Making inventions

Equivalent to the making of gestures or facial expressions, or other actions similar to these, or caresses and gesticulations that serve no real purpose.

1.

As every schoolboy knows, the heart must be seized by the first phrase. This was Ezra Pound’s only on-message message. “Seize it, unpack it, stop it, pop it, make it pump pump pump to a brand-new jingle jangle.” Otherwise, what happens? It turns to stone, that’s what happens. Trust me, I have seen it, heard it, read it, lived it, a million times.

In my mailbox, just now:

This is not me in my present nor in any confirmable past configuration. I have never, to the best of my knowledge, exhibited, evaluated or formalized bedside skills. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, have I written about them.

The best of my knowledge? The best? Nixon’s assessment of Reagan during Iran-Contra applies: “He’ll survive because, when all is said and done, he can get up and say, ‘I am an idiot and therefore can’t be blamed,’ and everyone will agree.” That said, still, I am reluctant to click the This Is Not Me button in the Academia e-mail, as I have no idea what consequences this might have. Leave me out of it, that is my instinctual response: my sense of what is and what is not has long been compromised and counterfactualized, and this is especially true where any me or component of me is involved.

Muslims believe everything is written down, that everyone’s fate is sealed, that the hour of our death was appointed at the moment of our birth. Tocqueville disagreed: “The thing is new, therefore I must try to define it, since I cannot name it.” So here’s a thought then (almost): If yanked out at birth and thrown backward then as far as forward since, I would have landed in 1898, the year America began flexing its imperial muscles and Brad’s Drink, a mix of sugar, water, vanilla, caramel, lemon oil, nutmeg, kola nuts, pepsin and other proprietary compounds, was re-named Pepsi-Cola.

New York that year mitosisized into its five boroughs. The Brits sent their first rent cheque to China for Hong Kong. In Paris, Zola wrote J’accuse…! and in Papeete Paul Gauguin, while living with his second of three teenage brides and working a desk job—painted Le Cheval blanc (the White Horse), which I saw, all alone, last night, in a room on the fifth floor of the Musée d’Orsay.

Minutes before, I had been on the second floor, in a large and much-ornamented room, the Salle des fêtes, where, in a Hexagon post last April, we heard General De Gaulle, five days after the coup d’etat that brought him to power, promise to not “inviolate civil liberties” and ask his nation the rhetorical question, “Who honestly believes that, at age 67, I would start a career as a dictator?”

Tocqueville, the sentence preceding the one of his cited above: “The old words despotism and tyranny are not suitable.”

This time, this Orsay, last night, while sitting uncomfortably on the very same ballroom floor that General de Gaulle strode across to pump the hand of André Malraux, we heard a 1995 recording of Jeff Buckley singing “Dido’s Lament” while two young dancers, one of whom is the nephew of a valued friend and Hexagon reader, performed a choreographed “sketch” by Benjamin Millepied.

The dance was lovely. The Gauguin was lovely. But the Purcell aria, and Buckley’s voice, left me—leave me—this me—speechless.

2.

When I am laid, am laid in earth, may my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀
🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹
🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹
🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹
🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹
🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹
🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹
🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹🥀🌹

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊
🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊
🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊
🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊
🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊
🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊
🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊
🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊

Explanation:

• The roses and the thorns represent the love and the pain that Dido feels for Aeneas. The alternating pattern shows the contrast between the two feelings. The roses are red, the color of passion and blood. The thorns are black, the color of sorrow and death.

• The fire represents the burning pyre that Dido builds to kill herself. It also symbolizes her anger and despair. The fire is orange, the color of flames and destruction.

• The waves represent the sea that separates Dido and Aeneas. They also symbolize the tears that Dido sheds for her lover. The waves are blue, the color of water and sadness.”

  

  “I’m sorry if you didn’t like my previous attempt. I used emojis to create a visual representation of the lyrics, but I understand that you wanted something more artistic and expressive. I’ll try again, and this time I’ll use words only. Here is what I came up with:

  When I am laid, am laid in earth, may my wrongs create
  No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
  Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
  Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
  
  When I am gone, gone from this world, may my sorrows fade
  No shadow, no shadow on thy light;
  Think of me, think of me, but ah! not of my plight.
  Think of me, but ah! not of my plight.
  
  When I am lost, lost in the dark, may my love remain
  No burden, no burden on thy heart;
  Dream of me, dream of me, but ah! let us not part.
  Dream of me, but ah! let us not part.
  

  Explanation:

• I used rhyme, repetition, and contrast to create a poetic effect. I also changed some words to make the lyrics more personal and emotional.

• I kept the same structure and melody of the original lyrics, but added a second and a third stanza to complete the song.

