WLK: Study of Sounds

Three types of “squares”: no aggregate, light grey; white concrete with sandy pebble aggregate; dark concrete with gravel aggregate. It is observed there are more pebbles in the pebble filled aggregate than there is gravel in the etc.

From the “top” it goes: three of the first; two of the third; five of the first [no]: ten of the second; three of the third and two of the third, eleven of the third; Lamp Post 5,6 & 7 of 9. First lamp post at the top of the hill on the far side; second on the near, third on the far, so forth — but 8 & 9 are both on the near side. Across from “LP-9” on the far side is a telephone pole, its top ensconced in dark tree branches, where at times of year huge flocks of crows will settle and threateningly caw.

Sometimes when you count sidewalk grooves you can get messed up because you tend to count steps rather than grooves and each step or each other step and each step or other step will not pass over, in every case, a groove. So you step and you think that’s one (but I have not passed over a groove), then in your next step you pass over a groove and think two or you think hold it that is one but now you’ve thought to yourself two— and the irregularity of the step-to-groove ratio only increases as you move– but I actually tried to count this and note the variations of aggregate of the forty some “squares” between Post 6 & Post 7 (these are on the so–called “far side”, on which I walk):

–3 no aggregate
–4 pebble aggregate
–9 gravel aggregate
–2 pebble aggregate
–3 gravel aggregate
–7 pebble aggregate
–9 gravel aggregate
–2 pebble aggregate
–7 pebble aggregate
-11 gravel aggregate

(Another level of complexity appears. I knew there to have been some forty “squares” between the two posts but had difficulty distinguishing the breakdown of aggregates –how many squares of each aggregate type there were– now I look at my records, which I must be reading wrong, and which I don’t know how to read right, and find I have accounted for many more than forty squares. Therefore, etc., and I don’t know)

Idea occurs of being hardly separable from the air I pass through, a cold front of it, slightly hardened instance of nothing, it will seem, I have now made a note of this, the mass containing many odd shaped clouds, (the “nose” shaped cloud, the “mustache” shaped cloud, the knee with a painful area on it shaped cloud, lightning and cracking upon that point) bringing rain and lower temperatures to northern Virginia. concrete pads, tiny bouquets propped from its cracks, he will not joke in pretense of self-awareness about coldness, he adjures self.

(Before I further elaborated on the idea of myself or my person as being a cold front, the “cloud” of my fingers cradled that of my chin, and I puzzled over if I was not more balloon-like than cloud-like, either a blimp or one with a cartoonal animal shape for parades, with many tethers that were all the time dropping off, popping out, every year another set of the tethers popping off, every year another set of holes causing me to resemble more and more that atmosphere which, for the time, I yet floated higher and higher up in, feeling less and less that I was anything at all, thinking “I’m not here, I’m not here,” feeling vanishing)

“A cold front”, I wrote, “with feet thunderclaps cyclonic storm cells of socks…” (some of my writing didn’t make any sense.) I wrote: “widening tornadoes stretching up,. native american storm god tearing up dust,…. stirring unseen hills with my trouser-cuffs. My shirt front a curtain of rain, a curtain of rain drawn across a strange room: the window, the room, of a bare chest. The chest is a window on the body, and yet, it will be observed, one cannot look through the unopened, unadulterated chest. No to open the chest you must fuss about with the buckle […]

I am not that which steps I wrote, I am the real being for whom the stepping being is a virtual man. The real walker makes the movements of the walking person but doesn’t move; the body, the virtual man, only follows after and apes what I cannot call a person in the mind. I am not that which writes: I pick up the stone the real being has cast and wonder what’s cast the stone. I stoop and think: maybe what I write is just from the brain of my second body?) There is: (i) the self I am when I write or perform well or am well (ii) the virtual man (which I call the body, and is a projection of that self) and (iii) the second body, the arch enemy, which views imagined things as real ones, in my current construct of the world.

Lamp Posts More Natural than Trees

The substrate of words, I wrote, streets that are paved in vocabulary (“plunged into it, marinated. That is the reason for the strong smell of everything here being well marinated, turned over the spit of being recalled, of being well learned about and repeatedly identified). What is Brisket? I must have looked at that tree a thousand times yet a dendrologist are arborist knows it better than myself (and so with a person knows people this person I’ve inhabited these years).

As you get out into the country it is not so much that things are without names as that the country is without namers, I wrote. In the city, and in the areas around the city, every square piece of paper is to be given a name, each square, each segment, a name like this one. The city starts with a name to be thinged and the country with a thing to be named. But there is no country: as fake as this tree is are the crops in the soil of the so-called country. To stop thinking of this.

Fake as this tree in the mulch is that plant in their mind. Why is technology more authentic than nature? Why is this lamp post more genuine than this degenerate mulch enmeshed tree, this ornamental bush? Because it is itself, unadulterate, pure, he writes. That tree is a “tree” but that lamp post is un post de luz. (To stop thinking of this.)

The Idea of The Afterlife is Inspiring

To live again, for there to be a second life, now there is thought that could get one up in the morning; there is a thought that could wake me up when I heard and believed it; that is a thought — a mere idea– that is a real and material idea in one’s life. Like a drill sergeant, like a drug. Really invigorates, instantly dissipates, everything else, every weight.

(This, that we call life, is merely the spring board to life. This, that we call life, is merely the running start to life. This, our so-called life, is just the preparation for it, after which comes the actual life. How would you be in your new life? What does how-you-would-be-later require of you right now?)

And if one can live again when dead surely one can live again while living… If one might live a second time then mightn’t one live for a first time? (Let the dead bury the dead.) Was there still hope for this life? (Stop your housework and listen to your heart.) Be calm. Maybe the after life turned out to be here? –after this stupid thing he’d known so far known as his life. (One must be reborn. How?) After stupid life, intelligent life, genuine being.

Q(In what book was it written: “you need only a day to experience all happiness.” A: Same book that makes me look at this leaf here.)

–A stride which is like a bridge that has been built for the second it stands and then demolished beneath the stride that follows it for the second of its standing (the next stride itself a bridge)

–A walk which is a great knot of such over-and-underpasses — it is a great immobile structure of concrete crotches through which passes Traffic Time

–The stride has been tackled, it has been “clipped” by the opposing tight end of the succeeding stride; its numbers and jersey smother the jersey; the team of the right and team of the left…. Right ham and left ham (and one’s thoughts like this: one ham lapping over another, coving and being covered)

–A pile of strides on the feet soon accumulates, of strides that have fallen (strides layered upon the shoe soles like sandwich meats) (the walker is a delicatessen with a lunch crowd beneath his feet, the walker is in a “rush”) (the distance traversed is the sportscaster speaking of the jersey piles: the metric system is the sportscaster) (all the sandwich meats are chasing after the sandwich, his shoes make the fallen steps, it is the meat slicer of steps.)

–One travels over the bridge one’s stride has made; the sheer cliff face of one’s clothes one looks down; the ledges, the cradled nooks and aeries and areas for coins and pencils; this is all suggestive of King Kong; the distant stress release grooves in the ribbons of concrete that are the rivers that traverse the remote valley floor of the isolated island one ever remains in — that one ever remains the king of. One is the king above one’s shirt and pants. Praised by the shoes and pocket contents, one is assuredly de jeffe of Skull Island, the King.

Post de luz. How the lamp post takes on more reality in another language. As if the ordinary must pass through the foreign to be seen.

