the portfolio of time

"...peering with steady blue eyes into the portfolio of time."

Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer

Tropic of Cancer -- Henry Miller quote

 "Lawyer, priest, doctor, politician, newspaperman—these are the quacks who have their fingers on the pulse of the world. A constant atmosphere of calamity. It's marvelous. It's as if the barometer never changed, as if the flag were always at half-mast. One can see now how the idea of heaven takes hold of men's consciousness, how it gains ground even when all the props have been knocked from under it. There must be another world beside this swamp in which everything is dumped pell-mell. It's hard to imagine what it can be like, this heaven that men dream about. A frog's heaven, no doubt. Miasma, scum, pond lilies, stagnant water. Sit on a lily pad unmolested and croak all day. Something like that, I can imagine." 

Tropic of Cancer — Henry Miller

Some Emily Dickinson on Black Friday.

 They say it's called "Black Friday" because it's the time when retailers finally go "in the black" and turn a profit. 

But it can also be, under the right circumstances, even blacker, and darker. Suppose it is overcast, and you have nothing to do on Black Friday. You're not at work, and although you imagine you can fill a spare day with productive or entertaining activity, you mostly sit around in your pajamas, unwashed, looking at the Internet. 

It isn't so much depressing, but melancholy. But can we make Black Friday even blacker? We can! How? Bring forth 

Emily Dickinson! (1830-1886)

Emily Dickinson was a shut-in who didn't give a rip about punctuation, titles, or anything else. Her poetry came from the Blackest of Fridays, an infinity-long afternoon of gloomy brooding unmatched in literature. Dickinson stared into the void and brought back reports such as this:

A Death blow is a Life blow to Some

Who, till they died, did not alive become;

Who, had they lived, had died but when

They died, Vitality begun.

Sip some chamomile tea and dwell on that for a minute. 

Oh, is it still just around two in the afternoon and this day is dragging on forever? 

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

Then there’s a pair of us! – don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know!

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring Bog!

Hm... still just a bleary overcast afternoon. Here's one more to make this Friday the Blackest Friday ever!

To help our bleaker parts

Salubrious hours are given,

Which if they do not fit for earth

Drill silently for heaven. 

"Salubrious!" What does that even mean? (it means "healthy")

And I give you this:

Did Emily Dickinson 

Smoke the Weed?

Did Emily Dickinson 

Do the Deed?

Did Emily Dickinson 

Travel Far

To spaced-out dimensions 

Beyond the Stars?

Did Emily Dickinson 

Trans-mutate?

Did Emily Dickinson 

Levitate?

Was Emily Dickinson a super-dimensional alien from a realm beyond our comprehension? We shall never know. But Google her image on the Inter-webs and decide for yourself. 

The Dubsar and The Astronaut

They do their work on the Galilean moons of Jupiter, millions of men and women, ancient beyond imagination, chiseling, one letter at a time, the entire history of mankind, on great slabs—not indigenous, of course—of purest marble. Chisels and mallets in chapped hands. Tap tap tap. The vast face of Jupiter looms overhead, shining glorious on the scribes, lined up before their pedestals.  No spacesuits. No held breath, no discomfort, just ageless fatigue. These are not lives, but afterlives. Not too old, not too young. Just that middling age that makes one almost invisible. Gray, but not completely gray.  Taught skin over lean muscle and tendon. Things happen on earth, these men and women, chosen by mysterious gods for mysterious reasons, sit for ages, chiseling the past into stone. The rise and fall of empires are recorded. The stubbing of a toe, probably not, but the loss of some minor local, obscure election, with enough pathos? This is recorded. The death of kings? Of course. Lost car keys? Not so much. 

Naram, once a dubsar in Mesopotamia, had served Sumerian kings, then Akkadian kings. He had lived what he thought was a chaste and sinless life, but here he sits on a little wooden stool, in this unexpected afterlife, on the surface of Europa tapping out the vagaries of human history, one letter at a time. For awhile it was cuneiform, but as the centuries passed he had written in every conceivable language.  The context of the events as they unfolded, the comprehension of each language, and the details of events small or of great consequence, formed in his mind as easily and simply as a dream.  He wondered sometimes if he were recording events, or making events. He knew it was the former, but he liked to imagine the latter. 

