Back to how songs I like function as texts, read on the screen or page, sans instrumentation…

Consider this pre-hip hop jam by the unsane Bob Dylan/Robert Zimmerman:

Subterranean Homesick Blues

Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine,
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government,
The man in the trench coat,
Badge out, laid off,
Says he’s got a bad cough,
Wants to get it paid off—
Look out kid,
It’s somethin you did—
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again—
You better duck down the alley way,
Lookin for a new friend,
The man in the coon-skin cap
In the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills,
You only got ten—

[Two more verses...]

Ah get born, keep warm,
Short pants, romance, learn to dance,
Get dressed, get blessed,
Try to be a success,
Please her, please him, buy gifts,
Don’t steal, don’t lift—
Twenty years of schoolin
And they put you on the day shift—
Look out kid,
They keep it all hid—
Better jump down a manhole,
Light yourself a candle,
Don’t wear sandals,
Try to avoid the scandals,
Don’t wanna be a bum,
You better chew gum—
The pump don’t work
Cause the vandals took the handles…

Here, the line breaks hardly matter, and the rhyme and meter are so irregular that it’s hard to say in what way they matter (though they certainly do).

Reading the song on the page or screen, I come away with a general sing-song-iness, and I am dazed, battered into accepting the stream of signs. It’s a very medial song, prefiguring McCarthy: The poor Kid gets told a dozen things by a dozen interlopers, none of whom has his interests at heart. The world consumes him, even taking the fucking handles off the pump. (And what does the pump pump? Water? Gas? I’ve always wondered.)

The next song I’d like to explicate is Lupe Fiasco’s “Daydream,” which deserves a vast, vast space.

Today, right now, I suggest writers of songs consider how their words are read, even as an exercise, and readers of words begin to read aloud, breath to breath, sign to sign, feeling the ideas glued to the instruments’ sounds separate and present themselves, one by one, in time.

The following is the first installment in a lengthy, madcap investigation of how songs I like function as texts, read on the screen or page, sans instrumentation. Prosodists, sharpen your metrical pencils.

She said, she said:
“Nothin’s wrong—and I belong on stage…”

—Ted Leo, “Hearts of Oak.”

Songs aren’t always satisfying poems when read on the page. Many songs lean heavily on the voices of their performers—how their performers breathe them forward into time, meter them into space, packet of sound-information by packet of sound-information, toward our ears. The signs of the song march along, one by one, and we assemble a meaning that is not purely textual (signal, verbal) but also sonic/phonic, playful, almost religious.

In some cases, however, the written song meanders back and forth between poetry (decent, if not mind-blasting) and something else entirely—prose that’s simply being fed to us at a certain clip.

This is one reason I like hip hop so much. It doesn’t try to achieve the lyricism of a great written or spoken poem. Let the rockers try to match Dante. Rappers ape another form entirely. Their songs are often political, usually essayistic, and almost never anything but prose, spoken in a quasi-meter, with a few forced rhymes to keep up the illusion of “song”-ness.

This isn’t a criticism of my favorite genre of music. Hip hop’s strategy of not having to be poetry pur sang is brilliant. It’s freeing. Hip hop sounds more powerful, not less, for giving back to the page the powers of the line, and giving back to the metric breathers the power of the rhyme and the accented/unaccented syllable.

What does hip hop retain? The ordered flow of signs.

Consider one favorite of mine—“Throw Your Hands Up” by 8Ball & MJG, featuring Outkast, an epic and wry anthem which steers an ostensible call-to-have-a-party back again and again into the political. Sure, the people should party, the song says, but they should also examine their roots, and how they’re allowed to communicate with/in the larger world… Leaving aside its grander themes, I like this song as a song. I wouldn’t want to read most of it in a book. But there are exceptions.

First, of course, there’s MJG’s immortal couplet: “Ham sammich in the driveway—drop top, / naked women in the den, playin—hopscotch.” Wow. Talk about an image that perfectly fuses effortless cool (eatin a sandwich, ignorin the party) with money (got my cool car, dropped its top, probably put some Ds on it) with sex (the women are naked, playin around) with jeu, the game, the perhaps unintended metaphor for hip hop (hopscotch—a jumping game, a game of metered movement, accompanied by sing-song, by proto-rap).

This couplet is strongly metered and so isn’t a great example of hip hop’s prosaic-poetic style of rhetoric, but it does strike at the heart of image control. It moves us sign by sign, image by image, toward a picture of MJG, a mosaic of the generic (post-jaded/post-carnival impresario, laid back southern rapper, sandwich aficionado) and the specific (MJG—who else rhymin about sandwiches?).

