One’s body more and more seeming a part of the earth, and that the husk of one’s helpless seed….“Cezanne of The Earth”

Non est tanti… It’s no big thing. Cui bono
Boswell, Life of Johnson [pp.981]:

“He disliked much all speculative desponding considerations, which tended to discourage men from diligence and exertion. He was in this like Dr. Shaw, the great traveller, who, Mr. Daines Barrington told me, used to say, ‘I hate a cui bono man.’ Upon being asked by a friend what he should think of a man who was apt to say non est tanti; — ‘That he’s a stupid fellow, Sir, (answered Johnson): what would these tanti men be doing the while?” When I in a low-spirited fit, was talking to him with indifference of the pursuits which generally engage us in a course of action, and inquiring a reason for taking so much trouble; “Sir (said he, in an animated tone) it is driving on the system of life.”

.

Madame Bovary. . .10–11 / 1

Le programme des cours, qu’il lut sur l’affiche, lui fit un effet d’étourdissement : cours d’anatomie, cours de pathologie, cours de physiologie, cours de pharmacie, cours de chimie, et de botanique, et de clinique, et de thérapeutique, sans compter l’hygiène ni la matière médicale, tous noms dont il ignorait les étymologies et qui étaient comme autant de portes de sanctuaires pleins d’augustes ténèbres.

Il n’y comprit rien ; il avait beau écouter, il ne saisissait pas. Il travaillait pourtant, il avait des cahiers reliés, il suivait tous les cours ; il ne perdait pas une seule visite. Il accomplissait sa petite tâche quotidienne à la manière du cheval de manège, qui tourne en place les yeux bandés, ignorant de la besogne qu’il broie.

Chancing to look at weeds in Hamlet I notice that three of the four times “weeds” is used to refer to plants (it is used two more times to refer to clothing) it includes the adjective “rank”. Rank etymology… Though at this point I couldn’t tell you how reliable that weeds in Hamlet post is.

My interest in the tamarisk is, I suppose, of a more literary and symbolic sort where that of Theophrastus was botanical and scientific; nevertheless, it occurred to me to read his works on plants on deep background, as it were, for my tamarisk investigation. His mentions of the tamarisk in the first volume of his Enquiry Into Plants (Loeb edition, translation Sir Arthur Hort) are below. Some preliminary observations:

Otherwise, what’s most notable is that Theophrastus doesn’t mention the tamarisk a great deal, and usually we find it in a list of other plants given to provide an example of a certain quality or attribute. Nor does he mention it in his chapters on the industrial uses of plants, suggesting there was no such use for the tamarisk among the Greeks. (Whereas Herodotus, in his history, mentions that in Egypt the tamarisk was used for building rafts and its sap used to sweeten foods,– though we know from the below that Theophrastus considered the tamarisk in that part of the world somewhat different from that to be found in Greece.)

Tamarisk in Enquiry Into Plants I.

(Note that Theophrastus doesn’t separate items of a list with commas, which style the translator has preserved.)

I.IV.3 “However, if one should wish to be precise, one would find that even of these some are impartial and as it were amphibious, such as tamarisk willow alder, and that others even of those which are admitted to be plant of the dry land sometimes live in the sea, as palm squill asphodel.”

I.IX.3 “Again some trees are evergreen, some deciduous. Of cultivated tree, olive date-palm bay myrtle a kind of fir and cypress are evergreen, and among wild trees silver-fir fir Phoenician cedar yew odorous cedar the tree which the Arcadians call ‘cork-oak’ (holm-oak) mock-privet prickly cedar ‘wild pine’ tamarisk box kermes-oak holly alaternus cotoneaster hybrid arbutus (all of which grow about Olympos) andrachne arbutus terebinth ‘wild bay’ (oleander). Andrachne and arbutus seem to cast their lower leaves, but to keep those at the end of the twigs perennially, and to be always adding leafy twigs. These are the tree which are evergreen.

I.X.4-5 “Again there are various other difference between leaves; some trees are broad-leaved, as vine fig and plan, some narrow-leaved, as olive pomegranate myrtle. Some have, as it were, spinous leaves, as fir Aleppo pine prickly cedar; some, as it were, fleshy leaves; and this is because their leaves are of fleshy substance, as cypress taramisk apple, among under-shrubs kneoros and stoibe, and among herbaceous plants house-leek and hulwort. This plant is good against moth in clothes. For the leaves of beet and cabbage are fleshy in another way, as are those of the various plants called rue; for their fleshy character is seen in the flat instead of in the round. Among shrubby plants the tamarisk has fleshy leaves. Some again have reedy leaves, as date-palm doum-palm and such like.”

III.XVI.4 “The arbutus, which produces the edible fruit called memaikylon, is not a very large tree; its bark is thin and like that of the tamarisk, the leaf is between that of the kermes-oak and that of the bay.”

