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CPU: Ideas, an internet novel of ideas

“I can conceive of absolute justice and beauty and the like and as long as I can keep fixed on this conception, it is the soul that is fixed on it, it is not myself; and as long as the soul is fixed on it, it does not die, and is indeed reborn, and is indeed a sort of absolute.”

“Before religious practice, personality disorder.”

Body position: not unlike Michelangelo’s Pietà with the role of Mary being served by the wheeled office chair; feet propped on the corner of the desk, at the level of my head; torso slightly twisted to view computer; hand pawlike upon the mouse. A bodily position which is not to change as I proceed through a series of wikipedia pages: from Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, to Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat, to Velasquez and Las Meninas, to the Order of Santiago, to James son of Zebedee (in Spain); and ending at the Historia Compostelana.

I had never heard of the last item. I had had no idea that there were legends of St. James having been in Spain. Velasquez had received the Order of Santiago late in his life. Not even the king could grant this order, I read, but a special commission was required to investigate the purity of the bloodline of the nominee. St. James was “the moor killer”, which was barbaric, that a holy figure could be thought of this way, but I could see the attraction in being immersed in some of these myths: the decapitated form of St. James in a pilotless ship sailing across the Mediterranean to Spain. Rather than me, here, this, this desk, this distant hum of a refrigerator and whir of a computer fan. Not sailing or lying headless in a boat. I suddenly remembered I had aggressively to seek out life, as I read in Tolstoy the other day — life was God. I remembered the Slaughtered Ox, which is a striking painting. (As I edit this post, months after first having written it, I find myself in the exact “Pietà position” described in its opening… And I find myself still in this position and still editing months after having finished the preceding sentence… Indeed, a year later, and years later, the same. It is only after the passage of still more years, during which I’ve not at all found LIFE, that circumstances have arisen such that I have had to print it out to edit it, and will edit it in all kinds of bodily positions.)

Idea occurs to me that “all the world was created that I might focus on a simple thing,” but I mean it non-solositically. Idea occurs to me that “Life is not outside the window, not outside the door, not to be found in an ‘adventure,’ whether real and challenging or fake and amusing, but in that moment when I clicked from the page of the Order of Santiago to the page of St. James of Zebedee just now, then scrolled down to the part about Spain.” Somewhere among all these moments we ignore, because of course we ignore them, we’re not stupid — there was life.

Velasquez, it occurred to me, was one of those great painters I simply never thought about: how much greatness there had been which one never thought of or knew about in the first place, so of what use was greatness? (Then I clicked on the Order of Santiago.)

(Tolstoy had asked that also. Even if he were as great an artist as Shakespeare, what then? What would that matter?) For Tolstoy Life was God, while for Aristotle Logos was I guess God; but if logos was the same as reason (which I guess is correct) Tolstoy did not think it was God; for reason, according to My Confession, if I’d read it properly, belonged to the upper classes and only persuaded one of the evil of living, and of god’s non-existence. Be like the simple people who never doubted such things as the goodness of life and the existence and greatness of god, thought Tolstoy (though he was skeptical of the forms of the church, which these simple but life-loving people embraced.) (Was the word “god” itself such a form — and a dubious idol or icon of God? Was that why one ought not pronounce the name of the supreme being? Maybe the spiritual effort could be defined as trying to arrive at the name of the supreme being? If the object of the spiritual effort was indeed to give a name to the supreme being, suddenly, questions about the gender of that being seem not so frivolous as they have hitherto seemed to me). The existence of God was as evident and obvious as the appearance of life….

Using Perseus, I’d looked up ἀγεννής earlier, which means low-born, low-minded, sordid: Aristotle didn’t think much of the lower orders and slaves, certainly didn’t suppose they had the answers to life. (After I had looked up ἀγεννής, I had looked up the English word illiberal, which is another translation of the word ἀγεννής and indeed the one given in the translation I was reading.) Idea again occurred to me that all the world was created that I (by which I meant all persons) might focus on a simple thing –could be a word, could be a stone– then I clicked on the link to Historia Compostelana and somewhere also along the line (I recall now it was from the James page) I had clicked on a link to an apocryphal text that was supposedly written by James; at which point it occurred to me that I had been interested for a while now in how you got the word Iago from the word James, but instead of finding that out I landed on the wikipedia page for Shakespeare’s character Iago, and read about the source text Shakespeare used for Othello, and thought about how many great authors and filmmakers had not started from scratch but used as their template someone else’s narrative. There Will Be Blood: “Oil!” The Shining: “The Shining”. Othello: “Un Capitano Moro” in which, according to the wikipedia article, the Iago character is not given a name. (A picture of Edwin Booth as Iago, from 1870, is featured in the top right corner of this article.) (I did not find out how you got Iago from James.)

Idea occurred that money is, on the population level, a feeling; (that is, that what seems to us, as members of a species, a fact of life, a thing we need, a coin, is experienced by the species as a whole as something more akin to an emotion or perhaps a protein. A roaring economy is like high blood pressure, getting good exercise, for the way it makes money move); that money somehow indicates where the interests of the individual and species merge; (also, where the ideals of the individual and the interests of the species diverge); that (I suddenly become in my thoughts a little strident and hot here, though the propped position of my legs had not been altered) “when a person holds in his hand a dollar it is the materialized blood of the species”!; (or if not of the species exactly then of something to have to do with the species, as, for instance, Time, that is to say, Time with respect to the species (“history”); the earth (money either the blood of the earth or the hair of the earth, money is the salt on the grey hair of the earth) (now growing increasingly muddled) money some vapor of earth that heads gradually or quickly sunward (“history is to money what evaporation is to geography”)? Idea that I hope to reach “Montagne through Molloy” is thought.

Now looking at the wikipedia entry for Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil, where there is a museum devoted to prehistory mentioned in the article I have just read, which was about the discovery of some two hundred footprints made by Neanderthal children, perhaps in a sort of prehistoric preschool, eighty thousand years ago. Before that, read article on “super bolts” — powerful lightning bolts which generally strike in the middle of the Atlantic ocean and Mediterranean Sea, a thousand times more powerful than regular lightning bolts. Before that, an article on “cleaner shrimp”: how they manage to avoid being eaten by the fish they “clean” by means of a self-identifying dance. Was reminded I had been moved to look up shrimp. Was reminded how a customer had said she had eaten a crepe filled with shrimp at an event at the Eden Center, and I told her, you just made me recall I’d been meaning to look up the etymology of ‘shrimp’. I can’t recall what had initially put the word shrimp in mind as something I would look up. Customer, I recall, hadn’t gotten bubble tea at the Eden Center, which is one of those things you hear of people doing at the Eden Center. (Shrimp seems to come from an Old Norse word meaning thin and was used in English to describe a small person very early on and an especially small person might have even been called a shrimplet, according to my source.) (Old Norse was a Germanic language.) Before that, read an article on “forgetting in mice.” The authors of a recent scientific journal had located a sort of chemical I think it was, or neuron, that arose during sleep which was responsible for the jettisoning of unneeded memories. I was most interested in the early part of the article, which concerned the unusual case of a man who never forgot anything, but could exactly recall random numbers he’d been shown twenty years previously, and my attention often drifted –drifted back to thinking of that man– as I went on to read further of the specifics of the study. The article said that this man who never forgot had, on the other hand, difficulty working with abstract concepts and figurative language, which caused me to think of myself as being like him though to a lesser degree, a lesser version of the man who never forgot: for I had a good memory, I’d been told, (good but prone to lapses, good but not immune to embarrassing cases of misremembering) but was not so good with concepts. Montaigne, I recalled, expressed he had a very bad memory and I wondered if that might have been a key or otherwise related to his great genius.

Now looking up Caribbean Monk seal. Initially my investigation into the range of pinnipeds (which are seals and related life forms) revealed they were not to be found in the Caribbean, which puzzled me, as I was sure that was where the poem that was the occasion for this search had been written, but then I happened to glance, scrolling through the page, that there once had been this so-called monk seal in the Caribbean, which had been declared extinct in the 1950’s, and perhaps it was a seal of that sort that Hart Crane had been thinking of in the concluding line of his poem Voyager II, written some decades before then, which is:

The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

Spindrift is the spray from the tops of waves. Spoondrift is an alternate spelling of spindrift. Now back to the monk seal page to see from the image there if the gaze is “wide”, if the gaze is somehow suggestive of spindrift, but the image available is not ideal for making such determinations and before I check the wider web for an image, I am moved to scroll down still further and read the details of its extinction. “The Caribbean monk seals’ docile nature and lack of flight instinct in the presence of humans made it very easy for anyone to kill them.” (Now I’ve been made sad, feel sad: men clubbing these trusting creatures on the beach — “our very selves”. And the more numerous we become, the more like this we become, an immense bleak cloud seems to accompany the idea of our development or progress as species… progress for the individual too? Do successful individuals leave clubbed seals in their wake? or was it the failures, or were the failures the clubbed seal? Idea that this could be new internet “handle” — The Clubbed Seal). On top of that, overfishing of their habitat led to the starvation of those not killed for their blubber. I’m made to recall Melville’s idea that the whale, whose blubber we also of course sought, and seek, could never be brought to extinction because they would just hide beneath the ice caps, an idea which seems especially naive now that ice is melting so markedly at the poles –now that we are literally destroying this immense would-be refuge along with hunting or otherwise driving so many animals toward extinction. Nothing is safe from us, it occurs to me to say, aside from what are probably our worst enemies, microbes of various sorts; the existence of these latter we indeed actively promote, it further occurs to me to say (getting hot, feet motionless, propped) — our overuse of anti-biotics, superbugs, and the like. (Maybe that’s why I “can’t write” I tell myself: because all there is for me or anyone to do is try to stop this. Why would there be anything “to write” in this era in which everything is known, and nothing done about what is known?) Google images reveals a surprising number of contemporary images for a seal that hasn’t been seen in over fifty years, its “wide gaze” maybe suggested by the wide separation between the eyes. It occurs to me too that the ‘gaze’ of the last line might be contrasted with the ‘wink’ of the first:

