February 5, 2025

February 25, 2025: I bought the book, took it home, and opened it. A scrap of paper ruled horizontally and vertically fluttered out. It was a note penned in block letters, the script slanted leftward. The tone seemed from a time altogether more generous than this time of ours, though it was not so long ago as all that. Otherwise, two rather matter-of-fact sentences suggested that, one, the recipient might enjoy the book, and two, the book was a way of thanking the recipient for some attentions received. In the Garden of the Beasts, Erik Larson, Crown Publishing, 2011.

The book is an account of an American ambassador’s stint in Berlin. He goes there in 1933 and stays on for four years. The prologue cuts to the chase, to the reason for the book: I have always wondered what it would have been like for an outsider to have witnessed firsthand the gathering dark of Hitler’s rule. For, despite that darkness, Berlin was an exciting city back then. Beautiful. Seductive. But the American consul general for Germany, a man named Messersmith, no relation to the German engineer, saw clearly that the “world out there” had no idea of what was really shaping up in the country. He had occasion to say: ‘With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.’ Has a familiar ring, does it not? … …. What he [Messersmith] did know was that the new ambassador would be entering a cauldron of brutality, corruption, and zealotry and… …. well, the horrors to come.

And if one were to go by the content and tenor of what are often described as dramadies, or American TV, you would think that what drives every conceivable type of human relationship depicted therein is ultimatum, ultimatum, ultimatum, I win. You, for reasons that ought to be obvious but will become clear in an episode or two, lose. It would seem a miracle that some supposed friendships survive three seasons’ worth of ultimatum, not to mention that the drama queens in every male and female thrive, and with gusto. Not to mention the litigants lawyering up, justice on the half shell always in delivery mode. (In comparison to which the inhabitants, even the worst of them, of Charles Dicken’s Bleak House are sweetly angelic.) A week or so ago, an American friend wrote me to say that America is not special anymore, not that it had ever been special, but that, despite how the history looks, there was still reason to believe that there were “possibilities” in the hearts and minds and souls of its citizens, that certain core principles would win out in the end, chief of which is the principle of equality under the law, and, no way, no kings, no Tarquins to run out of town. This friend who is not a quitter, nonetheless, called it “game over”. Perhaps it was premature on his part, and he was too quick off the mark, a reset called for. Still, I could hear his heart breaking all the way up here in the 51st state cheek by jowl with 50 others of a certain drift.