Lately, he'd been writing in Hindi, about the landing of space vehicles on his very moon. Naram found this very exciting. These Indian travelers had done several exploratory expeditions, and one traveler, one single astronaut, was approaching his valley. He watched this history unfold, on his marble stone, as he chiseled it there. 

Naram was finishing a sentence. He knew, without turning from his work, that a visitor was walking down his very row of stone slabs. Without looking up from his work, he raised his hand and beckoned over his shoulder for that visitor to approach. He didn't need to look. He knew all the details from that which he had written. He had just finished the Hindi word for "suit" when, as he expected, a shadow, the first shadow of movement he had seen for thousands of years, passed over his shoulder.  He turned to look. 

The shining sphere, a face-shield, black and gleaming, the black and white suit, not too cumbersome, but solidly built, silhouetted by Jupiter's vast glory, stood facing him, beholding the body of his endless work.

Astronaut Jenean Nayak, jaded, tired, not sure if she were hallucinating, squinted behind her face shield. Her breath went in and out. These people can't be here, she thought. I'm suffering neurologic compromise. This cannot be.  Already nervous, she had broken at least a dozen protocols coming out here on her own, so far beyond the perimeter.  She thought of the reprimand she'd get if she were discovered.  No one would believe this, even if she confessed to ignoring procedure. 

Naram knew not only that this masked figure was a woman, but that she was from the wealthy suburb Gulshan, she had married and divorced, drank on occasion, and was either about to live or die, depending on how fast she read what he, Naram, had just written in the stone. She was a figure of some note, for he had written her entire lifetime, on and off; her placement in school, her stellar academic achievements, and her career at IIST. 

Now this. The outcome of her story rested on her ability to comprehend what she read, and her ability to act quickly. 

"This is about me," she thought as she read. Her early advancement through St. George's in Hyderabad. Her divorce. The mission to Jupiter. 

She read:

She cast out on her own, ill-advised . . .

"This just happened."  How did this old man know? She looked at the man, thin, horribly thin, large dark eyes watching her expectantly, hammer and chisel held in slack hands between his knees. She had no way to communicate with him. How was he, or any of these people alive with no life-support? 

She continued to read. She felt so fatigued. 

#

Naram watched the astronaut crouch ever so slightly, obviously reading. "Get to the end," he thought. He watched her bend lower, reading the very last thing he had written. The movement. The flinch of recognition. He smiled and pointed back the way she had come. The figure bolted at once.

He would almost have found it comical, watching her try to sprint in her spacesuit, but too much was at stake. He watched her run as best she could. The large boots tramping, dust flying. 

He turned back to his work and read the last sentence. 

There was a tiny tear in her suit. Her air leaked out slowly, and her LS monitor, malfunctioning, did not alert her to the danger.

Now he waited. Not long. It would come to him as in a dream. 

He added, with a tap tap tap:

She read her fate, and ran for her life.

Still he waited. He could not see the future, however close. Only the past. 

A small detail came to him.  Tap tap. 

She fell.

Still he waited. Naram had never been so anxious. He had seen this person, now he was writing her history. 

Finally, he added, tap tap tap:

With the help of two others, she was dragged into the airlock, and revived. 

walking barefoot November 8th in Michigan.

passenger side heat blender 2011 Impala

a walk in Rockford

drivers side heat blender 2011 impala

got a new job

 that was easy.

"life: to some it's a miracle, to others, a curse, to most, somewhere in between."

I quit.

 Quit my job. 

reading notes

From The Razor's Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham

Masterlink, Ruysbroek, 

Plotinus, Denis the Areopagite, Jacob Boehme, Meister Eckhart, "Eleven Thousand Virgins," Cologne

"The Alone to The Alone","Dark Night of The Soul", "The Ineffable", Brague (painter), Gaugin, Renoir, "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb", Rastignac, Andre Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, "A play of Masterlinck's", "Paolo and Francesca", Berenice(play), Tacitus, Racine (poet? playwrite?), Houdon's Voltaire, Spinoza, Aeschylus, lumbago, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Holderlin, Rilke, Rolla, Valasquez, El Greco, Veronal, "Seven veils of Ingorance", Spinoza, Valery (writer), Baudelaire, Rimibaud;

General:

thalassocracy, The Winged Victory of Samothrace, Pindar, Rabelaisian

"The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind."