But the ruckus gets brought with André 3000’s verse:

You wouldn’t understand, if you stood under it—(Oooooh)
It’s like the more that I talk to you, the dumber that I get—
The closer that I walk to you, the further that we stand,
apart, distant. Nobody has the upper hand, but my body’s resistant—
So now, throw your phalanges in the ground.
I’m still abound. Unbelievers stay from hell around.
I found negatives n*ggas, they only keep you down.
Transmitting from Native American burial grounds,
I carry around the weight of all worlds on my shoulderpads.
I’m s’posed to blast space invaders: I’m somebody’s dad…

This is complex imagery laid out complexly, via enjambment (spilling over, line to line). There’s almost no song-like meter (meaning the meter of the song is the natural meter of English prose)—at least, so far as I read these words on the page or screen.

The rhyme scheme is simple, and it’s nicely buried by enjambment and echoes and the effect of the images, which concatenate, compiling future and past (video games and Native American burial practice), to create a moment-by-moment, modern consciousness—a fully realized portrait of a writer bound up in details and vexed by many of his listeners’ failure to reform their lives in full honor of his words.

The imagery speaks prose-poetically to this frustration of the generator at his consumers: First, let’s ask ourselves what it means to be “abound.” Wiktionary gives us a hint: “To be plentiful; to be very prevalent; to overflow.” And: “To be copiously supplied; to be wealthy in; to teem with.” The example given, “Where sin abounded grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20), is enlightening in that it situates the word in a religious context. André likewise compares himself to “unbelievers.”

We also have “abound” emanating out of “abounden,” from “abonder” (Fr.), “abundare” (Lat., “to overflow”), all the way back to “ab” + “unda“—the latter meaning “wave” (think of the water-spirits called the undine). We have the verb of abundance overflowing out of the simple sign of the wave. Then we have this ultra-abundant verb being frozen in noun form—indeed, in the form of a living dude—by the frustrated writer. He’s still abound. He’s vexed but still the generator, still the verb, made flesh.

Beyond the incarnate verb, we have the notion of the world’s weight, of Atlas’s burden (the mic—mediality—gripped by titanic phalanges), which speaks to the flipside of stardom: When not eating sandwiches with fine women, the rapper is a target, abandoned continually by his shifting, gadfly fanbase. He is, to boot, in the end, a father as well—a real man, as complex and human as he is simplistically in control, generator and “overstander.”

Throughout, the cadence of the words—long pauses devolving into fast runs, runs carried over into the next lines—guides us from thought to thought at such as speed that we can read the words any number of time without being able to settle on a center or focus.

This rap is flat, merging with what comes before and after it (the chorus—heavily metered, political, a chant, a beautiful thing to listen to but in a different sphere of art from this prose-poetic verse).

The words here merge seamlessly with the chorus even as the chorus demands that we throw our hands up in appreciation… appreciation of a verse about how we’re not getting it, we’re wrapped up in the wrong things, trapped by the wrong signs… Let’s give the guy an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

In the next 100% FREE future golden American ambitious installments of this pseudo-column, Reading The Song, we find: “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” indie rock, Lupe Fiasco’s “Daydream,” Iggy Pop, the early and impeccable Jigga, & much, much more…

The front matter is the stuff before the stuff. You open a book, but it doesn’t start right off. It starts with some weird crap about how happy the author is you picked it up, what edition it is, why he wrote it, and blah blah blah. What up with that?

I’ll tell you.

⁂

First of all, front matter, back matter, cover, and illustrations comprise a text’s paratext (”side text”), meaning frame or way-into the text pur sang. The text isn’t just, say, a novel; it’s an experience: A sexy cover catches your eye; a screaming title and subtle subtitle play with your naughty lizard brain; a table of contents or epigraph or short foreword make you want to learn more.

Paratext helps you ease into the text. Even the dullest novel benefits from a title which refracts its principal themes. And, yes, texts benefit from illustrations, and they always have. (Remember the weird spermazoid line in Tristram Shandy?)

Each piece of front matter has a specific paratextual purpose, often simply to delay you as you flip towards Chapter One (”Eating Better: Weeping Best” or “The Cowboy Who Was An Indian!! Part One,” perhaps).

⁂

Often comprised of a poem or a few lines therefrom, an epigraph is a quotation at the beginning of another piece of writing that serves as an introduction, a summary, an ironic or admonishing counterexample, and/or a link to a wider literary-historical continuum.

