“We should ask for the grace to weep for this world, which does not recognize the path to peace. To weep for those who live for war and have the cynicism to deny it. God weeps; Jesus weeps.” […]
“Young people, like well-planted trees, can be firmly rooted in the soil of history,” he said, “and growing heavenward in one another’s company, can daily turn the polluted air of hatred into the oxygen of fraternity.”
Diaries, 1922. “… Fretful that my life till now has been merely marking time, has progressed at most in the sense that decay progresses in a rotten tooth. I have not shown the faintest firmness of resolve in the conduct of my life. It was as if I, like everyone else, had been given a point from which to prolong the radius of a circle, and had then, like everyone else, to describe my perfect circle round this point. Instead, I was forever starting my radius only constantly to be forced at once to break it off. (Examples: piano, violin, languages, Germanics, anti-Zionism, Zionism, Hebrew, gardening, carpentering, writing, marriage attempts, an apartment of my own.) The centre of my imaginary circle bristles with the beginnings of radii, there is no room left for a new attempt; no room means old age and weak nerves, and never to make another attempt means the end. If I sometimes prolonged the radius a little farther than usual, in the case of my law studies, say, or engagements, everything was made worse rather than better because of this little extra distance.”
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Does anyone here know what a “”hawthorn peggle” is? (haw) (etym.)
Another division’s recycling pile. Satan’s Frozen Tears in a pile. Dropped calls are in a pile. Woman on the call-in show that morning: why
Are there thoughts that are devils and thoughts that are angels? If devils and angels are thoughts, and only thoughts, does that make them more or less real, as devils and angels? Are there thoughts that are miracles? Thoughts that are muscles? Perception is thought. Myself is thought. (Myself is chemical combinations, a sunday school of such combinations.) Recycling is good: Satan’s tears returned to Satan’s tear ducts”. Factories produce like vast calving icebergs our possessions. “Dirty Car”: a twitter handle. Cephalopod & Cephalopod (name of a distinguished law practice) Noah & Nicolas Christian and and rather than crossing toward it he enters it.
Only after having entered it, visually checking to his right. Centered manhole cover, five feet eight inches from eyehole, announces its point of manufacture as nation of India: manhole cover akilter too (as I have a Picasso Eye): has been given same painted double lines of the street, but turned clockwise ten degrees since it was painted. if artists painted the street (if the streets were painted to maximize beauty rather than safety.) Flaubert envisioned government by artists. (How would a government operate that try and achieved the beautifulness of the state?) At what point will dreams peer out of my perception, it is asked, when will I live in a dream? Not in this… this perception. In a barrel tub. (As I try to live in a dream, that woman from the call-in show appears, tells it to get back in its dream hole. Back!)
Experience of blindness the previous night as I reached for a water glass, which was before the dream of the five turtles (the parking lot having been inundated and transposed to the area beneath my window, three swimming turtles and two large tortoises appeared, bumping about the cement embankments. The two large ones came to rest side by side in a parking space, while the smaller ones managed to find a nearby rock to be sunned upon) having risen from bed.
It was not an excess of darkness but of light: the glass I reached for had a blinding sun behind it: “This is how it will be.” Maybe with hearing, maybe with sight. Perhaps I look to my right at a big tree: no cars are coming from the direction of the big tree, or they are yet at a distance. What a video game I am in, perception is a video game it is a salad bowl, big wooden half orb over my face, often oregano scented, in which, with the tongs of my brains’ ends, I hunt for tomato and cheese parts. Video game in which I hunt for what is not the game, in which one strives to forget too the part about “winning”, accumulating points. Here I go on describing the bowl, which I’ve learned ought not to be washed out: simply wipe out your wooden salad bowl with a cloth, so as to season it over time. What I see is the visual embodiment of what I see with, according to one set of ideas.
Nothing could season this street, this perfectly rational baked-in sameness. How could you season something with its lid on? Bolted on? How could you season this Eden of absence of sewage, this dragon hoard of absence of badness? (Here comes one of the dragons now, walking a cute-seeming non-barking sub-dragon, both perfectly nice persons of their type) at the street’s other side where the opposing condo division’s driveway, the sidewalk, and street all intersect. That is an important place which my foot finds all the time and which “has it all” (the perfect foot destination: “Bahamas Crook” I should call it when I make my map: Aerie de Metarsie, where feet will come to brood and nest and stain the sheer face of rock. The other named location is the Saddle Rock)–it has: my foot, the road, the driveway, the corner, the side walk, the median between the sidewalk and road; at no point do all these elements so effortlessly come together, mingle with such unseamed completeness as at this point. Like the north star, this point “has it all.”
