In my estimation, the final two chapters of Hydriotaphia are the bar by which all English prose is measured. I encourage you to read along as I do (noting the bits I elided), or simply read aloud for yourself — but in any event, make it an oral event. Feel the cadence of the clauses Browne stacks, one upon the other, and the drums of his alliterations, like heartbeats each, unto the end. Two examples:

If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death; our life is a sad composition; We live with death, and die not in a moment.

* * *

When many that feared to dye shall groane that they can dye but once, the dismall state is the second and living death, when life puts despair on the damned; when men shall wish the covering of Mountains, not of Monuments, and annihilation shall be courted.

Much more to be said. But for now, if the only immortality we corpses yet to expire ever experience is in our hope for anything that might endure us, remembrance or monument, then may at least, as with Browne, that hope be memorably stated and worthy of record.

Cheerful, one-armed, and black,
The gallows dangles paladins,
Satan’s skinny skeletons
Dancing bones of Saladins.

Christmas carols fill the air,
Small black puppets face the sky;
Messer Beelzebub makes them dance
Smacking heads and yanking ties.

Quaking puppets join spindly arms:
Black organ pipes swaying high above,
Their chests once pressed to maidens’ breasts
Now coitally collide, disgustingly in love.

Three cheers for dancers disemboweled!
There’s room to writhe on the killing floor.
Is it a battle . . . or is it a dance? Who cares:
Mad Beelzebub fiddles, evermore.

Heels this hard don’t need replacing.
Chests have shrugged off shirts of skin:
There’s nothing shocking left to see.
Skulls bear snowcaps, white and thin.

Crows crown heads, feather cracks;
Fleshy chunks quiver on chins:
They look like knights in paper armor
Colliding in darkness and nocturnal winds.

Breezes blow these hanged men, dancing.
Like an iron organ, the black gallows groans.
Along the horizon, the sky turns hellish red.
From violet forests rise lupine moans . . .

Someone unstring these grim commanders
Who, underhanded, read rosaries of love.
Broken fingers count pale vertebrae.
No monastery this, for the dead above!

And in this danse macabre‘s midst
One mad skeleton can’t stay in check,
Like a spooked horse he leaps into the red sky;
Stiff noose still coiled around his neck,

His little fingers grip a bony thigh
Squeezing out laughter more like moans,
And like an actor lost in drama,
Retakes the stage to the applause of bones.

Cheerful, one-armed, and black,
The gallows dangles paladins,
Satan’s skinny skeletons
Dancing bones of Saladins.

Arthur Rimbaud, “Hanged Men, Dancing” (trans. Wyatt Mason)

Au gibet noir, manchot aimable,
Dansent, dansent les paladins,
Les maigres paladins du diable,
Les squelettes de Saladins.

Messire Belzébuth tire par la cravate
Ses petits pantins noirs grimaçant sur le ciel,
Et, leur claquant au front un revers de savate,
Les fait danser, danser aux sons d’un vieux Noël !

Et les pantins choqués enlacent leurs bras grêles:
Comme des orgues noirs, les poitrines à jour
Que serraient autrefois les gentes damoiselles,
Se heurtent longuement dans un hideux amour.

Hurrah! les gais danseurs, qui n’avez plus de panse !
On peut cabrioler, les tréteaux sont si longs !
Hop! qu’on ne sache plus si c’est bataille ou danse !
Belzébuth enragé racle ses violons !

O durs talons, jamais on n’use sa sandale !
Presque tous ont quitté la chemise de peau;
Le reste est peu gênant et se voit sans scandale.
Sur les crânes, la neige applique un blanc chapeau:

Le corbeau fait panache à ces têtes fêlées,
Un morceau de chair tremble à leur maigre menton:
On dirait, tournoyant dans les sombres mêlées,
Des preux, raides, heurtant armures de carton.

Hurrah! la bise siffle au grand bal des squelettes !
Le gibet noir mugit comme un orgue de fer !
Les loups vont répondant des forêts violettes:
A l’horizon, le ciel est d’un rouge d’enfer…

Holà, secouez-moi ces capitans funèbres
Qui défilent, sournois, de leurs gros doigts cassés
Un chapelet d’amour sur leurs pâles vertèbres:
Ce n’est pas un moustier ici, les trépassés !

