“Roaring Spring“, a book in the sense that it was to be read from top to bottom; a blog in the sense that it was written as a blog (though later rearranged, edited, as a book); in structure, a collage; in type, something between an autobiographical novel and a personal journal, or just a personal journal with nothing very personal in it. Done some years ago, but still looks pretty good in spots.

“It brought about the end to a less well-known but similarly fascinating, and much older world — a supercontinental wilderness stocked with an odd collection of uncanny pre-mammal forebears and, in the seas, an archaic hallucination of shells and tentacles that had prevailed since the dawn of animal life.” [NYT]

Pausanias
[English]
10.22.3 —
[…] καὶ τὰ ἐς Καλλιέας Κόμβουτις οἱ ἐργασάμενοι καὶ Ὀρεστόριος ἦσαν, ἀνοσιώτατά τε ὧν ἀκοῇ ἐπιστάμεθα καὶ οὐδὲν τοῖς ἀνθρώπων τολμήμασιν ὅμοια. γένος μέν γε πᾶν ἐξέκοψαν τὸ ἄρσεν, καὶ ὁμοίως γέροντές τε καὶ τὰ νήπια ἐπὶ τῶν μητέρων τοῖς μαστοῖς ἐφονεύετο: τούτων δὲ καὶ τὰ ὑπὸ τοῦ γάλακτος πιότερα ἀποκτείνοντες ἔπινόν τε οἱ Γαλάται τοῦ αἵματος καὶ ἥπτοντο τῶν σαρκῶν.

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Frau Busse had introduced the new tenant to her two daughters not as Dr. Kafka, a writer from Prague, but as Dr. Kaesbohrer, a chemist, who would be conducting experiments in the basement… kafka in berlin

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As a supplement or surrogate to whistling while I work, I will sometimes recite lines from There Will Be Blood while I work, which is the inspiration for this Mcsweeney’s-like list of There Will Be Blood lines to recite throughout your workday. (Warning: demands an uncommon familiarity with the dialogue of There Will Be Blood.)

As I left the house, I noticed dark storm clouds above the condos, which, as with the day before, never managed to amount to rain. The “stuckness” or repetitiveness of weather patterns has become palpable –as is, sometimes, their jerky or clumsy effort to restore balance or get unstuck– hard showers/ or days of hard showers.

I walked to the Goodwill first, where I bought for a couple dollars a book on the physical sciences, thinking to bone up for no particular reason on the physical sciences, (though I never did wind up reading it) and a copy of The Hamlet, which had recently been brought to mind. (I didn’t plan on reading it again but just thought I might need it to refer to later, but I did wind up rereading it.) From there to work, a busy day there….

Woke up early and enthused, a spring in my step. In Kierkegaard I reread the part about the “poor clothing” of The Good: how The Good doesn’t need any one person — rather, it’s individuals that need and require The Good– and it takes a long time for the Good to achieve its ends. (The Good requires “unprofitable servants”: it doesn’t require us to be profitable — it requires us to will what’s good). I translated a couple lines from The Odyssey; they referred to a land –perhaps Egypt?– where everyone was a doctor and “had knowledge of all people”, the children of Paion, a god of healing.

This was the day I saw two people at a table sitting across from each other both reading Frederick Douglass’ autobiography. It turned out that they were a mother and son who had just returned from an afternoon of volunteer work at a literacy clinic somewhere not far from his house. I recently saw the mother again –she had been reading Walter Mosely, who I hadn’t read or heard of– and strongly recommended his books. (Walter Mosely).

I haven’t seen her since then –but I did finally get around to reading and enjoying “A Devil In A Blue Dress” this past summer. (I wound up putting this book, along with a few others, in the clothes drier, as the result of bed bug scare, which more or less destroyed the book.)

” Ils n’étaient pas des vieillards, mais des jeunes gens de dix-huit ans extrêmement fanés. Peu de chose eût suffi à effacer ces flétrissures de la vie, et la mort n’aurait pas plus de peine à rendre au visage sa jeunesse qu’il n’en faut pour nettoyer un portrait que seul un peu d’encrassement empêche de briller comme autrefois. Aussi je pensais à l’illusion dont nous sommes dupes quand, entendant parler d’un célèbre vieillard, nous nous fions d’avance à sa bonté, à sa justice, à sa douceur d’âme ; car je sentais qu’ils avaient été, quarante ans plus tôt, de terribles jeunes gens dont il n’y avait aucune raison pour supposer qu’ils n’avaient pas gardé la vanité, la duplicité, la morgue et les ruses.” [Time Regained, 94]
*

Andreas Mayor: “They were not old men, there were very young men in an advanced stage of withering. The marks of life were not deeply scored here, and death, when it came, would find it as easy to restore to these features their youthfulness as it is to clean a portrait which only a little surface dirt prevents from shining with its original brilliance. These men made me think that we are victims of an illusion when, hearing talk of a celebrated old man, we instantly make up our minds that he is kind and just and gentle; for I felt that, forty years earlier, these elderly men had been ruthless young men and that there was no reason to suppose that they had not preserved their youthful arrogance and their vanity, their duplicity and their guile.”

