I want to write a catchup entry without any images or contents, because I have a whole bunch of bad images that I don’t want to set as the official image for this post, but I want to share them anyway, and I also have a bunch of stuff to say about things that don’t matter and aren’t important and thus cannot respectably be called contents.
First, here’s the official image for this post. It’s called “14 inches of foam” because I snipped a pic of a queen-sized mattress from an ad and put it in the top right corner. Then I pasted a bunch of other pictures on the canvas which I found in our free local newspaper. There is nothing special about this collage: it lacks personality, it is not funny, it proves no point. It’s just a bunch of stuff to look at.
Next is the back side of a calling card that some missionaries gave to me. I was out on a walk with my sweetheart, and these missionaries approached us and began to talk to us; then they handed me their card and said, “Call us if you have any questions.” I mentioned this card and even superimposed its front side over a pic of a book in an image from my 24 December 2017 post.
Also, if you haven’t yet listened to all 47 minutes of my reading of The King Follett Discourse, which is the sermon that was delivered by Joseph Smith, Jr. less than three months before he was assassinated, I strongly suggest quitting your job and doing so. NOW. (By the way, I do not subscribe to Mormonism; I will never subscribe to Mormonism – I just like the mind of Joseph Smith, Jr.)
And below is another photo from the beginning of a book by my friend Friedrich Nietzsche. Actually it’s from two of his compositions bound as one. His titles appear sideways, so that you can read my handwritten notes (that’s the important part). You’ll doubtlessly recognize this as the companion image to the one that accompanied my post called “Eternity does not love THIS production of time”.
(Now I’ll start. The rest will be just plain text.)
Dear diary,
My brother-in-law Jed gave me a 25-dollar gift card to the used book store; so we went to this store and browsed around for a while, and I ended up spending the entire certificate. I bought The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the “People’s Historian” (a selection of texts by Howard Zinn). I bought The Infernal Machine and other plays by Jean Cocteau. And I bought Paul Mariani’s biography of Wallace Stevens, called The Whole Harmonium. I’m most excited about that last title – Stevens is important to me: I’ve spent many hours reading his poetry with my sweetheart – yet I didn’t even know anyone had attempted telling his life. I thought the man was too obscurely unknowable, sort of like Shakespeare. And Mariani is familiar to me as a writer because he did Hart Crane’s bio too: The Broken Tower. So I immediately began the Stevens book, and I’m just a little ways in—he’s only 27, at the moment—and I already found two paragraphs that I want to share. Here’s the first:
On April 22, 1906, the first Sunday after Easter, he thought of just lying down on his bed with a pistol nuzzled against his right temple and pulling the trigger. “It is such a splendid melancholy,” he mused, “and, mixed with a little beer and whiskey—divine. If only one could look in at the window when they found one’s body—one’s blood and brains all over the pillow. How terrible the simple books would look,—and the chairs and curtains so carefully drawn! How empty, for a moment, the lawns would seem,—the Sunday twittering of the birds! How impotent all the people!” Then he would tap on the window and say, “It is all a mistake. Let me come in again. I know how foolish it all is. But what is one to do?”
Coming from many other poets, this would not surprise me; but it surprised me to hear it coming from Stevens. He seems so impeccable to me; too spotless for such a performance—or even for such an imagination. So I’m glad that he preserved his fancy for us.
Incidentally, Whitman’s forethought of this unacted drama was pre-recorded in “Song of Myself” section 8:
The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where
the pistol has fallen.
Also I liked (and related too much) to this other passage from the biography of Stevens, also regarding the year 1906—tho I myself could change “two” to “seventy-two” where he talks of reviewing “the last two months” of his life:
. . . after five and a half years in New York and more years of the same to come, he was mired in his black abyss once again. “I am afraid to review the last two months,” he confessed, because he knew they had changed him for the worse. He no longer read or even thought much these days, his brain having morphed like his daily subway vision into some worm-like creature tunneling “its way though everything” and leaving “everything crumbling behind.” Once more life had been reduced “to a walk, . . . a little music, a few pages, a trip home at Thanksgiving.” It was certainly “no Iliad” recounting such a humdrum failure of a life. And nothing, he now saw, was going to change that anytime soon.