Oh! voilà qu’au milieu de la danse macabre
Bondit dans le ciel rouge un grand squelette fou
Emporté par l’élan, comme un cheval se cabre:
Et, se sentant encor la corde raide au cou,

Crispe ses petits doigts sur son fémur qui craque
Avec des cris pareils à des ricanements,
Et, comme un baladin rentre dans la baraque,
Rebondit dans le bal au chant des ossements.

Au gibet noir, manchot aimable,
Dansent, dansent les paladins,
Les maigres paladins du diable,
Les squelettes de Saladins.

Arthur Rimbaud, “Bal des pendus“

I have no time for those pompous imbeciles
Who go into ecstasies before bunnies’ burrows
Because nature is ugly, tedious and hostile;
It has no message to transmit to humans.

How pleasant, at the wheel of a powerful Mercedes,
To drive through solitary and grandiose places;
Subtly manipulating the gearstick.
You dominate the hills, the rivers, and all things.

The forests, so close, glitter in the sun
And seem to reflect ancient knowledges;
In the depths of their valleys must lie such marvels,
After a few hours you are taken in;

Leaving the car, the irritations begin;
You stumble into the middle of a repugnant mess,
An abject universe, deprived of all meaning
Made of stones and brambles, flies and snakes.

You miss the parking-lots and the smell of petrol,
The serene, gentle glint of the nickel counters;
It’s too late. It’s too cold. The night begins. The forest enfolds you in its cruel dream. (via Collapse IV)

Reading this today, I thought of Lewis Mumford’s comparison of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Melville:

Emerson was the perpetual passenger who stayed below in bad weather, trusting that the captain would take care of the ship.  Melville was the sailor who climbed aloft, and knew that the captain was sometimes drunk and that the best of ships might go down.

Where the lesson of one such captain, Ahab, drunk with monomania if not drink, was that the “pasteboard mask” covering such truth might ultimately be there for a reason, and that one should strike through it with care; it seems to me that Houellebecq exemplifies another possibility, that of what becomes of us when there is no mask at all.

I couldn’t attend the 2,000-strong protest march in the afternoon (a planned takeover of a vacant building) because I needed to collect the wife at the airport and didn’t want to risk her being stranded if things should turn sour. Instead I made my way down in the evening after she’d collapsed into bed for hours on end, weighted down by a week’s worth of exhaustion & emotion. What I saw from a distance, “protected” by the paternally confused expression of police power, were some three hundred people on the sidewalk in front of the YMCA and a line of buses aligned like boxcars bound for suburban detention centers.

^{(Still from livestream [shot by @OakFoSho])}

Theirs was a different kind of resignation – to that of an immediate fate, to be sure, but more importantly (to their credit) one defiant to this fate’s perceived cause & lasting effect. They were accused of (a) failing to disperse from the scene of a riot (when a riot is encased by police, whose riot is it?) and (b) attempting to invade & occupy the YMCA. What I came to learn, and had confirmed by numerous sources sympathetic & unsympathetic to the cause, was that some employees of the YMCA had actually opened their doors to protesters fleeing the bureaucratic pornography of the Oakland Police Department, who rarely issues a dispersal command that isn’t simultaneously counteracted by the corralling force of its bludgeons. A few protesters were, I’m told, fled through the back-alley exits; most, however, were caught. Reportedly, over the course of the day, some were flung down stairs, others absented their teeth.

These, whose weapons ranged mostly from Evian bottles to makeshift shields to tedious rhetorical & graffiti styles, we’re now told by a few leaders of Oakland are the new loathsome face of “domestic terrorism.” The coincidence of President Obama’s signature on new indefinite detention legislation for such enemies of the state is terrifyingly striking – not least because its first high-profile application may well be in the liberal Disneyland that is the San Francisco Bay Area.

