Evsey D. Domar ” argued that the more or less simultaneous rise of serfdom in Russia and slavery in the New World were driven by the opening of new land, which made labor scarce and would have led to rising wages in the absence of coercion.” according to krugman

(War & Peace) “Sometimes he remembered how he had heard that soldiers in war when entrenched under the enemy’s fire, if they have nothing to do, try hard to find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger. To Pierre all men seemed like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in toys, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in governmental affairs. ‘Nothing is trivial, and nothing is important, it’s all the same — only to save oneself from it as best one can,’ thought Pierre, ‘Only not to see it, that dreadful it!'”

“Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.” Emerson, Spiritual Laws.

“Let the great soul incarnated in some woman’s form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to service and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its effulgent day-beams cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms; until, lo, suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and head of all living nature.” (Emerson, Spiritual Laws.)

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3

Where the walker sound starts the thought sentence ends. Centcom. Supreme Leader of Allied Forces in Europe. Sir. “Metal rattling over concrete riddles with punctuation interior attempts at…at…” at statements.

Head tipped back, advertisements coming alive, passengers’ heads looking like snakes and it all looks like some cheap movie — or rather, not cheap: as they have in fact spent millions and millions of dollars to create precisely these cheap effects.

Head tipped back, mouth agape, rumbling bus, thumb rubbing base of index finger for no reason; thought helping the poor was “bullshit” [pause] because I’m the poor. Closing eyes, the professor seems to address the bus riders from his podium: “the ratio of the circumference of society to the radius of its relief of the poor is equal to the irrational root of it all.” (Had to give kudos to his saying that.) “of podiums that are my craniums” (and to that)

But he felt the need to sit. (You are already sitting. “I know but.”) From his sitting position he sat, and he sat again as the bus rumbled beneath. He sat repeatedly in himself as if stuck in the act. Was he trying to get comfortable? Was he moving?

Looking at the figures seated on the bus he seemed to view them as figures of the historical past, exalted and humble, George Washington in particular (there were actually a couple of George Washingtons) among the exalted, Roman and American slaves among the humble, a Halloween of what no one wanted to go as, sitting on a sunny knoll where the grass was still gleaming and wet.

He brought his hands to his temples, thought of the “new sunny knoll of his cranium”, and no longer felt the need to sit.

(Bringing his hand to his temples was like scooting the chair up beneath him. He had been sitting but now he truly seemed to be so, sitting and still.)

And when the bus, which he truly believed himself to be on, and was on, opened its doors, he did not remove his hands from head’s temples, and continued to feel calm, though he moved.

Then he removed his hands from his temples and had just time enough to say Oh Hell

–How’s it goin there man, a voice said.
–Hanging in there Ben! How bout yourself?
–Yup, hangin in!

No I didn’t or would, –was blubbering but didn’t-slash-wouldn’t have, at least I happen to have not

Invasion of Sicily, sir. Malta they called “Finance” while I believe Sicily itself was codenamed “Horrified”. Sir. Seriously, what the F has happened to this country? Excuse me. (That flag again which seemed almost a flashing skin around his brain: its soft and waving sheath.) “I have to confess: I’m not having a good day today. Just so you know. Excuse me.” (He really had, he now realizes, depended on a certain idea of his country which had, in a heartbeat, scattered away. Where? Who?) There were no carriers in the Mediterranean. Naturally all were deployed in the pacific. Maybe there had been a few escort carriers, I don’t know. Someone had said The Wasp, but I doubt it. There it goes again, what the F, a feeling like, a feeling like … “Heh man how are ya?” I can only look him in the face (my look may be a little hostile) and bury my face in my hands. “Are you…? Do you need…?” “Excuse me no” (don’t seem so stern) “I’m sorry I just need a second. I’ve been through this, I’ve been through this. Thank you, I just, just.” “I understand, I–” he says, backing off.

Landing on the beaches. The Italians were not born fighters. I see “A.S.” sir. Eisenhower I believe smoked three packs a day. You can see them cross the beaches and the jeeps and tractors parked by the dunes. This was the first time that they employed the Duck landing craft. Used phosphorous. I think that’s right. The sand spraying from the scrambling tires. There was a pool of magma. Patton: “Clear out! Magma pool!” Was it the Germans? No. Was it the Italians? No. “Get those tanks outta here and pronto, we got a magma pool creeping up our butts!” There it is approaching and widening, bubbling and roaring, and having this incredible heat.

Footnoted, Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United, Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Tom Logan (Nov. 12, 1816), in The Works of Thomas Jefferson 42, 44 (P. Ford ed. 1905):

“I hope we shall . . . crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country”

“We should ask for the grace to weep for this world, which does not recognize the path to peace. To weep for those who live for war and have the cynicism to deny it. God weeps; Jesus weeps.” […]

“Young people, like well-planted trees, can be firmly rooted in the soil of history,” he said, “and growing heavenward in one another’s company, can daily turn the polluted air of hatred into the oxygen of fraternity.”

