion that is refused me.”

ἡ μὲν οὖν κοσμία τε καὶ φρόνιμος ψυχὴ ἕπεταί τε καὶ οὐκ ἀγνοεῖ τὰ παρόντα …

Now the orderly and wise soul follows its guide and understands its circumstances…

“If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.” Samuel Beckett, Molloy.

Every so often I will have dreams noticeably dominated by black folks, which will make me wonder how much research has been done in the area of race and dreaming.

Last night’s dream began with me at a bar with a friend who is black (or really mixed race but dark skinned) — I light a cigarette and sit at a stool beside him at the bar…

Next Fragment: On a Street Corner

Next remembered bit: I’m on a street corner in an urban area among a crowd of much younger black people, younger than teenagers most of them, sitting on a stone bench, when up comes a thin older black man with a hat and, most noticeably of all, a kind of silver throat guard. The kids back away from the stone bench, clearly regarding this man as a threat. For a moment I hesitate and remain seated, but then I do what the kids do —  get up from the bench and back off.

The Dream’s beginning

A final thing, which was actually the first part sequentially: I was loaning somebody some money, an act which pretty clearly evoked an incident from the preceding day, when a (black) African guy I know, under sort of annoying circumstances, asked me for a loan, though in the dream it was somebody else, race unknown, and I was enthusiastic about wanting to help.

In sum, this wasn’t a “good” or “bad” dream;  wasn’t especially pleasing or frightening or with much in the way of emotional content; the only thing that was interesting about it was that everyone was black (also male) and I didn’t realize that until I woke up.

UPDATE: The Silver Throat Guard

On reflection, the “silver throat guard” could very well be a mask which someone was wearing under their chin. (I do have to deal with issues of people wearing/ not wearing masks and this might have to do with that.) Which also explains the children backing away — backing away from the person not wearing their mask.

Also, the “thin-ness” of the old black man recalls something that happened the preceding day. I had seen an African man (not the one asking for money) whom I hadn’t seen in years, and he struck me as dramatically not just thinner but smaller since I last saw him, as if he’d been seriously ill — to the extent I probably wouldn’t have recognized him if it were not for other markers. (This man was wearing a mask, however, another reason I’d almost failed to recognize him.)

FURTHER UPDATE:  I understand this dream now

As I think about this dream further, it occurs to me that the guy who asked me for money could also be described as an old, tall thin black man, and he was wearing his mask around his throat when he asked for the money! Interesting! This dream is clearly about my unease at lending him money/ him not wearing his mask. 

Perhaps the racial issues are not as pertinent as I imagined, though one point of interest along these lines is that, though Africans seemed to have inspired the dream, the dream was filled with African-Americans. Also: the “children” in the dream were the four people present when the man asked me for money, two of whom were actual children but none of whom were black.  Final obvious point: when one is sometimes a racial minority, it is likely one will occasionally dream that one is.

Would be interesting to see a study of scientific principles found in literature before those principles were discovered or named, or at least without the author knowing anything about them. Saw this having come across what I think is an example of rheotaxis in Big Two-Hearted River (part one):

The river was there. It swirled against the log spiles of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watching the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again […] He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water…”

I haven’t read the Harry Potter series but am familiar with the name Hogwarts and was surprised to come across it in my reading of Finnegans Wake this morning (pp.296):

“But, yaghags hogwarts and arrhquinonthiance, it’s the muddest thick that was ever heard dump since Eggsmather got smothered in the plap of the pfan.”

Rowling apparently isn’t sure where she got the name, but speculates it’s from Hogworts. As for Joyce, wiki says that this herb is used as a laxative, which I would guess is the reason for his interest — “the muddest thick that was ever heard dump.”

Mirès disait que l’artiste était une variété du fou. Mais l’artiste n’a pas besoin, comme dans les autres professions, je veux dire à l’endroit même de la profession, de cette présence d’esprit, de cette fixité dans les résolutions, sans lesquelles ni le général d’armée, ni l’administrateur, ni le financier ne sauraient rien faire de bon.

Je pense, le lendemain, qu’une partie de la supériorité de Louis-Napoléon vient sans doute de ce qu’il n’a rien de l’artiste… Delacroix ….15 mars 1854

Hippocrates contrasting the “native heat” (metabolism?) of young and old people: English.

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“Impovernment of the booble by the bauble for the bubble.” — Finnegans Wake.

*

Remark on this. Obviously a play on “Government of the people for the people by the people”, (which phrase this Post article says predates the Gettysburg Address.) Impovernment looks a little like improvement but I think impoverishment is the clearer sense. The impoverishment of the people (boobies) by the bauble (by the trinkets and gadgets they are induced to buy?) for the bubble (stock market bubble/ commodity speculation?) Idea of a stock market “bubble” has been around for centuries.

Dream: great news, Eritrea had been liberated! Eritrea was free! Now only the exciting challenges of self-governance remained for the long suffering peoples of Eritrea!

Bad news: the shop was full of birds, birds of all kinds — eagles, hawks, owls, flamingoes. When I went to close the window through which these were all coming, here was a whole flock of sparrows making an arrival, which scared me a little — with their speed, with how many they were, with the military tightness of their formation.

(Meaning of this was pretty easy to discern: so as to improve ventilation in the store, I’d opened the back windows the previous day. These windows are unscreened, so –though it was a cold day– there was a risk of unwanted animal life coming in — as had happened this summer when the air conditioner blew out.)