This is my exact attitude, every time I write in this here diary. And I’m totally convinced that nothing is going to change this EVER. No, I am doomed. – If you want to write my biography, here I’ll help you:
Bryan Ray was born in 1977 to a church organist and a milk truck driver. The first half of his life was spent in aimless thinking, and the last half was spent in aimless writing.
I just wrote the whole book for you; it is finished. (I simply stole the blurb from under my author pic on Evilzon) You can maybe stretch out the length to thirty-five total pages, if you print one word per page. For I never murdered anyone; I never committed suicide; I never owned any pets; I never fathered any bastards; I never even got into a single barroom brawl.
I bet that if we’d look back into the past of my family’s history, we’d find no crimes: all my ancestors were probably just fishermen who’d never cast their nets into the water, for fear of harming the fish.
If that’s true, actually, then I salute my ancestors. It’s good dada, to stand out there in that boat like that doing nothing.
Anyway, then my mom stopped by to honor me and my sweetheart’s church-wedding anniversary; and she gave us each our own unique, personal gift: for my sweetheart, she bought some candy-colored flowers that stain your fingers when you touch them; and for me, she brought an article from the “Opinion” section of her local newspaper – it’s by Satyan Linus Devadoss, and its title is a question: “What’s more difficult: math or the humanities?” – I myself should dedicate an entire entry to this article, because that would be a good way to eat up time; but, for now, I’ll just share this one single quote, which aims to show how the four cardinal occupations—mathematician; biologist; historian; and artist—would be expected to behave, say, on the TV show Fishing with John (1991-92):
. . . let’s talk about seafood: A mathematician is given a fish, gutted and scaled. Asked to count the number of its bones, she does so admirably, proclaiming there are 84. The audience is wowed. Such precision! She is asked to do this again, to confirm her calculations. She again gets 84 bones. Such accuracy! Such consistency!
The biologist is asked the same question, but now the fish is moving and full of life. Because of the increase in difficulty, the biological calculation will not be as accurate or consistent as the mathematical one. The historian is requested to discover where the fish was swimming a month ago. And the artist is tasked with capturing what the fish might have imagined and perceived in its ecosystem. Complexity is inversely related to measurability.
Here are all the things that I like about this excerpt: I like that the fish has bones, and that the mathematician is required to touch them with her bare hands, in order to count them, not once but twice. I also like that the biologist is tasked with gutting and scaling the fish. And I like that the biologist must physically resurrect this gutted corpse, in order to prove that he can count the bones even when the fish is alive and swimming; then, when our biologist arrives at the same guess of 84 fish bones total, the mathematician announces that “this biological calculation cannot be as accurate or consistent as the mathematical one”.
I also like the historian, who, when asked to tell “where the fish was swimming a month ago” simply answers: “In a van down by the river.” (And this checks out.)
As expected, however, the artist is just plain wrong.
And that closing moral gives me bad whims: for if “Complexity is inversely related to measurability” then I daydream that everything measurable must be simple, while everything complex must be immeasurable. But the sun, a complex item, is easily measurable (it is ten thousand times ten thousand angels in diameter, and very holy to the touch); plus a guinea—the British gold coin: twenty-one shillings in predecimal currency—is a very simple item that remains, to this day, immeasurable (for no one knows how to tax it).
“Master, we know that thou carest for no mathematics: for thou regardest not the logic of math, but teachest the way of Art in truth; thus, we ask: Is it lawful to give tribute to Reason, or not?”
And Jesus said, “Why tempt ye me? Shew me the money.”
And they brought unto him a brazen coin, having graven upon it a gold-feathered bird in a palm. And he saith unto them, “Whose is this image and superscription?”
They say unto him, “We know now that it is not the Reason that makes us happy or unhappy.”
And Jesus answering said unto them:
Furthermore, Jesus said unto them: “Render unto Reason the things that are Reason’s, and to Art the things that are Art’s.” And they marvelled at him.
(Mark 12:14-17 + Matthew 22:16-22 + “Of Mere Being” by Wallace Stevens + “Song of Myself” sec. 23 by Walt Whitman)
P.S.
Here is another stupid rap rap demo tape that I made... (NOTE: all lyrics are on the album's Bandcamp page; just hover your pointer over the song title and click the word "lyrics" when it appears)
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