IV.V.7 “Some of these regions however have the plane in abundance, and others the elm and willow, others the tamarisk, such as the district of Mount Haemus. Wherefore such trees we must, as was said, take to be peculiar to their districts, whether they are wild or cultivated. However it might well be that the country should be able to produce some of these trees, if they were carefully cultivated: this we do in fact find to be the case with some plants, as with some animals.”

IV.VI.7 “The ‘sea-oak’ and ‘sea-fir’ both belong to the shore; they grow on stones and oyster-shells, having no roots, but being attached to them like limpets. Both have more or less fleshy leaves; but the leaf of the ‘fir’ grows much longer and stouter, and is not unlike the pods of pulses, but is hollow inside and contains nothing in the ‘pods.’ That of the ‘oak’ is slender and more like the tamarisk; the colour of both* is purplish.” (*Am fairly sure this ‘both’ refers to the sea-oak and sea-fir, not to the sea-oak and tamarisk.)

V.VI.8 “Moreover, the wood of the tamarisk is not weak there [Arabia], as it is in our country, but is as strong as kermes-oak or any other strong wood. Now this illustrates also the difference in properties caused by country and climate.”

*

“Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.”… Rabindranath Tagore [@ wikisource]

Blog title: Rheotaxic proprioception played by Paul Mitchell

“Dans ce livre, où il n’y a pas un seul fait qui ne soit fictif, où il n’y a pas un seul personnage « à clefs », où tout a été inventé par moi selon les besoins de ma démonstration, je dois dire, à la louange de mon pays, que seuls les parents millionnaires de Françoise ayant quitté leur retraite pour aider leur nièce sans appui, que seuls ceux-là sont des gens réels, qui existent. Et persuadé que leur modestie ne s’en offensera pas, pour la raison qu’ils ne liront jamais ce livre, c’est avec un enfantin plaisir et une profonde émotion que, ne pouvant citer les noms de tant d’autres qui durent agir de même et par qui la France a survécu, je transcris ici leur nom véritable : ils s’appellent, d’un nom si français, d’ailleurs, Larivière.” [Time Regained, 183, 184] Google Translated

(I think this passage may be Proust’s only explicit statement in La Reserche about where exactly the book falls in the spectrum between Fictional Novel and True Autobiography (though, come to think of it, there is at least one other passage that deals with this subject: the one in which the narrator, seeking to give a name to himself, seems to hold it as a matter of indifference whether the narrator is the author himself or not).

The account is perhaps self-serving for Proust to a degree, as he had reason to defend himself against accusations, made by friends, that he had portrayed them as personnage « à clefs ». Perhaps all that’s to be admired here is Proust’s cleverness in casting doubt upon on such claims.

Nevertheless, I find compelling the idea, which is probably only inadvertently implied here (or rather, something I’ve sentimentally inferred) that people only really exist in a fiction when they have selflessly existed in their real lives. That is: that only decency can exist, as it is, and only decent people can exist, as they are, in both real life and fiction; — or again: that decency, whatever its limitations may be, has the extraordinary power of remaining exactly itself both in life and imagination.)

From 1965, an excellent tribute from Lilian Helman to Dashielle Hammett. NYRB.

an octopus starts around 36th min.. Next. (“What is the spirit with which she writes this?)

Idea that were I ever to make the conversion from being an essentially “comic figure” to being an essentially “religious figure” –not to understand myself as a figure, but let us just say– if I were to become a person who could laugh at himself–; then I believe that would have to occur in a foreign language, that I would have to learn to think in a language other than English, which is something, I would add, almost impossible for me to conceive of.

(This very post, for example, would be of an entirely different character were I able to write it in French, by which of course I also mean something different from if it were merely translated into French.) (This would “indeed be a miracle of the order of the birth of Isaac,” if I were to speak in another tongue. “Indeed”, I would become a person who laughs easily, which would be like speaking another language.)

Whereas to become a tragic “figure”, I would need still more prolonged periods of silence and utter desocialization –would need to finish even less of my sentences. (Silence sometimes interrupted by music but never by speech. I could open the “hatch” of silence but not be permitted to disembark from the scuttled destroyer.)

Desocialization: perhaps that is the name of the herbal purgative that would get the “incurable actor and comic” out of my, at times, rather serious seeming (but only seeming) person. That would get the “figure” out. The real seriousness and toughness would get in through some such silent vow. Or perhaps a series of health tests is all that would be required to prevent me from thinking I am only a voice, that my body is the mere shell or cradle of the voice, the voice being the comedian, the voice being also the “grand figure” that will thunder because it alone knows what’s right and best in this instance, a voice that, in reality, is unattached to both intelligence and common sense and cannot be made to learn another language.