–And yet this great wink of eternity

(What do I think about that last line?) Someone’s directed me toward a youtube. The blogger who had linked to it wrote that the video made her “shake with rage” when she saw it; however, I did not, myself, on seeing it, shake with rage, or feel rage. Was it something I lacked or something I possessed, or something the blogger lacked or possessed, that explained the difference in our responses to the video, I pondered. Had we seen the same thing? Why were we different? Was she an emotional person, was I an unemotional person? was she a dramatic person who had exaggerated her account of her reaction to the video, was I an indifferent apathetic person who would have no emotional response to any video, no matter how dramatic? No matter how outrageous I would have had no response, because of my terrible apathy, I confirmed, leaning back. Of course. But was it really apathy, I wondered? Might it have actually been more conformity? (Because of the slow connection, the video proceeded haltingly, and I paused it, so as to let the loading “catch up.” When I felt the video had been given time to “catch up” I started playing the video again, but now the screen, having moved forward by a frame or two, was frozen. The frame of the film it was frozen on was of police in riot gear mulling around in front of a crowd standing in a roped off area, a crowd which also seemed mulling and listless.) What was wrong with me precisely? The coldness with which I asked these questions seemed to make necessary precisely these questions. The coldness with which I asked these questions seemed to betoken the apathy with which I would receive the answers, even in the unlikely event that they should prove the correct ones. The coldness, the indifference, the frozen screen, watching a video, having soon to get up, having soon to get up and do something, and a vague recollection of something said by the Pope. This all confirmed me in my spectation — my foot on the desk–that this was for my entertainment. What was it again the pope had said. I couldn’t remember and looked it up. He’d said:

No one is so poor they cannot give what they have, but first and foremost, who they are.

Looked up the word lapidary, which I had confused with word lapsidarian, which I’d also forgotten and yet didn’t look up. Lapsidarian having to do with a particular take on Christian doctrine, I believed. Maybe pertaining to the Fall. Prelapsidarian was maybe what it was. Something having occurred before The Fall.

What was Lapidary — having come upon it in an article alleging racism of Flannery O’Connor, in which the quote from O’Connor’s letters that she was “integrationist by principle but a segregationist by preference.” Looked up globalist, which an article had suggested was an anti-semitic slur. I knew the word had those overtones but wouldn’t have said it amounted to an actual slur and in fact I find neither wiktionary nor wikipedia includes any mention of anti-semitism in their articles on globalism.

Looked up why Matt Yglesias had supported the Iraq War (coming across a mea culpa he’d written, I’d not realized he was 21 at the time.) All That Rises Must Converge, last time I read it, seemed to me rather hostile to the civil rights movement. The young man, embarrassed by his grandmother’s patronizing attitude towards blacks, himself seems a bit callow; his educated ideas about race are made to seem paltry compared with the enormity of mortality and death. (Look up enormity. I have actually perhaps meant immensity again.) “Integrationist by principle, segregationist by preference” seems okay to me, or it seems normal that there would be, in general, disagreement between principles and preferences. (“Integrationist by principle and preference” might be the statement, one could say, of a person more under the spell of principle than of preference, but so.)

The customer had not said she was “proud” but that she “felt fortunate” to go to a predominantly African American church, I suddenly recall. Language is precise but we recall it imprecisely. (How I will misremember parts of The Octopus, which now I can’t recall an instance of. Often an a for a the but more than this.) “The a for a the.” Perform search, which turns up Chiasmus, because I can’t think of the Greek rhetorical device that “The a for a the” resembles.) She had said, I believe, “I feel so fortunate to go to a predominantly African American church,” but I had recalled it as “proud.” Difference. Perhaps that isn’t quite right: Everything that Rises is not against fighting against institutional racism, as the civil rights movement was, but is against the “enlightened” views of this particular young man, which maybe you could even view as being Flannery herself? directed toward the individual, provincial racism of the grandmother. Have to read that again (I’m surprised how drastically different my memories of stories are from the stories) — in the shelf there? (Look to my right.) No I made that the “Greek” shelf at one point. (Look back to computer.) But I recall having seen the white spine of her complete short stories there not too long ago and look again. (It isn’t there.)

Read from Emerson last night. Ives, who read from Emerson, and who rejected at first Henry Cowell when he was arrested and charged with sodomy, (“morals’ charges” had wikipedia) had suggested I bring out the Emerson, that particular paperback copy of the complete first and second series having been in the family a long time. Remember having seen that same copy on many of the family shelves, different residences, having many times taken stabs at reading it, but I have never quite understood, have always found him difficult to read, but what I seemed to understand from reading last night is that much of what I account my own ideas (or not my own, but no one’s in particular, with which I happen to agree) are particularly Emersonian, particularly those about the need to be oneself. (The Spell Check does not recognize Emmersonian or Emersonian, wikipedia, greek, Swafford, many others.) The importance of being oneself as well as the seeming impossibility of it; yet if there is anything spiritually possible at all it must be that or must be premised on that, on being oneself. One can’t love or hate or follow anything of course if one is not one. (Person walking across lawn with large box, visible through window. Leaning to my left, putting much of the weight of my upper body on my left elbow, which is resting on the cushioned arm rest of the swivel chair, I see she has taken the large box to the recycling pile, a neighbor.)

I think it should be the work, the stories, on which I should judge the character of authors, not the contents of their personal letters, which even with authors amount to hearsay. (Where do blogs stand with respect to that. Are blogs more like letters or more like books in being true expressions of the author’s ideas) (With letters. Books have editors.)

A real revelation of the Ives biography (Swafford) for me was that Ives was not a modernist per se. Ives attempted to reconcile the popular band music he loved as a child, through his father, with the European symphonic tradition. Why that involved him necessarily in such innovative music I remain unclear about, but it wasn’t something he set out to do, it was something he liked to do, and in a theoretical sense he wasn’t a modernist. Ives, despite his complexity, is not intellectual, but natural in his approach, is what I’m trying to say. Which made me think of Tarantino a bit. Tarantino is much more accessible than Ives of course, but in the sense that he begins with (my impression) a sincere love of the popular — of genre films — which he tries to bake into the history of the medium / reconcile with art films. What is for Tarantino kung-fu films and westerns is for Ives the music of marching bands. Interesting: I spelled Tarantino the first two times in wildly different ways and both times the Spell Check recognized what I must have meant. (Kierkegaard, which like Nietzsche, I can spell now, had given his reason for maintaining orthodoxy in his grammar and spelling somewhere in the diaries, but can’t recall that and, having sought it out a couple times, can’t seem to find it again. My own view is that Spell Checks and technology have imposed a kind Hegemony of Correctness upon our writing, which typos, more than misspelling as such, may help us cut our way through, in electronic transmissions at least. Typos bring something of Finnegans Wake to one’s writing. And yet I do look with admiration on that friend who recoils in horror at the idea that his Spell Check might be activated, because of course he spells correctly. This is also the friend who indents the paragraphs of his emails. It would be a horror to him if he spelled incorrectly, or had typos. One wonders how his correct writing differs from the correct writing of one who will be guided by their Spell Check.)

Prelapsarian, not prelapsidarian (neither the correct nor incorrect version sanctioned by the Spell Check), also lapsarian, infralapsarian, supralapsarian, and a few others (none of them accepted by the spell check). Lapsus — ‘fall’ in Latin. In Calvinism (underlined in red when I spelled it with two a’s), these terms denote differing points of view on the question of at what point God determined who would be the saved and elect of Mankind, relative to his creation and fall, according to Wikipedia. (A prelapsarian, I believe, thinks we were made the condemned or elect of god not only before we were born, but before mankind was born, and before we fell, through Adam’s sin.)

Literaria Deformis: a history of my terrible writing.

Having been reading Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria – a biography of his literary life (sort of) – it occurred to me write one of my own, taking stock, though in my case the writing was frequently badly deformed — which I say somewhat hyperbolically but also having inside knowledge of how deep the unpublished valleys can be, how amateurish, never mind the character of the published or recorded peaks. I wrote that early in life I evinced a talent for stupid rhymes and jokes songs; I wrote that reading Moby Dick in highschool “saved me” from television and through the humor of its grandiloquence got me interested in literature; I wrote that college got me interested in serious poetry, leading to my hilariously awful Hart Crane imitations; I wrote that the Mendoza Line taught me art wasn’t an academic exercise. The artwork had in some sense to deliver — and that by and by I would at times make things which did deliver, though I have yet to entirely shake from my nature that tasteless entity who makes stupid rhymes.

The literaria deformis was itself deformed and failed to deliber so let that stand for its contents.

Now, I’m directed to this post I put on my blog from a while back in which I suggested that Bob Dylan’s winning of the Nobel Prize represented a win for populism from the left over cultural institutions just as Donald Trump’s election to the Presidency represented a populist win from the right over political institutions. (I didn’t argue for this but just made note of it as a kind of intuition. And, you know, I’m not a person who thinks both sides are to blame in politics but I do think there is a sense in which both sides play a role: that the outrages against what is being done to Democracy felt by many on the left has a mirror image in the outrages against what has been done to Culture felt by many on the right. Is it related to this that two of the last four Republican Presidents have been entertainment professionals?)