Now, fairly early on in Proust’s The Past Recaptured, seventh and final volume of his seven volume opus, Proust is dismissing literature as nothing more than a vanity project and then, one turns the page, and presto zesto, change of weather, and literature is the noblest endeavour a man or a woman can get up to and so, amigos, get to it. And when it comes to making literature there is this to consider: … …. For instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it. But excuses have no place in art and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgement. … …. A man who, in this time, might easily be mistaken for a ponce comes off sounding like a drill sergeant, if one who drills with the use of polite language… I have not here the energy with which to explain why Proust rated the human memory as superior to the photograph for true recollections of a past time, but I might mention here that we are opening a new section in Ephemeris called “Sanctum” (the link to which will appear on the home page of this site soon), and poet and journalist Michael Glover of Clapham (one of those mystical parts of Londontown), will kick things off with a few mentations regarding the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), who kind of looked like the actor Andy Garcia, and who foisted The Duino Elegies on the poetry-speaking world.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: In a mood more rum than usual perhaps, Lunar springs this on me: … …. ‘Again, there is something in the ether that is contaminating human discourse. Ordo amoris, whence the order of love?’ … …. (At this mention of ordo amoris, I see some exotic bird, most likely extinct, in my thoughts. Perhaps its movements were awkward on the ground, whether or not it could even take to the air and fly the coop. But moving on): … ‘Zelensky for the first time has begun to wobble. … …. I think he is about to be thrown to the dogs. And Musk, what he said of Zelensky [,] that he feeds upon the bodies of dead Ukrainian soldiers… I'm amazed [this] has not been reported [on] more… [Musk is] utterly obscene’. … …. (And then… and then): … …. ‘a surprising defence of Trump's idiocy, [B] saying it would force Europe to stand on its own more. And then the discussion came to whether the British have the metal [mettle] for it, and we agreed although it would not necessarily be found in its politicians. The apron strings do appear to be severed and maybe high time too. I repeat what I said earlier about not being able to trust America. Did you know this country [England] has not yet paid off the debts incurred by World War One? It is exactly where America has always wanted this country to be, in perpetual debt. Going it alone may be precisely what we need. Will the Pope survive? If not, then at least it will be said he fired a couple of salvoes at Trump and Vance. Salvoes, lovely word the more I think of it, so close to salve. I just love when of an evening walk, in Sicily especially, one is greeted with a salve. … …. You think things are bad? Top this. A gust of wind took my brand-new hat off my head and landed it in a mud puddle.’ … …. (I stopped here in the middle of a Lunarian soliloquy to picture a look of dismay spreading across his face. But back to the man): … …. ‘I caught myself listening to Charles Ives yesterday. I am wondering if he is not in fact a terrible composer as opposed to the genius he is supposed to be. At least his Fourth Symphony is unlistenable. I know you detest Copland [Aaron] and I wonder if it is for the same reason that some people here detest Elgar, a surfeit of Americana? I find both composers beautiful. Elgar is misunderstood in the same way idiots misunderstand Kipling as being the brash voice of empire rather than its dying echoes. If one listens to what Elgar composed just prior to World War One surely it is with a deep ache. I somehow imagine that even the sunlight was different then. America is not to be, can never be, trusted.’ … ….

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana (head in an east-northeasterly direction should Yalta, not Munich, be your spiritual destination): … …. ‘Having listened to Trump lo these many years it never occurred to me that the man could become even dumber. He was flawlessly consistent in his holding patten of exceptional stupidity in his first term: reams of bullshit, little action. In his '24 campaign he sputtered abnormally intense bullshit, but that sort of thing is not uncommon when stumping. The change came in this, his second round, the forsaking of his all mouth, little activity pattern. Hence Newton's Third Law kicked in with immediacy, something that anyone with an IQ larger than his hat size could have predicted. While cutting government's throat he cut his own. There's no precedent in US presidential history where the incumbent so rapidly destroyed himself. John Tyler came close, but this idiot is truly sui generis (and that’s not chow mein). At least I've found something to admire about the moron. … …. psychosis means only detachment from reality. No one in touch with reality would so consistently behave as though there's no such thing as the real world. That's something that resides merely in Trump's diseased brain. … …. I remain convinced, as I've passed along to you once or twice, that Trump will find himself with few allies of note in reasonably short order. And sure enough, this morning I read what I believe is an opener of confirmation: "A number of Congressional Republicans are starting to flee the blowback of his Department of Government Efficiency’s slash-and-burn approach to federal budget cuts, driven by growing evidence of a groundswell of concern among groups of ordinary voters." Those GOP pols are fine with slashings and burnings, but what they care about above else is protecting their seat in Congress. If that means turning on Trump, they'll do it.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘I watched about 5 minute’s worth of de Mille’s Cleopatra with Claudette Colbert. God knows why. Apropos of nothing. Berlin, 1933? I followed her bellybutton around, got dizzy. Thanks for reminding me of the existence of the marsh Arab book (see previous post) which I have been enjoying. How the world looked to an educated man in the 1950s, no matter that he was being eaten by bugs amongst the marshes of Iraq and was interminably seated in a cross-legged fashion in all the canoes and inside all the reed huts in which he was a guest, every muscle in his body crying out that he be a man of the west once more. But then this, speaking of a “handsome people”: … …. The foothills of Khuzistan… village of buffalo people… fewer people suffering from eye diseases… good teeth… the softness of the faces… the hard brown woollen cloaks… the work, worn hands… so vulnerable within that armour of beauty…. …. As I’m reading how he and Thesiger go from village to village with varying adventures, I’m envisioning, if you will, a people who live much closer to nature than we do and yet, overall, in their own ways, they are just as petty and materialistic even if they do less damage to the world. They’d give up the buffalo in a heartbeat for a two-car garage with a freezer in it. And the neo-libs took that sentiment and ran with it via the Chicago School of Economics or some such shake-down enterprise. Percival the goat grunts at mention of your name. Grunts with favour or disfavour, hard to say. He has become my rock. Even here on this quasi-remote island, foul distillations from a wider world spoil what the tide brings up, dead sea things no longer pristine in their being dead, or seemingly so. But that’s enough. For the nonce, colour me a marsh Arab poking about in a canoe.’

