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.)

I thought that, the better to kick off my new life of virtue, I’d better write a hymn to virtue itself. Why, you might ask, to virtue itself? Why not simply write a hymn to virtue? The answer is essentially (I can’t go into all the ins and outs just now) that it just sounds tougher. Virtue, sure — but why not virtue itself — The whole deal!

“Virtue is being wise,” I begin, “virtue is loving being wise. Like some people love a particular person, like another person will fall into raptures when they hear a certain song, that’s how the virtuous person feels as he’s treading the paths of pure wisdom! You can imagine how dejected this lover feels when he’s being false and foolish!”

You will tell me that is not a bad start for a hymn, with which I concur completely, with one caveate: that this hymn, I don’t imagine, is the sort you’ll find on your popular music stations of today, howsoever wonderful it may be in all other imaginable respects. For one thing, it doesn’t have a rocking beat (except for the rocking beat of pure goodness!); for another thing it doesn’t come with a flashy video (unless you consider Reality a good enough video for you!); nor is there a faddish dance associated with this song (saving those dance steps required for the performance of good and noble deeds!). But enough of this. Now we want to hear more of the hymn.

“Virtue is moderation! Virtue is courage! Virtue is gazing at a point you can’t fully make out and yet must!!” (I admit that with this last remark I embarked on some original research, giving vent to an idea I’ve had recently that is actually pretty weird: that when I try and gaze upward to a point actually located behind my eyes and within my head I’m striving to attain to virtue, albeit in a curious way.) “Virtue is a sense of urgency! Virtue is a sense of stillness! An urgency to do and not to do! Why should any time be wasted? Why should any of life be spared from being bent upon life’s purpose? Always always always virtue!”

It may pain the reader-enthusiast of my work to know I was half-tempted not to commit to paper this song. This from the fear, the nagging fear I have had, that I might render ridiculous, through my Hymn, the very thing I mean so earnestly to exalt by it. But the stakes, in this case, were too exceedingly high; for just as a lullaby may bring many a child to sleep, I had hopes –and I think quite reasonably– that with this, my own hymn, I would bring many a person, and myself too, to virtue. But enough of this nonsense. Let us hear more of the song we love:

“Virtue: not being a phony. Virtue: remaining oneself under pressure, under scrutiny (for what have we to fear?) Virtue: which begins with self-respect. Always always self-respect! always always virtue!”

Hippocrates 2.43 / english

τῶν ἀπαγχομένων καὶ καταλυομένων, μηδέπω δὲ τεθνηκότων, οὐκ ἀναφέρουσιν, οἷσιν ἂν ἀφρὸς ᾖ περὶ τὸ στόμα.

Kafka, Diaries, 1921. “Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate — he has little success in this — but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others; after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor. This assumes that he does not need both hands, or more hands than he has, in his struggle against despair.”

Kafka, Diaries, 1921. ” [Moses] is on the track of Canaan all his life; it is incredible that he should see the land only when on the verge of death. They dying vision of it can only be intended to illustrate how incomplete a moment is human life, incomplete because a life like this could last forever and still be nothing but a moment. Moses failed to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life.”

Diaries, 1922: “The gesture of rejection with which I was forever met did not mean: ‘I do not love you,’ but: ‘You cannot love me, much as you would like; you are unhappily in love with your love for me, but your love for me is not in love with you.’ It is consequently incorrect to say that I have known the words, ‘I love you’; I have known only the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my ‘I love you’, that is all that I have known, nothing more.”

“Your love for me is not in love with you” is so much nicer than my silly paraphrase in the title….Also: “the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my ‘I love you’.”

Proust: “On a trop dormi, on n’est plus. Le réveil est à peine senti mécaniquement, et sans conscience, comme peut l’être dans un tuyau la fermeture d’un robinet. Une vie plus inanimée que celle de la méduse succède, où l’on croirait aussi bien qu’on est tiré du fond des mers ou revenu du bagne, si seulement l’on pouvait penser quelque chose.”

Scott Moncrieff: “We have slept too long, we no longer exist. Our waking is barely felt, mechanically and without consciousness, as a water pipe might feel the turning off of a tap. A life more inanimate than that of the jellyfish follows, in which we could equally well believe that we had been drawn up from the depths of the sea or released from prison, were we but capable of thinking anything at all.”

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eye
word
screen
number
power
desk lamp!