The epigraph frames the rest of what follows. If it’s doing its job, you should forget it, in the moment, but continue to munch on it, in your back-brain, as you read the rest of the story or book. When I hear the word “epigraph,” I always think of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

—Dr. Johnson.

⁂

Preamble is primarily a legal term. A premable introduces a document, explaining its purpose and the philosophy underlying its writing. You hear this word used often in conjunction with the constitutions and other important, top-level legal coda of sovereign states. Just remember “We the people:”

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

⁂

A foreword is short, comes before the author’s introduction, and is written by someone other than the author. This is as opposed to the preface, which is written by the author. The writer of a foreword may describe how he came to know the author of the book, or why he was asked to write the foreword. The foreword may explain why the current incarnation of the book has been printed. (”Errors was made. But we fixed em,” e.g.)

In the foreword to Umbrella Academy: Dallas, Neil Gaiman merges his praise of the soon-to-follow graphic tale with a warning of the conflict that is already happening, in medias res, in that tale—thus collapsing the narrative distance between the reader and the text unexpectedly. Postmodern forewords by fictional critics accomplish the same trick, usually with less Abraham Lincoln. See: Pale Fire, &c.

⁂

A preface is an introduction written by the author, in which he typically outlines the Grace-guided genesis and pothole-challenged actual-writing of the text, sometimes (but not necessarily) acknowledging his immense debts to the people who’ve supported his broke ass for the last five years as he’s scribbled page after page about telepathic monkeys, or whathaveyou. A book’s preface follows its foreword and precedes its introduction and its prologue.

⁂

An introduction or prolegomenon is, broadly, any initial piece that explains the purpose of what follows. All introductions should be engaging. In literary works, an introduction follows a preface and may speak to the work’s goals, when a preface sticks to its origins.

“Prolegomenon” sounds more formal, as them big-ass Greek words are wont. A prolegomenon may ask you to interpret what follows in a certain way.

One strong “prolegomenon” is the Greek title of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, which sets forth many of the logical, methodological, and philosophical errors historians can make when writing history; suggests history can be viewed through the lens of various class and economic conflicts; and in other ways predicts, from across a gulf of seven hundred years, modern historiography.

In a sense, Khaldun, in his Prolegomenon, asks us to interpret not only what happened up until 1377, but all of history afterward through the lens of the book: His book is a prolegomenon to the greater Book of time.

⁂

A prologue precedes the main story but is told in the voice of a character or omniscient narrator, as opposed to that of the author. (In some books the distinction is meaningless.) A prologue is, in some way, part of the “the plot” of the book. Often, events in the prologue take place years before those of the chapters that follow.

My favorite prologue is the title of Harry Mathews’s The Sinking Of The Odradek Stadium. The title forms an important plot element—one whose importance only comes into focus, however, on the last page of the book, making it recursive. To end a reading of the epistolary madness that is The Sinking is to begin again, at the end of the plot, with the title…

For this feat of front-matter manipulation, and for many, many other writerly acts others of note, Mr. Mathews receives today’s Honourable Badge Of Merit. Happy Monday, all.

Tis that time of year when solitude creeps in and can’t be kicked out. The warm fuzzies of holiday parties, exchanges of knacks and knicks, downings of buttered rums and unbuttered, crapulently spiced seasonal beers—all these do little stave off the feeling that the short cold days are not on your side, and that all your fellows, as wonderful as they may be, are ultimately kept secret and distant from you by an unseen wall of selfish cells, spent time, differing routines, and twisting, unrelenting private thoughts.

Teh winter, ZOMG, is here.

And yet that’s no reason to despair. We have a dude named Maria to help us through, for he has written many dope verses about the human spirit, its singularity and lonesomeness, and how it can interact with other spirits—like a chipper terrier at a sometimes-empty dog run (only, you know, a terrier made all ectoplasmic and goopy-divine and whatnot).

Kick back, and let Maria (Rainer _____ von Rilke) jam on human interactions, and why sometimes a little winter of the spirit is a good thang:

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them—they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

There are no classes in life for beginners. Right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

Word.

Related and also worth considering is this Gordon Marino essay on the difference between depression and despair. According to Marino, Kierkegaard defines despair as a self’s inability to live as… itself. Anybody, even a happy person, can know a deep sense of despair. Simply, if you can’t be content being you, and being stuck alone being you, then winning the lottery and impressing millions of people mean nothing.