Postscript V: Rutilius: ‘Ordo amoris is not an emu-like looking thing. Otherwise, I wouldn’t want to put words in your mouth… It may or mayn’t be a theologian’s view of what love is, but JD Vance is all House on the Prairie, his soul, even so, that of a burgomeister of some drab eastern European town circa the infamous 30s, an era when poets had to write poetry like they were shucking corn because decency demanded it. I’d give you Auden, but Auden is not mine to give, nor is Marianne Moore my modernist to give, she appearing to wear tri-corner headgear in some photo or other, and I’m all Bishoped out when it comes to Elizabeth. Just saying that there are noble souls and then there are noble souls of a Yankee stripe, and then there are the Vances who wouldn’t know nobility of it bit their prize hog on the hind end.’ … …. My, my, but Rutilius here is sounding rather like that Longinus of the third century AD who said that literature ought to transport rather than persuade, but hey, I am open to a little persuasion now and then, if it will free up my TV from You-Know-Who’s perpetual scowl.

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: ‘Shiver me timbers, but you can put words in my mouth anytime. Just let me lay aside my French horn and I’ll take my cupcakes out of the oven. I have Nadezhda in mind, wife of Osip Mandelstam the Russian poet. (Not that my baking has anything to do with a cozy dacha.) Just that, in a book she wrote (Hope Against Hope, I believe), she got cheesed, the “west” gloating a bit too much at the death of Stalin, and she had no reason to esteem the man who’d put her husband in a camp where his life came to an end. She wrote, and I grossly paraphrase, that the west would have its own Stalin episode, wait and see. Well, we have waited, and we have seen (or not), and it’s not looking good for a renaissance. You won’t have a cupcake with me? Good God, man, we live in the same building. It’s not like we’d have to resort to time travel to connect….’

February 18, 2025: Yes, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, an odd question struck me this morning. Odd questions, odd thoughts, odd moments of certitude, odd, protracted spells of doubt – this is all par for the course on any given day, but Proust as Old Testament prophet? Could be a stretch, asinine silliness on my part. Still, Jeremiah in wingtips? Isaiah with a taste for piano sonatas? Some Trumpian covenant dividing the kingdom? Might not a Julia Child tuna fish casserole highlight one of Solomon’s banquets (before he managed to tick off God)? But then, I have got my eras wrong.

Jeremiah and Isaiah were, perhaps, the most politically-minded of the “major” prophets. (As was, perhaps, Micah among the minor perusers of tea leaves, predictors of fortune, relators of truth to power.) But as I am reading along in The Past Recaptured, I am thinking that Proust had more on his mind than the effects of sexual desire on the soul.

Then again, the 1920s, and the “crazy years” were in full bloom, postwar reconstruction purring along, North Africa a peach, and was a certain Treaty of Versailles the whole nine yards or merely a wrinkle in the question of German reparations? Did the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire add anything new to Proust’s understanding of the world and how it operates behind closed doors? We leap ahead a million years. What about Gaza, eh? How do the Furies work this if not on retainer with the International Court of Justice? Hamas is one thing, but Yahweh, AI capabilities in play, put his mind to something, and hubris delivered: hundreds of two thousand pound bombs dropped on concrete and tents, dead humans no doubt, lots and lots and lots of them, the object of the exercise. What better home awaiting? What justice? The circle is squared, and we have only just started, it seems, so much turned on its head. Orwell had not the faintest.

