Latin:

privatus illis census erat brevis,
commune magnum

English:

Each Roman’s wealth was little worth,
His country’s much

Sun filled heat filled asphalt bike path. Speckled with whatever aggregate. Having turned my head to the side (don’t know why I turned my head to the side, and wish now I could return to that moment between when I had not turned it and when I ultimately did turn it; of all the moments of history, of all the moments one so desperately needed a time machine for, I would wish to return to that one; all of history was buried in my neck, in that senseless gesture of its turning, I supposed, and if I could just understand it, if I could only go back to rip that head off, shake its contents out, discover what had been inside it…)

Having turned my head to the side and seen among the tall brown grass trash of a sort I can’t now recall: paper or aluminium but not plastic.

Something about this moment seemed important and I knew that I would later be here, now, writing about it — which, however, hardly seemed so inevitable then, or at any point during the day, until this very one.

There was myself, the path, me passing the trash and looking at it, and there was a thought about gender and sexuality, inspired by a passage from Thoreau’s journals. Thoreau had imagined a kind of sexless union of souls between man and woman but of that union being like the sexual but refined in someway (as I took it), platonic perhaps.

I was passing the dry tall grass and the trash on it. I was “looking” in the sense of scanning: not really noticing anything but alert should there arise an object of interest. Thought of there being no gender, of there being “only human.” Sunlight, heat, sweat, activity, moisture in the air. Where Thoreau had wanted the relationship of man and woman to be transcendent, I, with the additional not entirely clear information we have today about gender, was trying to understand what happened to the sexual impulse, or even the religious impulse, when, if, it was understood there was no man and woman or male and female, no Other of any kind, no friend and no enemy — if it was understood we were, really, all one. “No other of any kind” equals, I now suppose, something close to what I have taken to be the meaning of God.

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Adolf Hitler,Robert E. Lee

Abraham Lincoln,Franklin D. Roosevelt

Robert E. Lee,Ulysses S. Grant

Robert E. Lee,Ulysses S. Grant,Jefferson Davis

Hippocrates. 2.16 / English.

ὅκου λιμὸς, οὐ δεῖ πονέειν.

The Altar to pity is said, in a footnote of my copy of Pausanius, probably to be the basis for the Ara Pacis, I said.

We should have Altars to Pity here, in this country, my friend said, as well as to concepts like Air, Dirt, Forethought, Rumor. No more statues of people. Enough of that. Enough of people who did this or that. Altars to Dirt, altars to Life, altars to Stars, alters to repeated spelling errors, to microbes, climate, obscure legal statues. Markers of what we don’t see that yet exists. (Perhaps Zeus is quite like The Atom, The Microbe.) Perhaps poems are all we can hope for, by way of altars, to honor these things.

(Altars also to various tax schemes or latin terms, he added. I think an altar to 401ks would be good, and on the side there would be, etched in the marble, an explanation of what it was exactly, do you know? and of other financial and governmental terms and of technical existences that are still more recondite than 401ks.)

The Body Casts The Vote

As a voter intellectually I may be decided — but there is to consider — that it must be my body that will ultimately physically cast the vote, and my body may not be decided or may be decided in favor of doing something totally erratic, in favor of something quite opposed to what I have intellectually decided.

I can’t intellectually will my vote to be cast– transfer my thought into the ballot box — and the body has a will of its own. And the will of the body, my friend added further, or what I might call One of its great wills, is that of total arbitrariness (which should be one of our altars too: Arbitrariness) — that of having decided deliberately to do one thing instead of another, but, in the event, “Doing Whatever”– either doing the opposite of what one has decided or doing what one has decided for reasons that are un-involved with, and not relevant to, and perhaps the opposite of, one’s initial decision.

Altar to Doing Whatever

Maybe the Will to Doing Whatever is not the body’s will but again attributable to oneself: it is a hatred or distrust of what one thinks, a disbelief in one’s ability to think. The thing you think is good turns out to be bad, and vice versa, and this happens again and again, this has happened so often, sowing distrust in your reasoning capacities and sowing “the will to whatever.”