Diaries, 1922. “… Fretful that my life till now has been merely marking time, has progressed at most in the sense that decay progresses in a rotten tooth. I have not shown the faintest firmness of resolve in the conduct of my life. It was as if I, like everyone else, had been given a point from which to prolong the radius of a circle, and had then, like everyone else, to describe my perfect circle round this point. Instead, I was forever starting my radius only constantly to be forced at once to break it off. (Examples: piano, violin, languages, Germanics, anti-Zionism, Zionism, Hebrew, gardening, carpentering, writing, marriage attempts, an apartment of my own.) The centre of my imaginary circle bristles with the beginnings of radii, there is no room left for a new attempt; no room means old age and weak nerves, and never to make another attempt means the end. If I sometimes prolonged the radius a little farther than usual, in the case of my law studies, say, or engagements, everything was made worse rather than better because of this little extra distance.”

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Does anyone here know what a “”hawthorn peggle” is? (haw) (etym.)

Another division’s recycling pile. Satan’s Frozen Tears in a pile. Dropped calls are in a pile. Woman on the call-in show that morning: why

Are there thoughts that are devils and thoughts that are angels? If devils and angels are thoughts, and only thoughts, does that make them more or less real, as devils and angels? Are there thoughts that are miracles? Thoughts that are muscles? Perception is thought. Myself is thought. (Myself is chemical combinations, a sunday school of such combinations.) Recycling is good: Satan’s tears returned to Satan’s tear ducts”. Factories produce like vast calving icebergs our possessions. “Dirty Car”: a twitter handle. Cephalopod & Cephalopod (name of a distinguished law practice) Noah & Nicolas Christian and and rather than crossing toward it he enters it.

Only after having entered it, visually checking to his right. Centered manhole cover, five feet eight inches from eyehole, announces its point of manufacture as nation of India: manhole cover akilter too (as I have a Picasso Eye): has been given same painted double lines of the street, but turned clockwise ten degrees since it was painted. if artists painted the street (if the streets were painted to maximize beauty rather than safety.) Flaubert envisioned government by artists. (How would a government operate that try and achieved the beautifulness of the state?) At what point will dreams peer out of my perception, it is asked, when will I live in a dream? Not in this… this perception. In a barrel tub. (As I try to live in a dream, that woman from the call-in show appears, tells it to get back in its dream hole. Back!)

Experience of blindness the previous night as I reached for a water glass, which was before the dream of the five turtles (the parking lot having been inundated and transposed to the area beneath my window, three swimming turtles and two large tortoises appeared, bumping about the cement embankments. The two large ones came to rest side by side in a parking space, while the smaller ones managed to find a nearby rock to be sunned upon) having risen from bed.

It was not an excess of darkness but of light: the glass I reached for had a blinding sun behind it: “This is how it will be.” Maybe with hearing, maybe with sight. Perhaps I look to my right at a big tree: no cars are coming from the direction of the big tree, or they are yet at a distance. What a video game I am in, perception is a video game it is a salad bowl, big wooden half orb over my face, often oregano scented, in which, with the tongs of my brains’ ends, I hunt for tomato and cheese parts. Video game in which I hunt for what is not the game, in which one strives to forget too the part about “winning”, accumulating points. Here I go on describing the bowl, which I’ve learned ought not to be washed out: simply wipe out your wooden salad bowl with a cloth, so as to season it over time. What I see is the visual embodiment of what I see with, according to one set of ideas.

Nothing could season this street, this perfectly rational baked-in sameness. How could you season something with its lid on? Bolted on? How could you season this Eden of absence of sewage, this dragon hoard of absence of badness? (Here comes one of the dragons now, walking a cute-seeming non-barking sub-dragon, both perfectly nice persons of their type) at the street’s other side where the opposing condo division’s driveway, the sidewalk, and street all intersect. That is an important place which my foot finds all the time and which “has it all” (the perfect foot destination: “Bahamas Crook” I should call it when I make my map: Aerie de Metarsie, where feet will come to brood and nest and stain the sheer face of rock. The other named location is the Saddle Rock)–it has: my foot, the road, the driveway, the corner, the side walk, the median between the sidewalk and road; at no point do all these elements so effortlessly come together, mingle with such unseamed completeness as at this point. Like the north star, this point “has it all.”

I recognize a bumpersticker. To left, another division’s recycling pile, this one at the foot of a tree — flat bottomed boxes and bags tipping off, resting uneasily on, its grey dry looking roots.

ngrams: Emerson,Thoreau
Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal
Charles Dickens,Jane Austen,Thomas Hardy

ngrams: Charles Ives; Charles Ives, Hart Crane; Charles Ives, Hart Crane, Charlie Chaplin; Charles Ives, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore; Theodore Dreiser, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore; Theodore Dreiser, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner

Vergil, Fourth Eclogue:

Sicelides musae, paulo maiora canamus!/ non omnis arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae;/ si canimus silvus, silvae sint consule dignae.