But Proust? Born 1871, died 1922? Considered by some to have written the greatest literary prose ever? That would, in fact, be Marcel Proust, French man, Catholic-raised son of a Jewish mother. Was he a nice guy? I have no idea.

In The Past Recaptured, seventh volume of his seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust, or his proxy the Young Marcel Getting Older, has had a crisis of faith. It is to say he has lost his faith in literature as being anything other than a vanity project (and he never had much faith in his own literary ability), and along with a loss of faith in art in general there will come a loss of faith in anything else that can possibly matter, such as “justice” or a fair distribution of wealth, or civility between handlers of hockey sticks, or commonweal across the Monopoly board (whatever “commonweal” has come to mean, these days); in whether anything you can think of means anything at all beyond ‘let’s play Let’s Make a Deal, and here’s the deal: you f—k off and die’. The sometimes irritating I-I-I of the young Marcel has been overgrown by an I-I-I older and wiser and perhaps weary of all his I’s. There is no transcendent consciousness. There is no moral centre. There is no code by which to live as will ensure justice for the deserving, and the undeserving – they have been calling the shots since hell last froze over. You live in the suburbs, and you get told things. You live in heaven even if your prime rate sucks, even if what your kid gets out of school is drugs and rapid fire, any excuse for a Code Red, education a bridge too far. That book club in Butte, Montana circa the 60s and 70s? It still thought literature a noble endeavour, cowboy and cowgirl poets the cutest damn things, especially those out of Alberta….

And a hundred and some pages into The Past Recaptured, and there has been the humbled pride of one M de Charlus (or Palamède de Guermantes), a baron, listed by “Britannica” as a “licentious gay man”. He has had a stroke. He is being squired about by his secretary and lover and Man Friday (bordello manager) Jupien. M de Charlus, on account of his stroke, is now having difficulty forming words. Even so, he will insist on greeting a society woman chanced upon in the street. How things have changed. For in better times, when he had full command of his speech organ and wits, he would not have given her the time of day – in as rude and dismissive a manner as possible. He was, after all, upholding French “values”. Society Woman, even so, now has her life’s triumph: acknowledgement from what had always been the dreaded baron who, at a dinner party or salon concert, could rattle off the complete lineages of any number of aristocratic families on a dime all the while telling you why Nietzsche mattered. Proust had no intention of making Charlus a symbol of French decay, or so I reckon, but the France of Pétain during and after the collaboration with the Nazis – does it not ring a bell? What goeth before a fall along geo-political lines, never mind what renders a national soul queasy? One can hear Jean Paul Belmondo saying, ‘Oui mais, Beckett wrote our epitaph when he got all Irish in our bistros.’ And then, pointless extensions to “an already tedious existence?” Cool-eyed Simone Signoret lighting a cigarette was the most honest thing to come out of those sorry years, no matter what Sartre thought he thought. Is America going to churn out a Proust? Has it already? Vanity project going once, going twice … sold… to the gentleman wearing the red cap with stencilled latters on it (in caps) and the bimbo beside him.

The only happiness lies in nature, so Proust winds up saying more or less. That in the play of sunlight on various surfaces, for instance, one might experience the joy of being alive for the sake of being alive. &c.

And Young Marcel Getting Older begins to snap out of it. Melancholy and depression (and a set of problematic lungs) had had him by the short hairs during the war (WWI) and afterwards. He recovers for himself the poetry of the world as is typified, say, by Venice (as he remembers the place), or the taste of the famous pastry as triggered memories in him, and if there is any art that is not merely a vanity project, then it is an art in which the heart of the matter is, in fact and always, time and memory. Arguable, but there it is. … …. For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning which it is possible for us to extract. … ….