• I used the words “gone”, “lost”, and “love” to emphasize the themes of death, despair, and devotion. I also used the words “shadow”, “light”, and “dream” to create a contrast between the darkness and the brightness of the situation.”

3.

Paul Gauguin, Le cheval blanc, 1898

Yes, this is the painting I saw on the fifth floor. From the Musée d’Orsay description: “An impression of paradisiacal serenity emanates from this canvas which has become a veritable icon. The pharmacist in Tahiti who commissioned the picture did not appreciate Gauguin's daring use of colour. He refused it on the grounds that the horse was too green.”

Why is the white horse green? Why is it white?

From the Musée d’Orsay description: “A white horse, its coat tinged with the green of the vegetation, has given the painting its title. It is drinking, standing in the middle of a stream that flows vertically through the composition. The solitary animal probably has a symbolic meaning related to the Tahitians' beliefs about the passage of the soul into another world. In Polynesia, white is associated with death and worship of the gods.”

Is it just me, or is this horseshit?

4.

You ever play the backward/forward time travel game? Like, Covid hit four years ago. If we go forward four years, I’ll be… or… my eldest was born in 1998. Twenty-five years before that was 1973, the year of the Yom Kippur War. Twenty-five years before that was 1948, the year James V. Forrestal, in his first report as secretary of defense, listed 15 “solid accomplishments in the process of unification” including the formulation of long-range and short-range strategic plans and the passage of the National Security Act. Twenty-five years from now? Dead, probably. Etcetera.

The year I was born, Grecian Formula and Head & Shoulders were launched, and Ike warned the world of the growing powers of the military–industrial complex. Twelve years before, when Backwards Me would have been 51, James V. Forrestal, the last Cabinet-level United States Secretary of the Navy and the first United States Secretary of Defense, a man blessed with an orator’s voice, heroic posture, and immaculate dentition, who positively absorbed and exuded poetry from every pore—he could recite from memory more than half of Mark Van Doren’s An Anthology of World Poetry—cracked like a china teacup during the mildest Beltway spring on record.

When Reason's day
Sets rayless-joyless-quenched in cold decay,
Better to die, and sleep
The never-waking sleep, than linger on.

This is from the first stasimon of the poem James V. Forrestal was transcribing on May 22, 1949, seconds before flinging himself out of a diet pantry window on the sixteenth floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital with a dressing-gown sash wrapped around his neck. Flinging himself? Or flung? The poem, “Chorus of Ajax,” is by Sophocles. V. stands for Vincent. What, you ask, precisely, is a diet pantry? A diet, here, is a special course of food to which a person is restricted for medical reasons. A pantry is a kitchen.

From the New York Times (May 23, 1949): “A book of poetry beside his bed was opened to a passage from the Greek tragedian, Sophocles, telling of the comfort of death… Mr. Forrestal had copied most of the Sophocles poem from the book on hospital memo paper, but he had apparently been interrupted in his efforts. His copying stopped after he had written “night” of the word “nightingale”¹; in the 26th line of the poem. The book was Mark Van Doren’s An Anthology of World Poetry, bound in red leather and decorated in gold. A red ribbon bookmark was between Pages 278 and 279 where “Chorus from Ajax,” translated by William Mackworth Praed appears.”

Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save 
In the dark prospect of the yawning grave.... 
Woe to the mother in her close of day, 
Woe to her desolate heart and temples gray, 
When she shall hear 
Her loved one’s story whispered in her ear! 
“Woe, woe!’ will be the cry– 
No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail 
Of the lone bird, the querulous night… 

When Forrestal got to “night” in the word ‘nightingale,” he stopped. Why? He stuck the sheets of memo paper into the back of the book, placed the open book on his night table, walked across the hall into the diet pantry, tied one end of his bathrobe belt around his neck, secured the other end to the radiator, removed the screen, and jumped out the window. Or was pushed. It was long ago.

5.

Archimedes believed he could move the world if he found the right spot to wedge in a big enough lever. I could do likewise with just the contents of my head. In the secret hoards of my memory alone there are innumerable heaps, hollows, plains, caverns, vaults, and canyons—and burdened upon the poles of this vast mass are varied multitudes of glaciated forms. Exploring these, mapping them, will require teams of men with veins of ice, long supply lines, and huge quantities of arms, horses, tinned meat, marmalade, and gin. But let’s be clear here: most people don’t so much get along as ignore each other. I cannot tell if this indifference is genuine or staged. In East Berlin, the Stasi even used birds. Sparrows, swallows, starlings. Most people, as far as I can tell, dress casually; I, on the other hand, dress very smartly. I still feel the pull towards the ideal form. Polished shoes, tailored suits, cufflinks, expensive ties, high-quality socks and underpants. Always have, always will.

6.