Perhaps some people—the lucky few, the Lamas, the Buddhas, the Neil Youngs—just know who they are, straight up, no fakery. Most of us, however, are locked in a battle with ourselves, autumnal cannibals. We are our own uncharted hinterlands. We know less, we worry, as we learn about ourselves, and the dead of night jumps on us like a cat, forcing us awake with a start: Who am I? (Think Jackie Chan now.) What do I want?

Recently, in my solitude, I have just barely limned in dreams the edges of my spirit. I have seen the holy mountain, as it were—but I have astigmatism, and my glasses were nowhere in sight.

The following is the totality of my understanding of my own spirit, as of this night, Tuesday, December the First, MMIX:

• Want: [ ], blue mint birds, books written, everyone clapping, rapping music, shaving more excellently, solitude is like Rilke, cat will be flying, winter is making cat turn invisible-white and make noise from horns mysterious to grow on its brain-head, plus all the beer at the bar really red wine and I am not even drinking it.

• Do not want: books writing, making bad verse recordings, shavings bump, solitude is like Beavis and Butthead in later years when first member of duo passes due to lung cancer (very sad never aired episode), winter is not ending, cat is awake even though I am thrown all of Roma library at him until he is bleeding Gibbon, plus never anything to drink but beer.

It’s apparently the end of baseball season: Even as I write, millions of Americans are gearing up to watch the World Series [Of America Only], during which rival cohorts of swollen, tights-clad men with cudgels will parade around sandy rhombi.

One last hurrah these quasi-gentle giants will have, before they all catch H1N1 and are reduced to ague-wracked skeletons. But what a hurrah t’will be. The winners will literally eat the losers alive, and, if we’re lucky, the Gods Of The Games will be pleased enough to let Susan Boyle sing our National Anthem, perhaps alongside T-Pain…

I lose myself in reverie. The point of this essaylette is that John “Touched The Sky” Updike was the only person whose words have ever made me truly give a dang about sports.

Now, I may have railed against Updike sometimes for focusing too intently on the more boring facets of life in America, such as sports and tedious divorces. But Mr. Updike was truly a wonderworker, all told, as his cornucopic corpus of soul-lifting fiction, nonfiction, sportswriting, and poetry attests. He even wrote a story about prehistoric mammals (and divorce).

What’s more, he even made me love baseball. For about five seconds.

So now, Gentle Reader, in honor of baseball’s icy death at the hands of November, in honor of its various color-coordinated, beer-sodden teams & players, and most of all in honor of Mr. Updike, who is (presumably still) dead, I present a snippet from King Kaufman’s lovely Salon.com encomium of John-Updike-The-Sportswriter:

Six-thousand words later he’d summed up Williams’ career and that final day at Fenway, capped, of course, by the Splendid Splinter hitting a home run in his final at-bat. That inspired Updike to write the most famous thing ever written about the Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived. It’s the last sentence of this passage describing the aftermath of Williams’ final swing:

Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Traditionalists may see the death of old media and the fracturing of style as threats to time-tested systems. Old writers likely want people to read books, dangit, and books written within clear limits of genre, even if those limits have only existed for a few decades. Each medium wins its hawks, and so each medium has mourners to bemoan its inevitable death.  But how much gladder am I to laud the comings of a form, the birth of a new literature, a new system of meaning, one made of transparencies and Japanese music videos…

These musings are really just to say: My friends P. D. and M. R. of What We Know So Far have been presenting for the last year or so a series of simultaneously low-fi/hyper-current lecture-operas about, among other rhizomatic topics, the internet—what it means, where it’s going, and how quickly information in general is mutating in the Twitter era.

The other night at 3rd Ward they presented a series of short… lectures (?) and videos, some of which I’d seen in earlier, less-polished (but always entertaining) rounds of composition. To sum it up quickly and perhaps badly, WWKSF’s work blends the words of Baudrillard and the images of ICanHasCheezburger seamlessly, so that it’s afterward surprising that the great French de-thinkers of the twentieth century weren’t inspired by the internet, but somehow prefigured it, perhaps by doing lots of awesome drugs, or by being really smart, or a mix of columns A and B.

For What We Know So Far’s bold and hilarious efforts to probe just what we know and how we know it, in toto, they receive this week’s Honourable Badge of Merit.

In related news, (i.e., the news of cat memes on the internet), I found a new favorite sentence of the summer, from the New York Times:

No group, from the mostly white soldiers and bureaucrats who corral and abuse the prawns to the Nigerian gangsters who prey upon the aliens and exploit their addiction to cat food, is innocent.