I recognize a bumpersticker. To left, another division’s recycling pile, this one at the foot of a tree — flat bottomed boxes and bags tipping off, resting uneasily on, its grey dry looking roots.
Vergil, Fourth Eclogue:
Sicelides musae, paulo maiora canamus!/ non omnis arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae;/ si canimus silvus, silvae sint consule dignae.
Prose translation, Moses Hadas and Thomas Suits:
Muses of Sicily, let us sing matters somewhat more momentous. Not everyone takes pleasure in groves and lowly tamarisks. If it is forests we sing, let the forests be worthy of a consul.
Lady Bellaston. Jones having given away a sum he had just borrowed to a family in need. Jones having given away a sum he had just been lent by a woman who’d wished to lay claim to his affection. The couple Jones had helped being a couple who had married for love, who were now in poverty. The husband of the couple he had helped turning out to be the “highwayman” he had previously helped.
Desenganarse(maybe) “don’t fool yourself.” The feeling of having one’s book, paper and pen around one, amphitheater of book-paper-pen around one; and of having one’s reading from the book and of having one’s taking up of the pen and of having one’s writing with the pen and having one’s writing with one’s pen on the paper (the “seismograph” creeping up); and of one’s having it probably in mind what to write again even, yet of not doing it or not quite doing so —
Feeling of one not quite or of not quite entirely feeling one is “studying”, for instance, to call it that “studying” (though we ought to check the etymology there). And it is not “studying” that is felt to be important or the feeling of it that is important or that the feeling of doing it is, though it may be all or one of those things that is important, but that actually doing what one is doing is important, is an idea that will recur to one; that what they call concentration is an idea that is said to be important, will recur to one also; and as dubious as the benefits of concentration will seem the demerits of distraction are really quite vivid to one, one thinks, (distraction seems closer to gambling than concentration, and only via this Gambling of Distraction might there arise some truly unprecedented “good luck” to reward ones attention, each glance away from ones book like a lottery ticket purchase of a sort, is an idea that recurs, –that must be the logic behind distraction, the idea that one might get lucky, the idea one might have “good instincts.”)
yet one is not quite doing it, one has not yet quite even engaged with the fact that one is not yet even remotely aware of not doing it, but is only about to be about to realize this; one is only on the verge of realizing that one will never get farther than the verge of realizing that one is incapable of concentrating, maybe now, maybe ever, and yet still one has to sit with one’s pen and one’s paper and book — one still has to be watched by the amphitheater. (The audience awaits but what is the action, there is none.)
Piketty. global population growth has spiked, global per capital output has spiked — these are not necessarily related, but it essentially seems as though we can expect a return to the historical norm of slow growth… Inflation largely a post WWI phenomenon.
Actors that seem to be Christians (that is, actors who are in fact portraying Christians) walking out to what we imagine are lions (we hear from the location they walk toward the recorded roar of lions, a sound that has even more of a “recorded feeling” attached to it than do the pictorial elements of the film, as if they had played a recording on the set rather than overdubbing it, in effect doubling the “recorded feeling”) in the Roman Coliseum in the movie Sign of The Cross: the first thing that occurs to me is that Christ would have avoided that situation (imagining the situation as real), I suppose meaning by this that Christ himself was not a “martyr”; the second thing that occurs to me is that Christ had in fact directed himself into the heart of exactly such a situation, I suppose meaning by this execution; the third thing that occurs to me is that, “forget walking to one’s death, one can’t even expose oneself emotionally”: Not walking to ones death, but walking to ones ego’s death, is what one can’t do. “In which coliseum does ones ego get fed to the lions?” is thought and “one is afraid of those lions” is thought.
“Could one get beyond the ego’s death one could probably get beyond or face the real and total kind (of death),” is thought, which is “the idea of having two bodies.” Afraid for the death of the exterior body. Instead of soul and body, body and body; or body and anti-body; or body and self-delusion, is thought. (Or adult body with a childish self-regard.) Maybe there’s a soul, too, but I can’t even think of that, or even of my body, because I’m thinking of this second one, this body which on the one hand is a sort of exo-shell and is, on the other hand, pretty much all that I think, and yet not essentially, maybe not remotely, what I “really am” — an enveloping delusion — as if my skin tried to think of my brain. “Can’t think of three if I can’t think of two or two if I can’t think of one,” thinks ones ego which is the first in thought but the last in essence or importance. Ego: the first in mind and last in thought which weeps not at feeling pain but that someone might afflict it with pain, weeps at thought and intention. (An adverse intention is cause for weeping, and maybe even he would not weep at actual pain, since the next layer down can be surprisingly tough and unfeeling.) “The ego is so divorced from the body it doesn’t even know there’s actual suffering, there is only the psychological kind,” is thought. (“So aware of shame it is unaware of life,” might be added.)
