Dear diary,
I can’t get over it: we’re living in a nightmare of repetition. Didn’t William Wordsworth witness the French Revolution occur in his time? Didn’t he even write about it in his Prelude? Didn’t the upheaval look promising before it turned ugly? And wasn’t that just prior to 1800, so now it’s more than two full centuries later? And Jesus either returned to our world unnoticed or is hastening toward us still (perhaps there was a hang-up in heaven which delayed him); because he couldn’t have been a no-show: I won’t allow it.
NOTE. Beryl is a transparent pale green, blue, or yellow mineral consisting of a silicate of beryllium and aluminum.
I lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold a certain man clothed in linen, whose loins were girded with fine gold of Uphaz: His body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude.
Then said he unto me, Fear not; for from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, thy words were heard, and I am come for thy words. But the prince of the kingdom of X withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, one of the chief princes came to help me. Now I am come to make thee understand what shall befall thy people in the latter days.
That’s from the biblical book of Daniel, ch. 10 (5–6; 12–14), with the pronouns removed, because I wanted to concentrate on the fact of being confronted by a body of beryl with news from the future, and proper names only get in the way: they housebreak the weirdness. It is my desire to wonder so intensely that dents get inflicted upon the fabric of possibility, and the event of an ultra-dimensional imp appearing to aid us earthlings becomes inevitable.
But what did the stranger say would happen after France had its flirtation with the unspeakable? Did not the “Y2K Millennium Bug” cause all the computing devices to malfunction at the turn of the century? For none of the electronic processors could understand the concept of 999 becoming 1000? Is that why wealth inequality is so amusing today? Robots forgot to manufacture their human masters to be able to change their own intellectual program? Is this the same fatal blunder that humankind committed by inventing GOD? For an artist is made in her own artwork’s likeness and image.
Now here are a couple facts that I found on a web page about the history of U.S. voting rights:
- 1776: Declaration of Independence; only people who own land can vote.
- 1856: All white men can now vote; property ownership no longer a requirement.
- 1920: Right to vote extended to women.
- 1965: Voting Rights Act aims to prevent the Constitution from preventing African Americans from voting.
- 1971: Voting age lowered to equal the draft age.
- 2000: A federal court decides that the nearly 4.1 million US citizens who reside in US territories including Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the US Virgin Islands, cannot vote.
Now here’s an excerpt from the book that I have been reading this afternoon, Gore Vidal’s Hollywood: a novel of America in the 1920s.
Although Caroline’s teeth were set on edge by all political rhetoric, the reverent intoning of the national nonsense-word “democracy” most irritated her. The much-admired Harvard professor George Santayana, now retired and withdrawn to Europe, had noted the curiously American faculty for absolute belief in the absolutely untrue as well as the curiously American inability to detect a contradiction because, as he had written, an “incapacity for education, when united with great inner vitality, is one root of idealism.” That was it—American idealism, the most unbearable aspect of these people. For the first time in years, Caroline wanted to escape, go back to France, or on to Timbuctoo, anywhere that these canting folk were not.
That’s from chapter five (p. 170); I quoted it here at the beginning because a diary entry has to start somewhere.
You know what? I bet I’m developing a manic-depressive disorder. For I was very sad while writing the last couple entries, but today I am very happy. However, on second thought, maybe I am flaw-free after all, because my change of mood is reasonable (as long as one can connect the dots of cause-and-effect, one is considered healthy and normal) – the reason I grew happy is as follows:
My superego just gave me permission to leave off reading the tome Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign. I trudged thru the first couple paragraphs, and then I lifted myself up by the lapels and shook myself out of my stupor. I don’t need to know any more about this last election. In fact, I’m very close to abandoning Vidal’s “Narratives of Empire” series, but I keep with it, because every time I think I know enough about the U.S.A.’s embarrassing history, I turn the page and Vidal surprises me with new insight. Plus, I have only one volume left, out of seven total. As I said before, Vidal’s series is astonishingly rewarding; it’s just that I get tired of hearing so much unfairness, badness, wrongness, while I’m unable to effect any change for the better. Or at least I don’t yet understand what course is available; the situation feels hopeless. I mean, once you awake to the awful truth, you can either cower in your kennel, as I prefer to do, and watch hell expand, OR you can become an activist and promptly get slain. Or worse, imprisoned and abused. To me, those latter fates are worse than death. And I’m not currently ready to face any of these ends. I don’t know if it’s my “calling” to endure being crushed fighting for humanity. At least I don’t think that any avenue that has an established precedent is the one for me: I’m only in favor of what has never yet been accomplished. The impossible. There is nothing new under the sun? Not so: I AM perpetually new. The paradise that I envision for this world has not been imagined by anyone else before me. You will not believe all the beautiful things that I have in store for us all. And they will come true.