Dreams galore at Chance Sweepings.

“Dans une boucherie, où à gauche était une auréole de soleil, et à droite un bœuf entier pendu, un garçon boucher, très grand et très mince, aux cheveux blonds, son cou sortant d’un col bleu ciel, mettait une rapidité vertigineuse et une religieuse conscience à mettre d’un côté les filets de bœuf exquis, de l’autre de la culotte de dernier ordre, les plaçait dans d’éblouissantes balances surmontées d’une croix, d’où retombaient de belles chaînettes, et — bien qu’il ne fît ensuite que disposer, pour l’étalage, des rognons, des tournedos, des entrecôtes — donnait en réalité beaucoup plus l’impression d’un bel ange qui, au jour du Jugement dernier, préparera pour Dieu, selon leur qualité, la séparation des bons et des méchants et la pesée des âmes.” [La Prisonnière, Proust, 172]

*

Scott-Moncrieff: “In a butcher’s shop, between an aureole of sunshine on the left and a whole ox suspended from a hook on the right, an assistant, very tall and slender, with fair hair and a throat that escaped above of his sky-blue collar, was displaying a lightning speed and a religious conscientiousness in putting on one side the most exquisite fillets of beef, on the other other coarsest parts of the rump, placed them upon glittering scales surmounted by a cross, from which hung down a number of beautiful chains, and — albeit he did nothing afterwards but arrange in the window a display of kidenys, steaks, ribs– was really far more suggestive of a handsome angel who, on the day of the Last Judgment, will prepare for God, according to their quality, the separation of the good and the evil and the weighting of souls.”

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Of what was the splotch on the desk by the computer composed? Of ketchup, I’d found.

How had the ketchup gotten on the desk by the computer? By an accident. I had inadvertently laid a bag of chips on a puddle of ketchup in the kitchen then took the bag to the computer desk, where some of its ketchup rubbed off.

A puddle of ketchup? I had made a ketchup sandwich earlier in the day [delicious!] [yes, thank you] Squeezing the bottle I had lead the thread of the red back and forth across the bread perfectly for the most part, and well within the confines of the crust. It was actually only my very first squirt, when I wasn’t even sure if anything would come out, that missed the bread and made the puddle on the counter.

I see — and you were too eager to eat your ketchup sandwich to clean up the dollop right away? Correct.

And by the time you had finished your sandwich you had entirely forgotten it’s presence — the dollop’s presence? I did come across it later in the day and thought it might pose a problem but was in the midst of something else at the time.

One last thing, how were you able to determine the origin of the splotch on the desk, which had been such a mystery to you in the dim light by the computer? Back in the kitchen, I noticed that what had been previously a perfect circular “pool” of ketchup was now an irregular splotch of ketchup — it had turned from pool to splotch. In addition, this new kitchen splotch was the perfect mirror image of the one I’d seen by the computer, so the conclusion to be drawn was obvious.

Very good. Thank you. I would mention only one more thing, that it was only after I’d determined what the splotch on the desk was that I was able to summon the initiative to clean up the kitchen splotch — and I’m curious, why would this be? Perhaps I had suddenly realized there were real-world consequences to not cleaning up one’s spills; perhaps this “concurrence of splotches” simply focused my attention on an issue from which previously I had been all too easily distracted. In any case, it was only after having identified the splotch and its source that I actually felt compelled to get up from the computer for the specific purpose of cleaning up the messes I’d made.

 Thanks again.

Cezanne, according to Joachim Gasquet: “Listen, I don’t want to belittle him… I like him, I admire him a great deal, but he is very much of his time, as we all are. We make pieces. We no longer know how to compose.”

“After sound, light and heat, memory, will and understanding.” ~Finnegans Wake

Faulkner (S&F) : “I began to feel the water before I came to the bridge. The bridge was of gray stone, lichened, dappled with slow moisture where the fungus crept. Beneath it the water was clear and still in the shadow whispering and clucking about the stone in fading swirls of spinning sky.”

Q: was there any correspondence or correlation between the philosophical question “what is reality?” and the everyday imperative or exhortation to “get real?”

A:  Yes, there was an opposite or inverse correlation. For implicit in the philosophical question, what is reality, was the idea that we don’t know what reality is, but only think we do; while implicit in the everyday imperative to “get real” was the idea that of course we do know what reality is, but simply refuse to see it or face it.

When we are told to “get real” we are being told to stop fooling ourselves, see the obvious. When we ask “what is reality”, we are told to stop fooling ourselves, look with care on the obvious.

(Amateur philosophizing galore –among other treasures–  at Chance Sweepings.)

Idea for a method of architecture which is not about new ideas about the sort of buildings that need to be made but simply about editing old actual building with no recourse to theory, even a simple cutting and pasting: of taking just the corner from that one huge house and blowing it up to make it the whole house or pattern of a house, or patching together hundreds of different styles. Architecture as seen and manipulated through a computer interface.

Had a supremely stupid idea of a house I’d like to live in: the facade a grid of fourty or fifty historical styles juxtaposed. However, the facade of the house would be like a television screen and the house itself would be a smaller reducing cone, that finally became a tunnel, just a wall of earth at the tail’s end. (Then the tunnel would lead to some distant river.)

The mantle makes up 84 percent of Earth’s volume, and though it’s solid rock, over the course of millions of years, it behaves like a liquid. (vox)…