Prose translation, Moses Hadas and Thomas Suits:

Muses of Sicily, let us sing matters somewhat more momentous. Not everyone takes pleasure in groves and lowly tamarisks. If it is forests we sing, let the forests be worthy of a consul.

Lady Bellaston. Jones having given away a sum he had just borrowed to a family in need. Jones having given away a sum he had just been lent by a woman who’d wished to lay claim to his affection. The couple Jones had helped being a couple who had married for love, who were now in poverty. The husband of the couple he had helped turning out to be the “highwayman” he had previously helped.

Desenganarse(maybe) “don’t fool yourself.” The feeling of having one’s book, paper and pen around one, amphitheater of book-paper-pen around one; and of having one’s reading from the book and of having one’s taking up of the pen and of having one’s writing with the pen and having one’s writing with one’s pen on the paper (the “seismograph” creeping up); and of one’s having it probably in mind what to write again even, yet of not doing it or not quite doing so —

Feeling of one not quite or of not quite entirely feeling one is “studying”, for instance, to call it that “studying” (though we ought to check the etymology there). And it is not “studying” that is felt to be important or the feeling of it that is important or that the feeling of doing it is, though it may be all or one of those things that is important, but that actually doing what one is doing is important, is an idea that will recur to one; that what they call concentration is an idea that is said to be important, will recur to one also; and as dubious as the benefits of concentration will seem the demerits of distraction are really quite vivid to one, one thinks, (distraction seems closer to gambling than concentration, and only via this Gambling of Distraction might there arise some truly unprecedented “good luck” to reward ones attention, each glance away from ones book like a lottery ticket purchase of a sort, is an idea that recurs, –that must be the logic behind distraction, the idea that one might get lucky, the idea one might have “good instincts.”)

yet one is not quite doing it, one has not yet quite even engaged with the fact that one is not yet even remotely aware of not doing it, but is only about to be about to realize this; one is only on the verge of realizing that one will never get farther than the verge of realizing that one is incapable of concentrating, maybe now, maybe ever, and yet still one has to sit with one’s pen and one’s paper and book — one still has to be watched by the amphitheater. (The audience awaits but what is the action, there is none.)

Piketty. global population growth has spiked, global per capital output has spiked — these are not necessarily related, but it essentially seems as though we can expect a return to the historical norm of slow growth… Inflation largely a post WWI phenomenon.

Actors that seem to be Christians (that is, actors who are in fact portraying Christians) walking out to what we imagine are lions (we hear from the location they walk toward the recorded roar of lions, a sound that has even more of a “recorded feeling” attached to it than do the pictorial elements of the film, as if they had played a recording on the set rather than overdubbing it, in effect doubling the “recorded feeling”) in the Roman Coliseum in the movie Sign of The Cross: the first thing that occurs to me is that Christ would have avoided that situation (imagining the situation as real), I suppose meaning by this that Christ himself was not a “martyr”; the second thing that occurs to me is that Christ had in fact directed himself into the heart of exactly such a situation, I suppose meaning by this execution; the third thing that occurs to me is that, “forget walking to one’s death, one can’t even expose oneself emotionally”: Not walking to ones death, but walking to ones ego’s death, is what one can’t do. “In which coliseum does ones ego get fed to the lions?” is thought and “one is afraid of those lions” is thought.

“Could one get beyond the ego’s death one could probably get beyond or face the real and total kind (of death),” is thought, which is “the idea of having two bodies.” Afraid for the death of the exterior body. Instead of soul and body, body and body; or body and anti-body; or body and self-delusion, is thought. (Or adult body with a childish self-regard.) Maybe there’s a soul, too, but I can’t even think of that, or even of my body, because I’m thinking of this second one, this body which on the one hand is a sort of exo-shell and is, on the other hand, pretty much all that I think, and yet not essentially, maybe not remotely, what I “really am” — an enveloping delusion — as if my skin tried to think of my brain. “Can’t think of three if I can’t think of two or two if I can’t think of one,” thinks ones ego which is the first in thought but the last in essence or importance. Ego: the first in mind and last in thought which weeps not at feeling pain but that someone might afflict it with pain, weeps at thought and intention. (An adverse intention is cause for weeping, and maybe even he would not weep at actual pain, since the next layer down can be surprisingly tough and unfeeling.) “The ego is so divorced from the body it doesn’t even know there’s actual suffering, there is only the psychological kind,” is thought. (“So aware of shame it is unaware of life,” might be added.)