This sentence claims to describe a movie, District 9, which I hadn’t really wanted to see until reading about the Nigerian cat-food gangsters. I wonder now, rereading the sentence from beyond the stars, if the c.-f. gangsters ever heard of Athanasius Kircher’s anti-mellifluous cat piano, and if cats like aliens, or if aliens fall into the same category as other cats, vacuums, mops, twine, roaches, bees, human toes, and floss.

I was talking to my friend P. V. recently about biopics. We tossed around different names of historical and musical and political and otherwise-notable figures about whom movies have not, to our combined knowledge, been produced. We settled on a few top choices.

Mrs. Margaret Thompson was not one of the potential movie-protagonists. But, rereading a passage from The Gentle Art of Smoking, a short, bizarre book about tobacco (mostly pipe-making and the making of “flake,” the baklava-esque tobacco preferred by pipe-enthusiasts in the mid-1950s), I was struck by how odd a scene Thompson’s funerary march would make if filmed. It’s right out of Fellini, or maybe Kaufman. Or maybe Sophie Barthes, whose Cold Souls juggles just the right mix of wtf-is-this-really-the-real-Paul-Giamatti?, gallows humor, and monkey’s-paw super science.

Presently presents the author, the case of the snorting ridiculousness of Mrs. Thompson:

The most notable female snuff taker of this period, as Mr. H. V. Morton pointed out in The Ghosts of London, was Mrs. Margaret Thompson, who died in 1776 and whose devotion to snuff is made clear in her will. She directed that the bottom of her coffin be filled with unwashed handkerchiefs and a sufficient quantity of the best Scotch snuff to cover her body. The six greatest snuff takers in the parish were to act as bearers and, instead of black, they were to wear snuff-colored beaver hats. Snuff was to be strewn before the funeral procession and carried in boxes by her pallbearers for their refreshment as they went along.

—The Gentle Art of Smoking, Alfred H. Dunhill, 1954.

In the summer, one should sit on metal scaffolding and drink tea or Pimm’s cups and eat meze. The following paean to metal scaffolding did steal my heart, when I found it buried deep within a book about urban adventure and the history of New York, a book otherwise readable but at no other point cockles-stirring, poetical, or propelled by such singular, semicolonic grace.

What, in fire escapes, do I admire? Their universality: their equal utility across cities and neighborhoods; their economy of design: their rugged skeletal strength and transparent unity: their spontaneous novelty: the simply sturdy curves overlapping when viewed from a given vantage, filtering the masonry or brick: their constancy: sound as a dollar, firm as Gibraltar, unshaken by the decades, neglected yet shouldering their vital charge, clinging, like Ulysses to his barque, through hurricanes, freezing gales of winter: safely conducting bolts of lightning; supporting, as Atlas, the gravid snows of winter: the variation within an essential form, like the very snowflake, each unique yet all bound by unyielding laws of construction: their balance, supporting the disproportionate mass with the well-placed lever arm: their hospitality, Ralph and Alice being neither the first nor the last to avail themselves in the heat of summer, and this tradition remaining firmly in place throughout the urban world from New York to California and Hong Kong: their elasticity, swelling in the humid summers, shrinking in winter months like the boards of the Ancient Mariner’s ship: their uncomplaining servility in blurring uneventful years: their silent heroism in the teeth of a four-alarm blaze: their romantic accessibility, climbing from the sidewalk into the starry firmament.

—Invisible Frontiers, Lefty Leibowitz and L. B. Deyo, officers of Jinx (a defunct [?] Libertarian urban exploration group).

I’ve been reading a lot of the Atlas Obscura of late, thinking about the job of cataloging the irretrievable, unmanageable past. This morning, my daily email from the New York Times included the headline “A Historian Is On A Quest To Locate Lost Events,” which piqued my inner amateur historian quite a bit.

Unfortunately, the questing soul featured in the article, Andrew Carroll, runs only a spartan website on which there’s little actual lost-event locating to be found. He mentions a blog but doesn’t link to it. Weird.

Weirder, perhaps, is Carroll’s URL, “hereiswhere.org/Here_Is_Where/Here_Is_Where.” Why the deuce, the rhizomatist wonders, would you not forge ahead simply with “hereiswhere.org,” an elegant, koan-like URL? Or even “hereiswhere.org/home,” a nod to convention? Or might I suggest “hereiswhere.org/whereishere/hereiam,” or some other act of play?