Walking meditation. To adopt the practices of the Far East but not as an American would, but as an African would. “To adopt the practices of the Far East as an African would adopt them, should be the goal.” Africa a filtration device, a cultural purifier, it is conceived, through which cultures get rid of just enough of themselves to see other cultures. Africa, the purifying lens. Africa, the technology of minds. Inner cities may also be such a device, perhaps even stronger, but looking at something else. What would we find if we looked closer and closer at the inner cities? Who would we find? India, Bangladesh… (Can’t properly perform the walking mediation til you learn what Africa and the inner cities have to teach… “All the sorts of people there are are the stages one must pass through to ‘achieve oneself’,” it is conceived.)
A sort of plan takes hold: first become African, then become Afro-Asian, then become Asian American, then become oneself. A sort of idea, which is unrelated, comes forth: that History is a line upon a sphere. The line is trying to get to the center of the sphere (which may also be the center of the earth, which may also be the center of ourselves, or of Time) but cannot ever penetrate it, even a little. And yet, in the effort to penetrate it, as the felt-tip marker of ourselves, so to speak, is pressed down on the sphere, the sphere slips — slips beneath the ever frustrated force of the felt-tip marker of history — and thus is caused its various squiggles, regressive, progressive and looping.
“Just as my steps,” I think, “exist beneath these thoughts, so does the core of history exist beneath its globular surface. My thoughts will never reach my feet.” (Thinking, though, that maybe my breath at least can reach my feet, as in a way it does without me trying, so I try and focus on my breathing. “Maybe if I know I have lungs I will know I also have feet.”) maybe I will make my feet and my mind reach through knowing them both. Maybe that will be the end of history.
*
Penultimate Idea — Evolution of intelligence has been uneven, and the smartest cave creature was cleverer than myself, as the clever of today are beyond myself.
Final idea: walking across this quite normal two lane bridge over the eight or ten lane interstate and realizing one is unqualified to make any part of this bridge, to assume any role in its construction; and one could perhaps never, despite all ones efforts, attain to any such qualification.
People do these things and are expert at such things, one realizes, while you — what do you know? (nothing) What useful thing like building a bridge or a part of it do you know how to do? (nothing) You are not even a very good unskilled worker (perhaps we should pay people not to work? pay them to get out of the way of the work?) And so the overpass seems quite the monument, quite the Pyramid of Cheops, this night.
And down below, the white pickup with the flashing and rotating orange lights inspecting an element of the new lane they’re fashioning: whoever is in that truck is a lot more than you, you realize; that person has an actual role in this world and is part of it. That person knows something, and is doing something, he is doing it correctly, this night.
not quite sure what makes me say this but wonder if Ives’s life might provide some unique insight into that question, eternal for me, of why modernist works are so difficult.
One factor Swafford brings up — the arts are viewed as unmasculine so making them difficult makes them seem tough.
My assumption tends to be that the arts and Yankee capitalism work somewhat at cross-purposes (if they are not out and out hostile to each other along the lines of what you find in Gaddis’s J R); so it is utterly remarkable to me, and something I need to ponder seriously on, that Charles Ives not only succeeded in becoming rich selling Life Insurance, but was a true believer that Life Insurance was something essentially good for humanity. Here is something Charles Ives really thought, according to Jan Swafford (pp.217):
There was not a service I could render to my fellow man that was more important than the business of life insurance.
The paragraph preceding the one in which that sentence is found gives a bit more detail:
Time and again Ives preaches his essential points. Life insurance is a natural step in social evolution, a humanistic and scientific response to fundamental needs. Buying insurance has become a basic responsibility of the head of a family. Teaching men, most of them innately good and reasonable, to fulfill that responsibility is a matter of presenting them with a few easily comprehensible facts. Spreading that responsibility in society is an indispensable part of progress toward a better and more prosperous community. Insurance “is an integral part of social evolution, an organism that has not been thrown on society, but which society has evolved.” In another paper:”Without going far in the field of metaphysics, an insurance idealist might hold that life insurance is altruism scientifically organized, or perhaps commercialized, accepting the term as more of a paradox than a contradiction. A practical insurance man will say that life insurance has a certain influence on the moral and economic development of a country.” If life insurance were abolished “Mankind in general would be thrown backward into a state of mind that would not be far from … the middle ages. Civilization … would have to adjust itself to many medieval standards, for Life Insurances has become not only a vital part of civilization but a civilizer itself.