Walking meditation. To adopt the practices of the Far East but not as an American would, but as an African would. “To adopt the practices of the Far East as an African would adopt them, should be the goal.” Africa a filtration device, a cultural purifier, it is conceived, through which cultures get rid of just enough of themselves to see other cultures. Africa, the purifying lens. Africa, the technology of minds. Inner cities may also be such a device, perhaps even stronger, but looking at something else. What would we find if we looked closer and closer at the inner cities? Who would we find? India, Bangladesh… (Can’t properly perform the walking mediation til you learn what Africa and the inner cities have to teach… “All the sorts of people there are are the stages one must pass through to ‘achieve oneself’,” it is conceived.)

A sort of plan takes hold: first become African, then become Afro-Asian, then become Asian American, then become oneself. A sort of idea, which is unrelated, comes forth: that History is a line upon a sphere. The line is trying to get to the center of the sphere (which may also be the center of the earth, which may also be the center of ourselves, or of Time) but cannot ever penetrate it, even a little. And yet, in the effort to penetrate it, as the felt-tip marker of ourselves, so to speak, is pressed down on the sphere, the sphere slips — slips beneath the ever frustrated force of the felt-tip marker of history — and thus is caused its various squiggles, regressive, progressive and looping.

“Just as my steps,” I think, “exist beneath these thoughts, so does the core of history exist beneath its globular surface. My thoughts will never reach my feet.” (Thinking, though, that maybe my breath at least can reach my feet, as in a way it does without me trying, so I try and focus on my breathing. “Maybe if I know I have lungs I will know I also have feet.”) maybe I will make my feet and my mind reach through knowing them both. Maybe that will be the end of history.

*

Penultimate Idea — Evolution of intelligence has been uneven, and the smartest cave creature was cleverer than myself, as the clever of today are beyond myself.

Final idea: walking across this quite normal two lane bridge over the eight or ten lane interstate and realizing one is unqualified to make any part of this bridge, to assume any role in its construction; and one could perhaps never, despite all ones efforts, attain to any such qualification.

People do these things and are expert at such things, one realizes, while you — what do you know? (nothing) What useful thing like building a bridge or a part of it do you know how to do? (nothing) You are not even a very good unskilled worker (perhaps we should pay people not to work? pay them to get out of the way of the work?) And so the overpass seems quite the monument, quite the Pyramid of Cheops, this night.

And down below, the white pickup with the flashing and rotating orange lights inspecting an element of the new lane they’re fashioning: whoever is in that truck is a lot more than you, you realize; that person has an actual role in this world and is part of it. That person knows something, and is doing something, he is doing it correctly, this night.

not quite sure what makes me say this but wonder if Ives’s life might provide some unique insight into that question, eternal for me, of why modernist works are so difficult.

One factor Swafford brings up — the arts are viewed as unmasculine so making them difficult makes them seem tough.

My assumption tends to be that the arts and Yankee capitalism work somewhat at cross-purposes (if they are not out and out hostile to each other along the lines of what you find in Gaddis’s J R); so it is utterly remarkable to me, and something I need to ponder seriously on, that Charles Ives not only succeeded in becoming rich selling Life Insurance, but was a true believer that Life Insurance was something essentially good for humanity. Here is something Charles Ives really thought, according to Jan Swafford (pp.217):

There was not a service I could render to my fellow man that was more important than the business of life insurance.

The paragraph preceding the one in which that sentence is found gives a bit more detail:

Time and again Ives preaches his essential points. Life insurance is a natural step in social evolution, a humanistic and scientific response to fundamental needs. Buying insurance has become a basic responsibility of the head of a family. Teaching men, most of them innately good and reasonable, to fulfill that responsibility is a matter of presenting them with a few easily comprehensible facts. Spreading that responsibility in society is an indispensable part of progress toward a better and more prosperous community. Insurance “is an integral part of social evolution, an organism that has not been thrown on society, but which society has evolved.” In another paper:”Without going far in the field of metaphysics, an insurance idealist might hold that life insurance is altruism scientifically organized, or perhaps commercialized, accepting the term as more of a paradox than a contradiction. A practical insurance man will say that life insurance has a certain influence on the moral and economic development of a country.” If life insurance were abolished “Mankind in general would be thrown backward into a state of mind that would not be far from … the middle ages. Civilization … would have to adjust itself to many medieval standards, for Life Insurances has become not only a vital part of civilization but a civilizer itself.

I suppose what I find interesting here is that the artist himself seems so well-aligned with American commerce, while his art remains so counter to it — that his insurance products should be directed toward the ‘average man’ while his music was seemingly not. Certainly, Ives’s music does not present the listener with “a few easily comprehnsible facts.”

(Occurs to me Kafka also worked in Insurance, and at around the same time, though in that case he was working for a state-run program, which, if I recall, insured workers against workplace accidents.)