I cannot write about Occupy Wall Street without reflecting, too, on the idea of movements. I’ve long ago stopped wondering whether it is in fact one. It is, I think, most certainly. But what kind? Is it, as I’ve suggested before, a kind of drunken stumbling — from side to side, maybe a little forward, but mostly just down, maybe even a little backward? Or, is it a death knell — not of history, never that, but of a certain historical moment? Which brings me back to ashes, from dust to dust. Life, even in decay, goes on.

Over and under the ground he hurried toward the place where he lived. No fragment of time nor space anywhere was wasted, every instant and every cubic centimeter crowded crushing outward upon the next with the concentrated activity of a continent spending itself upon a rock island, made a world to itself where no present existed. Each minute and each cubic inch was hurled against that which would follow, measured in terms of it, dictating a future as inevitable as the past, coined upon eight million counterfeits who moved with the plumbing weight of lead coated with the frenzied hope of quicksilver, protecting at every pass the cherished falsity of their milled edges against the threat of hardness in their neighbors as they were rung together, fallen from the Hand they feared but could no longer name, upon the pitiless table stretching all about them, tumbling there in all the desperate variety of which counterfeit is capable, from the perfect alloy recast under weight to the thudding heaviness of lead, and the thinly coated brittle terror of glass.

William Gaddis, The Recognitions

Once upon a time, I read made a show online of reading through William Gaddis’ stunning debut  novel The Recognitions. Recently, Dalkey Archive Press reprinted it, which will I hope attract a handful more readers. Of those, I suspect a few might Google around for some help or some conversations. Should they do so, it is my hope that they might find something of value out of the conversations had here and the posts themselves placed into a single PDF here. Just so you know.

Modern man likes eating in restaurants, at separate tables, with his own little group, for which he pays. Since everyone else in the place is doing the same thing, he eats his meal under the pleasing illusion that everyone everywhere has enough to eat. Even sensitive people do not need this illusion afterwards; those who have eaten do not mind stumbling over the hungry.

The eater increases in weight; he is and he feels heavier, and there is a boast in this: he cannot grow any more, but there, on the very spot, under everyone’s eyes, he can increase in weight. This is another reason why people like eating with others; it is a contest in repletion. The satisfaction of repletion, of the moment when nothing more can be absorbed, is part of the goal and pleasure of eating and originally no-one was ashamed of it; there might be a large quantity of game which had to be eaten up before it went bad and so everyone ate as much as he could and carried his store of food within him.

Anyone who eats alone renounces the prestige which the process would bring him in the eyes of others. He bares his teeth simply for the sake of eating, and this impressing no-one, for there is no-one there to be impressed. But when people eat together, they can all see each other’s mouths opening. Everyone can watch everyone else’s teeth while his own are in action at the same time. To be without teeth is contemptible and there is a touch of asceticism in refusing to show those that one has. The natural occasion on which to show off one’s teeth is when eating with others. Contemporary etiquette requires the mouth to be closed while eating and thus reduces to a minimum the slight threat contained in opening it at all. But we are not yet as harmless as this makes us appear; we eat with knife and fork, that is, with two instruments which could easily be used for attack; everyone has these ready in front of him, or he may even carry them around with him. And the bit of food which we cut off and, as elegantly as possible shove in our mouths is still called a “bite.”

Laughter has been objected to as vulgar because, in laughing, the mouth is  opened wide and the teeth are shown. Originally laughter contained a feeling of pleasure in prey or food which seemed certain. A human being who falls down reminds us of an animal we might have hunted and brought down ourselves. Every sudden fall which arouses laughter does so because it suggest helplessness and reminds us that the fallen can, if we want, be treated as prey. If we went further and actually ate it, we would not laugh. We laugh instead of eating it. Laughter is our physical reaction to the escape of potential food. As Hobbes said, laughter expresses a sudden feeling of superiority, but he did not add that it only occurs when the normal consequences of this superiority do not ensue. His conception contains only half the truth. Perhaps because animals do not laugh, he did not see that our laughter is originally an animal reaction. But neither do animals deny themselves obtainable food if they really want it. Only man has learnt to replace the final stage of incorporation by a symbolic act. It is as though the whole interior process of gulping down food could be summed up and replaced by those movements of the diaphragm which are characteristic of laughter.

