Following Flaubert

Flaubert studies draftsmanship. He sits, alone in his room, undertaking a deliberate rewiring of the convoluted, pre-Hausman street map of neurons which configure his brain. In so doing, he expands alleys into avenues. Line, previously a cramped dark path becomes something his eyes flow over like so many phaetons bustling along the Champs-Élysées. At the same time, he habituates his brain to this behavior. Each line he draws on the clean white parchment scratches a groove like a wheel rut into the neural pathways of his brain.

Even as line is reified, the laundry white uniformity of a blank field begins to wriggle in his mind’s eye like laundry in a warm breeze. Laying down shading, becoming aware of depth and shadow, a uniform field becomes rich with detail, infinitely discriminable. An undifferentiated mass of neurons slowly learns to make distinctions, each neuron weighted differently, each vibrating differently, each firing according to its newly distinguishably different weight. Even if, like the line of laundry, the array of neurons all sit along the same channel, the same sloping clothes line, the same mental pathway, each is newly differentiated as a result of Flaubert, day after day, trying to sketch this bowl of fruit or that accommodating prostitute. Slowly, Flaubert learns to see not a wall, but a thousand and one bricks, not a man in blue, but cerulean silk folded and rilled by the rumpled concavity of the slouching man’s chest.

Balzac did much the same, learning to notice, to see the detail, to account for each buckle on the soldier’s shoe, every pine speckling the distant hillside. Unlike Flaubert, though, Balzac does not seem to be aware that his senses are more acute. He sees the change as existing out there, merely sees an abundance of new stuff, not, as Flaubert does, the same old world, but registered through a new kind of mind.

At the same time, throughout France, a generation of young bourgeoisie undertook similar studies. They collectively rewired their brains to register the formal and the phenomenological, to be less aware of objects as things, to register them as sights, but at the same time to reify those sights into a new class of things. It is precisely this population, the bohemian student body of the La Rive Gauche, that is absent as Frederic plays the flâneur, but it is precisely these same young men, now progressed, like Flaubert himself, to middle age, at whom the book is addressed. The image in Frederic’s eyes was an image in theirs, is being summoned again by Flaubert to live before them once more. The leap across the decades is no less abrupt and no less invisible than the saccadic leap. Flaubert manages to recreate the real by striding over [thirty years] in the leap of an eye, as unconscious of the movement as a flâneur, his eyes on the shop windows and fruit carts about him, steps over a puddle in the street, never noticing the water, but adjusting his gate nonetheless. Flaubert manages to recall to life for the now older bourgeoisie their long ago ramblings down the streets and pathways of their own neuronal circuitry, their navigation of the folded-over forms of Paris, through the medieval alleyways of the history of their own minds.

Variation on a Theme from Eliot (Pri'y Lil' Cliché)

Time is a kind of music.
So is life. So is death.
I hear a honeyed harmony
In every sour breath.

Definition

metaphor, n. - a Venn diagram in N-dimensions where N represents the summed entropy of both terms.

Mud

Weeds lash the twining shallow wash — seems Carmen’s
toy-boy took the plunge. Wonder what he sees
through silver’s mudthick emulsion — seems Hawks
has rung his paper stainer ‘cause Bogey’s bugged :



What’s he doing
down there, sipping
silt through his nose?
The blued bruise is
whose doing : black
jack or car whack?



Was he bumped or did he jump? — seems Chandler’s
stumped, and the wa-wa brigade’s tongues are
wagging, corpse on a rope — seems some joker’s
loosed shredded wheat to the wind, where



it dissolves, exposed
to the wash of light.

Reel IV: Foggy Plodding

Group improvisation is a further challenge. Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result. This most difficult problem, I think, is beautifully met and solved on this recording.
— Bill Evans

On Certainty

Given imperfect knowledge, certainty should be viewed as an argument against rather than an argument for. If one admits that there is some force with the potential capacity to act on the system supposedly being described with certainty, then one must admit that one's reasoning is somewhere mistaken or inadequate. This is not true of systems, such as mathematics, in which all relationships are syntactic, specified through given axioms. It is, however, true everywhere else.

But then again, maybe not . . . .

The Restrictions of Language

French thinks with its vowels;
German, consonants; English,
everywhichway at once. It's
confusing you know. Pflaargh!

Steinian Analogy

Miss Furr and Miss Skeene
's to Bird as Tender But-
ton' 's to "Monk's Dream."

Dunno 'bout
Lifting Belly. What
rolls with jelly?

Hume Sweet

Took me
Good while
To see
How funny
It is
Hume was
Fat .

Fog

descends on LA :
a drunk passing to sleep.

glides between buildings :
Garbo through Ciro’s.

obscures the night :
left cross to the eyes.