There should be a god named Whatever and another called Thinks. And we should have, somewhere, for these gods, altars, said my friend. (Or even if they are only words and not gods, we should have altars made for them, altars beyond the words.)

[English]. Pausanius 1.30.4:

κατὰ τοῦτο τῆς χώρας φαίνεται πύργος Τίμωνος, ὃς μόνος εἶδε μηδένα τρόπον εὐδαίμονα εἶναι γενέσθαι πλὴν τοὺς ἄλλους φεύγοντα ἀνθρώπους.

— Technology arises out of spiritual failure –our failure to concentrate– and must grow more complicated as our distractedness increases. (It also increases our distractedness.)

— “To be dominated by artificial intelligence is the same as to be dominated by thoughts of the future.” (Artificial intelligence is an embodied incapacity to live without forethought. Prometheus not only unbound, but boundless.)

— Question. If “being in the moment” is in some sense the spiritual goal (or anyway, a desirable state) which is a greater impediment to its attainment: dissipation or technology?

— True or false statement: “If we were all good Christians and Muslims and Buddhists there would be a steady decline in the use of technology.” (If we were all good scientists…?) (If we were all bad Muslims and Buddhists and Christians?) If we were all good Marxists?

— Robots are the Ideal It’s said that we can’t arrest technology’s advance because we’re “all human” (we can’t help wanting the convenience and advantage technology provides, so we couldn’t go backward in that respect if we tried). But perhaps it’s actually because we’re all, in our essence, robots that we’re really so drawn to technology? That robots are for us, not a necessity, but an ideal?

(To say it otherwise, human beings are the first robots, the first artificial intelligences, and are now in the process, as it were, of spinning these attributes off.)

— The arts. Even if a computer could create Sly Stone (or his music) would it ever have an incentive to do so? One can certainly imagine a computer having both the capacity and incentive to create a Jar-Jar Binks. But (as it seems to me) there is no demand for Sly Stone until he has happened — one wouldn’t know to make him.

(This is to say: maybe artificial technology will have the same constraints as commercial radio, being without the incentive to create anything very lasting or unique. Supposing it could make a Sly Stone, would it have the incentive to make his music widely available?)

–Although I suppose artists to be as replaceable as anyone else by A.I., if not more so, I wonder if there would be a shift noticeable between pre-and post AI music that might be found, in the long run, to be undesirable; and that this would be found to extend toward other occupations also.

Artificial intelligence, artificial knowledge? In reflecting on the possibility of a computer which is, from our point of view, all intelligent, all knowledgeable, it might be constructive to reconsider the limits of knowledge and intelligence. What do these do and not do for existence? Perhaps in some sense humanity’s lack of intelligence that is responsible for its evolutionary success? Perhaps un-intelligence makes existence seem worthwhile?

–How will A.I control human understanding of human history? Will the story of human history become — how it came to develop A.I?

— can literary fiction (say, a Shakespeare play) be distinguished from commercial fiction (say, a John Grisham novel) on this basis of their word distributions (how many words are repeated in what ways how many times in these different genres)?

–a related question: will a work of literary fiction (a “classic”) have more “repetitions” than a work of commercial fiction?

— how are we to distinguish words that are repeated thematically (‘nothing’ in Shakespeare) from words that are repeated out of poor writing or another reason (is there a need to make such a distinction).

— given x number of words (the “author’s vocabulary” or “all the vocabulary the author is known to have used in print”) and y number of words (“the book”/ the number of words in his book) can we make an informed guess about how many repetitions that work might contain.

–Do people with larger vocabularies repeat words more or less often than people with smaller vocabularies, or about the same?

–Do early English literary writers (Shakespeare) repeat themselves more than late English literary writers (Joyce); how does it compare to the trend in, say, non-literary epistolary writing over the same period?