The only animal to make a sound really resembling human laughter is the hyena. This sound can be induced by placing food before a captive hyena and then withdrawing it quickly before the animal has time to snatch it. Here it is worth remembering that, in freedom, the hyena’s food consists of carrion. It is easy to imagine how often food must have been snatched from under its eyes by other animals after its own appetite had been aroused.

Elias Canetti, Crowds & Power

“Gloria Gammage,” by Mina Loy

It would be a decade before I would encounter my first great library. By “great library” I mean a library whose holdings are so huge that no one quite knows what is in its basements; a library in which Vivaldi scores may lie hidden for a hundred years; a library of density as well as scope; a library that will turn no book away—trash or treasure—for a good library is miserly, proud of its relics as a church, permitting even a cheap novel to be useful to the study of the culture it came from; an institution, consequently, that won’t allow ephemera to ephemerate and is not ashamed of having the finest collection of bodice rippers in existence; a library that has sat safely in the same place and watched like a sage its contents age, consequently a library whose dust is the rust of time; a library that never closes on cold days and will allow the homeless to rest in its reading room; a library that will permit me to poke about in its innards as long and as often as I like; and finally a library that makes generous awards, and then lets me win one.

[. . .]

My books are there to comfort me about the world, for only the wicked can be pleased by our present state of things, while the virtuous disagree about the reasons for our plight and threaten to fall to fighting over which of us is responsible for the misery of so many millions, and in that way steadily increasing the number of hypocrites, jackals, and rogues.Among them, writers of books.

No occupation can guarantee virtue the way hard labor makes muscle, and only sainthood requires it as a part of its practice. So the writers write, perhaps improving their texts from time to time, but only rarely themselves.

But the books . . . the books disagree quietly, as the minds of the many readers in the library may, without the least disturbance; and in that peace we can observe how beautiful, how clever, how characteristic, how significant, how comically absurd the ideas are, for here in the colorful rows that make bookcases seem to dance, the world exists as the human mind has received and conceived it, but transformed into a higher realm of being, where virtue is knowledge, as the Greeks claimed, where even knowledge of the worst must be valued as highly as any other, and where events as particular as any love affair, election, or battlefield are superceded by their descriptions [. . .] for these volumes are banks of knowledge, and are examples, carefully constructed, of our human kinds of consciousness, of awareness that is otherwise  momentary, fragile, and often confused. Among the shelves, where the philosophers tent their troops, there is a war of words–a war of the one supportable kind–a war of thoughtfully chosen positions, perhaps with no problems solved, but no blood spilt; shelves where human triumph and its suffering are portrayed by writers who cared at least enough about their lives and this world to take a pen to paper. Thucydides knew it when he said, concerning the conflict that occurred on the Peloponnesus, in effect: this war is mine. History occurs once. Histories happen repeatedly in reader after reader.

Every-one of these books is a friend who will always say the same thing, but who will always seem to mean something new, or something old, or something borrowed, something blue.

William H. Gass, “Slices of Life in a Library” in Life Sentences (2011)

I disagree very strong, actually. I don’t know why art should have to bring either pleasure or meaning, let alone be selfless. Art, as I see it, in the barest of terms, creates a kind of consciousness. It distributes our senses in ways that we would rarely, if ever, manage through the strictly mundane. Even those rare moments when the mundane does become art, somehow, often by way of someone, this mundane has been recast. Unlike most of my literary & philosophical heroes, however, I don’t think I really believe in the solitary genius puppeetering his or her way above the paragraphs & pages, in full command every step of the way of the failures & successes; nor do I regard the act of creation as his/her abject humiliation or self-emptying. The creator is not so much lost as conceptually redistributed, shuffled and re-dealt for a new hand. There may well be humility involved in this, but nothing so terminal as “selflessness.”