Una Acera. I walk on the sidewalk. Un Ardillo en la — sur la — sur l’herbe verte. If I ever manage to take myself seriously, I know, it will be in another language. (If this amateur become professional, if this comedian become nobleperson, if this single person should learn intimacy ever. If this married person should.) Une maison con trois fernetres, avec quatre ventannas. (but I can’t speak another language). (If I were to ever learn another language it must be by immersion into a negative charge.) (“I’m too old for it to matter what happens to me, unless there is eternity”?)

More real to me: why would this squirrel, this light, be more real to me in Spanish? I see almost a kind of flower around it. Squirrel actually a Greek word. Skulla doesn’t not mean ‘skull’ in Greek.

Conrad, then. Could Conrad have become a novelist of such great stature in Polish? I often think that if one were to write or speak a true word, or live a real life, then it must be (without being exotic) non-native, (without being exotic), — but I have no capacity for languages. English is “overlubricated” (one knows how to say nothing in it, one has become so trivial in the language one knows) womblike and the rest over-frictive as it were: terrible choking death rattle is heard as I begin to speak “in un autre” tongue.

(Reason for that: self-conciousness, stagefright, the excessive fear of pretending, simple want of basic brass. Perhaps the squirrel, in another language, exists outside the zone of my self-consciousness. In that flower obtains a world outside of myself. I fancy Shakespeare, albeit also not known for foreign language skills, lived constantly in such a world.)

At what point do you look at the traffic signal; when you see it what does it say; by what sign does it say it, and once you have seen this sign, how have you responded to it, how have you chosen to respond as you did

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stick, hole, imprint in the concrete of a bike tire, 5 dried leaves, couple more dried leaves to the side of them, smaller, muddy and creased leaves; grass well-hedged on the sides; “eructations” of soil; shorn delicate grass leaves line the walk here; old dry black flattened pine cone here, a small hole, a round small stone,

The glint from the car window calls for my attention . the woman’s figure and the toss of her head calls for my attention . the momentary but surprising irritation in my hip calls for my attention . . . but what is there not calling for my attention? That is what needs my attention

thinking of that small hole

Cars in the lot on the leftside are: perpendicular to the path of the walkway.

And cars on the street beside the grassy sign-studded median are: parked parallel to the path of the walkway, noses facing me.

And between the walkway and the cars on the right side are: condo signs and landscaped trees tucked in the fragrant thatch of mulch

[and…?]

–and the interval between the parking signs is as even as the interval between the trees, such that one can almost take measurements by them,

[and…?]

–and the radius of the circle of the mulch is equal to one third the length of a parking spot strip, I believe, with the cone described by the ring of the mulch and the crown of the tree existing mentally, and with what volume relative to my volume, and with what leaf content relative to my thought content, and the grass surrounding them, and so on and so on, and the mulch and the mulch of myself and the signs and the signs of myself and the grass being almost as level and uniform as paint in that spot while in that one you see evidence of excessive moisture, perhaps, so perhaps you have some guy responsible for maintaining this who keeps looking at the moss and thinking of the rain we’ve had and the moisture

And beyond the parked perpendicular cars to the left there are: more condos like those you have passed, the area locally known for the labyrinthine similitude of its lay out; although, having been made at a time when total similitude in the housing stock had as yet been imperfectly arrived at, it doesn’t seem totally homogeneous to the trained eye. Major builders prior to WW2 did not make more than 5 homes a year, I have read. The comfortable yet homogeneous housing of one’s own soul will seem built up behind one’s eyes to meet it. (“He who has made the outside has made the inside” seems yet applicable to the person who now walks through it) Nothing’s obviously bad, much is patently good, and if there is a sense of being in a headstock or “cangue”, it does not seem altogether an unenviable position.

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enfrentamientos armados —

. . .and that stretch goes on a long way before bending sympathetically with that off-ramp beyond the trees.

“We bend along with the visible road”, I wrote, but the road itself bends in concert with, obedient to, not features of geography but to some network of unseen lines –electrical, cloacal, legal] such a network undergirds this writing too, the biography that supports the literary, the biological that supports the biographical, the economical that supports the biological etc] concert of horn and step, concert of the hard stem of the grass in my hands] concert of abstract geometry and real lines, as conducted by paint ; for as wires conduct electricity, visibility conducts and begets geometry? (visible lines conduct geometric ones I perhaps mean . . ?) “the curveship”] that wends] terah & Haran “geometry is the electricity of the visible” (electricity the “reverse of prayer”?) how much time between one sentence and another, one word and another, “wends from the county road we’d only thought we’d left”

Valerie suddenly remembered and to think I might be remembered by another as I myself remember others. Valerie. (No one is named Valerie.) To have done that to Valerie and to countless others probably: be in her memory. Eternal return (in others’ memories). “Sorry to many but perhaps like Esau they would kiss Jacob’s neck.” I hope, but on the basis of little, to send gifts before me, to have done something for the world, so that my imagined neck is kissed by the ones who might recall. I plead with my neck to bend and for their lips to kiss. Or does no one look out these wide banks of physical windows, which do not hold the past no, but do not destroy it either. (Stop thinking of this.)

Cars about what you would expect in number. Squirrels about what you would expect in number, color and shape. (Have learned they listen to bird calls.) “The squirrels, which scurry, and are scurrilous, have shadow tails; and have learned the language of birdsong.” Frequent moving remodeling construction; perpetual landscaping; perpetual dog walking, gas blown mowers’ sounds (never any objection to this dragon hoard of absence of malnutrition, to this dragon hoard of the absence of the escapable obviously negative, to this dragon hoard of organization, to this dragon of how do I get a job, find a place or role in this world economy) perpetual baby carrier joggers acts of maintenance never see a black person, asian person / see latino and white person laborers/ see black mail people, UPS people. “Her personal history did not greatly dis-resemble this neighborhood with respect to its racial makeup.” as SW Asian family lives about a mile ahead. Car types, people types, car races, movie genetics, generic drugs, idiomatic philosophies, years Fifteen years, forty five years Ten years. Segregation of years. (“The generation not to be named gave the generations names.” The lie of there being generations) Segregation of Present from Past, past kept in the balcony, Miscegenation of 1975 through 1838. The Philosopher Emmanuel Kant is best known for writing what philosophical treatise? (no one knows the answer to this) Am passed by a Nissan sentry.

Then out of the general “highway hum” there arises a high and then a low pitched sound, then a sound a pitch higher than the high one and then one lower than the low one and then two just lower than the high tone and one just lower than the preceding two pitches; then what’s obviously a motorcycle; then what’s probably a box truck rattling as it crosses an uneven pavement patch; then more of the general hum (“whirr” “whush”) of the lanes below. The experience of a person alone above heavy traffic: what is a person’s claim to being relative to the claim of all that traffic? Chainlink fence and light posts, bird that’s made its home in the one with the casing broken off.

‘than’ was once ‘then’ as I read in the KJV

Two cars travel parallel with an empty lane between them — not just parallel but even; and not just even and parallel, but proceeding in the same direction and at what appears to be the same uniform rate; and with a uniformity of motion also which suggests the uniformity of the road and that of the bright yellow lines they drive between. Both these parallel cars seem, moreover, perfectly centered in their lanes, and so suggest an imaginary, perfectly centered, dividing line in the empty lane between them.

Leah was the daughter of Laban is thought (and all the deceit to be found in Genesis. How many cases, to name a class of deceit in it, in which people imagine they’re sleeping with someone entirely different. Another class: Abraham/ Pharo, Abraham/ Abimelch, the serpent.)