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….Africa’s third longest. ;-_) World’s fifth largest island..
…Eμὲν οὖν οὕτως ἔχειν.–.-`.–.\καὶ δεῖ πιστεύειν: ἃ δὲ lard
stδύνειν τὸν ἥλιον ἐν.–.-` ;-_- –\νίτιδι καὶμετὰ ψόφουilla
oy σίζοντος discharg.–.-` ;-_.–._.( λάγους κατὰ σβέσιν se
barr– .τοῖς πολλο .–.-` ;-_.–.- -. \ μοίως εἴρηκεν, está
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ταῦτα μὲν οὖ.–.-` ;-_.–.- -_.. -‘-|C i rιν ἐξ ἀκοῆς
ῖς καὶ χυδαίz – ————————-bsairν δεσμὸν ε
….ὶ τὰ σύμπg…………………………………G rτοῦ πελάγους
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Ποσειδ e……………………………………..zv aσίζοντος

Hippocrates, Aphorisms 22 / English:

νοσημάτων ὁκόσων ἀρχομένων, ἢν χολὴ μέλαινα ἢ ἄνω ἢ κάτω ὑπέλθῃ, θανάσιμον.

What is bile again? According to wikipedia, it is composed of:

(97–98)% water, 0.7% bile salts, 0.2% bilirubin, 0.51% fats (cholesterol, fatty acids, and lecithin), and 200 meq/l inorganic salts. The two main pigments of bile are bilirubin, which is orange–yellow, and its oxidised form biliverdin, which is green. When mixed, they are responsible for the brown color of feces.

(No kidding orange and green do make brown.) Word is from Latin but beyond that obscure.

dévergondage d’esprit:

Dimier pensait que les grandes passions étaient la source du génie ! Je pense que c’est l’imagination seule, ou bien, ce qui revient au même, cette délicatesse d’organes qui fait voir là où les autres ne voient pas, et qui fait voir d’une façon différente. Je disais même que les grandes passions jointes à l’imagination conduisent le plus souvent au dévergondage d’esprit, et Dufresne dit une chose fort juste : que ce qui faisait l’homme extraordinaire était radicalement une manière tout à fait propre à lui de voir les choses. [*]

Genius is a way of seeing, not of passionate feeling, which latter more often leads to “devrondage.” Very interesting, from the same entry: “Je remarque maintenant que mon esprit n’est jamais plus excité à produire que quand il voit une médiocre production sur un sujet qui me convient.”

It’s easier to fix something that’s wrong that to envision, from scratch, something good — or the mediocre as an aid to imagination and seeing.

I did a doubletake on reading this in my Ives biography. Speaking of Yale, which Ives attended, Jan Swafford writes (pp. 105)–

“Tradition ruled college life, from the weird ratcheting Greek Cheer of the football stadium, taken from Aristophanes’ The Frogs (BREK KEK KEK KEK! KOAX! KOAX!), to the structure of student-run activities, to the ceremonies of Ivy Day and graduation.”

Joyce also quotes the Frogs’ cry on first or second page of Finnegans Wake. Could he have been thinking of Yale? (Ostrygods gaggin fishy gods…) From what I can gather from the Yale Daily News, the cheer began in the 1880’s and disappeared in the 1960’s. Ives entered Yale in 1894. Listen to this glowing account of his success there (Swafford pp.104):

Yet Ives blazed through Yale as one of the most visible and popular men on campus, finally to be singled out as one of the ‘geniuses’ of his class. In his grief and emptiness [on the recent death of his father] he directed himself outward rather than inward. The system of achieving campus success was Byzantine, but Charlie mastered it, made his connections, and sailed to glory. As he had before and would time and again in the future, he would, with little overt sign of ambition, percolate to the highest rank of whatever endeavor he involved himself in.

Note, however, that this success did not extend toward academics, and grade-wise Ives was a below-average student.

La pendule, sonnant minuit,
Ironiquement nous engage
À nous rappeler quel usage
Nous fîmes du jour qui s’enfuit:
— Aujourd’hui, date fatidique,
Vendredi, treize, nous avons,
Malgré tout ce que nous savons,
Mené le train d’un hérétique […]

Baudelaire, L’Examen de Minuit

The clock striking midnight
Ironically invites us
To call to mind what use we made
Of the day that is fleeing:
— Today, a fateful date,
Friday the thirteenth we have
In spite of everything we know
Lived the life of a heretic […]

Again, an issue I have with my shapes is that I want them to be like Kalligrams –words which, incapable of normalcy, are magnetized into arrangements– but feel stuck in the world (if not of designs) then of poems brut, which depend on their being, as it were, not their message for their force. Perhaps if I slapped a title on it, like “Receiver.” (Actually, that idea advances my thinking a little bit: because if this were more obviously a phone receiver then the implication is that what is coming out of the ear-end is “limbs of a horse” and what is going into the mouth end is also “limbs of a horse” — someone is saying, and another person repeating, the phrase “limbs of a horse” — which almost is something, evoking the conversation from which that phrase has been excerpted.)

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