Saturday commute lxviii: hanging out on a question

  The delight I take

  in my thoughts is

  delight in my own

  strange life. Is 

  this joy of living?

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Diaries, 1932

Culture and Value

G.H. von Wright, editor

Peter Winch, translation

op. cit.

A magpie without name and I were talking

I had three guesses of his name,

and I blew them all. I thought,

of course, of Kipling; and so I

figured Mowgli would be fine. I

thought of Edward Elgar and his

dream of Gerontius; I even fig-

ured Lutyens on the durbar for

George V. I knew I was dealing

with a Potemkin sort of magpie,

an empty etch-a-sketch of shil-

ling for the exceptionalism of

the mercantile empire, but I in-

nocently got the dynasty wrong.

Mary of Teck would not have had

two Cadillacs.

The other day, our magpie was dis-

encumbering himself of a faith that

spoke wonders for the scope of his

bladder, on how the furthest reaches

of the Earth might be enhanced by a

constant sharing of our betterness,

as a people, burnished by the engine

of profits. Subsidiary, but equally
dazzling premises were advanced by
our chirpist, but I came to the ten-
tative conclusion that one can't ac-
tually know what he thinks, if he
does think a thing of his own any-
more, until and unless the President
of the United States is no longer of
African descent. But Friday is not a
day for unhappy reflections. He might
not, actually, revive torture in
our military jurisprudence, once the
spectacle of the black man's humane
Executive Orders were vacated; and
he might fret less about apologies
for our genius, if we had his to fall
back upon.

Yet every day does push forth his

demand to be our leader - our, if

you will, example, as he is bold

(always, we may count on it, bold)

to say. And this Friday I reflect

that it will be nice to have our

Fridays back, once this more can-

didly racist campaign than 2008

has washed away the magpie's tale.

ii  dark sea, Derek 

Horace at your back v: across the plains of the turbid sea

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum

Soracte, nec iam sustineant onus

  silvae laborantes, geluque

  flumina constiterint acuto?

See how Soracte, glistening,

stands out high in

its cape of snow, how laboring

woods let go of

their load, and all the streams

are frozen

over completely with sharpest

cold now?

The story is one of the more famous ever

drawn from the cruelest war ever fought,

of how an enterprising Special Operations

officer spirited the Wehrmacht general

of the occupying forces on Crete away to

British custody in Cairo, whom he'd kid-

napped by posing as his chauffeur. Escap-

ing Crete by hiking across Mt Ida, the

birthplace of Zeus, the General was heard

to recite the first line of this Ode, the

9th from Horace's first book, and his cap-

tor then resumed the recital to its end,

writing later, they had seemed to have

drunk from the same fountains, before.

It does not seem to most as likely that

the necessary task, ongoing now, to subdue

the forces of exploitation and cruelty in

American politics might later reveal them,

in their subjugation, as having been nur-

tured much by learning they are so merry

to revile. But heaven knows, they must do

Horace at Cranbrook sometimes, and it is

just possible that the poet may be shown

again to have been right:

Entrust, then, all the rest to the Gods

as soon as

they've calmed the winds that battle

across the plains of

  the turbid sea, the cypresses and

  ash trees of old will no longer tremble.

At the same time, we are entering the

season of book-signings, and soon the

most auspicious biography of that Brit-

ish officer will be in broad circula-

tion. The grand-daughter of Duff and

Lady Diana Cooper, and daughter of our

premier historian of Venice has had ac-

cess to everything and everyone who

could illuminate that life, beyond his

own undying memoirs in print. This is

an occasion of great news for people

who accept the escort of learning.

Horace

The Odes, I, 9

  To Thaliarchus

John Hollander, translation

J.D. McClatchy, editor

op. cit.

I cannot figure out Argentina

             

             We will be hitting

             it off smashingly,

             with Argentina all

             lighted up on my

             blogger map, game-

             ly propped up by

             Chile in silence;

             and then - I don't

             know, was it some-

             thing I said?

Now Atlas shrugs a fair set of shoulders

Have you ever held out hope,

this year, that Mitt Romney's

party's frenzy to circumvent

the voting rights of the young,

the hispanic, the african-amer-

ican, the white with a bacca-

laureate and, for all we know,

the female, the fecund, the

pansy, cummerbunned, the old,

the cold, the innocently punned,

could leave them then Apollo 

to confront, the figure the

Right supposes has so kept it

at the front, but not to melt?

If the people of the United States

were invited, as the First Lady

does invite us, to conceive of the

election as a referendum on the

human right of voting for one's

government, what is the chance that

the whirlwind they have sown would

not be reaped in freckles, scarcely

countable?

And why not? We keep hearing demands

of the fashionable, to discuss pol-

icy instead of politics, but why now

leave it to the gods to speak to the

chic, of nothing ever grander than the

equal right to have a say in the sur-

render of one's power to the state?

v  Valéry Lorenzo

    Note photographique

    September 23, 2012

Dep't of no kidding i: having a dream in English

  .. If there were no war we     would probably all be in bed.   In bed I lay me down my head.   Bed and board. Stiff as a       board in bed. Catherine was     in bed now between two         sheets, over her and under     her.

Which side did she sleep on?

Maybe she wasn't asleep. Maybe

she was lying thinking about me.

Blow, blow, ye western wind. Well,

it blew and it wasn't the small

rain but the big rain down that

rained.

It rained all night. You knew it rained down that rained. Look at it. Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again. That my love Catherine. That my sweet love Catherine down might rain. Blow her again to me. Well, we were in it. Every one was caught in it and the small rain would not quiet it. "Good night, Catherine," I said out loud. "I hope you sleep well. It it's too uncomfortable, darling, lie on the other side," I said. "I'll get some cold water. In a little while it will be morning and then it won't be so bad. I'm sorry he makes you so uncomfortable. Try and go to sleep, sweet."

I was asleep all the time, she said. You've been talking in your sleep. Are you all right?

Are you really there?

Of course I'm here. I wouldn't go away. This doesn't make any difference between us.

You're so lovely and sweet. You wouldn't go away in the night, would you?

Of course I wouldn't go away. I'm always here. I come whenever you want me.

"------," Piani said. "They've started again."

"I was dopey," I said. I looked at my watch. It was three o'clock in the morning. I reached back behind the seat for a bottle of the Barbera.

"You talked out loud," Piani said.

"I was having a dream in English," I said.

ii  Hans Hartung

v   Mathias Lauridsen

Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929

First Scribner edition, 2012©