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar, and something about being “out getting cultured” (exhibition of drawings by Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael), and then a visit to The Linnean Society, and then a ride back on the tube in which there was a man with a large tattoo on his neck "1994". It was all Lunar could do not to lean over and ask him why. Hercules returned from India? Then a knife attack around the corner of his domicile. Then a discarded knife to be brought to the police station. That knife crime has become a major problem in merry old Hammersmith, which it is the spiritual centre of Londontown, so some say. But … …. ‘If you want a notion of how the world order has been upset get ye on a plane over here. There are some very grave voices on the radio, one of the most serious from John Major who despite being not much of a PM is behaving like a real statesman these days. The dangers he points to ... well, I need hardly tell you. Netanyahu has been emboldened, Putin has been emboldened. Europe and, by extension, the UK severely weakened. Some Trumpite - I didn't catch his name - on the radio this morning accused Europe of having a tantrum. The contempt is beyond belief. Why not concentrate on Canada instead [?] [Hands off Greenland.] Let Greenland be.’ … …. Yes, it is what Lunar calls “P*l*t*cs” or that … …. ‘the only German politician Vance met was the right-wing one. I hadn't heard that until this morning. A man with no political experience addressing European leaders of considerable experience and employing that kind of language ... there is a rapidly growing hatred of America hereabouts. Does one laugh or cry at the report that the US admin is now desperately trying to locate and rehire the nuclear safety people they sacked the other day. Maybe they've all gone to Russia. The commentators are making one big mistake in comparing Munich 2025 to Munich 1938. The real comparison is Yalta when America and the UK gave half of Europe to Stalin. Maybe this country is waking up to what it has done by leaving Europe. Or has it had its first cup of coffee?’ [????] … …. More off the cuff remarks: … …. ‘Vance [clearly] hates Europe. What an arrogant little shit and now Europe hates him and, by extension, America. Any minute now Zelensky is going to turn into a zombie. US troops on the Canadian border? C'mon, now. You are as apocalyptic as me, probably even more so. Trump is going to put the squeeze on Canada in ways that will never require the loading of a gun. Did I ever tell you that all those years ago I had a title for my next book of poetry: Rogue States, which relates to one's inner rogue states as well as the outer rogue states…’ … …. Yes, well… No kidding? Do they have inhouse privileges? Whatever. By your leave… …. ‘By the way I don't think any of the words we use - fascism, dictatorship, internment camps, etc etc - apply anymore. It is something new for which we have yet to find a new adjective or noun, which would have to [have a ] tie-in with TV reality shows.’ … …. And so, we bring to a close another episode (think ancient radio show or a Rocky and Bullwinkle telecast) of Lunar Grinds His Molars. But I think the man is right in the short run and yet, it is always the same old same old that gets us in the end: greed, hubris, brittle bones.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, pull over if, in your rearview, you see tanks headed north: … …. ‘I have been stunned by the casual reception by the press and public of Trump‘s announcement that no law applies to him.’ … …. Yes, it would seem to have habeas corpus spraypainted all over it, this announcement, but looks can deceive. In which case, upwards and onwards: … …. ‘A declared dictatorship strikes me as a large headline. But I guess I'm just the neurotic sort [as, when I rummage around, I don’t see anything huge in the Headlines Sector].’ … …. In the meantime, Drake seems to think that everyone, no matter where they reside, in which nation-state or junkyard atoll, has reason to worry about Trump in general. Economic coercion &c. … …. ‘every country should do whatever it can to distance itself from this regime, just as it would a pandemic.’ … …. But is that wise? Dunno. Do not encourage the politicians to do politics is one option. But please, somebody do something is another. My local is open again after two hard weeks of franchise coffee, and the fish in their tank survived as did the poinsettias, the snowbank outside the door six feet high.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: “Your marsh Arabs guy… (A Reed Shaken by the Wind, Gavin Maxwell) – it rang a bell, and I realized I had a copy of the book stashed somewhere, and I found it, and was brought back to a discussion of the treatment of women (debatable as to whether they rated as much consideration as, say, the water buffalo what had indoor sleeping privileges). And then there was the slaughter of birds. On an annual basis. Bigtime holocaust for the birds every year. But as for you saying in your previous post that those marsh Arabs had none of civilization’s perks, not true. They had radio. They had tobacco. But no bingo halls. Otherwise, the islanders here (but not me) are into promoting tourism, these days, and (but not me) playing with virtual orcas. Jesus wept. Well, at least, I think He did. Percival the goat looks askance. But he’s not allowed inside the house (that’s more of a shack, but who’s counting)? On a more serious note, the full-sized F F-word is getting that lived-in look, from the looks of it, but as Mussolini in loafers as compared to Goebbels in shiny black knee-highers…’ … ….