Thinking about this again I thought of another point of similarity between Trump and Dylan — their antagonistic attitude toward the press — but I had mainly started thinking about this again because I felt compelled to add one caveat about Dylan here: that though I considered his songs interesting and funny and beautiful and much else, though not literary, “literary” probably being a smear against them anyway, many people of course not considering “literary” to be much of a good thing; nevertheless, he had done at least one thing I did consider to be “seriously literary”, and which I thought of at the time as having been, among literary works, most like Caesar’s Gallic Wars, which comparison made me think it would be almost more appropriate to think of Dylan as a kind of conqueror and Caesar than as a kind of Nobel Prize winning poet, and that was his book Chronicles. Can’t remember where I put that, in fact might have loaned it away. Attempt to write a post about this but the idea doesn’t develop. This is not something I am qualified to write about and in fact I can’t think of anything like that.

(My body: Thumb of right hand beneath right wing of mustache, knuckle of index finger beneath left wing of mustache). Idea that my mother’s and father’s talents had combined exactly such as to make me an ineffectual writer, an ineffectual worker in general. Ineffectual and cancelled in general. Idea that heavy literature more resembled supreme court decisions than it did commercial literature and served a similar purpose. Idea that serious literature (“Ulysses”) should expect to have about the same readership, numerically, as serious scientific and math papers (“Theory of Relativity”) or legal papers. Idea that my idea of “suicide bombers for life” (why did people die more passionately, or decisively, than I lived? so shockingly timid and habitual!) was somehow related to my question of why the self-deceived felt more conviction than the open-minded. Idea occurred to me of complexity of modernism that if art exists to break up the “frozen seas within us,” (Kafka) it’s complexity must indicate a thickness of the ice, just as the relative complexity of deepwater drilling indicates a rarity of oil. Reason for the complexity of modern literature occurs: “it somehow falls out of income inequality.” (I’ve remembered a dream to note down in my dream log.)

Idea that freedom of speech protections ought not apply to mass communication, which ought to require “dialectic.” (What would the legal definition of dialectic be?) Mass communication can involve only logos, would read the law. Idea that silliness was a refuge from intimacy and “really meaning it.” Idea that “thoughts were conjugated, and deeds declined.” Search: carbon levels atmosphere. Click on first returned result and read on the page displayed that carbon levels are the highest they’ve been in 800,000 years and not in 3,000,000 years, as the Times editorial I read days previously had claimed. I note the date of the page is 2018, which is last year. I note also that the level of carbon is said to be 407 parts per million. I click the back arrow and return to the search results page.

Search: carbon levels atmosphere three million. Click on the first result and only look at the page long enough to note two facts beside the three million figure: that the page is from from 2019 and that it lists the levels of atmospheric carbon as being 415 parts per million. The question of whether a mere 8 parts per million could potentially separate the atmospheres of 800 thousand and three million years ago is left hanging, as a serious thought occurs. “Serious thought” being here defined as one accompanied by a sinking feeling. A sense I have done something stupid. A sense I may have done something wrong.

Reminded: how I used to think kind of the pinnacle of being famous would be appearing on the Charlie Rose Show. And imagining you and Charlie Rose are having a conversation about issues you have interesting answers to. And how now there is no Charlie Rose show or anything like that that I know of. No such worldly ambition to aspire to. That world already gone and Rose disgraced. But more deeply it occurs to me my ideas of literature had been premised on a world of literary prizes and widely available reading material and education in which large segments of the population at least knew of the existence of a person like Shakespeare. Maybe that world would be ending too.

Looked up effulgent on an unrelated issue. Did it mean the same as radiant? Was it spelled with two es or an e and an a? Did I mean refulgent, Was refulgent a word?… Saw that, of the ten or so tabs of already opened webpages, there was one already open to wikitionary for epicanthic, which, I had already forgotten what that means.

Looking up words from Infinite Jest. Synclinal: useful. Carpopedal: nice to know, where the accent. Entrepot: ought to have known that one. Perhaps I could impress someone with the word carpopedal, perhaps I would be ashamed were it generally known that I didn’t know the meaning of the word entrepot. The person who knows what two bodies of water were connected by the Strait of Kerch ought definitely to know the meaning of the word entrepot, a person might reasonably assume, but it appeared that this person didn’t, so what was wrong with this person? (What, indeed, was wrong with this person?) What might this gap in his general knowledge say about him? Paul, had said a former colleague, a mocking Russian, of course Romanian is a latinate language. ROME-Ania. You think slavic because why? Very likely he will soon forget what bodies of water are connected by the Strait of that name, will forget the whole existence of the strait of that name, as well as, very likely, the Sea of Azov. The Taman peninsula. Already forgetting, but then, why should I know of it to remember? Is it here, do I need it? Synclinal, “same slope.” “Eyebrows had gone synclinal in puzzlement,” was Wallace’s phrase. (I’m already saying synclinial for synclinal. Already mixing things up.)

Have looked up enough and “bean counted” (Thoreau) enough and read enough, I assert, and though I haven’t looked it up well or read a fraction of what might be deemed sufficient, or read it well — though I haven’t read enough or well or remembered it, though I have indeed misremembered it, though I did indeed get wrong the first time what I subsequently misremembered, though I ought never have picked up a book, yet this is a victory, a true triumph attained, this is the time, the time to move on. “You don’t go with the army you wish you had, etc.” (D. Rumsfeld) I feel destined to use synclinal in a situation where a simpler word would have sufficed, and then pronouncing it synclinial, which the spell check, which I ought to turn off, plainly identifies, with a red line beneath it, as a misspelling. Oh, have you not heard of this great word synclinial? I’ll say, which has happened before, the sort of thing. 154 countries in Africa I’d said, I’d boasted. (There are almost exactly a hundred less than that.) Same age about as Wallace when he died. There was, interestingly, a word I encountered just today that meant inserting an extraneous syllable into a word, but I can’t recall it, and it didn’t exactly apply to my situation with “synclinial” because the situation it described did not involve a syllable being inserted accidentally or mistakenly.

That reminds me that I saw the Ancient Greek word for health today, Socrates in The Phaedo (but I’m not quite recalling it). Socrates asking Simmias or Cebes if there was such a thing as a justice or goodness or beauty by itself that you could see with the senses: could you see justice with your eyes? could you hear justice with you ears? (I’m embellishing but along these lines) could you see, with your eyes, what Health was in its essence? Could you see any idea at all with your senses?

Look up ‘gantlet’: alternate spelling of ‘gauntlet’.

Look up ‘gauntlet’: apparently the ‘gauntlet’ that means protective armor for the hand, and the ‘gauntlet’ used in the phrase ‘running the gauntlet’ are of different etymological origins.

It is the latter I’ve encountered in my newspaper article, which describes a highway with raging wildfires on either side as a gantlet.

It was the absence of a ‘u’ that caused me to look up the word — was it a misspelling or did I not know the proper spelling?

Reminded I had meant to look up 1737. That had been the total of the customer’s order the other day –for two soups, a medium hot chocolate and chocolate mousse– and kind of spontaneously the customer, a kind of older and intellectually curious person, said: now what happened in 1737?

Neither of us could answer this question offhand. I came up with something about Bach and Newton and Christopher Wren, and she said something about the Second Great Awakening. Bach was indeed alive then I now find, having died in 1750, but Newton and Christopher Wren were not: having died in 1727 and 1723 respectively. It also seems that the customer had meant the first great awakening, which had in indeed occurred in 1730’s and 40s, I discover. In 1737, I now read, Richmond Virginia was founded, Edward Gibbon was born, and three hundred thousand died in a tropical cyclone in Bengal.

(It’s been a good six months now since I last looked at this, and while I see much editing that needs to be done, more in the way of things needing to be tightened up than being entirely deleted, I am pleased to see that it more less pushes forward; but also recognize that the spirit that pushes it forward is very like to what you’ll find in Bouvard and Pecuchet — odd that the former but not the latter passes the spell check, from which I infer there must be some real thing “Bouvard” — this suburb in Western Australia perhaps — where the acquisition of information and knowledge will lead to nothing or to disaster, where knowledge is something essentially comical not essentially spiritual, the now I do this now I do that of Frank O’Hara. If you want knowledge of the existence of God, then love, says Father Zosima in Brother’s K., as I was reminded of having been pointed to some unknown person’s substack. Through love, not argument, comes a relevant knowledge. This needs to be more seriously thought upon. Currently having just finished Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, in the introduction to which I’ve just read that he thought of art as existing at the equator between one’s knowledge of self and one’s knowledge of things. Now reading Red Badge of Courage, one of those I’d neglected when I’d been assigned it but am seeing great interest in. I seem to have an adverse presentiment to most American Literature between say 1885 and The Great Gatsby, exclusive of (Hart) Crane, and there is no sense to it. I see great questions and essential situations of myself articulated here. Stephen Crane died at 29 from tuberculosis. Chekov at 44 from tuberculosis.)

