CXIX

 

In that burning house on top of the mountain…

 

 

The thought of what America would be like

If the Classics had a wide circulation

Troubles my sleep.

Sed Pound oncet

 

Saturday and the subways are all bolluxed up. No E trains running, so you wait for the downtown C at 42nd Street. Tourist woman approaches – American, d’un certain age. “What train,” she asks, “goes to nine one-one?”

 

Toward the end of Lysistrata, a Spartan herald approaches the Athenian Magistrate. Both men are attempting to disguise their enormous erections. (Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations do this image quite explicit justice). One translation, which I’ve modified, presents the scene thusly:

HERALD: Say, where do I find the Senate, or someone in authority around here?

MAGISTRATE: But wait: are you a man or a Priapus?

HERALD: (aside) Ah, but he’s a simpleton. I am a herald, come from Sparta to negotiate peace between us.

MAGISTRATE: Peace? Then why the spear under your cloak?

HERALD: I’ve got nothing of the sort!

MAGISTRATE: Hah, my lad, why I can see it standing there!

HERALD: I assure you, it is not what you think.

MAGISTRATE: What is it then?

HERALD: It’s a… skytalé.

MAGISTRATE: Oh, indeed, a skytalé, is it? Well, speak frankly then, how goes it in Sparta?

HERALD: Why, everything is turned upside down. The women have all sworn not to let a man touch them until we have agreed to make peace…

Now some translations have said “walking stick,” rather than “skytalé.” But the latter has a more nuanced meaning, since a skytalé is a rod used for encoding and decoding confidential messages. A strip of paper or leather is wound around the skytalé, then written on lengthwise. When unrolled, the writing becomes illegible – unless it is wound around a rod of exactly the same circumference as the one on which it was originally written. Whereupon, its meaning, if any, can be grasped.

 

Whereas Bartleby’s mantra – so “enigmatic” and tantalizing to generations of English profs who prefer to cast his tale as a meditation on individual freedom – is easy enough to decode, albeit less mechanically, once one recognizes the underlying predicate of the scrivener’s, and our, inherited mode of thought:

“I would prefer not to be or not to be.”

In those last four unuttered, aspirated, even aborted words inheres a revelation of an essential dualism and the tyranny it imposes on our thought and action. It constitutes the “core” tyranny from which all subsequent, ready-made tyrannies flow. Ah, Bartleby. Perhaps he would have said it – if he could have thought it. And Hamlet, in his earlier moment, might well have preferred it to not be the question. But he was nonetheless stuck with, and to it.

For neither Hamlet, nor Bartleby, nor their numberless descendents even unto ourselves, could invoke a mode of thought that would allow them to disengage the question, to step outside of it, and thus avoid its trap.

 

 

The inscription reads: “The sight I offer is the fairest of sights, the still firm breast of a lovely young woman… I am a vessel for musk and camphor and ambergris; [made by] Khalaf.” The exhibition card goes on to say that “Andalusian art is know for its ‘speaking inscriptions’ – texts that employ the first person to describe the objects on which they appear.”

 

You know you’re neck deep in bourgeois culture when you, and everyone you know, devotes a vast amount of energy to protecting some vicious little entitlements.

 

Beware of geeks bearing grifts.

 

Grift graft riff raff

 

Domes of the world, who can count them all?

 

There’s more than 1 naked city in the naked city

 

History retreats itself

 

Is someone who shampoos, i.e. showers a dog, a fidoduciary?

 

FatesBook®.

It’s complicated with Zeus.

Transgendrification: it means whatever you want it to mean

 

A young man, tall, black, neatly bearded, immaculately and stylishly dressed, paces the sidewalk in front of Trader Joe’s speak-shouting a stream of invective. “Yeah, well you, you have to bring this shit to a conclusion down here.” At first you assume this to be a heated cell phone conversation, but then see he has neither phone, nor wire. He pauses, takes a drag from his cigarette, then wheels round and stalks off down the street. “You’ve already witnessed several cosmic battles. Do you really think your attitude is going to add muscle to milk?”

