Been thinking that “complexly” in Infinite Jest was an example of a non-poetic repetition of a word; that unlike the word “nothing” in King Lear, for example, the repetition of which contributes to a undercurrent or subtext of meaning, I’d say, “complexly” was just a word that Wallace found useful and maybe over-used a touch.

However this passage from the Eschaton chapter has got me reconsidering that and thinking that complexity is an important theme of a work which is complicated itself. This and other passages in the segment at least suggest that complexity and the fascination with it –and being overwhelmed by it– is baked into the rest of what Hal has been going through with respect to drugs — is “marijuana thinking”:

Troeltsch says he for his own part wouldn’t be just sitting and lying there if any of the Little Buddies under his personal charge were out there getting potentially injured, and Hal reflects that he does feel a certain sort of intense anxiety, but can’t sort through the almost infinite-seeming implications of what Troeltsch is saying fast enough to determine whether the anxiety is over something about what he’s seeing or something in the connections between what Troeltsch is saying and the degree to which he’s absorbed in what’s going on out inside the fence, which is a degenerative chaos so complex in its disorder that it’s hard to tell whether it seems choreographed or simply chaotically disordered.

.v v iR v v
..e a …..,,,,.v a v
hl……………..,,,,,a i
..Limbs. of the. horse
..e. c …………,,,,,.v a
.m h ……….,,,,,.i r
.o iA aIva i r
..

Pale of Settlementl…………………………………..
o…………………………….e…………………………………
l…… coign ……………p……………………………….
.d ………………………….A……………………………..
k l….marla malecón ………………………….
e….a……………..….a…………………………..
y….t……………..….l…………………………..
H Ghan Du Mu…………………………..
e….….os…………………………..
p

.v v iR v v
..e a …..,,,,.v a v
hl……………..,,,,,a i
..Limbs. of the. horse
..e. c …………,,,,,.v a
.m h ……….,,,,,.i r
.o iA aIva i r
..

Geology In:

“In a new survey of the sub-seafloor off the U.S. Northeast coast, scientists have made a surprising discovery: a gigantic aquifer of relatively fresh water trapped in porous sediments lying below the salty ocean. It appears to be the largest such formation yet found in the world.”

“The water probably got under the seabed in one of two different ways, say the researchers. Some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, toward the end of the last glacial age, much of the world’s water was locked up in mile-deep ice; in North America, it extended through what is now northern New Jersey, Long Island and the New England coast. Sea levels were much lower, exposing much of what is now the underwater U.S. continental shelf. When the ice melted, sediments formed huge river deltas on top of the shelf, and fresh water got trapped there in scattered pockets. Later, sea levels rose. Up to now, the trapping of such “fossil” water has been the common explanation for any fresh water found under the ocean.

But the researchers say the new findings indicate that the aquifer is also being fed by modern subterranean runoff from the land. As water from rainfall and water bodies percolates through onshore sediments, it is likely pumped seaward by the rising and falling pressure of tides, said Key. He likened this to a person pressing up and down on a sponge to suck in water from the sponge’s sides.”

“Terrestrial fresh water usually contains less than 1 part per thousand salt, and this is about the value found undersea near land. By the time the aquifer reaches its outer edges, it rises to 15 parts per thousand. (Typical seawater is 35 parts per thousand.)”

Proust: “Tels les Verdurin donnaient des dîners (puis bientôt Mme Verdurin seule, après la mort de M. Verdurin) et M. de Charlus allait à ses plaisirs sans guère songer que les Allemands fussent — immobilisés, il est vrai, par une sanglante barrière toujours renouvelée — à une heure d’automobile de Paris.”

Andreas Mayor: “So it was that the Verdurins gave dinner-parties (then, after a time, Mme Verdurin gave them alone, for M. Verdurin died) and M. de Charlus went about his pleasures and hardly ever stopped to reflect that the Germans — immobilised, it is true, by a bleeding barrier perpetually renewed– were only an hour by car from Paris.”

relying on one subversion of stare decisis to support another …

… But the main thing for June is to attack a la Balzac and be serious. (Not to attack Balzack but to attack a la Balzac!)/ June is named The Month of Balzac for the extraordinary industry that will brought to bear during that month (Balzac, it is said, having been a person of the most extraordinary industry himself)….

In fact, when June faces the Hammers and Furnaces of The Month of Balzac; when June faces that welter of winches, that terror of tilt walls, with its pistons and jets, with its suffocating aromas of weldments and glues, there may not be much of June left, we must sadly report: a blasted fragment of a corner of a calendar day will be what’s left of that formerly erstwhile month known as June.

(That calendar as if put through a calender will be what’s left of what was known of that month; wisp of a shadow of a cloud that had appeared on one of the days of that month, is all that will remain of that month.) June may yet emerge from beneath the magma waves of the Month of Balzac, it is thought, but it will be a changed, a haggard and a molten month; it will have days filled with gaping holes, be an airless space, the days will be like rags upon the light, it will be a fetid asteroid field where once existed Planet Month, a noman’s land of an entire twelfth of our time, cratered, strewn with barbed wire air!