I suppose what I find interesting here is that the artist himself seems so well-aligned with American commerce, while his art remains so counter to it — that his insurance products should be directed toward the ‘average man’ while his music was seemingly not. Certainly, Ives’s music does not present the listener with “a few easily comprehnsible facts.”
(Occurs to me Kafka also worked in Insurance, and at around the same time, though in that case he was working for a state-run program, which, if I recall, insured workers against workplace accidents.)
I thought that, the better to kick off my new life of virtue, I’d better write a hymn to virtue itself. Why, you might ask, to virtue itself? Why not simply write a hymn to virtue? The answer is essentially (I can’t go into all the ins and outs just now) that it just sounds tougher. Virtue, sure — but why not virtue itself — The whole deal!
“Virtue is being wise,” I begin, “virtue is loving being wise. Like some people love a particular person, like another person will fall into raptures when they hear a certain song, that’s how the virtuous person feels as he’s treading the paths of pure wisdom! You can imagine how dejected this lover feels when he’s being false and foolish!”
You will tell me that is not a bad start for a hymn, with which I concur completely, with one caveate: that this hymn, I don’t imagine, is the sort you’ll find on your popular music stations of today, howsoever wonderful it may be in all other imaginable respects. For one thing, it doesn’t have a rocking beat (except for the rocking beat of pure goodness!); for another thing it doesn’t come with a flashy video (unless you consider Reality a good enough video for you!); nor is there a faddish dance associated with this song (saving those dance steps required for the performance of good and noble deeds!). But enough of this. Now we want to hear more of the hymn.
“Virtue is moderation! Virtue is courage! Virtue is gazing at a point you can’t fully make out and yet must!!” (I admit that with this last remark I embarked on some original research, giving vent to an idea I’ve had recently that is actually pretty weird: that when I try and gaze upward to a point actually located behind my eyes and within my head I’m striving to attain to virtue, albeit in a curious way.) “Virtue is a sense of urgency! Virtue is a sense of stillness! An urgency to do and not to do! Why should any time be wasted? Why should any of life be spared from being bent upon life’s purpose? Always always always virtue!”
It may pain the reader-enthusiast of my work to know I was half-tempted not to commit to paper this song. This from the fear, the nagging fear I have had, that I might render ridiculous, through my Hymn, the very thing I mean so earnestly to exalt by it. But the stakes, in this case, were too exceedingly high; for just as a lullaby may bring many a child to sleep, I had hopes –and I think quite reasonably– that with this, my own hymn, I would bring many a person, and myself too, to virtue. But enough of this nonsense. Let us hear more of the song we love:
“Virtue: not being a phony. Virtue: remaining oneself under pressure, under scrutiny (for what have we to fear?) Virtue: which begins with self-respect. Always always self-respect! always always virtue!”
τῶν ἀπαγχομένων καὶ καταλυομένων, μηδέπω δὲ τεθνηκότων, οὐκ ἀναφέρουσιν, οἷσιν ἂν ἀφρὸς ᾖ περὶ τὸ στόμα.
Kafka, Diaries, 1921. “Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate — he has little success in this — but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others; after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor. This assumes that he does not need both hands, or more hands than he has, in his struggle against despair.”
Kafka, Diaries, 1921. ” [Moses] is on the track of Canaan all his life; it is incredible that he should see the land only when on the verge of death. They dying vision of it can only be intended to illustrate how incomplete a moment is human life, incomplete because a life like this could last forever and still be nothing but a moment. Moses failed to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life.”
Diaries, 1922: “The gesture of rejection with which I was forever met did not mean: ‘I do not love you,’ but: ‘You cannot love me, much as you would like; you are unhappily in love with your love for me, but your love for me is not in love with you.’ It is consequently incorrect to say that I have known the words, ‘I love you’; I have known only the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my ‘I love you’, that is all that I have known, nothing more.”
“Your love for me is not in love with you” is so much nicer than my silly paraphrase in the title….Also: “the expectant stillness that should have been broken by my ‘I love you’.”
Proust: “On a trop dormi, on n’est plus. Le réveil est à peine senti mécaniquement, et sans conscience, comme peut l’être dans un tuyau la fermeture d’un robinet. Une vie plus inanimée que celle de la méduse succède, où l’on croirait aussi bien qu’on est tiré du fond des mers ou revenu du bagne, si seulement l’on pouvait penser quelque chose.”
Scott Moncrieff: “We have slept too long, we no longer exist. Our waking is barely felt, mechanically and without consciousness, as a water pipe might feel the turning off of a tap. A life more inanimate than that of the jellyfish follows, in which we could equally well believe that we had been drawn up from the depths of the sea or released from prison, were we but capable of thinking anything at all.”
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