LII

 

Ladies and Gentlemen: after an earlier incident at Knightly Avenue, Emma trains are now running on schedule.

 

Tune into the moment before manifestation. Then make your stroke.

 

Una bella bozza.

We shall have occasion to return to these terms again.

 

Philemon: If you have eyes, prepare to open them now. Look at these charming little bits of nature, both in grove, meadow, and mountain ! ?

Belinda: I feel the force of your mode of reasoning; and admire the process by which you conduct us from the grand to the simple.

Writ Thomas Frognall Dibdin in “First Day,” The Biographical Decameron; or Ten Days Pleasant Discourse on Illuminated Manuscripts. London: 1817.

 

A medal struck by the Bodleian Library way back when. On one side a profile of Sir Thomas himself, and on the other, a betoga’d woman holds aloft emblems of the sun and moon. She is flanked by the motto: R P LITERARIAE AETERNITAS: The eternity of the republic of letters. And the Bodleian is still entitled, whatever that means, to an unbound copy of every written work printed in England.

 

“DO NEW YORK”: James to Wharton, 1902.

“Atmosphere is my style”: Turner to Ruskin, c. 1845.

 

Atmosphere: to which we shall have occasion to return.

 

Faroom the bell tolls.

 

Leave a little Kool-Aid for the gods.

 

Decline of external threats

Men of wealth and property allowed this problem to reach the stage of open conflict between Parliament and the King in the early years of the seventeenth century, primarily because they were no longer afraid, or rather because the were no longer as afraid as they had been.

—Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642. New York: Harper, 1972, p. 76.

 

What is it about the police choke hold – the nightstick-augmented version of the wrestling “sleeper hold” : a S.I. man allegedly selling “loosies,” a woman grilling on her stoop, Spiderman (while Elmo looks on) in Times Square – that signals something in the wind(pipe). It’s so much more personal than a bullet – rather more like a hug gone wild, or a gesture toward decapitation, a recursion to hanging by the neck until… Gone Tyburn, come The Crossroads of the World.

Airway problems as they say in doc-talk.

In Chinese “inner alchemy” diagrams – describing the inner circulation of Qi/Breath – the trachea is represented as a twelve-story pagoda. It is through this passage that the saliva, or Golden Fluid is swallowed, following the Ren vessel as it returns to Dantian to regenerate Qi.

 

Here I sit, in open air, at this café table, as if it were Paris.

As if Paris were Paris.

 

Vasari, in describing the “perfect manner” in painting, extolls the deliberately blurred image, i.e., Leonardo’s sfumato: the deliberate effacement of line, the cutting down of pictorial information so that the images “hover between the seen and unseen.” But the object here, unlike with Chinese painting, or poetry, is to stimulate the mechanism of projection, to obscure deliberately in one quarter in order to create clarity in another, to facilitate, in short, the making of distinctions and separations among things. This is our way of locating ourselves, along lines of perspective converging on a central truth, within a field of more or less fixed values.

Indistinction serves a function, therefore, as a technique used to induce clarity, rather than to evoke an immanence, a plenitude. Looked at through even the most discerning Western eyes, indistinction always runs the risk of falling into disorder, it symptomizes chaos, whereas in Chinese thought, indistinction is emblematic of the tao’s endlessly processive transformation of forms, of a foundational coherence uniting all things.

Not so very long after Leonardo blurred in order to sharpen, Descartes promulgated the notion that the distinct serves as the gauge of truth: “that the things we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true.”

By inquiring into the nature of literature, as well as my own lineage as a writer, it has gradually been borne in upon me that with the apotheosis of Truth, the indistinct – that other and shunned less-than-reality, now identified as “false” – needed somewhere to go. So it sought refuge in fiction – made its home within the structure of the novel.

China, according to Jullien in The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Non-Object through Painting, “never separated ‘literature’ from ‘philosophy,’ as we continually did at least until the modern age (our modernity lies in part in that effort to return to and repair that rift). Once philosophy had chosen the clear and distinct, literature, became by way of compensation, the realm of ambiguity. Philosophy is an enterprise to determine essences, which can be contradicted dialectically and transcended, abolished in order to be conserved (Hegel reminds us that what is characteristic of the determined is its absolute anxiety about not being what it is), but not dissolved and blurred. Therefore, it sometimes falls to poetry, at its most profound (by virtue of its indetermination), to think the other. In China, conversely, poetry, and especially landscape painting from its very beginning… are directly linked to the conceptions of Chinese – and notably Taoist – thought. Wang Wei said he was predestined for painting, though he is better known as a poet, and there were many thinkers who painted. Emperor Huizong painted. Wang Fuzhi painted. Indeed, though I cannot conceive and explain the undifferentiated any further without facing the obvious risk of losing it, I can, paint it as a landscape – by letting forms recede, by painting with pale ink, by shrouding the horizon. I need only a spot of ink nebulously soaking the wet silk to figure it.”

To become a de-picter of land(e)scapes.

 

 

Q: What did Marco Polo bring back from the Orient?

A: Atmosphere.

 

The elephant in the Western living room is ambivalence. The question is: how to accommodate it? Literature, and, in particular, the novel, can teach us something about how to do this – how to inoculate ourselves against pure causality, or even purity.

 

Official language of South Sudan: English.

 

Bush: The Decider.

Obama: The Allower.

 

A passport-sized photo of a “black” president surrounded by white space on three sides and with the words: Against Iraq Rebels pressing from above.

 

 

Allowances: One of your generals was killed in Afghanistan. So OK, you can go ahead and bomb Iraq.

You’ve been a very good little boys: you ate your spinach, so now you may have your ice cream.

 

And he floats like a dot in the great white sea.

 

 

Welcome its coming, then permit it to return.

 

Send it back along the same route by which it came.

 

Organ [grinder] donations.

 

“Isis persecution of Iraqi Christians has become genocide, say religious leaders,” sez the Guardian headline.

Slowly, St. Bernard’s holy war claws its way out of the bag and into open language. Sack Constantinople. Then send the children.

How shall I send thee?

 

Philosophy as we have evolved it in the last two millennia plus is but another species of madness. Like science, it determines, it reifies, but produces nothing you can put in your kid’s mouth.

Is it possible, at this late date, to free philosophy from itself?

 

Wu wei er wu bu wei.

 

B’ware the determining termites of termination.

 

The impossible is the compossible disguised as a that.

For a that an’ a’ that…

 

You pull out a fiver to pay for yr pynta and there’s Jeff Davis staring ya in the face. Rummage through pockets, through wallet and they’re all the same: confederates, scrip, shinplasters, fakes, specie, counterfeits: Ceausescu, Indira and Idi Amin, all winking, no leering, like so many Brothers and Sisters Number One, no Zero.

And instead of the inscription above the pyramid: a ruined sphinx and the letters Este e ouk esti,and you hear, or perhaps it hears you, the sound of false teeth and the jingle of tongues in their chattling chains.

I am heading for Bethlehem, but I ain’t no slouch.

I’m gonna find that girl

            If I have to hitchhike ‘round the world…

 

 

You enter the WC at Le G.

What’s that down there in the corner in the shadow beneath the toilet tank, a firefly?

Put on your glasses. Ah, it’s the deodorizer’s LED, flashing its presence in the darkness. Just before you flush, it sneezes politely. Take off your glasses. In praise of Tanizaki.