You are the third or fourth person in recent weeks to note my tendency to swing between cynicism & sentiment. A friend wrote me the other day to say, for example: “I’ve no how idea you seem to manage a sort of idealistic timelessness sharing the page with bleak and painful modernity at the same time. . . .” It is, I suppose, quite true. As I’ve gotten older, I just don’t have the emotional energy for unbridled cynicism. But neither do I trade in the industries & activities that are supposed either to create hope or, barring that, provide distraction from this hope’s conspicuous absence. On the contrary, the literature about which I’m idealistic and/or enthusiastic is not fully (or sometimes at all) in the service of hope, and rarely is it a medium of distraction. It is, rather, as I see it, an investment in the very happening of the world. For precisely this reason, it could never be free of hope or despair — or, for that matter, orgasm & boredom. A silly thought, perhaps, that one can achieve all this w/ a nose in a book or eyes strained on tiny fonts sometimes smudged by time, drink & dinner, but no sillier than the more or less “real world” alternatives that are continually set before me.

Samuel Beckett. Yes, as a matter of fact, he is quite important to me. Some authors, however, I simply cannot write about. Not because they are somehow above the fray, or because I cannot do them justice. Few things are so holy or unspeakable. Just ask Yahweh. No, such authors, esp. Beckett, are spectacles — they are the thing beheld, like the sun in the opening sentence of Murphy (“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”) that becomes the means by which we see everything else. Through them, these spectacles, we realize how blind we’ve become & will remain. (Debord was only half-right about the society of the spectacle, but I’m not sure which half.)

Oh, and yes, though I’ve no discernible characters of which to speak or plots to keep, I’m confident I’ve written a few sentences worth keeping. It is perhaps bad form to confess, but I’m not very self-deprecating when it comes to my writing. I accept that it is not for everybody (or, indeed, for most). But, why, selflessness be damned, I enjoy much of it, especially so when I must work to rehabilitate a piece — or, more likely, a piece from a piece. The rest can be rubbished, or published on a blog somewhere. Some are, of course, unworthy of the effort, but we could all use a little wasteful discipline in our life.

Yours,

Yes, you surmise correctly. I was indeed “once in school.” Very deeply in school, in fact. Ah, but it seems now that the bad decisions of my adult ambition did very little to provide proper redress for the poor judgements of my immaturity. Which is to say, my non-academic life today was one borne not of principled decision, at least not on my part, but is a sentence imposed by circumstance.

I was describing to somebody the other day my sense of alienation from what passes for popular — we were specifically discussing online writing. I much to prefer to read, meditate even, discuss at length, with myself certainly but also occasionally with others, things that beg to be re-read — things to which one must & want to return. For some, there is a libidinal aspect to this: some kind of gratification gained. But for me, such writing is almost strictly a sort of survival, a kind of oxygen. This preference informs what I try to write, as well. Sadly, this desire is rarely shared by even my closest friends. Utility is the name of the game, it seems, certainly of success, in the service of a pursuit of truth or knowledge, but also enjoyment & distraction. This, in my experience, is the prevalent pose, if not necessarily the default, of even a good many doctored literature professors. I don’t begrudge them this; it’s not, after all, like I’m innocent of it either, even in the articulation of the distinction. But preferences, such as they are, always exceed their expression.

Many of my friends remain far more idealistic with respect to higher education than do I. Most of them still believe in the value of the humanities, for example (of a well-rounded mind, the moral intelligence honed, etc.). And, yes, as far as it goes, as is the case with many a doe-eyed humanistic truism, I suppose I believe in that too. My problem is simply the cost of such an education these days. It all seems to me vaguely like a criminal enterprise. And while much of contemporary Western life likely is as well, at least from the perspective of the well-read, they being the ones with a sensibility & perspective that goes beyond the immediacy of the moment & all manner of perceived needs & outrage when these are not met, who have not lost their taste for “the enemy’s” blood so much as they have the confidence to know where to begin biting, the criminality of the American higher education system seems the one easiest for me to avoid. Though, of course, I didn’t avoid it, did I? — and, worse still, I would gladly accept a position anywhere if somebody should email me today to offer one. Perhaps another benefit of being well-read is the capacity to knowingly deceive oneself, marking the fact one feels bad about it all as a kind of credit in one’s favor as one continues the deception.

I hope you are well. Enjoy your twenty-fifth birthday. Now is the time to set aside childish things: bad decisions await.

Yours,