Pentecostal Adventists I am told for the most part no longer speak in tongues. That is a shame. If you toss faith out the window, what’s left? And what do you put in its place? There will always be a hole, an emptiness, and this is where meaninglessness settles, and death becomes just that. Death.

The old words, Tocqueville tells us, despotism and tyranny, are not suitable. Learning is remembering. If I had learned it, I would remember it. Pain in my chest, numbness in the wrists and fingers. Chalky sharpness in a big toe. Sky again, all day, everything below flattened, like an autumn leaf in a book. Trivialized. No birds, no Stasi, no clouds.

Muslims who go to Mecca are not just remembering Abraham’s struggles to be faithful, they are renewing their own strength for their own struggles to be faithful. Jews don’t remember Passover, or meditate on it, they experience it. They eat and drink it into their being. Rabbis used to be taught this, or something similar. Christ’s disciples didn’t use symbols, they used the sacraments. His body. His blood. They chopped it up, threw it down their craws and squeezed it into golden goblets.

The Kwakiutl ate human flesh—not for pleasure, it disgusted them, it made them sick to their stomachs. The leader of these rituals was never sober, he was forced to drink and swallow until he was beside himself, foaming at the mouth, shaking and gyrating like the electroshocked. The other dancers would tie him down with cedar cords and sing²:

Great is the wrath of the great spirit. 
He will press men in his arms and torture them. 
He will devour them, skin and hair, 
Chew them to bits, skin and bones, with his teeth. 

The dismembered corpse was put before the dancer on cedar plates and the initiate would tremble and buck at the sight of it. “Now I must eat,” the closed circle of masked performers would sing. “My face is as deathly pale as a ghost.” Often the initiates couldn’t keep the stuff down or couldn’t even swallow it. Others took emetics or shoved their fists down their throats. The music would intensify, the monotonous drums beating faster, the masked dancers spinning around the tethered unfortunate, who soon enough was beside himself, driven out of his wits into ecstasy, into the higher plane of ecstatic being.

Remember this: whoever loses his self makes room in his guts for God.

7.

A Japanese friend says that everything is an entanglement of other things, that time and space themselves are emergent phenomena, mere side effects. If you can’t make the big stuff comply with the little, the planetary with the molecular, the general with the quanta, what’s the point? It’s all mindless dither.

People worry about AI superseding human intelligence, making us redundant. Please. There’s an elephant in the Washington Zoo that plays the clarinet. My Japanese friend tells me there’s an elephant in Tokyo, alone in a concrete box, half a century old, born in captivity. Elephants are meant to walk 50 miles a day.

“They should return it to the wild,” I said.

“There is no wild,” said my Japanese friend.

Elephant jokes were first introduced in 1960 by L.M. Becker Co of Appleton, Wisconsin, the parent company of Toy 'n Joy and Kid Zone. In February 1963, the jokes appeared in the Los Angeles Times, TIME, and Seventeen. That August, four short months before that fateful day in Dallas, one of the jokes appeared in the Dallas Star.

Q: How do you shoot a blue elephant? A: With a blue elephant gun.

Q: How do you shoot a yellow elephant? A: Have you ever seen a yellow elephant?

Q: How do you shoot a red elephant? A: Hold his trunk shut until he turns blue, and then shoot him with the blue elephant gun.

The ancient Greeks’ enemies converted elephants into the most formidable weapons to hit battlefields since the Sumerians strapped carts to horses 2,000 years before. Mobile archery platforms, towering over the terrified men on the ground, trampling entire armies into a bloody pulp. Alexander’s Macedonian generals—specifically, I believe, Antigonus—briefly neutralized the “elephantastical advantage” with pigs. Spooked by the swine’s squeals and their breakneck speed, the elephants broke ranks and ran amok, crushing their handlers. As a countermeasure to the Macedonian strategy, their bitterest enemies the Persians raised elephants and pigs in the same pens, thus habituating them to each other’s presence. This strategy was countered again at the siege of Megara: the Greeks covered their pigs with pitch and set them on fire.

According to Herman Melville, “the military elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence.” He also wrote of Darmonodes’ elephant’s visits to the flower market, where with low salutations it presented nosegays to damsels “and then caressed their zones.” Which zones?

Eight years after Forrestal’s leap, in the summer of 1965, Margaret Howe lived with a dolphin named Peter in a partially flooded two-room house at the Communication Research Institute in the Virgin Islands. Their relationship was complicated. At the start, Peter nibbled on Howe’s toes, until she donned rubber boots. Then he began ramming her with his nose and hitting her with his flippers. Howe held him off with a broom. He rubbed his teeth gently against her thighs, gently, and showed her his genitals. She rubbed him back.

They developed a sizable vocabulary.