Nauscopie, I recall, was a word I looked up earlier in the day, which is the alleged capacity of a person on shore to detect the approach of a sailing ship before it has crested the horizon. This unverified mythical skill comes to mind as I again contemplate my own unverified capacity to detect good and bad writing — discern one from the other — by merely looking at it: that is, not by reading or comprehending it, but just looking at the words as one might look at a drawing to discern whether it is well or poor drawn. Nauscopie of writing it occurred to me to call it: by which art the quality of the appearance of writing may be found to indicate the quality of its meaning. I was serious about this; though by ‘good and bad’ probably something like ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ is meant, I told myself, or ‘beginning and advanced student’, rather than the more or less interesting works of a professional. I probably couldn’t, for example, looking at a page of Moby Dick and a page of White Jacket and tell which was the superior novel — by looking, mind, not reading, as if the spacing of words held a clue (though perhaps I could tell the earlier from the later?). (Would it apply to languages I didn’t know? Could I tell from looking at a latin text, which I don’t understand, which was the work of Horace and which the work of a Roman teenager? Or does my special ability of logoscopie apply only to English? I wondered). This might be an interesting experiment: present test subjects with the closing arguments of legal cases (or even the majority and dissenting opinions of supreme court cases) and ask them “just by looking” to say which they think has the stronger argument, and which they thought won the argument, and which argument they thought most agreed with their own sense of justice. (1) do their glances have any predictive power? (2) supposing not, how do their glances inform their judgment? (3) supposing so, is their glancing more predictive than their reading? That is, does their glance tell them more than their reading does?

My “logoscopie” now tells me that all the writing I’m now looking at on the computer, which is my own, is bad. I don’t read it, don’t know what it says and don’t need to know. Writing so bad one doesn’t need to read it to know it (my “logoscopie.”) (Perhaps it is the writings’ want of spirit that I detect, not about the words themselves but about the force of breath behind them, about whether or not the words were actually meant.)

Looked up coprolite. (I had written somewhere that to know the meaning of a word like coprolite was a powerful ward against death — for how could one die while knowing something like that? — one merely held up this crystal as the vampire approached whereupon its aspect favorably changed, if it didn’t disappear entirely — and as fanciful as that was, I thought I’d better be certain of the definition, for I could easily envision a situation in which the vampire came up and I held up the crystal but no light burned from it because I’d forgotten or misremembered the definition.)

Looked up Laurentia. Hadn’t known this ancient continent had been named after the St. Lawrence river which was in turn named after the actual Saint who I see got in trouble with the Roman authorities of his day for replying (when they asked him to turn over the wealth of the church) that the “poor of Rome constituted its wealth, its widows and virgins its pearls and jewels,” according to wikipedia, a point of view I found refreshing, as you don’t hear anyone credibly arguing it anymore, or not very often in public, that poverty is wealth and wealth poverty. (How blithely we consign ourselves to perdition, had said Melville, to paraphrase, when he contemplated the New Testament’s camel and needle metaphor.) Maybe punk music credibly did.

Looked up nozzle. Interesting: diminutive of nose. Looked up Socket: spear head, plough share, hog snout. Looked up Samuel Coleridge (died in his early seventies.First prescribed laudanum first for chronic ill health) and Mount Abora. (I guess I didn’t realize the C.A.R bordered South Sudan, which seems very far east to be “central.”) And proper spelling of koan. (You are incorrigible, I suddenly recall my mother having said to me as a boy, — a “random thought.”) Pondered: that my blog was not a thing but an anti-thing and being used to serve the aims of Russian mobsters. Pondered: weren’t Shakespeare’s prose passages as “poetic” as his metered one? Pondered: Spinoza counsels us to try and form “clear and distinct ideas” of our passions to alleviate their influence. Did I have a ‘clear and distinct’ idea about my blog? (Also the Koan of what to do with one’s blog.)

Looked up etymology of Capitalism. My source said it dated from the French Revolution, though one could imagine it having been popularized by Marx. Looked up how many in U.S had a disability (1-in-4 said CDC — a lot). Looked up excrementitious, though mainly just to see if anyone beside Whitman had used it (To One Shortly to Die.) And want to read those closing “leaves” more closely. “Play outside a play,” seems to be what I have written in my notes, as if “I had my back to Shakespeare but think I’m facing the front [???]” What I perhaps meant was: “I am pretending, as if I were in a play, but it is real — this is my real life.” Looked up optates while listening to Chet Baker. Looked up sjw at 6:52 PM and came somewhere across an actual picture or link to a picture of not a white-tailed ptarmigan per se but a ptarmigan. “Feeding on heather bells and alpine buckwheat” was what the white-tailed ptarmigan of the poem did.

Yonaguni was westernmost isle of Japan, near Taiwan. Transnistria was contested region between Moldova and Ukraine. Ukraine was largest country by land area in Europe. I had the idea that a popular cookbook could be arranged on the basis of Aristotle’s Four Causes (on the cover a weird medieval style picture of a prone and satyr-like Aristotle, prostrate across a pentagram, with piping hot dishes balanced on each of his feet and hands): ingredient (material cause) recipe (efficient cause) presentation (formal cause) satisfaction of appetite (final cause). (Wasn’t sure whether to say Taste or Nutrition was the final cause and thus felt satisfaction of appetite embraced both. If one had an appetite for the nutritious one couldn’t be satisfied by the delicious, could one? But actually I wasn’t so sure about that — and so let’s just cancel the book).

Looked up Paul Dirac, British physicist. Remembered painful phone conversation I’d had with my elderly father about how to reset the password to his Amazon account, a near exact repetition of the previous day’s painful conversation on the same topic, which caused me to stare off and rub my chin, because in a way that’s what I’d wanted this book “book” to be, exactly such an excruciatingly laborious account. (To what good? “Montaigne by way of Beckett,” I had said, but why? Groping aimlessly through pieces of knowledge as if through physical objects and landscapes — holding up shaped woodblocks in confusion — staring idly at the under carriage of a bicycle, but in fiction — ) And remembered that opera about the telephone…

To have an interior platonic monologue don’t you need also to have an interior platonic Socrates, a first among equals among the voices of the mind, one who has already thought these issues through? (I.e., Plato’s Socratic dialogues are actually his monologues, in a certain sense, written after he’s conceived his idea, whereas our monologues represent the stage before having that crystallizing idea, the stage when our mind is a quarreling turbulent crowd of equal notions, which may never find such a one…? ) You don’t have a point.

Needing to kill a few minutes I arbitrarily pulled something from my shelves, which turned out to be Henry Miller’s book on Rimbaud, The Time of The Assassins. How this brought back to me ideas I’d entertained twenty and thirty years ago! There was no useful place in the world for the genius. The genius was too unique and inventive to be usefully employed in any bourgeois system of labor. The genius had to do the work of a dishwasher, of a stevedore, to get by, roaming the earth on an empty stomach… sort of thing.

Looked up Ca n’en finit plus (“it never ends) looked up ‘mk‘ (slang), article on involvement of lightning strikes in producing life on earth. (Lightning strikes can create phosphorous, which is vital to life, and otherwise rare on Earth) Proposition: that as Pentheus was to Dionysius you have been to Materialism. Chorus: “people don’t want to be rich, people want things that are nice, a nice middle class existence, is all people want, the case worldwide.” Pentheus: “does it make sense to entirely remodel a perfectly functional kitchen, redo the floors and the bathrooms while you’re at it? Where do all the new things come from and where do all the old things go?” Stage direction: Pentheus leaves stage to sound of hammering, drilling and the Latino station, hands to ears, comically pestered. Agave, Pentheus’ mother, enters stage shortly after, carrying his severed head in one hand and samples for the backsplash in the other. Fin.

Do you remember when you were reading Balzac (or Flaubert or Zola) in French and had to look every blessed word up? Every word up in French, every word up in Greek, every word up in Latin, every word up in Spanish, a lot in English even, (how many times have you looked up, for instance, the word stanchion?) two times, three times, wiktionary, word reference, Websters, google translate, Lidell & Scott, Cunliffe, stanchion, you learn nothing, you retain nothing, you look up stanchion again and again, stanchion in Websters, stanchion in Wikitionary, you must like just the drudgery of it, the safety of drudgery, look here and hold open two books at once why don’t you, this one opened over your knee this one opened over your chest, write it down, write it down on a card, fold and carry the card in a wallet, then you will know the true meaning of stanchion (which is a vertical pole, or framework of them, such as those you will find outside an exclusive restaurant or club, suspending a velvet rope.) What is this about?

Looked up Childeric I, Clovis I, Battle of Soissons, Kingdome of Soissons, Rump State, Allemanni, Helen Prejean, Atilla the Hun and related Battle of Catalaunian Plains (his invasion of Gaul somewhat repulsed). Looked up “blue thunder intro” (watching it and trying to think of that time when this introduction and its music aroused such a great feeling of anticipation for me — now Blue Thunder was to begin!) and related Airwolf and Jean Bruce Scott and Knight Rider. Then went back to playing Son House and looked up Battle of Jarama (Spanish Civil War) and the Cantabrian Wars (Cantabrians/ Asturians were hold-outs in the Roman conquest of the Iberian peninsula); asked myself why history “was all about war” but remember, when having first read Gravity’s Rainbow, wondering why it wasn’t more about war, — so it wasn’t “them” it was “me”, with an interest in war. Me who was “playing guns” as a kid. Gravity’s Rainbow had it that “the war” was always happening, which would be obvious if you were half-paying attention, the displays of actual violence and bombs being only the most visible cataracts of it. Can’t hide that we’re dying for the accumulation of wealth somewhere, dying for some Pharaoh’s pyramid.