–How about across cultures as well as times? Does Virgil, Homer, or Shakespeare make more use of repetitions? How do the repetitions in literary work compare to those in a legal document, or to those in a collection of the letters of a college-aged student.

–How about with respect to speech? do we repeat ourselves more when we speak or when we write? Does Philip Roth repeat words more frequently when he speaks or when he writes?

–Suppose literary word repetitions (‘Nothing’ in King Lear) don’t indicate a ‘deeper meaning’ — what else might such repetitions indicate? Is repetition a rhetorical device, a natural consequence of writing with some purpose in mind, or something else? If I were to right down eighty words randomly would it contain more repetitions than a sonnet of Petrarch that had around the same word count?

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This n-grams viewer graph jibes with my own sense that people are using the word robust a lot more often than they once did. (From latin robustus, literally “as strong as an oak.”)

I was under the vague impression that it was Donald Rumsfeld or the Bush administration that popularized its use, but the graph (which, of course, measures written and not spoken instances of the word) seems to indicate that its meteoric rise began circa 1980.

In a similar vein is the phrase “salacious details” which I recall as having arisen from the Monica Lewinsky investigation. (And, again, Iraq War, ‘embedded.’ — though contrast with ‘embedded journalist.’)

Other ngrams:

— Pale Blue Eyes,Candy Says;

—Ghana,Gold Coast;

—Joseph Conrad,Henry James;

—Mars,Jupiter,Pluto,Saturn;

—hurricane, cyclone …

Not getting a joke (He brews it) then suddenly getting it (hebrews it) — describing what is really going on there.

Question: how does Moses make his tea? Answer: He brews it. Is it that the mind, when it does not get the joke, hears he brews it and when it does get the joke hears hebrews it; or does it hear, when it gets it, hebrews it and he brews it at once? Or does it hear hebrews it, and hears two nouns, and thinks the statement makes no sense, two nouns, and trying to make sense of it discovers this alternate meaning. Does it hear “he brews it” and think “why is that even a joke?” then discovers the pun. Why should the discovery of the unexpected provoke laughter?

Question: to deliver the joke properly, on which syllable of the punchline should the teller place the accent? The question is whether to pronounce it as two unrelated words, “hebrews” and “it”, or as the phrase “he brews it”. (Or the question is whether to put the accent on the antepenult or penult, which is perhaps to say the same thing.) I tended to mix it up without about equal results.

Marcel Proust: “Les êtres les plus bêtes par leurs gestes, leurs propos, leurs sentiments involontairement exprimés, manifestent des lois qu’ils ne perçoivent pas, mais que l’artiste surprend en eux. À cause de ce genre d’observations, le vulgaire croit l’écrivain méchant, et il le croit à tort, car dans un ridicule l’artiste voit une belle généralité, il ne l’impute pas plus à grief à la personne observée que le chirurgien ne la mésestimerait d’être affectée d’un trouble assez fréquent de la circulation ; aussi se moque-t-il moins que personne des ridicules.”

Andreas Mayor: “The stupidest people, in their gestures, their remarks, the sentiments which they involuntarily express, manifest laws which they do not themselves perceive but which the artist discovers in them, and because he makes observations of this kind the writer is popularly believed to be ill-natured. But this belief is false: in an instance of ridiculous behavior the artist sees a beautiful generality, and he no more condemns on this account the individual in whom he observes it than a surgeon would despise a patient for suffering from some quite common disorder of the circulation; the writer, in fact, is the least inclined of all men to scoff at folly.”

War & Peace today. Sonya — able to bear her self-sacrifices, cheerfully even, because secretly she believes that it is not self-sacrifice, but deferred gratification, and that she will one day receive her reward (marriage to Nicholas Rostov). When she discovers, however, that that reward, too, must be sacrificed, the walls start closing in and, rather than seeming to herself, as formerly, a good and self-sacrificing person, she seems a person who’s never gotten anything of what she’s wanted. . . Yup.