I remember when I was a baby, not yet verbal, I had a repertoire of communicatory gestures much like Peter’s: shaking my head up and down, shaking my head from side to side, blinking, hand clapping, slapping myself on the forehead, staring up at the ceiling.

If I ask myself, honestly, in the decades since, have I added any new ones?

My favourite was the blink. I seize you with my eyes, I make you disappear. I make you reappear. You. Not You. Me. Not Me. Punctuated equilibrium. I find much comfort in this. We sometimes lock into situations, then revolt. We do the same things in the same way, no matter how different our brains are. Thought is not something in our heads; it is all around us. Like music. The picture and the person, the painter, the white horse, the viewer: there has to be something in common between them. There has to be something. Bing understood: “something more artistic and expressive”. We just need to unlock it, find its music.

8.

In the sixth canto of Purgatorio, Dante and Virgil are on the second spur of the ante-Purgatory, out on a jagged clifftop that looks, in my befogged mind, like the one that the family caught in the flood are on in the Poussin painting discussed here last May. The poets are on their way up the hill towards Beatrice, and Dante is trying to hurry Virgil, not because he wants to get laid, but because his soul is a dark, heavy burden, and he is lost. But they won’t make it there tonight, they will have to hunker down and make camp, down among the scum, lost souls who died violently without last rites, pagans who grab at their sleeves and stroke their cheeks and beg and pray for their prayers. And Dante rails: Vieni a veder la tua Roma che piagne vedova e sola, e dì e notte chiama: «Cesare mio, perché non m’accompagne?». Come see your Rome, that weeps / Widowed, alone, and day and night exclaims / “My Caesar, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Don’t tell me you don’t see the parallel. Dante compares his Italy to a horse without a rider, its saddle empty, its bridle in the hands of the Church.

At a certain point, whether the horse is white or black, you have to trim the bit and adjust the bridle, saddle up, and leave the ranch.

9.

An impression of paradisiacal serenity is once again emanating, and with it an odour, which, I’m not sure why, reminds me of old canvas tents and the kerosene in camping lamps, and the unfinished basement of my childhood home, the junk room behind the carport where my mother kept things that she at some level knew she would never use or even ever look at again but that she just couldn’t bear to get rid of.

My mother could see the latent value in things better than anyone I’ve ever met. This was both a gift and a curse. She couldn’t get rid of things to save her life. Suitcases filled with school drawings. My earliest attempts at poetry and philosophy. Photographs and letters. Kitchen gadgets and bundles of coat hangers and old mothballed coats and hats and clothes, and cookware, and cookie tins filled with buttons, and sewing boxes and mouldering stacks of National Geographics and old books and more hats and broken lamps and carefully labelled boxes of Xmas lights and Xmas ornaments and school supplies, essays, science tests, report cards. Library cards. X-rays. Stationary from her many failed business ideas. Jam jars. Sporting goods. Baseball trophies. Hymnals. Tools.

She did culls but she could never get around to throwing much of anything away. She moved it around, this mass of debris and flotsam, reboxed it, re-organized it. Which is where I get this, I suppose, this predilection. And then she died. I almost cry when I think of these things. I feel tears well up and then my throat tightens. And then nothing. Why do these things happen? What are the physiological mechanisms at work?

These days, para-dichlorobenzene is more common than naphthalene. The smell is more or less the same. Mothballs.

10.

I woke with a start. Birds again, the night(ingale), at the window. Now the music. Only one in ten thousand people has absolute pitch, but the numbers spike significantly among young women born blind in East Asia. This has something to do with exposure to pitches: tonal (Mandarin, Cantonese) and pitch-accent (Japanese) languages.

I’m not interested in your likes and dislikes, your memories, your tastes. Many men have important things to say, or at least something worth saying, but very few are capable of saying it. Expressing it. Like relieving pressure in a gland. A suppurating wound. I have nothing to say and I can’t shut up. John Cage said something like this, but he said it better. So what? Reduce is the wrong word. It is not a question of simplifying. The DSM-IV has reduced survivor guilt to a mere symptom of PTSD. Why? Avoid stock phrases. Avoid obfuscation. But at the same time, hide things. Talk about the light. The wind. The sky. Hide things in the details. In the descriptions.

11.

Richard Nixon, unlike Peter, never looked at women. His drives were in completely other directions. And on August 9, 1974, he gave the most moving speech by a statesman in history.

12.

A Study in Scarlet:

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

“But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What of the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

13.

“I woke with a start.” A puzzling phrase. Tocqueville: “the thing is new.” Tocqueville: “The old words… are not suitable.” Where is the marvellous swiftness, the dark thick cloud, the chariot of fire? Cast the eye, cast the voice, sing into the wilderness.

14.

1. αηδόνι' (v. 629)

2. Gerardus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, 1932