Now there appears a third car traveling in that lane, along that line between them, and faster than they are, gaining on them, and perhaps approaching the possibility of passing them; the trivial idea of it occurs, the expectation, that one car might pass another; a car which strikes me somehow as a dotted center yellow line between two solid ones, of which there aren’t any instances on this road, at this time, no dotted lines (though this will change in coming months, with the construction), as the three pass below where I am, and disappear beneath the overpass.

(“If the straight lines represent constant and uniform motion, then the dashed ones stand for acceleration and deceleration,” must have been what I meant.)

three or four cars, five cars, in three lanes in a staggered formation; a second group, gaining on this first group: green, brown, brown … how will these groups combine and which cars among them will go ahead; these pass beneath the bridge and now another formation or wave with slightly different components of color and shape and number and make, assumes their spot — breaking off from the group it falls behind, a commercial truck with ladders rattles among this new group. pickup truck with flapping tarps and stacked paint buckets catches my eye as I pass over, cutting a transverse across their commute.

Aggregate and Concrete

Woman picking up object from the ground with her right hand, when it would have more easily been done with her left, which was, however, in her pocket; the action revealing between her shirt bottom and pants top, a very white band of skin, almost as if it were that band that held her two halves together, the binding or tape.

a blemishless reflective red sign with white lettering (STOP) before background of two dark conifers by a sidewalk corner with a fire-hydrant

grey aggregate with grey concrete; dark grey aggregate with light grey concrete (rough black marks of old gum); sandy colored concrete with variously colored pebble aggregate; sandy colored concrete without aggregate with a sizeable nick in it; grey concrete without visible aggregate with graffiti etched into it (a single name, “Juan”) and with the spray paint of the utility company starting here, a blue circle and dash

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Amazing and instructive: that all ones work on a blog is the equal of Dickinson’s work in a trunk. That only its essence could ever help a poem. O’Hara too in a drawer. Pessoa.

Paragraph by paragraph, often indeed fairly petty and unartistic in its difference, the grass blades the person indigenous to now, but nothing else, will find here, for example, are too well combed, they are over-combed;

EQUALITY> Feeling, perhaps, if these homes were made of dried mud and thatch rather than (as these to my right) brick and slate, they would suggest more of Equality than of Sameness, and be good. Maybe if we made the homes ourselves, mowed the grass ourselves, therein would consist the equality, and the difference also, maybe thereby would be dispersed this sense that we are in a feedback loop. Maybe if we turned the machines off. Maybe that is the root cause of this feeling of sameness, so often felt, and felt now, as I look at the license plate. Maybe the machines are the reason. Maybe the machines are the cause of our sameness without equality. Maybe they don’t need to spring alive to destroy us. Maybe simply our using them destroys us.

…And there’s nothing at all wrong with being destroyed or with being in what I am calling a feedback loop necessarily, but that there remains this idea that one’s actual life, that actual living and actual feeling alive, lies somewhere outside of the loop — seems to; and that there is actual living and actually life, it really does exist — somewhere — you don’t have to do this– something actual about life that you haven’t yet been doing.

EQUALITY> I could be walking this same region of suburb /// this sense of it not really being myself who experiences this– myself indeed maybe being the one who is a Ray to obliterate, diffuse, reality before it reaches myself, the Ray whose job is to keep from being diffused itself — maybe that ray is part of a headset worn by the Real Myself, who is hibernating now or comatose — maybe it is mere selfishness for one of the relatively privileged of the earth to consider his ‘real self’ — what of the real people who have not been so privileged, if that is the word, had you thought of that?– so what is to be done but to proceed robotically (which was what was already being done) toward ourselves, toward our destiny (when we are ruled over by our Robot Masters we will find that after all there has been no change: we have ever been ruled over by our robot selves, we will find, we have been ruled by the robotic about us of which the actual robots will be a mere incarnation or objectification, A.I the very pinnacle of what we have ever known as Habit — that to become liberated from the robots we must actually go to war with ourselves — .]

His chest was behind his shirt (that hadn’t been the case earlier when, for example, the shirt was slung over his chair.)

“The chest was as unthought of behind the shirt as the heart was unthought of behind the chest.” True. Yet the heart was, in a way, more noticeable than the chest, like something heavy in the breast pocket of the shirt that he wore [on his chest].

Like you’re working with a hammer out in the yard and you have no convenient place to rest or hang it, and so you put it in your breast pocket, [Right] which only barely serves the purpose however: the head of the hammer not really fitting in the pocket of the shirt and its long handle levering it out; such was the feeling of his heart, which had begun suddenly and threateningly to pound, and not from mere exertion. [Very threatening and sudden, his heart.]

[episode seems to have passed] paint and shadows of a telephone wire (the shadow of someone’s long distance phone conversation) (shadow of the broadcast signal of someone opening the door of their refrigerator) sun surrounding the light that is to shine out of someone’s refrigerator. the light that is cast in the rubber. the light that is made into a fossil (into a thing on the door of the refrigerator.) Something laid down on the road like the road itself was laid down (a shadow of a cable is the fossil of an electric light)

ligatures, paint, shadow, bones, Humanity, the insulated light of one’s bones, the refrigerator of oneself, the mayonnaise of self on the door of one’s body, body on the asphalt as a shadow, one’s own shadow next to that of Humanity’s (the Shadow of Humanity being that of a single long wire) the wires of the telephone company and the spray paint of the utility company upon the asphalt your shadow now falls over and over which you now step

Two fighter jets overhead: the clouds too low and thick to see through are completely incapable of muffling, in the slightest way, their sound. (A loudness that dispels utterly any myth of apparent substance to the thick clouds.)

Sky overcast, the air clammy such that, were one to enter a supermarket’s parking garage, one would be insensible of any atmospheric change.

The military jet in the sky: huge sound of the aircraft tugging behind it the distant toy.

Women and Leashes:

–Woman wielding the dog leash as if she tried to hit a small point with a long pole.

— woman (as if trying to make an awkward shot with a pool cue) as if flying a kite, as if at a station of the Universal Gym, withdrew her dog from the range of [].

–The woman, as if kneading and stretching dough for baguette, restrains her dog from [].

–The leash a cord to the lawnmower, or thread from the needlepoint

— The woman, as if making a catch: the leash is the trajectory of the thing she catches, made visible, and her mitt is the handle of the leash.

“As the comic book superhero, Spiderman, cast webs from the spinarets at his wrist, so did the old woman, but in reverse –“

Portraits and faces:

–young woman whose adult face seemed to protrude or peek from her youthful face,

–tough professional face, stern official’s face, that peered from behind a friendly person’s features,

–person who reflected their young self in one profile and their older self in another

–The hand and head (adjunctory to the leash and phone) seem to inhabit a plane to the left and forward of the one that she actually walks in.

–the nape of the mother’s neck is level with the backsides of her arms (as she pushes the basinett or crib).

–“As the woman pushes the stroller up the back of her arms are level with the nape of her neck, with the occiput of her skull.”

–they say that muscles are formed by the tearing and wounding of muscles (so did this person’s beard seem)

–“this persons beard seemed to have formed from the ripping and tearing of previous beards”

–the woman clenched her arms, bent her knees, shivered, looked close into the face of the parking meter, and turned away.

–“the memory of a face is comparable to the x-ray of a face.”