 

Inward dog: not so much a yoga posture as a psychospiritual state

 

You’ve come the wrong way, baby

 

OK, so what’s the real myth?

 

I was a frumious bandersnatch for the FBI

 

Can what we think of as counter, also be understood as meta or infra? Counter, then, in the sense of against, but against not so much as separate and distinct, as in the relational, i.e. The broom was leaning against the wall.

 

Ah, and ever again the New York Times, where all the news fits, somehow, into the Real Estate Section. As in “the first victims in central Paris were 15 diners killed at Le Petit Cambodge, an Asian restaurant near a canal that runs through the once working-class and now fashionable 10th Arrondissement…”

“Mai Hua, 38, a fashion blogger, was eating nearby with three friends on a terrace at Madame Shawn, a Thai restaurant… when she and her friends heard explosions at around 9:15 p.m. She said she initially thought the noise was related to gang clashes that sometimes blighted the area…”

“In just half an hour, gunmen raked at least four restaurants and bars with gunfire in a fast-gentrifying area of Paris…”

Devastating, these hair-trigger bursts of Property-fire concentrated within a few column inches of prime 4th Estate news space: “’They Did Not Give Anybody a Chance,’” by Andrew Higgins and Milan Schreuer. New York Times. November, 15, 2015. A1:1.

 

And nearby, in a sidebar laying out the facts and stats, an odd tallying system of lives lost:

[2nd incident] 9:25. Restaurant and bar. 15 dead. Shooting.

[3rd incident] 9:30. Stadium. 0 dead. Suicide bomb.

[4th incident] 9:34. Bar. 5 dead. Shooting.

Leaving one nearly breathless in wonderment at a system of accounting in which it is possible for a suicide bomb to leave zero dead.

Unless, that is, one recognizes that simple arithmetic cannot hold a candle to social math.

 

Next day, reporting on the demographics of those killed in the attacks, the Times describes these predominantly young, geographically diverse folk as having come to “the French capital to study, to party, to work. And they embraced a decidedly Parisian culture of public socialization – the sharing of stories and bottles of wine on Friday nights in an array of nightspots in the bourgeois bohemian enclaves of the city.”

 

So many little and big wheels of history: The Stade de France, one of the sites in the multiple-attacks of November, 2015, is located in Saint-Denis, a district populated by numerous French Algerians and as well Arabic-speaking immigrants from several countries, most of them living in high rise cités, just north of Paris. But once upon a time, in the 12th Century, L’Abbé Suger, converted the ancient basilica of Saint-Denis into a magnificent symbol of the Christian faith: the first full-blown “gothic” church. Over time, the basilica became key point on the pilgrimage route as well as the traditional repository for the bodies of the French royalty, many of whom were interred in elaborately sculpted monuments.

When it comes to crusades, Suger, himself, did not approve of one preached enthusiastically by his opposite number, the Cistercian minimalist Bernard de Clairvaux. But after Clairveaux’s second crusade ended in catastrophe in 1149, he and Bernard planned a new one, their conspiration cut short by Suger’s death two years later.

The cités of Saint-Denis are taller, on average, than the basilica’s remaining tower, originally one of a pair. The taller north tower was compromised by two storms in the mid-19th Century and dismantled. The stones were preserved, and are, to this day, stored behind the basilica. A plan was proposed in 1992 and adopted in 2013 to commence rebuilding in 2015, but as of this writing, reconstruction has yet to begin.

ISIL, the “Islamic state” claiming responsibility for the Paris attacks, routinely refers to us, i.e. Western Europeans and Anglo-Americans as “The Crusaders.”

 

 

And then, there are the chairs. Flanked left and right by their Parisian counterparts, those in the center live at Le Grainne Café, formerly Le Gamin, in New York City.

 

And then, as at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, and especially notable in its three deep west-facing portals, there is the “gothic” arch, aka pointed arch, aka ogival arch – a form long in use in the Near East and possibly introduced into Europe by returning crusaders. It is said that Villard de Honnecourt coined the term ogive in the 13th century, but the etymology is obscure, and it is speculated that it might come from the Late Latin obviata, the feminine perfect passive participle of obviare, meaning the one who has met or encountered the other.