But I can tell that when I emerge from this current political fever that has sapped me, I will never want to hear about politics again. It won’t be like my affair with film: When I was fresh out of high school, I began watching movies: I screened everything I could get my hands on, and I read many books on cinema: criticism, interviews with directors, etc. But then a few years later I stopped watching films entirely. I didn’t see any movies for a broad swath of time. At long last, this film-fast broke when I met my sweetheart; for then I wanted to share all my most-loved movies with her. So we screened more than seven trillion photo-plays during our courtship. It was bliss.
But I wish that the movie world would allow me to make films of my own. I have a limitless flood of ideas, and they’re all very interesting.
But once I quit politics, I’ll never go back. And I don’t want to be president yet, so don’t vote for me. Wait till I’m dead. Then make me the first dead president who isn’t money.
*
I must thank my man Montaigne for tuning my man Powers on to Horace, for Powers in turn has turned me on to Horace: I finished reading his Odes just now, and since I have nothing better to do, I’ll quote some of the snippets I noted. But first, let me acknowledge that I found a good translation – you can tell that a rendering is choice when it feels alive. As if an insect were to show up and writhe before you voluntarily, without your having to pin it down on a corkboard. A good translation feels lucky. If you get a bad or merely literal translation, it’s like beholding the mounted corpse of a once-wild beast, instead of the living creature bounding freely through its natural environs. Greek: taxis (arrangement) + derma (skin). Taxidermy: the arrangement of skin. By the way, once I’m president, I want you to display my cadaver proudly in your mansion. In the living room, by the silver lamp. And do not dust me. If you think that having an itch under your forearm’s cast is an annoyance, you should try expiring and then being stuffed and dusted. ...Anyway, I found this translation of Horace by James Michie, and I really like it:
Actually I have so many passages that I loved—for legal proof of which, see the above receipt—that I’ll just share one or two of them, lest this entry become a repeat of my Tranströmer debacle, which ruined the eyesight of sixteen percent of my readership. (Plus I have a meeting with my boss in a quarter of an hour.) Let’s see how many I can paste here before time sucks:
That's from Book I, Ode XI. Note that bough rhymes with now.
That's from Book I, Ode XIX. Note that is kinda rhymes with -pice. (I'm not trying to be sarcastic: I really did, only this moment, come to the realization that these sample verses, thus removed from their context as part of a formal poem, lack any obvious indication that they were composed as rhyming couplets. Nonetheless, the strength of these quotations is in their wisdom. And I love the idea of lust possessing a precipice from which one slips: that seems right; we fall in love, we fall in lust.)
That's from Book I, Ode XVI. I cannot get enough of Prometheus. The origins of mankind. The idea of a fatal flaw, but one that we would not want to see "fixed". (I even watched that stupid movie from the Alien franchise just because they titled it Prometheus. But I far prefer Aeschylus or Shelley.) —Yet by the cross of the mouse foot, egad! I must sleep faster...
That's from Book I, Ode XXXI. I'm sorry because the dude does not deserve more attention and compliments from the likes of me but this simple stanza reminded me of David Lynch. I hope that if I myself have the misfortune of living a long life, I possess good health, sound mind, a stylish grip on my hideousness, and one plain lyre (read: electronic drum machine).
Ods bodikin! I barely got through the fragments of the first book, for I also xeroxed full odes that I loved, but I didn't dare offer them up to this entry, for fear that my poor blog would suffer a poetry overdose. I saved copies of favorites from all four books, but I'll have to post the remainder later...
P.S.
Not to be confused with my full-length, ten-part masterwork The Fireman Tape, here is a single from the new batch of tracks that I’ve been uploading lately in these Chip Log postscripts—it’s called “Plastic Fireman” (I don’t know why I wrote so many smash hits about this profession):
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