Tolstoy locates her inclination toward secrecy in her financial dependency, but I wonder if that’s true of her self-sacrificing attitude also….Interesting that her rival for the love Nicholas Rostov, Princess Mary, who is herself a rich heiress, finds her “affected,” which I believe is the first time we hear a truly negative judgment made about Sonya’s personality, which even the Old Countess, who is annoyed by Sonya, doesn’t feel she can object to. (Sonya doesn’t really care, like Natasha does, that Prince Andrew is dying and the suffering this causes her, Princess Mary feels.)

Was interested in this exchange between Mcconnel and Manchin, haven’t before seen Manchin in action.

Outside the K-1

the worker exits the store
he is feeling so sore
he’s heading for his pickup’s door
he says to himself he can’t walk any more

in his black bag,
so it’s starting to sag
is a bottle of beer
that leans almost clear
held by one handle
a foot in a sandle
that walks from the door
he is feeling so sore

and puts it in the seat
a significant feat
what with the trash
and the abundance of ash
and the pile of plans
and the mountain of cans

and then off he goes
through parking lot groves
and pavement tahitis
with palm tree graffitis
and permitted zones
among holders of phones
with nice courts of cones
and advertisements for loans
and the pools of construction
amid spools for conduction

until finally he’ll sit
and open what’s in it
and not think of the day
or what it may say,
but sigh with relief
that it was brief.

Referring to Lybia from Strabo’s Geography (English):

ἔστι δ᾽, ὥσπερ οἵ τε ἄλλοι δηλοῦσι καὶ δὴ καὶ Γναῖος Πείσων ἡγεμὼν γενόμενος τῆς χώρας διηγεῖτο ἡμῖν, ἐοικυῖα παρδαλῇ: κατάστικτος γάρ ἐστιν οἰκήσεσι περιεχομέναις ἀνύδρῳ καὶ ἐρήμῳ γῇ.

Came upon these lines, somewhat randomly, from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, and was curious if “moist cabinets” was as over-the-top an idea in Shakespeare’s time as it seemed to me in mine (Shakespeare was, I think, sometimes kind of over-the-top in his articulations, which I count among his fine points):

the gentle lark, weary of rest,/ From his moist cabinet mounts up on high…

Here is etymology of cabinet –related to cabin, from Latin cavea. (Seems like a lark might well issue from a moist cavea — i.e, usage not over top)

To think about the sounds at work in “his moist cabinet mounts up on high” — moist & mounts — his and high– cabinet and up on.

Wondering if there is name for when words in a poem intermingle visual and auditory rhyming –sometimes attracted to each other by appearance and other times by sound.

Having articulated that I am suddenly unsure what I mean, but am thinking of Marianne Moore’s lists again. For instance, this line:

Bows, arrows, oars, and paddles

Filled with a’s and o’s which seemed to go together visually in a way different from how their sounds combine. Or here:

Indian paint-brushes, bear’s ears and kittentails

How the –ia in “Indian” goes visually with the rhyming –ai‘s of “paint” and “tails”, while the –ear of “bear’s” goes with the —ear of “ears.” And the -i and -en sounds of “kitten” goes with those of “Indian.”

For me it’s these sort of things that are of central interest in the poem.

48. eng.
ἔμβρυα τὰ μὲν ἄρσενα ἐν τοῖσι δεξιοῖσι, τὰ δὲ θήλεα ἐν τοῖσιν ἀριστεροῖσι μᾶλλον.

Tangentially — have been reading Supreme Court Decision Roe v. Wade, which considers the Hippocratic Oath‘s specific prohibition of abortion. The court’s idea about this (relying on the work of a scholar whose name does not now comes to mind) was that the Hippocratic Oath was reflective of a specifically Pythagorean philosophy of life, which was not believed in or adhered to by ancient practitioners of medicine as a whole, and rather adopted by medical ethicists in the middle ages as being consistent with Christian doctrine.