Officially, all word-hijinks aside, I salute Carroll and his ilk for wandering down that hallway of the past. My only admonition, I borrow from novelist Andrei Bitov, who writes in Pushkin House:

He expresses the evasively simple idea that it is equally false, if not more so, to infer a historical picture of a given age solely from data that are few and extremely meager. The contemporary of an age and his historian move toward each other in darkness, but this is a bizarre simultaneity, for the contemporary exists no more, and the historian not yet. The few things that the historian sees when he looks back are too clear to him; to the contemporary, they are engulfed by life. Why, one might ask, if a scholar succeeds in establishing something with precision, does it seem to have become more obvious and better known in the past? The scholar, more often than the dramatist, succumbs to the delusion that every gun fires.

Always to shine,
to shine everywhere,
to the very deeps of the last days,
to shine—
and to hell with everything else!
That is my motto—
and the sun’s!

—Vladimir Mayakovski.

Courtesy writer and friend Jack Gendron. The sun’s motto. Jammin.

Wythe Marschall… tells a fable about a legendary kangaroo king. The king presided over a fairy-tale court wherein only anecdotal evidence was permitted. One day the king fell ill (a grasshopper jumped into his pouch), but before he died (official cause: confluxication of the rhinomphalos) he told a parable about a king and a grasshopper. We, his subjects, couldn’t parse the king’s allegory until a dolphin named Jacques Derrida pointed out that we were trapped in the fable I’m telling. Then everybody had lemonade and Mexican beer.

***

Some people think postmodern philosophy is depressing. Well this pun—a Derrida snippet, on a Derrida conference, about being the guy the conference is all about, about feeling dead while still alive—proves them all wrong:

If I am applied Derrida, how can I bear being here? It’s unbearable. To be dead without being dead: unburyable.

(Emphasis added.)

J. D. was always punnin’.

The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.

—Norbert Wiener, Philosophy of Science (1945) (with A. Rosenblueth).

Courtesy my brother G., an aphorism about the best command-model for cat-thinking-about: Think about the cat you actually have. Problem of cat-concept solved.

This brings up the hilarity of phenomenology in general: What is the best (the only) description of a thing? The thing. (The thing beyond description. Chillin in its own little multiverse of thing-ness.)

Applies also to music: “What’s DOOM’s new album sound like?” “Well, you know—[insert comparison to other DOOM albums], [insert me humming a few bars]. It’s good.” Which is not to say that I wouldn’t enjoy going into figurative overdrive to describe DOOM’s work—only that my description would be inadequate for someone with little or no experience of paratactic/rhizomatic rap music about food, cartoons, and rap music.

This is all to say: I anticipate eagerly the new DOOM album, and if I have to paint a cat, I guess I have to paint my own cat, even if neither of us knuckleheads is happy about that situation.

These words are all words I have encountered and considered, at least once:

We ask peace for the gods of our fathers, peace for our nature divinities. It is only just to assume that the object of all people’s worship is the same. We look up to the same stars, one sky covers us all and the same universe surrounds us. Do the means by which a man seeks the truth really matter? There is no single road by which we may arrive at so great a mystery.

—Symmachus, Relatio 3, trans. Smith.

My city is Rome, insofar as I am Antoninus; but insofar as I am a human being, my city is the Cosmos. Therefore all that benefits these cities is alone my good. (6.44)

Humans have come into being for the sake of each other, so teach them or learn to bear them. (8.59)

—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, trans. J. Needleman & J. P. Piazza, The Essential Marcus Aurelius.

I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.

The earth’s a door, if you press your ear against it.

Music’s a wood you walk through.

—David Mitchell, Black Swan Green.

Bees [Lat. apes] are the smallest of birds, and are born from the bodies of oxen.

Bees live in community, choose the most noble among them as king, have wars, and make honey. Their laws are based on custom, but the king does not enforce the law; rather the lawbreakers punish themselves by stinging themselves to death.

—Hrabanus Maurus, De rerum naturis (On the Nature of Things), an encyclopedia covering “the entire field of sacred and profane learning.”

We’ve been locked in the world’s box,
love sets us free, time kills us.

—Adam Zagajewski, “Little Waltz,” trans. Clare Cavanagh.

If not while making this site, then during the completion of some other recent enterprise I have said, “Boy howdy, I’m glad to have read [those particular words].”

I have even juggled them before the emperors of sleep (there are three) and worn them as hats when my head grew cold. Words are powerful. They be illin.