These assuredly will be the tragic consequences when we bring to bear the Industry of Balzac upon that slurry pit which will soon be formerly known as June (a great pit of coal ash now will it be, positioned adjacent to the brilliant solar mountain of July, Mont July, we shall call it! A tremendous shining summit! What a month shall be July, when after all our labor we found ourselves upon the mountain!) From every pore of my body I do espy a grimy smoking gas, delicious exhaust of the Month of Balzac, this is how much labor I can feel myself putting forward!

“Earth hasn’t always had plate tectonics and it hasn’t always progressed at the same pace,” Brown said. “It’s gone through at least two periods of acceleration. There’s evidence to suggest that tectonics also slowed to a relative crawl for nearly a billion years. In each case, we found a connection with the relative abundance — or scarcity — of glacial sediments.” ***

HATS – IN AGAINST THE DAY

r a a ……………… F e T
b v l …………….. d o e
o i w ._ _ _ _ . u h h
d o e .|_ _ _|. o i w
y t g .| _ *. |. lacia
brf y U.cCt h h fy y
iaa d ocCt oe.i aa
h…….r……… p…..e
T………d………. a…j
E……..r……….. p……..c
G…..i………… e…….c
*……….O……h………. r..t……….*
*……….*……….t……………*…………*

–-A final conjecture about Strange Commonplace that what Sorrentino gives us in this book is in some sense Time without history. Time is why we get old and remember; Time is what events occur in; Time is why there might be an appearance of history, a coherent network of events; but none of these moments are connected to each other in the way that history implies. There is not one story of our lives that we inhabit from start to finish, but many, a range of lives, each one of which we sample a little bit at a time.

“Nevertheless, it is difficult to discover exactly what Crane’s reaction to war was. Certainly it was not the reaction of Ernest Hemingway — another young writer who was ultimately, for far different reasons, to prove a suicide, and who was born on the same day in the same year as Crane to a mother named Grace in Grace Crane’s home town. Hemingway, who suffered from defective eyesight (Crane did also), had moved heaven and earth to enlist in the war — and failing enlistment had settled for overseas duty with the Red Cross. ‘Delirious with excitement,’ he had marched down Fifth Avenue from Eighty-second Street to the Battery in an end-of-May parade that Crane might well have watched from the curb, his own contribution to the war effort in his pocket, a brand-new liberty bond.” (Voyager, John Unterecker, pp.108)

Wouldn’t she do something like this in 2800 AD? (wlk)…

I think the literal interpretation of Matthew 19:24 is in general probably the best: that having a lot of money is not liable to lead to good things in an eternal or spiritual sense… But is Schopenhauer asking us to consider in this passage [World as Will and Representation, sect. 68.] that all of us who experience the present are “rich”? That the present is a sort of unseemly palace of luxuries we escape from only very reluctantly, if ever at all?

“At times, in the hard experience of our own sufferings or in the vividly recognized sufferings of others, knowledge of the vanity and bitterness of life comes close to us who are still enveloped in the veil of Maya. We would like to deprive desires of their sting, close the entry to all suffering, purify and sanctify ourselves by complete and final resignation. But the illusion of the phenomenon soon ensnares us again, and its motives set the will in motion once more; we cannot tear ourselves free. The allurements of hope, the flattery of the present, the sweetness of pleasures, the well-being that falls to the lot of our person amid the lamentations of a suffering world governed by chance and error, all these draw us back to it, and rivet the bonds anew. Therefore Jesus says: ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.'”

“… mais la beauté des vers ne consiste pas dans l’exactitude à obéir aux règles dont l’inobservation saute aux yeux des plus ignorants : elle réside dans mille harmonies et convenances cachées, qui font la force poétique et qui vont à l’imagination… ” 19 septembre 1847

Red Beard, Kurosawa (1965). If poverty and cruelty could be eradicated there would be much less need for medicine. As it is, doctors only treat symptoms of a larger social malfunction and are up against long odds when it comes to easing human suffering.

*
Initially put off by some of the film’s narrative passages, which struck me as a bit halting in their development, as well as by the slightly hagiographic portrait of the Red Beard character, I was nevertheless moved by the sweetness of the film’s second half and by the compelling portrait it gives of what disease is and what a doctor must do to cure it. All in all, a heroic portrayal of the medicinal art (as Ikuru was of the beaurocratic art).

What prompted me to put this in my queue was that I had read that this was the last film Kurosawa had done with Toshiro Mifune (who plays Red Beard). Apparently, the movie was difficult to make and had strained relations between them. On which, wikipedia:

Red Beard is the last of numerous films in which Kurosawa worked with Mifune. In the DVD commentary, film scholar Stephen Prince mentions that Mifune’s natural beard had to be maintained through the lengthy production, so he was unable to act in other films. The resulting financial stress on Mifune was one of the causes of the breakup between the actor and director.