Looked up Siege of Sarajevo, Selective mutism. Wikipedia:”People with selective mutism stay silent even when the consequences of their silence include shame, social ostracism, or punishment.” Don’t know if it is something real but certainly have felt myself to be paralyzed like that.) Looked up Lev Yashin, Bert Trauman. (There was only one other goal keeper besides Lev Yashin, according to Lev Yashin — Bert Trauman.) Something fascinating about ancient sports heroes. Was Theogenes the name of the athlete whose statues tipped over and fell on a scornful sports rival? Bert Traumann had been a Nazi, received the Iron Cross. (Searched for “nazi sculptor bert” but Arno Breker had been the famous anti-modernist Nazi sculptor.) What an odd time that just- after-the-war period (in which much of Gravity’s Rainbow occurs) must have been. Had customer heard name of Lev Yashin? – Wasn’t sure. – Only asked because customer had just mentioned having watched the Czechoslovakian national team play in Boston in what was that 1964, ’69? — Yes, they had had a devious strategy of mounting a vigorous forward attack then suddenly passing it back, confusing the defense, you see, for why ever would they be passing it back? then remounting the forward assault with still greater vigor which would very frequently result in success — was how he remembered it. There had been these sudden rainshowers that day in Boston in the 1960’s (to which he had come up for the weekend, tired of usual work-then-rest routine) and what one did when they came on, was stand beneath the Longfellow Bridge, then they stopped and you went out again. Best thing about that trip, he’d said, had been the U.S.S. Constitution, magnificent ship…

Looked up Eswatini, Pedestrian Call Button, Sealed Train. (The train car itself wasn’t physically sealed; it meant you didn’t have to checked through the customs of the countries it passed through.) Lenin — Lenin. Looked up sciolism, appropriate, practice of holding forth on a topic about which one has only superficial knowledge.

Raw hard hot sweet potatoes had been a good phrase [A] potassium rich potato repast to grace my palate and plate had also been good but the email as a whole had a forced uninspired feeling, so I left it as a draft then erased the draft, then looked up the etymology of ‘rehearse.’

I looked up Calanque (narrow rocky inlet) and sought out why British English speakers will use the future perfect to describe events in the past, and looked up uncaught third strike, the baseball rule, and Pegasides, the ancient Greek stream spirits, which were birthed of the hooves of Pegasus, and Battle of Jaji, which occurred toward the end of the Soviet’s war in Afghanistan with Mujahedeen.

Read an interesting article about Chinese Americans in the U.S. during the 19th century. It wasn’t that Chinese immigrants were particularly suited to become merchants and grocers — they had been farmers — but the law at the time pushed them into those occupations. (One recalled the story of Jews having become bankers in Europe since white Christians had been prevented by law from charging interest.) Why, around here, did Ethiopians drive cabs while Latinos more worked construction and SE Asians were in the convenience stores? (That was the men, while among women, Ethiopians seemed to dominate coffee shops and Latina worked in banks, and they all worked hotels.) Was it law, natural proclivity, chance? Probably law. In the case of these Chinese grocers it seems to have been specifically The Page Act of 1875, according to the Post article, though when I looked up The Page Act in wikipedia there seemed at least a layer of haze between what it said and the claims made by the Post.

Been a long time since I’d read Cannery Row but I believed it had a Chinese grocer in it. Close, shrewd, was the characterization. Reminds me I should read some of the Steinbeck I haven’t, Sweet Thursday perhaps. [I have since read Sweet Thursday, in which Lee Chong is lionized as a legendary character. A beloved member of the diverse Cannery Row community.]

Came across african american enclave of tweeters: yt , which I couldn’t figure out from context, pronouncing it ‘yit,’ of course means white. Came across a classics-minded enclave, then a humor-minded group. Olivine was a word I looked up: a very green stone or mineral that weathers easily. (Where had you come across the word “weathers” recently? Herman Melville’s historical novel Israel Potter though it’s not exactly an uncommon word.) One tries to read how the fact that olivine readily weathers makes some believe it can help extract carbon from the atmosphere, but your gaze down the page is soon impeded by an impenetrably dense thicket of equations.

Tab open to the far left is free version of Biographia Literaria, which will run you 70 dollars new in hardcopy on Amazon, as the tab beside it discloses, but I’m not sure I can read it in this format. Coleridge had made the distinction between poetic thoughts and thoughts that were merely rendered into poetry, leading me to wonder — had I ever had a “poetic thought”? (I had thoughts that were more generally like the opposite: thoughts that were acutely conscious of poetry’s absence. Abysmal jokey thoughts.)  (The tastlessness, the broadness, the anti-poetry, the anti-philosophy, the anti-scholarship, the anti-religiousness and professionalism with which I’ve been grafted, “if only the boil could only be lanced”…. Perhaps it’s a bit as if Kafka’s father had undertaken to write, I will think. As if someone totally opposed to study had studied. Why didn’t my desire and nature point the same way? Reading Flaubert, reading James, feeling like a total infintesimal. Being one.)

Read some more of “black twitter” and then something I’d written, the tedious slowness of which reminded me for the first time of the slowness I would exhibit in other work environments, too much caution and overthinking, which is fearfulness, “the boil” — too much care where it isn’t needed and too little where it really was (for example, in parsing ancient greek verbs). (Something similar: Bravado and thundering was an unlimited resource, but real courage?) Looking up obnubilate — covered or darkened as with a cloud. I had asked my Latin scholar if he could he could figure out the meaning of pavonine (which spellcheck wants to make pavoninin, a chemical used in shark repellant) and he easily could and now I will ask him obnubilate. Recap: Did I learn anything today? That there were two regions named Iberia: the well-known peninsula, where Spain and Portugal may be found, and a region in the country of Georgia, lesser known. Recap: Did I see anything out of the ordinary today? Actually yes, a gosling. Bunch of geese near the underside of the 14th street bridge complex and these two adults in particular standing by this small awkward fuzzy thing.

Looked up and listened to The Shinelle’s “Tonight’s the Night.” Looked up “colourable.” (Used to mean plausible, now more like specious.) Looked up émeute, French for “riot”. Pressed speaker icon to hear how émeute was pronounced and pressed it a second time to hear it pronounced still more slowly. Saw a spoof of Mulholland Drive, which I shared with a friend, and a cartoon representation of a Zizek lecture. Weren’t we being deceived by what is called corporate responsibility, if you buy this cup of coffee we’ll contribute this much to saving the rain forests, or what have you, the lecture asked. Didn’t corporations take with one hand what they gave with the other? Snowing but not sticking today. All at once it occurs to me I haven’t checked the time in some while and now it appears I’m running late. Looked up “smoothie” originally applied to a smooth person and is from the 1920’s. Looked up subduction zones (there had been a fascinating map in the NYT of the last billion years of plate tectonics) and asthenosphere (layer of the earth’s crust beneath the lithosphere, 80-100 km down.) Came across maps that had been drawn up in the event that Napoleon/ Hitler had successively invaded England and looked up operation Sea Lion, the Nazi plan for invading England. What were the arguments against ethnic nationalism: why not have whites, blacks, reds, blues in their own countries? “Just easier that way.” (i) The bloody history of ethnic nationalism and the holocaust (ii) the impossibility of establishing racially pure regions given technology and a globalized world / djinni already out of bottle; (iii) the impossibility of establishing ethnically pure regions given human nature: no matter how much alike people are, they’ll discover and dwell on newly discovered ethnic divisions of import (iv) the differences between cultures can create annoyance and division but also interest and strength (v) the real differences between people are more often of an economic nature… Came across tweet asking whatever happened to Queen Lear, which brought to mind that Gloucester too might not have had a wife in the play… (Was the implication that perhaps Lear’s faithless daughters were, like Edmund, illegitimate?) Looked up the interestingly named Instruction Of Any (Any was Ani, an ancient Egyptian scribe, and an “instruction” was the name for a kind of wisdom literature.) Discussed meaning of colourable, with a man, who thought it meant opposite of specious: capable of being colored, capable of being fleshed out.

Funny. I had recommended to a customer, who was looking for challenging reading, Infinite Jest, which he’d never heard of, and he actually took me up on it and was enjoying it immensely. Initially gratified that my recommendation had been pursued, I soon observed he had a much better grasp of the book than I did and ever would or could, and found myself not wanting to talk much about it, lest he realize as of course I realized already, that, while I had this enthusiasm for high and mighty things and fat tomes and the like, I had, with respect to them, no great competency, no real grasp. This is not to suggest my enthusiasm is insincere but that I tend to embrace the style of the thing rather than, often, to penetrate its gist.

Watched video of philosophy professor naming the countries of South America and realized I was due for a review on this topic: most of the countries bordered the edge of the continent: Chile, Equator, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana; then the big interior ones (Argentina, Brazil, Peru — Brazil of course has a long coast line) Paraguay and Uruguay with the latter being coastal, maybe both. Should come to thirteen. Missing one or maybe miscounting. (And of course I’ve misspelled about half of those too.) Why, I’d asked a customer, did he bother with being informed? Was it worthwhile being what we call informed? Would it bother him if, for example, he had no idea who the current U.S. President was? Yes it would bother him quite a bit to not know who the President was, he said, but he supposed each person had their own standards about the degree of ignorance they were willing to accept.

Attraction to poor grammar and unusual punctuation involves: Emily Dickinson and Thoreau’s notebooks and Melville’s sisters’ letters and the idea of writing when the moment demands rather than as a discipline and profession demand. (Does not involve: an especial enthusiasm for the work of E.E. Cummings, for instance. Experimentation.) Repulsion to polish in writing and elsewhere involves: that we live in times in which polish is almost made compulsory by technology (editing programs, music studios). Doesn’t not involve: repulsion to Flaubert. (It’s just that my mot justes were mot wrongs. It’s just that my Bouvard and Pecuchet is a diary.)