*

To be that religious figure, that is, to be a member of a religion, perhaps my thought is, I would need to be an “immigrant”, confront life on another’s terms, confront life where the norms are not my norms, where I’m a stranger, if I could change my language I could change my thinking, etc. Yet “my body would rather starve than speak another language.” Similarly, when I have experienced things in immigrant-fashion (let us say, when I have tried something “new”) instead of really encountering and participating in that new thing, I or retreat or burrow inward, where things remain old and familiar, despite the novel surroundings.

Very much so: as if God spoke only Spanish or French and I’m troubling over English and the things I say or don’t say in it. (Anything in Spanish, say, being more right than saying the right thing in English, which isn’t understood at all in the sacred places open to me.)

“Never again violence against children. May a child never again have to suffer like this. I pray for him continuously. Do not despair,” (x)

27 avril…..Revu une dernière fois le portrait de Joséphine de Prud’hon. Ravissant, ravissant génie ! Cette poitrine avec ses incorrections, ces bras, cette tête, cette robe parsemée de petits points d’or, tout cela est divin. La grisaille est très apparente et reparaît presque partout.

……………….,,,…..….. A. a I
……………….,,,…....v v ………iR
……………….,,,…..e a ……..,,,,,.v a v
……………….,,,….. hl……………,,,,,a i
……………….,,,…..ta…………..,,,. A R I
……………….,,,…..e. c ………….,,,,,.v a
………………..,,,……m h ……….,,,,,.i r
……………………,,,…..o.. i …….,,,,,.vairvairvairvair

L…… Jumping wire ……N………………

A. g ren deGranaa g eD………………

Reading A Strange Commonplace closely made me extra sensitive to mentions of polka dot scarfs. There are two such mentions in Raymond Chandler’s A Long Goodbye, (although these are black polka dots and not the blue polka dots of Strange Commonplace and they are constructed of unstated material while Strange Commonplace’s were made of silk).

Page numbers are from The Library of American Edition of Chandler’s works “Later Novels & Other Writings.” The first passage refers to the very beautiful Eileen Wade, who is the wife of depressive writer of popular romances Roger Wade, the second to the unbalanced associate of Dr. Verringer, “Earl”, the most obvious common thread between them being that they are both fairly dangerous individuals.

490. “She was slim and tall in a white linen tailormade with a black and white polka-dot scarf around her throat. Her hair was the pale gold of a fairy princess. There was a small hat on it into which the pale gold hair nestled like a bird in its nest. Her eyes were a cornflower blue, a rare color, and the lashes were long and almost too pale.”

533. “Earl was a cowpoke tonight, and it had been a cowpoke who brought Roger Wade home the time before. Earl was spinning a rope. He wore a dark shirt stitched with white and a polka-dot scarf knotted loosely around his neck. He wore a wide leather belt with a load of silver on it and a pair of tooled leather holsters with ivory-handled guns in them.”

…

-__
.-|
. ;-_)
.–.-`.–.\
.–.-` ;-_- –\
.–.-` ;-_.–._.(
.–.-` ;-_.–.- -. \
.–.-` ;-_.–.- -_.. -‘)
.–.-` ;-_.–.- -_.. -‘-|C
z – ————————-bs
g…………………………………….G
G……………………………………..G
e……………………………………..z
~……Satyagraha………….!
(………………………………. *
J………………………. m
H……………… H
H………H
M..mH

-__
.-|
. ;-_)
.–.-`.–.\
.–.-` ;-_- –\
.–.-` ;-_.–._.(
.–.-` ;-_.–.- -. \
.–.-` ;-_.–.- -_.. -‘)
.–.-` ;-_.–.- -_.. -‘-|C
z – ————————-bs
g…………………………………….G
G……………………………………..G
e……………………………………..z
~…….Matthew Flinders….!
(………………………………. *
J………………………. m
H……………… H
H………H
M..mH

…

writing on foggy window “Paris” in the love of Jeanne Ney (Jeane strikes out)/ writing “bill” in dusty window in Kill Bill (Beatrix rubs out)

brf y………..brf y………………
……………….
……………….brf y………..brf y
……………cCt
………….
|………|………|
|……..|……..|
|…….|…….|
iaa ……….iaa…….
cCt.……
..…..iaa ……….iaa
brf y………..brf y…….
….…iaa ……….iaa
…....cCt
…….
iaa ……….iaa…….brf y………..brf y

“The sophistry that undid me is common to the majority of men, who deplore their lack of strength when it is already too late to make use of it. Virtue is only difficult through our own fault. If we chose always to be wise we should rarely need to be virtuous. But inclinations which we could easily overcome irresistibly attract us. We give in to slight temptations and minimize the danger. We fall insensibly into dangerous situations, from which we could easily have safe-guarded ourselves, but from which we cannot withdraw without heroic efforts which appall us. So finally, as we tumble into the abyss, we ask God why he has made us so feeble. But, in spite of ourselves, He replies through our consciences: ‘I have made you too feeble to climb out of the pit, because I made you strong enough not to fall in.'”

Rousseau, Confessions, Book II.