— love as an idea of the perfection of the species (perfect person)

First letters of a stop sign visible to the right of the light pole. Now the whole of the stop sign is visible so that one may read what it says. Now the light pole looks to be farther to my right than it had been. Now I can’t see the light pole at all. Now I’m nearer to the tree.

That map of Barcelona I saw today on the computer — how large and involved was the map– how great seemed the city it delineated (mapped)– how far that city seems from the one that I now walk in, (which itself seems big and involved)– how much larger it is than here, than this county, which itself seems large (huge)– an apartment building seems huge– to think of all that happens and is thought of in just one apartment building– in one apartment– in just one person, –which can seem a lot– and of how one hardly even thinks of Barcelona. Of the map of Barcelona. How many people represented by that building and how many buildings represented by that map. So many living human beings.

to here

Jogger rubs wrist on white tee-shirt (“the white t-shirt of a jogger is wrist-rubbed“): around the right side of a rib cage he moves. His shirt moves (flutters) to and away from his skin. His arm moves (forward and back) repeatedly they pass his sides. He Looks at his wrist. He’s running but still needs to do something with himself. So he looks at his wrist like this then he rubs it against his stomach or his side as if there were something on it, maybe there is. Maybe some bit of sweat hit a hair just so. Some population of the flora of bacteria on his arm at that particular time decisively accumulated at that place in particular where now he must look, as if there were something there he could see, (a miniature pile had been made or a miniature building demolished maybe) something there he may have to rub. (We’re not what we think: we’re so many slivers between each other, masses of things that are hardly ourselves, but with the sense of an attainable freedom.) Perhaps he isn’t going fast enough as his head passes beside and below the leafy branch; he hasn’t tested or pushed himself sufficiently, this is the reason he is distracted from his activity to the extent that he must look at and rub his wrist. Or he is bored: he has no headphones. If there are no headphones, there’s nothing. So he must be seen running as well as be running and so he self-consciously rubs at his wrist, where there is not even, however, an itch.

aside

Latino on knees in mulch beneath tree, the runner has passed. Maybe one no longer feels the longing one once did on seeing music videos. And maybe this is because of something tedious in oneself, because of some hulking empty seriousness of aloneness or oldness that has interposed itself between you and the youthful person one once imagined oneself to be, but mainly hadn’t ever been … music videospopular cculture.

aside

Looking up at a branch (but as though up a chimney, with head turned), up a trunk rather but as thin as a branch, landscaper with clippers. To think of a tree as the flou of a chimney, as a chimney. (To think of the clippers as the flame of the chimney) to think of the earth as the flame that makes the smoke of the trees rise from the chimney. To think of the leaves as the escaping ash and soot of the fire of the earth. To think of this man’s actual job versus this man’s actual husbandry (what it would be.) To think of this man’s husbandry as being the soul of the tree. A portly man now holds a great string of keys white bearded red shirted heavyweight approaches red stopped vehicle with jangling string of keys walks in front of me on way to his car. Vegetation from the highway’s margins are pushing through the links of the bending fence.

car SIGN
Linden Tree

Around there I see that the mulch almost has disintegrated, more a greyish dirt around the tree roots at this time. Almost like there is only one remaining greyish chip of it around the landscaped but untended tree.

Several sorts of “darkness” visible: darkness of the shadow of myself; darkness of the parking lot’s asphalt beneath my shadow; darkness of the asphalt struck by the sun without my shadow on it; the darkness of the calking or sealant with which they have covered the cracks in the asphalt; the three different shades of the sealant, some of it hit by the sun; the waving shadow of the tree branch beside the sunlight on the walk; the black distant road, seen between cars and bushes, has also a different hue than this one.

Don’t know what it is that made me reach for my nose but discover it is so –that I have reached again for my nose– not like a person brings a hand to his nose but as one brings a thing that is there to a thing that is near– which I know by touch and by sight– a nose, nose that I do not smell –it’s inner and outer have no sense at all of each other– the smell of the hand does never meet the touch of it– held in the crook of the left hand between its thumb and first finger.

…………..world on fire
…………..cat walks
………….. mower, chiropractors
…………..“”lawn-coli” (soda name?)
………….. mass halos — gas engines

how is it you can see anything beyond a shadow… why doesn’t the light “get stuck” as it tries to pass through the shadow to you — why do you suppose that shadows should be like curtains, should be utter black holes and dark spaces — looking now at the onramp beyond the wood of the road margin. (Lucretius on that.) The yellow lines broken up…. why aren’t dark areas impassable to images (how does light pass through the dark?) Air is Windows Shadows is Curtains Images wade through shadows as through swampy bogs. so you see you’re misunderstanding something basic (is darkness the absence of light? Doesn’t it denote what light doesn’t pass through?) Lucretius on that.

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.

“TREE“

Do writers know techniques for the preservation of experiences like archeologists know techniques for the preservation of relics? (Ought they establish a grid pattern, as it were, over each experience? Best practices?)

TREE

Real weather, owing to technological advancements, seeming more ‘man made’, seeming like ‘movie weather’, more dramatic and violent than the uncharged whether of former days; while, movie weather, also because of technological advancements, has been made to seem more natural or realistic. No more people throwing buckets of water from off-camera.

TREE

Techninques for the Preservation of Experiences

(1) establishing the base unit of experience as The Moment
(2) being able to quarry off moments from each other and
(2b.) to experience and transcribe a moment as if it were the last, or only one. (This that one now experiences, is not to be followed by forty years of other experiences; it is the last experience.) Maybe the last moment of the whole species is what’s needed? if the last thing Homo Sapiens saw was that back of the Stop Sign at 31st and Abingdon.
(3) i.e., I am tucking my hands into the pockets of my green trousers on exiting the bathroom. If it were at that time that the heart attack would come, or the brain randomly burst in an explosion of blood, a red lettuce, I would probably have appreciated all the nuances of that experience of exiting the bathroom much better; as I would locked in that moment which normally I pass through. (Returning to (1) and the idea of a quarry. Is that what’s needed to get at experience, a quarry, a deep quarry?) (Now I’m typing out a row of 9s as I try to scratch some dried spaghetti sauce from off the 9.)

STONE PINEAPPLES

—Another idea: “Technology in the arts makes exact replications of nature, only not; the hand makes inexact replications of nature, only so.”

(That is: technological advancement in the arts has made representation both more true and less authentic. Somehow a naive sketch of a thing more authentic than a professional photograph of a thing.)

–Schopenhauer-like idea of the after life: after life is disorganized matter, if you consider the universe disorganized, while life is an organizing spirit.

Q: what is literary carbon

Excellent question I should probably note down. (What’s literary is so incosequential I guess, there probably isn’t anything very much like literary carbon.)

Having come upon an old paycheck stub for paper in short order, the search for a writing tool, through backpacks many pocket, through the knotted mass of clothes and shoes in the backpack’s primary core, proved more involved. But here, too, I was successful having eventually found a pencil, with a tip, of about an inch’s length in the back pocket of my second pair of short

Using my opened left for a writing surface: Now I’m in the painted “penalty area” enclosing the tip of the parabola of grass between the entries to the parking lots of the pre-school and firehouse respectively.

Sonya from War and Peace — am about to hit that portion in the book where she’s called a “sterile flower,’ so often remembered. ‘Sterile’: that word had come up in a Post article I’d just read. FDA appalled by conditions of CDC labs. If not a government lab they’d have been shut down, etc. falling short of guidelines for sterility. That combination of apparently unrelated texts (a classic of literature, a daily newspaper) about apparently unrelated things (a virtuous person who could however not be loved, and inadequate safety protocols in government run scientific facilities) , these unrelated things joined by a word, caused me to stop and ponder where I was: in what spot did the confluence of these ideas of sterility occur?