Had to think — couldn’t think; tried to “absorb this” — didn’t “absorb this”; thing to have been “absorbed” instead “ricocheted” or “bounced right off” the hardened element I might have wished had been more absorbent. . . . Eon, era, epoch, period. The hadean period, The phanerozoic eon. The Battle of Forest of Tuetenburg, A Glossary of Ballet terms. Idea that Malone Dies (Beckett) is comparable to 8 1/2 (Fellini): both are artworks about artists completely lost in their project, don’t know how it began, don’t know how to bring it to an end; in its midst, they are at a loss; do know how to move it forward, don’t know how to bring it order; Beckett from inside, Fellini from outside…? At any rate, haven’t ever thought of those artists in the same breath.

Got up from office chair, went around edge of couch, and sat in the sofa chair, my path describing a U. I picked up Coleridge, opened Coleridge, bent my head toward Coleridge. Sometimes I would notice my head rising from it and becoming unbent, but I would compel my head to be bent toward it again — toward Coleridge.

Coleridge: could I write with the masterful articulation of an adult but with the purity of observation of the child? [No.] Coleridge: and had I managed to perfectly wed my Thought with my Feeling? [No.] And was the scene I described impregnated with a certain humanely imaginative coherence? Did it seem, in other words, that beyond the mere words there was aureated a kind of sublime charm or virtue? [No.] And had the poet, most importantly, managed to limn and illumine and underscore common truths and realities, separating them out from common falsehoods and obscurities, and proving thereby, with a magical touch, the persistence of beauty within the everyday? [no, Coleridge, no — no.]

Now I noticed that someone had visited the post on my blog – it gets very few visitors – titled “It is never right to do wrong or requite wrong with wrong” — a quotation from The Crito. And I pondered or rehearsed it: It is never right to do wrong or requite wrong with wrong, which seemed refreshing and straight forward and a phrase really to make a part of oneself through repetition of the words. It is never right to do wrong.

. Looking up vacuole having used that word in an attempt to describe my evening meal of corn mush, the large bubble produced in it suggesting the heated effervescent mudpits of the American South West. Thought the word was derived from geology and indicated heating vents but was in fact derived from biology and meant the membrane of a cell. How would I have mixed that up, perhaps I had just misspelled it, but why would I have even known that word well enough to have misused it. Thought I had perhaps come across it in an An Octopus but searching the internet for the poem, and then searching the poem for the passage, I find the line I had been looking for contains no mention of hot springs, heating vents or vacuoles –“perched on chimney pots and cleavers,” was the line I’d been thinking might involve vacuoles. Cleavers. Funny how the meaning of words can, as it were, “slip locationally”, — I was just looking up the etymology for chimney which appears to have initially meant the room where a fire was kept before it “slipped locationally” to mean what we now know it to mean, the architectural feature of a room that vents smoke; something similar with the word to browse which meant “to bud” then came to mean “to feed on buds”; something similar with word “hearse” which, a bit more complicated, had I think first indicated the rake one used on a gravesite before it became the vehicle or conveyance that carried corpses to graves. Vacuole had probably entered my consciousness most recently through reading of how everyday soap was effective at killing the corona virus: soap somehow separated or otherwise made to rupture its outer membrane or vacuole. (As I think of it, I’m not sure it is true to say there are “effervescent mudpits” in the Southwestern states; I had more been thinking of Wyoming.)

Looked up cretaceous period (period?) having thought again the previous night what a shame it was I didn’t know basic things like what sort of sand, if it was sand, the sidewalk’s cement was constituted of, and what sort of sedimentary rock that sediment in the curbs might eventually become, (was there such a thing as projective or predictive geology, where people predicted what sort of rocks might arise, the rocks of the future? Was geological sci-fi a thing? Or are the rocks of the future the rocks of the past? Because there was no beginning and no end to rocks really… the idea that what we now know as human civilization will be appreciated a few hundred million years hence, as a kind or strata of rock. That’s human they will say as one would say that’s quartz.) and what was the age of the rock beneath this paved lane, and weren’t all rocks the same age as other rocks and as old as they earth…? (Of course, everything is as old as the universe, from a certain point of view, but when and how did certain rocks come to have the attributes they now have, is the proper question? What attributes did they have before and which will they come to have later?) Remembering that Wizard of Earthsea Idea of what a writer was, as one who knew the names of things. As Joyce described water’s passage from the reservoir to the tap to know how this patch of concrete came to be poured here, etc. These really possible wizards and magi of the world of today who identify exactly that tree, that bird, that color. Could see in this wikipedia page I’m gazing at not just the text it presented but the code that organized and transmitted it. Similarly in their perceptions: they didn’t see the mere tree but, through knowledge, could see as well the code that presented it in this precise format, this day. (If the tree is analogous to a wikipedia article, then all the information pertaining to the tree I would liken to the code that creates the article while all the code written to read the page –the browser, e.g.– I would liken to the day in time the tree has been encountered.)

Identifications qua lasers and forcefields

It is by naming or identifying things that we bring them into our intimate existence: I never quite saw that the lid of that kettle was held in place by black electrical tape until I have said it — seeing it, noticing it, isn’t strong enough a laser to burn away our dulling premonitions and assumptions of what constitutes our ordinariness. The opposite is also true: only by identifying things with a name can we defend ourselves from unconsciously incorporating them into ourselves, sloth, gluttony, prejudice, stupidity, the like, against which things words operate as forcefields, briefly illumining them before burning them up — that is why we will call ourselves stupid when will do something of that stripe — to burn it off, keep it away. A principle is a kind of forcefield and name (“It is never right to do wrong….“). Of course — the words we know aren’t always enough or rehearsed enough. Our forcefield has not been brought up to strength.

Interesting discovery as I was tossing out old writing today, the original poem (one of my “Hart Crane imitations”) I wrote from which I drew the lyrics for Like a Wire. Or maybe it was not the original poem (it has choruses, which I would not put in a poem, and is a handwritten clean copy, which is strange) but a sort of mean between that poem and what eventually became the (much shorter) song lyrics.

(I had a very short song writing career, most of the fruits of which can only be heard by standing very close to me at random times.  This song Our Love is Like a Wire was one of my first mature efforts and made it onto record.)

This is perhaps what is generally referred to as navel gazing, but still, nothing matters, and it is interesting to reflect upon how you turn a piece of writing from something that doesn’t work into something that does; the difference between all you want to say and the little you in fact can; the difference between one of my Hart Crane imitations and Like a Wire.

Basically the process is — you’ve written a lot yet there’s nothing interesting in what you’ve written except for these words and that line —  so you cut out everything except those working elements, unite them, add nothing else, say it like you mean it, and that’s the song. Chief thing is — that you do whatever works and avoid whatever doesn’t.

Touting my own euphonium here for a moment, I will say that I’m Small was an example of a song I wrote that really didn’t know what it was about until its last stanza, but I bluffed my way through the bad lyrics in the hope that the musical elements would carry the day, which I feel that they did.(Bad lyrics of course are different from lyrics that make no sense: bad lyrics are obscure or make bad sense. Obscurity is different from making no sense: obscurity is pretending to make a kind of sense.)

The lyrics in the first half are really searching to bring meaning to the idea of being small — was this about arrested development, sexual organ self deprecation jokiness, “childhood”…?– but gets around to making a strong statement:  a person whose life is mainly behind him reflects on when his life had mainly not begun.

I really like the intimacy of this recording, I will further tout — done on 16 track I didn’t know how to use, and with the assistance of Eleanor “Underscore” Reed’s sensitive euphonium accompaniment. Final Verse:

And all these days that I recall
They are shadows on the wall
Dusty ruins on the web
Soon to break and lose their thread
They are the tokens of the dead
And the sins that won’t have fled
They are the days that can’t be lived
They have fallen through the sieve
Once for all
But I was small.

Having been reminded that Wilde died in his forties, I recalled Kafka had died in his forties (thirties), and Thoreau had died in his forties, and Whitman had lived a long life, and Hemingway had died in his early sixties, and Faulkner in his sixties, and Woolf in her forties or fifties, and de Maupassant in his forties, and I “simply could not imagine another forty years of not being Thoreau,” was how I absurdly put it … and Jane Austen in her forties, and Flaubert almost sixty… “the cog of My Life having failed to meet the cog or gear of Life in General,” was how I put it, (Hart Crane I believe in his thirties, Stephen Crane is late twenties, Proust and Joyce in their fifties) “the gear of writing having similarly failed to meet The Writing Cog, –” “gear not touching gear nor sprocket chain so that everything moved yet nothing happened,” — and could one possibly envision another forty years of it?” (Certainly one could and it would be fine. But truly “will the cog not meet the sprog” before I totter into the nursing home? Will I truly not have a thing to make me proud, so to speak?) I hate that I need that but apparently I do require some talisman or avatar of self worth. (“Will the cog not meet the sprog” — would be a good refrain for an anthem.)

Why the desire to write a book? It feels more virtuous than simply to “leave something behind you” or Faulkner’s “kilroy was here.” Proust was right that it was to make material and solid the moments of our lives which, no matter how many photographs we may take, passes us by as an apparently unseizable ether. Menelaus, seizing Proteus, is the author trying to crystallize something of his vanishing life, is thought. “Now one might well question the necessity of that,” is thought, “for maybe that, too, is ‘Kilroy was here,’ but it would be better or easier to do that in light of having written one’s book.” (Alternate idea or complimentary idea to Proust’s was — “to forge in the smithy of my soul…” that we might find an enduring morality here in serious encounter with our own experience — scientists who dismembered no animal or vegetableand disturbed no rock and required but the simplest tools. Also Settembrini’s: that the author, the humanist, is the spokesman for his historical time: the one who has passed all that has ever happened through the filter of himself and of what’s happening now and sets it down in something stronger and vaster than stone.)