Teruyo Nogami, Kurosawa’s longtime script supervisor, says in her autobiography Waiting on the Weather that the author of the book Red Beard was based upon approached Kurosawa after seeing the film and mentioned that he believed the film was good, but Mifune got the character of Red Beard wrong in his portrayal. This, Nogami says, caused Kurosawa for the first time to question Mifune’s abilities, never again asking him to work on a film with him. Nogami also says that Mifune wished later in life to collaborate once again with Kurosawa.

Wikipedia goes on to say this was K.’s last black and white film and the only one to feature nudity.

r.nhu pro
i……………lust
commination
m
e
The See’r
The See’r
The See’r
e
m
pcommination
i……………lust
r.nhu pro

environmentalism of the built environment…

Idea (maybe not related to that article) – that the aim of the environmental movement is not to preserve nature, but, in some sense, to preserve naturalness?– (in this sense, an environmental and literary movement could be conceived as being aligned — they are aimed at a manner, rather than an end, that is natural — the natural perhaps better stood as a way of being, a manner we might have, rather than a “natural setting.”)

And this question: what if environmentalism were, above all, to involve individuals acting naturally? Such that environmentalism, rather than involving natural environments, became a sort of social question: people behaving naturally were also people behaving in an environmentally responsible way? Or even, a question of manners. (Perhaps: for people who make a study of the environment it does become a social question — but it is that study that is required.)

(We would probably argue the reverse: a person tossing his soda can into the trash receptacle instead of the recycling bin if the trash can was nearer would probably be the one acting more naturally. On the other hand, maybe it’s not the behavior that’s wrong: it is the soda can and trash receptacle that’s wrong. On the other hand again, how did he come to have the soda can? And still again: perhaps it is not having the can or putting it in the receptacle but the unnatural manner with which he took up this can and threw it away.)

‘Feeding the hand’ I like that idea. It’s like we’re not even using sight, which is for obvious reasons generally so important to the visual arts, but we’re empowering our hand with a way of being. Or we’re empowering ourselves by means of a concentration upon the being of the hand.

Interesting also to think of drawing as being a kind of link between the hand and eye, like — these are linked biologically in a person obviously– but maybe they are also linked through art — like the hand-pen-paper-eye is a solid connection in the way that the nervous system, or other tissues and networks of the body, are a solid (or maybe not so solid)connection.

Is what you’re saying though that drawing/ art is ‘Tai Chi with a pen’ or other implement? Is it that? So if a renowned master of the martial arts were to put crayons and pencils to his finger tips, and if he were to consider his antagonist the paper, or something along those lines, is something like this what you’re calling the artistic process. If we were to meditate and have somehow our minute motions be recorded could that be called your artistic process?

I would restrict this to drawing but I do think something like that, yes — though when you put it that way I begin to consider there may be some unresolved problems with my view. For example, I can’t consider that the martial arts master would be concerned much if he made a bad drawing –he would be concerned with the movement that made the drawing– whereas I would think that the artist is very much concerned with the effect — with whether or not his movement resulted in a good drawing.

Is there an artist or sort of artist that would accept a good movement even if it resulted in a poor painting? Hold it. What do we mean by movement. Because I trust that ‘movement’ is not the same as ‘technique’.

documenting documenting itself

So what is drawing if there’s nothing to be drawn, if there is no subject you are drawing? One person might draw from a model, and another from an image in his head, but you say you are not drawing from anything, so then, what are you drawing, what is it you say you are drawing?

— I’m drawing the experience that occurs as one draws something: I’m drawing drawing itself.

That is… so you have the pen and you have the paper and you’re drawing, but you’re not drawing anything, what are you doing, what is the thing you’re drawing?

— It doesn’t necessarily even have to do with drawing. It is the documenting of the attempt to experience that one is moving. In this case, one is moving to do something, one is moving to draw something, but it is really all moving. It simply happens to be the case that this moving is a documenting also … documenting itself. Documenting documenting itself.

(Explain more.)

You’re drawing what it feels like to be drawing….? You’re drawing what the hand tells you it’s doing and you feed that back to that hand as it does it? You’re ‘being there’: that’s all it is. That’s all it is — In the moment. You’ll next say, well, wasn’t Degas, wasn’t Vermeer, “in the moment”? I would say that I suppose that they were when they made what they made, but being in the moment wasn’t what they were drawing/ painting: it was what made them paint and draw as they did: with that degree of quality. For them, what they painted was important; for me how they were when they accomplished what they did is most important and is my subject.

What was missing from the scene of the young man walking in his bright red coat?… Bright Red Winter Coat

A Yoknapatapaw County of my room: what for a county is decades and centuries is for my room minutes, hours and days. The great interweaving of stories (how there had been a desk there but it was taken to the living room; how that bare stretch of carpet has always looked approximately like that and never had anything beside it or covering it) and romantic characters (the desk, the chair, the shirt that needs hanging up.)