* * *

Were I to back up a bit and look to my right, I would see. Were I to backup still further and look to my left, then to my right, then continue forward, I would see. Why don’t I start walking backward. Why not raise my knees another inch than I do. Why don’t I depart from the norm in even the slightest way? It occurs to me that” nothing that I see or come across is satirizable” (but I don’t know what that means). (Does it mean I basically “believe in this world”? Relatively “good time in history”?) Community swimming pool and its fence and gate between condo spaces. “Quite reasonable really,” if you don’t look at the news.

Though much of what I see will seem rather above or beneath me, it is all, it is all, whether they like it or not, it is all, whether I like it or not, it is all, it is all more or less reasonable — we are the people [even in northern hemisphere] […] And those persons who are not the people, existing too far beyond the general travail, live where I will never see them live, pass by where I will only very seldom pass, seldom pass, and never see anyone passing by at that time.

It occurs to me the vitriol against whites, while not being misplaced, will give way before long to whites needing to be embraced as minorities: whites are blacks, it occurs to me as I cross the street. (Axis Bold as Love: what does that mean, why does it occur to me. Why do I think of the title of this Jimi Hendrix album?) It occurs to me that there isn’t actually any vitriol against whites that I know about. (Where did I get that there was “vitriol against whites?”) It occurs to me — “there are not whites.” (Nation of Islam maybe occurred to me as a source of vitriol against whites). It occurs to me that writers are minorities in a way that scientists are not and it occurred to me ponder if the literature of racial minorities held a clue for minorities of all kinds? (Congressional minorities — loyal opposition) “Last people” of all kinds? It seems unlikely that racial propblems will exist many centuries hence (look at the Huegenots) it seems quite impossible that (caste systems of other countries) racial problems will ever disappear. America still best hope race thought.

As I look to the left I see an “idealized version of the street.” (My “ideal” is like a commercial. It is not an ideal at all just oddly blemishless, airbrushedness. “Brain’s sad airbrush.” Somebody’s idea of art: well-taken photo of the Jefferson Memorial. Art is “professional”, the French Academy idea.) (Henry Miller: kick in the pants of art, though he was pretty conventional it turns out) As I look to the right, a lane to a school which seems always to be under construction (not idealized, the actual case) Vermeer’s Little Street occurs to me. Occurs to me the county government is “panicked by technology.” (I don’t know anything about the county government.) Occurs to me: take each day as it comes. You say: and wander blindly into the trap? You say: no, you’re right. I over-reacted. I apologize. (But before the idea wasn’t there and now the image will come down at times, a “stake in the heart.”) Take each day as it comes, you say. You say: I know I’ve over-reacted.

It was the painted No Parking “penalty area” — a painted three-sided rectilineal figure, white painted thick diagonal lines tracked upon the interior, indicating the area was not suitable for legal parking — the first time in a while it occurred to me to think of my walk, or to realized it was in fact happening, cool spring morning at the beginning of April, a month or so into the quarantine.

Dummy is Me & Ventriloquist is Me

The attention one had not received (seemed improper, mean to think of. One should think of the attention Spinoza had not received. One should think, let me be like Spinoza) Seemed unwise: since maybe that saved one. –Been spared — yet have a chance. I would and I do,– don’t want that then what then now– like ventriloquism, dummy is me and the ventriloquist is me but over here — no up here. Or two dummies maybe. Hard to Cheat an Honest Man. (We are hearing the scratch of their soulless wood.) “Cervantes is me and Quixote my experience.”

A momentary feeling that “my head is a television set.”

What about this feeling suggests the television?

My range of vision seems broad like a television seems broad (instead of narrow and small like a face does); seems as broad as a television that holds within it the image of a face. A feeling of being vacuous, of thinking nothing, of thinking nothing because of the television I’ve watched, having been filled thereby by unthinking, of being full of space (though the interior of my head, I suppose, is much more dense than that of a television) like the interior of an old boxy television.

That the television is a shower of images and I a receiver of them (although don’t each of do both: both receive and send out images?) that this is so does not make the comparison less apt; to the contrary… it is somehow the point, which can’t understand, as the feeling and the thought about it flit away so quickly, that somehow I see in the same way that it shows; that, if I were to have the experience of being a television, I would understand that for it, sending out images is it’s manner of seeing.

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.

Mint said something then Roger coughed, in another room Jacob put something on a shelf. Roger thought he could hear it: it had occurred (that is, the placement of the thing on the shelf had occurred) between the moment Mint had said something and the moment that Roger had coughed. When Jacob came into their room, the both of them sat, Mint on the bed with the comforter and Roger on the sofa with the plastic sheet. Roger asked Jacob had he put something on the shelf. Jacob made a reply, with reference to the shelf, and Roger went to a different room. Mint rose from the bed and tapped Jacob on the shoulder. Jacob expressed an idea, which touched on the activity Mint had just performed (the tapping) then Mint thought of something else and made a reply to Jacob. Jacob roared with laughter and they both fell to placing things in a box, then to placing things on a shelf, the shelf that was by the mirrors. (Roger looked into the room, saw what they were doing, and coughed.)

Mint looked into the mirror and said something, then he turned in profile and said a second thing, which was thought to have been in jest. Jacob looked to one side then to the other side. He expressed an idea that pertained to Julie, and Mint responded with a reciprocal notion of the person he had named, and thought of Julie, then Jacob and Mint smiled, two nice smiles, and Mint looked closely in the mirror. Mint looked closely at the face that he saw reflected in the mirror and whispered something to it, which seemed “bitter to himself” (as he would later express).

Jacob had an idea about the mirror, and a separate but nearly simultaneously occurring idea about Mint’s activities around the mirror, then raised both of his hands toward his own head. After a period of looking at them, he put his hands (fingers) through his hair, about which he had the idea that he had washed it recently, which in fact he had. It felt that way and it was that way, was roughly what he thought about this: that he had recently washed his hair and his hair indeed felt recently washed, which was not how it always worked out. He had an idea about the conditioner he had used and expressed this idea to Mint. Mint expressed an idea about hair washing, about how he did it, then put his hands on either side of the mirror, staring in. Mint had an idea about something to say around the same time that Jacob did.

The room was quite small. Roger came into the room then left it. In another room, he started beating on the walls, with a hammer or mallet it sounded like, but they weren’t sure, then he started breathing so hard, in and out, that they could hear him though they were in the next room over, maybe a couple rooms over; then he stopped and it was quiet. When Roger next entered the room, he expressed an idea about Julie, then Julie herself appeared, somewhat behind him, with a smiling face. Roger coughed and the others came near to her, indeed they had come almost as near as to her as Roger, but Roger remained in between them.

Roger coughed. Julie expressed an idea about it, which made Jacob laugh and Roger smile nicely. Mint also smiled nicely and handled an object in his pocket. Roger, who had been nearest to Jacob, now moved nearer to Julie, then, expressing an idea, moved far from the group and out of sight. The garden gate clanged shut — they all heard it.

Jacob and Mint expressed ideas to Julie, who not only listened carefully but responded with ideas of her own that she expressed, or mainly expressed, and neither Jacob nor Mint was aware of, or would have minded, that Julie thought more than what she expressed, for Jacob himself often thought more than he expressed; Jacob, indeed, thought more than he expressed about Julie in particular, and Mint was often unaware that he expressed less than he (Mint himself) thought, his thought seeming nothing that a person would say. Perhaps Jacob’s thoughts were like that at times: things a person wouldn’t say because they oughtn’t even be thought.