All of sudden wondering what Nietzsche thought of Schopenhauer, I looked into the index of Will to Power for his remarks on same. I found that, among other things, while he credited Schopenhauer for identifying “will” with Kant’s “things in themselves” he faulted him for failing to “deify” the will [1005]. (For Schopenhauer, will-lessness was the preferred state. For Nietzsche the kind of will was quite important.) Elsewhere [WTP 685] Nietzsche interestingly distinguishes between will and desire:

“Willing” is not “desiring”, striving, demanding: it is distinguished from these by the affect of commanding. There is no such thing as “willing,” but only a willing something […] The state of tension by virtue of which a force seeks to discharge itself — is not an example of “willing”.

That dreams are the excercise routine of one’s biological elements — the head is the gym; and when the reds and the whites compete in the stadium like Romans; and when the liver goes on parallel bars; and when your skull is on a treadmill; what results, from the perspective of one who has to actually experience oneself and the exercise of oneself; from the perspective of one who is not his skull; is a dream.

(However, the question arises: how does one know that dreams occur in the head? That this is where the camping tent has, after a long day flapping in the wind, been rolled up to? Perhaps if I had a true sense of my body and its inter-relations I would see it not how the eyes see it, or as the ideas do, but with the feet above the neck.).

The idea of planting the flag, of The States and of The World, not on the moon, which is a mere far away place, merely still farther away, but upon Being, which is the most elusive extraordinary area conceivable, neither near nor far yet ever and never present ( A Kantharos upon Being) or without a flag at least.

“…And perhaps the sexes are more related than we think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings, in order simply, seriously and patiently to bear in common the difficult sex that has been laid upon them.” Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke, Norton translation.

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Globalization didn’t create a lot of losers, but the ones it did were concentrated in the countries that were the driving force behind it.… POST

Nothing in our evolution has prepared us for the potent double whammy of caloric modern food and potent recreational drugs… NYT

NEXT, the attendant sprang, with a springing leap, toward the dish rag.

Next, the attendant, with an unparalleled ardor of courtesy, with unprecedented parameters of princiliness, removed from a customer’s table her plate…. NEXT

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World as Representation, 1.2.4, trans. Payne, pp.178: “Further, we do not let abstract thought, the concepts of reason take possession of our consciousness, but instead of all this, devote the whole power of our mind to perception, sink ourselves completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building, or anything else. We lose ourselves entirely in this object to use a pregnant expression; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception.”

Proust and Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer mentions a “magic lantern” (World as Representation, Bk 2, Sect. 28, trans. Payne, pp.153 ), Proust mentions a magic lantern (e.g., The Search / overture, translation Moncrieff, pp. 9, but is recurrent theme).

Schopenhauer speak of the experience of being absorbed in the observation of a thing, of being a “pure subject” (World as Representation, 1.2.4, trans. Payne, pp.178, quoted in part above) Proust dramatizes this activity (e.g., the hawthorne scene, The Search, transation Moncrieff, pp. 150-151, but there may be a better example of this), and Proust biographer William Carter speaks of this as having been something Proust would really do (quoted in part below).

Schopenhauer is mentioned at least once, as I recall, in La Reserche, although in passing (actually twice, both in Time Regained): 1, 2. Apparently Beckett’s book on Proust discusses Schopenhauer… ( See this, which doesn’t dwell directly on the perception of the “pure subject”, but does have interesting remarks on Proust, Schopenhauer, and Beckett’s treatment of the two.)

A question this begs for me is if Joyce’s “epiphany” involves a similar or opposite process of disinterested entranced observation. I guess I don’t know where, if anywhere, Joyce made a definitive comment about his “epiphany” but my vague sense of it is that he located the source of the epiphantic in the object itself –in superpacked nodes of events– rather than in identifications made by a pure or will-less subject. (Difference between “perfect moments” and perfect observations of regular moments.)

At Reveillon

William C. Carter, Marcel Proust, A Life, pp.173-174: “At Reveillon, one August day, when Marcel and Reynaldo went for a walk in the garden, an incident occurred that held a clue to Proust’s ability to concentrate and observe. Hahn later recorded the event: ‘We were passing by a border of Bengal roses, when suddenly he fell silent and stopped. I stopped also. but then he started walking again and so did I. Soon he stopped again and asked me with that childlike sweetness that was somewhat sad that he always kept in his tone and voice: “Would you be angry if I hung back a little? I’d like to look against those little roses.”‘ Reynaldo left Marcel and walked all the way around the castle until he came back to where he had left Marcel, who was still there staring “intently” at the roses […] According to Hahn, this was the first of many such episodes, ‘mysterious moments when Marcel communicated totally with nature, with art, with life, in those “profound inutes” when his entire being… entered into a trance where his superhuman intelligence and sensitivity… reached the toor of things and discovered what no one else could see.”‘” (Carter goes on to compare this to the Hawthorne episode.)

“Palinurus clearly stands for a certain will-to-failure or repugnance-to-success, a desire to give up at the last moment, an urge towards loneliness, isolation and obscurity. Palinurus, in spite of his great ability and his conspicuous public position, deserted his post in the moment of victory and opted for the unknown shore.” Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave. [Palinurus]

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