Notes from The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

Things I jotted down while reading "The Secret History, by Donna Tartt, 1992

Benjamin Jowett 

Periclean Athens

Balliol Rymme

Doggerals

Clerihew

stereopticon

bilous

Hesiod's primordal chaos

Josephine Baker

Liddell and Scott

Kouroi

London, by Pennant

Byron's Marino Faliero

"A mock thalos, Doric by way of Pomeii"

Elizabeth and Leicester

Emma Bovary

Alexander Pope

Duc de Saint-Simon

piquet (card game)

Vanity Fair (book

"Twelve Great Cultures"

Constable (writer? book?)

John Donne

Izaak Walton

Rupert Brook (poet)

"The Gautama"

Brian Eno

the Pantheon

Hegel

The Sitwells

Pindar

"Borges, the writer"

Martin Bormann

Artaud

The Fleshtones

"Traumerei"

telestic madness

"Bakcheia"

"To escape cognative mode of expression"

chiton

Pythia

oreibasia

Khairei

Carracci

Pyrrhic

"epigram of Callimachus"

Ilion

Mrs. Gamp

hoi polloi

Pliny

Comun, Tifernum

Malacca Chair

bibelot

Arthur Rimbaud

The Greeks and the Irrational Dodos

Ray Milland The Lost Weekend

Howdah

Attic vases, Meissen Porcelain, Alma-Tadema, Frith 

Jean Cocteau

dado

"Philistine" in context of a modern person

exordium, Palinurus

Theophile Gautier

Vigny's Chatterton

Schliemanns, Ilios

excavation of Hissarlik

antelion

Morris Lee Harden

Anwar Sadat

Golda Meir

garrulous

ecumenical, bravura

A.E.Houseman (poet)

"With rue my love is laden 

Lycidas, gladiola

Morphia

Phaedo

Marcel Proust

George Sand

ebullient

Cortes, Gregory of Tours 

"Mycenaean inscriptions from Knossos"

Spleenwort

Davy Balfour from Kidnapped

P.G. Wodehouse

Pluto and Persephone

Harold Acton

"duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice"

Proust

"Jacobian dramatists:" Webster, Middleton, Tourngur and Ford

    The Malcontent, The White Devil, The Broken Heart

Christopher Marlowe,

        Raleigh and Nashe

"But ture, I cried too much /
the dawns are heartbreaking

Our Mutual Friend

"Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return>"

Hagin Sophia

Orpheus

St. Basil's in Moscow

Chartres

Salisbury and Amiens

Weekend

 Brutus killed a vole

finally played 10,000 games

huff park. saw a deer up close. Went to see Alex's new place. 

deb paints kitchen

read a good portion of "The Secret History" 

9,999 Chess Games!

 

A Timeline of People and Things.

Ancient Greeks

Pericles                         495-429 BC

Existentialists

 Søren Kierkegaard     1813-1855

Friedrich Nietzsche     1844-1900

Jean-Paul Sartre     1905-1980

Poets

John Keats                        1798-1821

Alfred, Lord Tennyson     1809-1892

Authors

Jane Austen                 1775-1817

Virginia Woolf             1882-1941

Firewood weekend

 760 logs, 26 trips from the pile to the stack using my hand cart. Took about two hours to stack. 

Saugatuck: We did not get eaten by a bear.

Also, I pulled all the weeds in the driveway. 

 

i made another tiny zen garden.

 

I made a tiny zen garden.

I made a tiny zen garden. Also this weekend: cleaned sink trap, went to Horrock's and got pickled quail's eggs. Also, got a new pillow.  

weekend accomplished!

Painted the house, fixed the switch in the upstairs bathroom, and made a tiny fountain. Weekend accomplished!