Idea. That knowledge on the internet is all “lateral” and no amount of reading it will result in depth, but any amount of habitually reading it will result in considerable breadth.(Corollary: books are naturally creators or enablers of depth and not breadth. With a book, a person is stranded on a topic, while the internet is always offering detours and escapes.) (Counterargument: the opposite of the internet isn’t a book but a teacher, a school, where there is a an authority over you and other students along with you… The internet, as well as the library, is for autodidacts and most of us don’t know how to be autodidacts.) Idea that “at the computer one thinks computer things without realizing it.” In the church one thinks church things, and in the grocery one thinks grocery things, and so forth. The difference at the computer is you don’t realize you’re doing it: you feel you are just thinking. (This is the opposite of activities that really cause you to think of things utterly unrelated to it, like walking.)

Idea that in literature you strive not for an ideal world, but one in which our real selves without surfaces encounter each other. A world in which history and evolution are banned from personal relationships.

It doesn’t seem that light, if a wave, can be propagated without a medium through which to propagate, therefore the aether; it doesn’t seem possible that a person could exist without having a life, yet — (I hereby abandon this thought.)

Looked up Clark Gabel: last time I’d looked up Clark Gabel there was a story of him having killed a person while drunk driving, which I see no mention of now. From Ohio. (And Mogambo: yes, I’d seen Mogambo.) Looked up “molly-guard” — any relationship between that word and the word “molly measure”? (No: both were named after Mollies but they were different Mollies. The former was the child of an IBM researcher who kept disturbing sensitive equipment, the latter a government employee during the Johnson Administration. Might have been coined in the same era though.) Looked at my internet history from the previous day: it had taken me longer than I’d thought to figure out roughly how many excess deaths there had been in the United States since April of 2020; and had come across a community of single men who were distressed and even a little sad in the comments about the possibilities of manhood today. (He was a man, was what Gabel’s costars would say about him, according to wikipedia. “The manliest man I’ve ever known. He had balls.” Many marriages and affairs, served in the war, apparently Hitler had put a bounty on him.) Writing, I had wanted to use the word propound; it had certainly been some while since I had used it, but I had only just used the word purport and one could of course not purport to propound, which was nonsense. So I didn’t use the word propound though I had it in mind now to use it. (Looked up propound: which was “to put forward or propose” while to expound was more to explain or discuss.) Had randomly opened Gravity’s Rainbow to the song The Penis He Thought Was His Own and fell asleep to the first few pages of Ulysses — Dedalus had the Jesuit in him, according to Buck Mulligan, but “injected the wrong way.” Looked up Alaska Days with John Muir. Looked up Majuro, Banu, Knesset….

Way that this could end: it never ends. Like a Kafka parable, the first step of an infinite journey is itself infinite. As I breathe my last, the palace guard will close the shop door, then will appear the bulldozers. (This shop had been opened only for me.)

Way that this could end: it never ends. Once the store ends some new version of it starts — gradually the outer reality conforming to my own interior pattern — unless I can find something new in myself.

What would the Book of Job say to Portnoy’s Complaint?

Looked up Sexuality in Ancient Rome (which article makes the sex of that time seem notably unfraught.) Surprised to see feature in local online publication of rug shop near where I work — “woe, I actually know those people.” Now I’m searching obituaries — I was told today a special customer had passed away — which was a shock and is still a shock, though he’d been sick — and find no evidence of this online. ( To consider — what is the special quality, if any, of local content appearing on a global forum? Could it be claimed the internet has a distorting effect upon local content?)

Portnoy’s complaint, if I recall, was why couldn’t he, Portnoy, who had been such a good and dutiful and civic person, experience pleasure without guilt, why couldn’t he be bad? (Are you recalling this correctly?) Not only were bad people bad, the narrator (Portnoy) laments, but they enjoyed the fruits of their badness without feeling bad about it. So why couldn’t he, who was good, be free of conscientiousness once and a while, and be, without misgiving, a little bad? (I think Kierkegaard, Socrates, would say to Portnoy’s Complaint doing good is its own reward, doing bad its own punishment.) What would the Book of Job say to Portnoy (I’m not sure yet — yet one would feel like one of Job’s friends to say his complaint was entirely invalid. One would first need to be as good as Portnoy himself was before passing judgment.) To consider: Is Portnoy’s complaint comparable to Job’s? (Job, who doesn’t deserve suffering, suffers; Portnoy, who deserves enjoyment, isn’t permitted to enjoy.)

Read that Joyce was “complicated but superficial” while DH Lawrence was “simple but profound” — what does this mean. Looked up canular, a noun, meaning “hoax,” sometimes there were two n’s. Read of Samuel Beckett’s quietism (looked up quietism.) Could I lay serious claim to having sought — to having sought out personal understanding, or a more generally applicable kind of truth — wasn’t I just filling time, etc. “Categories, aha, categories!”: failure to think in terms of categories is “the undoubted root of my failure to think in general.” I look at this and think this. I don’t look at this and see both it and its category. … Clicking, typing, reading, listening. Looking up ao dai (traditional Vietnamese garment now mainly worn by women) I suddenly come upon an amusing Fellini quotation — you must live spherically, Fellini has apparently said. Which sounds like good advice and I shall attempt it when I get up…. it means in all directions at once, the translated quotation goes on to say. Joyce apparently liked maps as a youth: his Dublin, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpa, Balzac’s Paris, that drive to make an imaginary world, one’s own Napoleonic empire. Meanwhile, one is so “adult” and so “serious” and so “literary” that one’s creative attempts resemble a child’s: one is forty and fifty and sixty years old and writing and drawing and speaking “like a kid.” One has been an “adult” — unspherical – and is consequently incapable of producing mature artworks, or even a serious business letter. Looked up Amanda Gorman, Kay Ryan. Finished Finnigans Wake, ran eleven miles, found a driver’s license on the trail, picked it up, took it home, put it in an envelope with the address found on the license and mailed it, Couple weeks later got a note back with a gift card — and sat at the computer and looked up smol (internet spelling of small — small and cute.) Looked up Jacobin and Jacobite (always getting these confused) and morgue (means disdain, arrogance, coldness, in French), and Liberville, capital of Gabon, which was once part of French Equatorial Africa. Brewing and shipbuilding industry there. Picture of its coast with worn colonial stonework near the sea and shore with green vine growths tumbling down to it. One wanted to write actually but it seemed “as far from one as the shores of Liberville.” I spend about twenty seconds then looking at an image of the moon Miranda, another twenty reading that poem Michelangelo made while he was painting the Sistine Chapel, another twenty forging comparisons that don’t work (was the computer a kind of Sistine ceiling to oneself, to which one was pressed, etc) Moon of Uranus, daughter of Prospero. Looking up Athenian Democracy and the “Kyklos” and “Mixed Government” it seemed like The Enlightenment had essentially changed the character of Democracy since Ancient days but had it? (The Republic’s portrait of the citizen of democracy continues to ring true, though perhaps that’s because it’s more generally a portrait of humanity. Citizens of all governments will have those attributes.)

“To be Chateaubriand or nothing” (Victor Hugo) but it is actually hard to be absolutely nothing other than that thing one most admires or aspires to be. (And yet to be not a father, nor a professional, nor a wealthy person, nor a man about town, nor a master of a trade, nor otherwise important, is thought by many to be essentially absolutely nothing — so perhaps one had succeeded after all in being “Cheateaubriand or nothing.”) I’m nothing — no one.

Solomon’s Wish

Looked up Marianne Moore — there was something about her poems’ endnotes that suggested to me a certain way of thinking and I wanted to know where it came from but I felt like I had already read the wikipedia biography of her multiple times and what I meant by “a certain way of thinking” was becoming increasingly vague. Maybe it had to do with that physicist’s remark I had read about earlier that he had made to a fellow physicist who wrote poetry how he couldn’t understand why he would write poetry since the work of the physicist was to make complicated things simple while the work of the poet was to make simple things complicated because often Moore’s endnotes didn’t elucidate an element of the text so much as lend to it another layer of texture. The poem I had read that morning, for example, a very short one yet by no means transparent in its meaning, was given a new dimension once you read the endnotes about it. I had been moved to look up I Kings 3:9 which one of the endnotes said was what the line about Solomon’s Wish had been about. (“Solomon’s wish” had been to have an understanding heart that could judge between good and bad, according to the passage in Kings.) The poem then jumps from that wish to the apparently different but really I suppose the same wish to be a dragon which is “a symbol of the power of heaven” and she is thinking, one learns in the endnote, not of the creatures of medieval European fantasy, which was what immediately came to my own mind, an anti-Christ in opposition to the Christian knight, but of the dragons of the orient, which have an entirely different character, not at all suggesting a malevolent serpent of the world but a mighty spirit of the air and sky, and so in reading the endnotes an unexpected complexity emerges; one finds these dramatically different faith traditions — of the ancient Hebrews and ancient Chinese — have been juxtaposed, and one gives body and answer to the question and soul of the other, so to speak. The understanding heart, we’re told, is a dragon — and not necessarily a very threatening one — it could be as small as a silk worm or invisible. Its power consisted of being a symbol — a symbol of the power of heaven.

(What will people say of me when I’m dead? Sam Malone. A parted nimbus with light rays and the chortling heads of Flaubert and my father: Sam Malone.) Nekton (swimming) was the opposite of Plankton (drifting) while Neuston referred to waterbugs. (Plankton are considered “uncountable” and a mass noun, like information, which is why you don’t have plankta or planktons, same as why you don’t have informations). (Interesting, plankton comes from πλάζω “to wander, drift” while planet comes from πλανάω “to wander, stray” — could there be a connection?) (Wiktionary’s already thought of it, — and while it does seem likely, it says, no formal link has yet been discovered.)