Roger and Jacob thought more than they expressed about the person and demeanor of Julie; and Julie thought more than she expressed about the work of Roger, Jacob, and Mint, which had not been precisely what they’d discussed; and Mint, though perhaps unaware that what he thought was quite expressible, knew that he thought and knew what he thought: thought of himself, without expressing it, as being a sad person, as a person without hope.

Julie had something in her pocket too, which she began to handle, the expressions going back and forth, and the clang of the garden gate was heard again and soon there reappeared Roger, expressing ideas and smiling and laughing. And so Julie and Jacob expressed ideas that set them all laughing, except for Mint, who smiled nicely, and Roger, whose laughter was interrupted by coughing.

Then Jacob set down the box, which was heavy, and Julie and Mint brought forward the objects in their pockets, respectively, a personal check and a stainless steel key, the latter of which Julie took and the former of which Jacob took as Julie expressed an idea, which made Mint and Jacob smile nicely, while Roger, ducking to the side, spit.

As Roger, Jacob, and Mint all left, Mint had an idea he was conscious of not expressing but had articulated for himself: that he couldn’t understand at all how people laughed so easily, and suddenly Julie expressed an idea to Mint who stopped and turned to be only with her while the others went through the gate. She expressed an idea to him, and he shook his head, and she asked him a question, and he put up his hands, and she expressed an idea and he felt very sorry. Then she looked and he looked, smiling nicely, but he didn’t meet her eyes again.

Jacob and Roger didn’t express their ideas. There was a pounding now on this part, and now on that part, of the nearby wall, which they both were faced away from. It grew loud, quiet, seemed to have stopped, then started again, and with renewed vigor, before suddenly once again stopping. Then there was a little tapping in just the one corner. Then it was in two corners that the gentle, almost pleasant, tapping occurred, growing louder and sharper; then weaker, buffered; then multiplying in more and more spots, so that now the whole wall seemed alive and near bursting in a deafening crescendo with the thundering of many hammers of all sizes, here and there, high and low, gentle and pounding, steady and intermittent, held by a whole troop of workmen, it must have been, then all dying down as there arose a savage whirring and, its companion sound, a fierce wall-shaking grinding, the inferior giving way to the superior, the tapping and scraping to the whirring and grinding.

They faced away from this wall. Roger turned to the side and coughed and moaned, and Jacob, though moaning also, turned to his side and slobbered and spit, having coughed up something that looked to him “disgusting”, he had actually said, yet also perhaps betokening improvement; then rolling again on to his back, he closed his dim eyes and expressed something.

Roger reached for something, breathed heavily out. Mint handed it to him, whatever it was, and Roger greedily stuffed his face with it. Mint expressed an idea to Jacob, listened carefully to Jacob’s reply, then took the action that that reply most seemed to call for, it seemed to him.

It was right at this time that Julie came in, “plopped” the plastic bag on the plastic chair and announced a conception which made them all roar with laughter. Burst out laughing. Roger and Jacob expressed some ideas. Roger and Jacob laughed and then coughed. Mint, his action completed, found he had difficulty expressing his thoughts, though he smiled and even started laughing. Mint wasn’t sure he had thoughts to express, yet he had thoughts. No ideas, no ideas! Mint told himself, surprised by the sudden appearance of Julie.

He had a positive thought about Julie, which he was conscious of as having occurred to him, (perhaps it was in the manner of a cough, he supposed, a very positive sort of “clod clearing” cough, as he thought of it), and was conscious also of having this very negative thought of himself — it was rather negative yes; yet also, too, kind of positive. He appeared to himself, as an idea, like a healthy positive gob of phlegm he might have got out of himself, as a body, was the thing. And the thought of Julie was the positive cough that got out the also positive appearance of phlegm.

(And the whirring and grinding of himself, he thought, of the walls of himself. The whirring and shaking and pounding of his walls: and the phlegm and cough of his thought of her and the cough and phlegm of his thought of him. And the syrup, yes the cough syrup –the cough syrup? An idea: he thought this was an idea but perhaps he wasn’t expressing it right. Not like an adult who had an idea. Not like a person who had courage would express their idea when it was unpopular. A real adult person who could laugh at his own idea if it should sound funny coming out. “A real adult was one with his expressed idea in a way he could not be,” was something he confusedly thought.)

Julie thought not that she had come to see something new and positive in Mint, but that previously, though she had seen in him something positive, she had previously only seen it negatively expressed. Mint, having previously been merely “not elsewhere”, Julie now saw as being here, so to speak.

This worked out and thoughts were expressed. Motions, gestures accompanied the thoughts, or sometimes occurred at random. A man by the wood of the fence was alone. Many saw smiles and made smiles themselves; some laughed; garments were rearranged by gravity or by their wearers; silverware and plates were set upon tables; bugs flew, and the lights went on.

After still more thoughts were had and still more expressions were made, people all said Roger must have been drinking the rum punch (which of course he was) because he was talking on and on about “Labor” and … “Yes I am talking about Labor again,” he confessed, though he was really thinking and talking about a topic somewhat broader than the Labor movement (about which he was also, however, he could also be passionate): about how good it was to work, and how bad it was not to work, and how much more interested he sincerely was in cleaning up after parties than in being a guest at them — which was “just what he liked,” his preference. The drinking when not thirsty and the eating when not hungry and the talking and thinking when there was nothing much to think and say doesn’t much appeal to me he told them. And all the abundance and extravagance when there is so much want; and all the relaxing and idleness when there was so much to do; and all the toys and the games when there is so much waste; and so on, and so on, so that it felt like “a breath of fresh air” to Roger, when everyone, finally taking the hint, started in, as a giant team, with the clean up: lifting and stacking and clearing and scrubbing, and breaking up certain things and putting certain other things back into designated places, all the guests and all the honored couples, inspired by Roger’s speech and enthusiasm, and even the jogger who had wandered in and had leaned exhausted against the wood fence, even he had taken a keen interest in supervising the recycling station. So that soon people were commenting that, if someone didn’t stop Roger, he would would embark on some sort of home improvement project, and jokingly hid from him some masonry in need of repair. And so on (though in fact Roger did see the Masonry and came up with a plan) leaving the place much better than they found it.

“NAUSCOPIE” (the alleged capacity to detect the appearance of a sailing ship beyond the horizon by visual means only) and my own feeling that I can detect good and bad writing –discern the 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 good or bad. Nauscopie of writing: by which art the space between the words indicate the quality of the writing.

As ridiculous as this sounds, and surely is, I remain half serious about it, having noticed about my bad writing a certain ‘look’ — though by ‘good and bad’ probably something like ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ is meant, or ‘beginning and advanced student’, rather than the more or less interesting works of a professional, for example. As if the spacing of words held a clue. (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?)

In sum, I don’t think I could distinguish between the major and minor works of Kant, or between the stronger and weaker arguments of a supreme court case just by looking, but perhaps between the work of a better and worse student? or the work of a student when he has tried more and tried less?

