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.