Looked up Samara, looked up catkin, looked up “language of Jesus”. (Probably knew Aramaic with some Greek and Hebrew.) Had been interested to learn that Mohamad was illiterate. I believe we’re told about Socrates that he read others’ philosophical treatises (in Protagoras?). We’re told that Jesus amazed scholars with his knowledge of the scriptures but I’m not sure we’re explicitly told or led to deduce anywhere that he could actually read. Homer could have been, I guess almost definitely was, illiterate. Confucius (lived around time of Socrates) I’d imagine literate. Interesting to think of non-divinely inspired poet composing and recalling a work of the length of the Qur’ an, The Iliad. Reverted to the tab that had the County Gov’t staff report on the proposed amendments to the site plan for the coffee shop. The situation there now was that another company, reportedly Chinese-owned, had purchased the building and had revamped the plan to develop the site which the shop was on. The county needed to approve this for the construction to move forward, which it did.

Looked up “alight”, original sense to make light, a wagon was made less heavy when one alighted from it. Passage from the Symposium: Love, chancing on a person of a hard disposition, leaves them, but a person of soft disposition it dwells in, makes its home in. Looked up ASL sign for ‘boring.’ Looked up Corn Dolly, folk lore, pagan practice. The fruitless search of people into the pre-industrial. Reminded I’d had an idea of how I might assuage “my concerns about death”: I felt so much pleasure giving gifts, I’d been thinking, that perhaps if I could die with the knowledge of having given a great gift, or if the death itself was such a gift, then that would be enough to “carry me through.” (But that pleasure of giving was all only ego wasn’t it? Look how generous I am, look how rich I am, look how much I have to give, which only showed attachment to life…. Anyway-what sort of gift did you have in mind?) Looked up macerate. Customer had directed me to 1970’s era ecological study on the Kamodo dragon, or Ora, where it was learned that the scent of macerating stomachs of wild hogs were successful at attracting the giant lizards. Macerate means to soften. (To “give a great gift” would be something like discovering a vaccine for small pox for example. However, science could be double-edged in our hands; today’s cure, tomorrow’s superbug inducer, today’s combustion engine, tomorrow’s climate change, etc.) (You’re thinking of it the wrong way. A great gift had to be the sort of gift that any person could give. You didn’t have to be a unique person to give a great gift… Consider, too, the gift of not being something: of not being an idiot, of not being a curse and annoyance; of not writing  — if it was not in us to produce a great gift, it was in us, perhaps, to show restraint and not be a great curse, and perhaps that would be our great solace on dying: “I did it — I … wasn’t … that way!” –i.e. that way I really wanted to be, but was stupid and boring. Or maybe it was what Pope Francis had tweeted: that all of us had ourselves to give, and that represented a kind of upper and lower bound or integral to our gift — truly being ourselves.) Proverbs: “the just die with hope.”

Wrote four emails, looked up hypotaxis, as well as No Gun Ri and  Dream of The Red Chamber. Article: a positive conception of how A.I. would affect human labor is that humans would essentially be relegated to the role of determining which tasks were to be performed without having actually to perform any of those tasks. Computer, render my writing into a coherent whole which is not needlessly unattractive or obscure. Also, said the article, even if A.I. did do everything better than us, implying there would be no jobs for humans left, the best allocation of resources must probably result in leaving humans to perform a lot of occupations. (A.I. would have better things to do than the liliputian tasks of which we were capable.)

Question — on the assumption A.I. could write anything I tell it to, would I know what to tell it to do? Computer: increase polysyndeton in this passage by 50 percent. Increase anacoluthon by 80 percent…. Abort, abort!

 what if every word a person was to write and every thought a person was to think could be predicted by a computer, maybe from birth. Would writing mean anything then? Computer, write what I’ll have written — then spend my life reading it? (In this world, the question would not be, did you write your book, but did you read your book.) On the other hand again, perhaps that’s what reading has always been about: reading yourself, discovering ideas you thought were original to yourself have in fact been bandied about for millennia — that you have probably not even thought yet all the thoughts you’ve inherited.

Having a sense of purpose. A customer had asked if I would be his POA and executor of his estate. Two or three years later he had a debilitating stroke; two or three months after that he died. In those couple months I felt an extraordinary sense of purpose and direction and was busier than I had ever been. Visiting the hospital, calling the financial adviser, calling the insurance, mailing and copying documents, meeting at the bank, picking up records, family, emergency rooms, consulting with doctors, what could be done about the aphasia, what could be done about the nausea, “you’re the only one who can understand what I’m saying,” he would say, “no: it’s getting better,” I would say. One of the funny stories that came out of it was that, waiting for him in the second of the assisted living facilities we’d placed him in, I’d stretched out on the bed, waiting for him to return from his breakfast — tired, and I would need to be at work soon — when a nurse came in and told me it was time for my insulin shot. This recently happened again, visiting my father in a facility. This is how old I look for my age in my prime.

Read Alyosha The Pot (Tolstoy), about the short life of a simple worker, and felt I had some of that same spirit in myself but muddled and impure. Looked up Alyosha The Pot, having wondered if Dostoyevsky had used this as the basis for his own Alyosha, but if anything it was the other way, this story having been written late and published posthumously, wikipedia said. Invoking the name of ‘holy fool’ in its description of the character (which recalled Nietzsche’s attacks on the ‘holy fool’, which was part of his feud with Wagner) the article indicates he was likely based on a mentally impaired servant of the Tolstoys. (“We all have Alyosha and Fyodor and Ivan in us — one degree or another,” is thought: “duty, intellect, appetite.” And, I suppose, our Smerdyakovs, I might have added.)

“One degree or other”: If there had been more physical work and less television in my youth… is thought. Then I was thinking in an academic vein about footnotes — academic, but it may importantly pertain to the structure of this work. Envision each page here as a footnote but you don’t know what it is a footnote to, that information having been lost — the central text has been lost, the central text may not exist, the central text may not be existible or may be “me” and not a literal text — which would be dissatisfying or maybe not as it’s all the same water or “case” being sloshed to different sides of the filthy yellow mop bucket […] (There is an Over Voice to my Interior Alyosha, which at once makes me more authoritative, and worse — which is Ivan. One can neither go forward into independence nor backward into obedience. One had never really been a child: there had been this adult despondency, depression, all the way through, since adolescence, an oppressive intimation of sex —of Mitya) Next envision the footnotes as opened windows in your browser, each page a window. This perhaps too gimmicky to pursue, what am I thinking? Sort of narrative that can only be read on an electronic device perhaps, as it is impossible to read in sequence, the thing being not meant sequentially. Each time you appear at the site it randomly presents a new window — the book is opened at random. For example:

THE KARATE KID

[The Karate Kid is an interesting movie. The Kid, the hero, cannot see the girl’s desire for him because in her too he sees the strong monster who desires the girl. The girl’s strong desire for the Kid cannot overcome the Kid’s strong fear of the monster who guards and defends her.]  [In real life, there isn’t any monster and there isn’t any girl, there is just the indelible imprint of those two entities grafted and irremovable from ourselves, fear and desire, the three of us metamorphosed into rocks unrecognizable as human, a geochemist required to unbake and distinguish the original elements of this pied hunk of stone and crystal, which from your point of view is experienced as an omnipresent gas, a vague feeling of never quite being yourself, of being free to move but trapped, always winding up at the same place in the maze, though once in a while there do seem these moments of escape: neither gas nor stone nor monster nor girl but ones own substance and self and free. Free to fight monsters, free to love girls.] But was fear and desire the problem or was that the bad movie version of the problem? It was this fossilized fear and desire that had somehow become one with oneself… Somehow turned you to rock.

Perhaps this spectation the computer offers is the reward and consolation for those who have fled the monster and relinqished the girl… One has seen and desired the girl. One has found her to be the possession of the monster. One knows one cannot defeat the monster, one knows one cannot get around the monster, and because the monster is so much stronger and faster and more cunning than you, it occurs to you he’s simply better than you; maybe in fact it’s you who are the monster and he who is the knight, you are even made to think (though that role is in fact filled by the girl’s loving father, the aged knight.) “Whatever — doesn’t matter,” you think “I’ll simply leave this girl and this monster and find another girl without a monster” but you also come across the same monster with any given girl. Maybe the monster will not yet visibly be there, not with this particular girl, but you know this is only a matter of time, and his or her potential presence is as terrible as the actual presence. So one cannot only not reach that girl, one can reach no girl; and so one thinks well, is there something more important than girls and power and sensual pleasure and all those obviously secular things, is there god and community and charity and satisfaction in just being above ground, and so can’t I just go away and not have to do with monsters and girls? But all that too lies beyond the monsters, for by ‘girl’ we’ve meant to indicate just those things, the symbol of any kind of desired thing, any kind of realized success, and by monster we’ve meant something that makes such a success impossible, and so in fleeing the monster and the girl and in fleeing all monsters and girls one discovers the same: one can live for a time, one can eat and drink and carry on and be bad and go to jail or be good and win the praise of the mayor himself but ultimately you only demonstrate to yourself — and this is what the story of Jonah is to me about, and why it abides with me as a kind of favorite — there are somethings from which one cannot runaway. The girl will be there, unwon, the monster will be there, unbeaten, so long as one fails to be a hero, and that is the creeping displeasure of your life.