This might be an interesting experiement: present 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?

r.m… h.n
e..o…….. i………..n
h……r……… p….e
T………d………. a…j
E……..r……….. p……..c
G…..i………… e…….c
*……….O……h………. r..t……….*
*……….*……….t……………*…………*
…The last doge was Ludovico Manin,
…who abdicated in 1797, when
…Venice passed under
…the power of
…Napoleon’s
…France

……………

The shoulder of the jogger. I had been looking to see if the jogger ahead of me was the same jogger I’d passed previously. This previous jogger had worn a sleeveless shirt and had a tatoo of a kind I could not recall on her shoulder, while this current jogger had a shirt I’d call sky blue in coloration, and I was looking at the shoulder of it, which had a sleeve, and no tattoo could be seen there.

That corner of her shirt, –and I don’t believe I’m joking when I say this — although I may be joking– occurred to me as something important. Looking at the figure of a woman is something that will in some engender sexual excitement; and sexual excitement derived from things that don’t seem sexual we call a fetish; but what I saw on this shoulder was a kind of distillation of ordinariness, something so uninteresting, it seemed what all life was made of, an elementary particle of boredom. Not sexual, not a fetish, not of interest, but a fabric of everything that was sort of the opposite of a fetish, leaving one lifeless and mesmerized by ordinariness. It was something even more fundamental than an atom, this random part of a t-shirt.

This jogger and I actually ran on opposite banks of the stream for a while after that. The trail on her side being far more meandering, I was surprised to see she’d caught up with me at George Mason, and I lost heart a bit when I lost track of her on Walter Reed.

Tale of The Dried Red Sauce

Now I have a headache; earlier I’d gone to the post office. I’d become worried while going to the post office because I’d discovered a bit of dried red sauce on my fleece and thought of the postal clerk I was sure to see there as being kind of a military type and stickler about such things, who would not be amused. Then it got worse because as I tried to contend with red sauce, scratching it off with a finger, I discovered tooth paste remnants too, not only on the fleece, but on the shorts. And yet, in the event, the postal clerk seemed alright with me this time: I wasn’t some disorderly civilian who had toothpaste all over him and didn’t give a damn, but a customer of the store who, in spite of his significant failings, needed to be treated in a professional manner. I sent off a post card to my niece and to a college friend and bought a package of post card stamps and forever stamps and left.

To be self-deceived but by truth…. (who believes in anything so much as the deceived and self-deceived do?) If only those possessed of truth, or the intellectually honest, let us say, could be as obdurate as the brainwashed and deluded… If believing in truth made one as stubborn as believing in falsehood.

…The way the self-deceived and deluded, among whom we must include ourselves much of the time, have a unique capacity to be unaffected by ideas they haven’t thought of before. In contrast, someone we might call intellectually honest would be troubled by such ideas, which have the capacity to overrule the basis for ones beliefs.

Idea that self-deceit is our natural state, our baseline state, meaning by deceit perhaps our individual mode of filtering perceptions.

Latin:

privatus illis census erat brevis,
commune magnum

English:

Each Roman’s wealth was little worth,
His country’s much

Sun filled heat filled asphalt bike path. Speckled with whatever aggregate. Having turned my head to the side (don’t know why I turned my head to the side, and wish now I could return to that moment between when I had not turned it and when I ultimately did turn it; of all the moments of history, of all the moments one so desperately needed a time machine for, I would wish to return to that one; all of history was buried in my neck, in that senseless gesture of its turning, I supposed, and if I could just understand it, if I could only go back to rip that head off, shake its contents out, discover what had been inside it…)

Having turned my head to the side and seen among the tall brown grass trash of a sort I can’t now recall: paper or aluminium but not plastic.

Something about this moment seemed important and I knew that I would later be here, now, writing about it — which, however, hardly seemed so inevitable then, or at any point during the day, until this very one.

There was myself, the path, me passing the trash and looking at it, and there was a thought about gender and sexuality, inspired by a passage from Thoreau’s journals. Thoreau had imagined a kind of sexless union of souls between man and woman but of that union being like the sexual but refined in someway (as I took it), platonic perhaps.

I was passing the dry tall grass and the trash on it. I was “looking” in the sense of scanning: not really noticing anything but alert should there arise an object of interest. Thought of there being no gender, of there being “only human.” Sunlight, heat, sweat, activity, moisture in the air. Where Thoreau had wanted the relationship of man and woman to be transcendent, I, with the additional not entirely clear information we have today about gender, was trying to understand what happened to the sexual impulse, or even the religious impulse, when, if, it was understood there was no man and woman or male and female, no Other of any kind, no friend and no enemy — if it was understood we were, really, all one. “No other of any kind” equals, I now suppose, something close to what I have taken to be the meaning of God.

……q……g
.au………..ra
lia…..p……vel
swin…ang…ines
ging..siron.. sand
Maryof Egypthami
dMar…….dabashitru Mar…….
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Abraham Lincoln,Franklin D. Roosevelt

Robert E. Lee,Ulysses S. Grant

Robert E. Lee,Ulysses S. Grant,Jefferson Davis

Hippocrates. 2.16 / English.

ὅκου λιμὸς, οὐ δεῖ πονέειν.

The Altar to pity is said, in a footnote of my copy of Pausanius, probably to be the basis for the Ara Pacis, I said.

We should have Altars to Pity here, in this country, my friend said, as well as to concepts like Air, Dirt, Forethought, Rumor. No more statues of people. Enough of that. Enough of people who did this or that. Altars to Dirt, altars to Life, altars to Stars, alters to repeated spelling errors, to microbes, climate, obscure legal statues. Markers of what we don’t see that yet exists. (Perhaps Zeus is quite like The Atom, The Microbe.) Perhaps poems are all we can hope for, by way of altars, to honor these things.

(Altars also to various tax schemes or latin terms, he added. I think an altar to 401ks would be good, and on the side there would be, etched in the marble, an explanation of what it was exactly, do you know? and of other financial and governmental terms and of technical existences that are still more recondite than 401ks.)

The Body Casts The Vote

As a voter intellectually I may be decided — but there is to consider — that it must be my body that will ultimately physically cast the vote, and my body may not be decided or may be decided in favor of doing something totally erratic, in favor of something quite opposed to what I have intellectually decided.

I can’t intellectually will my vote to be cast– transfer my thought into the ballot box — and the body has a will of its own. And the will of the body, my friend added further, or what I might call One of its great wills, is that of total arbitrariness (which should be one of our altars too: Arbitrariness) — that of having decided deliberately to do one thing instead of another, but, in the event, “Doing Whatever”– either doing the opposite of what one has decided or doing what one has decided for reasons that are un-involved with, and not relevant to, and perhaps the opposite of, one’s initial decision.

Altar to Doing Whatever

Maybe the Will to Doing Whatever is not the body’s will but again attributable to oneself: it is a hatred or distrust of what one thinks, a disbelief in one’s ability to think. The thing you think is good turns out to be bad, and vice versa, and this happens again and again, this has happened so often, sowing distrust in your reasoning capacities and sowing “the will to whatever.”

There should be a god named Whatever and another called Thinks. And we should have, somewhere, for these gods, altars, said my friend. (Or even if they are only words and not gods, we should have altars made for them, altars beyond the words.)

[English]. Pausanius 1.30.4:

κατὰ τοῦτο τῆς χώρας φαίνεται πύργος Τίμωνος, ὃς μόνος εἶδε μηδένα τρόπον εὐδαίμονα εἶναι γενέσθαι πλὴν τοὺς ἄλλους φεύγοντα ἀνθρώπους.

— Technology arises out of spiritual failure –our failure to concentrate– and must grow more complicated as our distractedness increases. (It also increases our distractedness.)

— “To be dominated by artificial intelligence is the same as to be dominated by thoughts of the future.” (Artificial intelligence is an embodied incapacity to live without forethought. Prometheus not only unbound, but boundless.)

— Question. If “being in the moment” is in some sense the spiritual goal (or anyway, a desirable state) which is a greater impediment to its attainment: dissipation or technology?

— True or false statement: “If we were all good Christians and Muslims and Buddhists there would be a steady decline in the use of technology.” (If we were all good scientists…?) (If we were all bad Muslims and Buddhists and Christians?) If we were all good Marxists?

— Robots are the Ideal It’s said that we can’t arrest technology’s advance because we’re “all human” (we can’t help wanting the convenience and advantage technology provides, so we couldn’t go backward in that respect if we tried). But perhaps it’s actually because we’re all, in our essence, robots that we’re really so drawn to technology? That robots are for us, not a necessity, but an ideal?

(To say it otherwise, human beings are the first robots, the first artificial intelligences, and are now in the process, as it were, of spinning these attributes off.)

— The arts. Even if a computer could create Sly Stone (or his music) would it ever have an incentive to do so? One can certainly imagine a computer having both the capacity and incentive to create a Jar-Jar Binks. But (as it seems to me) there is no demand for Sly Stone until he has happened — one wouldn’t know to make him.

(This is to say: maybe artificial technology will have the same constraints as commercial radio, being without the incentive to create anything very lasting or unique. Supposing it could make a Sly Stone, would it have the incentive to make his music widely available?)

–Although I suppose artists to be as replaceable as anyone else by A.I., if not more so, I wonder if there would be a shift noticeable between pre-and post AI music that might be found, in the long run, to be undesirable; and that this would be found to extend toward other occupations also.

Artificial intelligence, artificial knowledge? In reflecting on the possibility of a computer which is, from our point of view, all intelligent, all knowledgeable, it might be constructive to reconsider the limits of knowledge and intelligence. What do these do and not do for existence? Perhaps in some sense humanity’s lack of intelligence that is responsible for its evolutionary success? Perhaps un-intelligence makes existence seem worthwhile?

–How will A.I control human understanding of human history? Will the story of human history become — how it came to develop A.I?

— can literary fiction (say, a Shakespeare play) be distinguished from commercial fiction (say, a John Grisham novel) on this basis of their word distributions (how many words are repeated in what ways how many times in these different genres)?

–a related question: will a work of literary fiction (a “classic”) have more “repetitions” than a work of commercial fiction?

— how are we to distinguish words that are repeated thematically (‘nothing’ in Shakespeare) from words that are repeated out of poor writing or another reason (is there a need to make such a distinction).

— given x number of words (the “author’s vocabulary” or “all the vocabulary the author is known to have used in print”) and y number of words (“the book”/ the number of words in his book) can we make an informed guess about how many repetitions that work might contain.

–Do people with larger vocabularies repeat words more or less often than people with smaller vocabularies, or about the same?

–Do early English literary writers (Shakespeare) repeat themselves more than late English literary writers (Joyce); how does it compare to the trend in, say, non-literary epistolary writing over the same period?

–How about across cultures as well as times? Does Virgil, Homer, or Shakespeare make more use of repetitions? How do the repetitions in literary work compare to those in a legal document, or to those in a collection of the letters of a college-aged student.

–How about with respect to speech? do we repeat ourselves more when we speak or when we write? Does Philip Roth repeat words more frequently when he speaks or when he writes?

–Suppose literary word repetitions (‘Nothing’ in King Lear) don’t indicate a ‘deeper meaning’ — what else might such repetitions indicate? Is repetition a rhetorical device, a natural consequence of writing with some purpose in mind, or something else? If I were to right down eighty words randomly would it contain more repetitions than a sonnet of Petrarch that had around the same word count?

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This n-grams viewer graph jibes with my own sense that people are using the word robust a lot more often than they once did. (From latin robustus, literally “as strong as an oak.”)

I was under the vague impression that it was Donald Rumsfeld or the Bush administration that popularized its use, but the graph (which, of course, measures written and not spoken instances of the word) seems to indicate that its meteoric rise began circa 1980.

In a similar vein is the phrase “salacious details” which I recall as having arisen from the Monica Lewinsky investigation. (And, again, Iraq War, ‘embedded.’ — though contrast with ‘embedded journalist.’)

Other ngrams:

— Pale Blue Eyes,Candy Says;

—Ghana,Gold Coast;

—Joseph Conrad,Henry James;

—Mars,Jupiter,Pluto,Saturn;

—hurricane, cyclone …

Not getting a joke (He brews it) then suddenly getting it (hebrews it) — describing what is really going on there.

Question: how does Moses make his tea? Answer: He brews it. Is it that the mind, when it does not get the joke, hears he brews it and when it does get the joke hears hebrews it; or does it hear, when it gets it, hebrews it and he brews it at once? Or does it hear hebrews it, and hears two nouns, and thinks the statement makes no sense, two nouns, and trying to make sense of it discovers this alternate meaning. Does it hear “he brews it” and think “why is that even a joke?” then discovers the pun. Why should the discovery of the unexpected provoke laughter?

Question: to deliver the joke properly, on which syllable of the punchline should the teller place the accent? The question is whether to pronounce it as two unrelated words, “hebrews” and “it”, or as the phrase “he brews it”. (Or the question is whether to put the accent on the antepenult or penult, which is perhaps to say the same thing.) I tended to mix it up without about equal results.

Marcel Proust: “Les êtres les plus bêtes par leurs gestes, leurs propos, leurs sentiments involontairement exprimés, manifestent des lois qu’ils ne perçoivent pas, mais que l’artiste surprend en eux. À cause de ce genre d’observations, le vulgaire croit l’écrivain méchant, et il le croit à tort, car dans un ridicule l’artiste voit une belle généralité, il ne l’impute pas plus à grief à la personne observée que le chirurgien ne la mésestimerait d’être affectée d’un trouble assez fréquent de la circulation ; aussi se moque-t-il moins que personne des ridicules.”

Andreas Mayor: “The stupidest people, in their gestures, their remarks, the sentiments which they involuntarily express, manifest laws which they do not themselves perceive but which the artist discovers in them, and because he makes observations of this kind the writer is popularly believed to be ill-natured. But this belief is false: in an instance of ridiculous behavior the artist sees a beautiful generality, and he no more condemns on this account the individual in whom he observes it than a surgeon would despise a patient for suffering from some quite common disorder of the circulation; the writer, in fact, is the least inclined of all men to scoff at folly.”

War & Peace today. Sonya — able to bear her self-sacrifices, cheerfully even, because secretly she believes that it is not self-sacrifice, but deferred gratification, and that she will one day receive her reward (marriage to Nicholas Rostov). When she discovers, however, that that reward, too, must be sacrificed, the walls start closing in and, rather than seeming to herself, as formerly, a good and self-sacrificing person, she seems a person who’s never gotten anything of what she’s wanted. . . Yup.

Tolstoy locates her inclination toward secrecy in her financial dependency, but I wonder if that’s true of her self-sacrificing attitude also….Interesting that her rival for the love Nicholas Rostov, Princess Mary, who is herself a rich heiress, finds her “affected,” which I believe is the first time we hear a truly negative judgment made about Sonya’s personality, which even the Old Countess, who is annoyed by Sonya, doesn’t feel she can object to. (Sonya doesn’t really care, like Natasha does, that Prince Andrew is dying and the suffering this causes her, Princess Mary feels.)