Postscript V: Rutilius: ‘I sent you a snapshot of the Neptune fountain in Presov. The wriggly thing around his thigh is part of a sea serpent. The trident is very tridential. You said you’d comment on it, but you haven’t so far. Let me say that it was paid for by a Jewish merchant who, in contradistinction of a ban on Jews living in the town, did manage to live there, and did rather well, had an in with the emperor. Therefore, in gratitude… But why a sea god? Last time I looked, Slovakia is landlocked. I may be a most particular poet with a lot of particulars-studded poems, but I don’t know everything. Trump is on our radar here, but he’s only one blip among blips. I try to see the world through the eyes of my cat. It sometimes causes my head to hurt. The future is a present so wide it cuts across the universe… God as Felis catus? Now I’m being cute. Apologies. I may go back to Joseph Roth, his The Radetsky March. The empire, not the waltz…’ … ….

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: “I may be only a maker of jewellery, which puts me low on the arts and crafts food chain, and I may only play the sub-level basics of the French horn (“Blow the Man Down”), but put Cezanne, any Cezanne, next to anything by Damien Hirst, and three guesses as to what I’d pick. We’ve had massive snow and bitter temps. But then you know that, as we live in the same building! Can live with people for years and not even know they exist. Well, clearly, we saw that we each existed. I was wearing a hippie dress. I was smoking an Arturo Fuentes Hemingway. The look on your face said you could take it in stride. Do you think a serious art movement can get itself born under such conditions? As when the whole point of life is to get one’s old beater dug out from under a ton of snow, three prepositions in a row and counting? Trump. If you want my continued input into things, I would insist on a moratorium on the use of the name. But like I said, I’m low on the food chain, and besides, I've a yen to go to the library. I have a membership, you know. Entitles one to billiards and a drink at the bar. Oh, and I just might return to Joseph Roth, his The Radetsky March, the empire and the waltz.’

February 10, 2025: I was listening to Respighi’s “Ancient Airs and Dances”, bemused by the fact that the man did not know his piano scales, and gratified that the composer was, to a large extent, self-taught. I asked myself, ‘What are the origins of music?’ Well, I am sure I have put this question to myself before. I am sure I have read up on the matter. But why not read up on the matter again? And so, I have, and what now sticks in my mind, apart from the fact that apparently there is a grey area between “speech” and “song”, that the differences between the two are not all that distinct, is the image of a bit of bone with holes “made” in it, the object some 40,000 years old or thereabouts. Flute or pipe off an early production line? You bet. Parts of a dead bird (or other animal) fashioned into something that sings? God only knows what I think that signifies.

And now they know there is something in this universe colossally immense, apart from the universe itself. That “something” is something like 1.3 billion light years across. In light of which we might be permitted to answer a question put to me by one Slick Williams of the archtop guitar. (This man is “Muskrat Ramble” proficient now that “muskrat” is a “thing” on social media, an allusion to Musk’s goonies terrorizing Washington.) The question is: should he – jazzman – be reading Suetonius and Juvenal as opposed to, say, David Brooks the pundit? (That the one man was a skin-deep historian with a nose for the scandalous. That the other man was a muckraking poet of spleen. That the pundit, having been something of a ninny in the Bush-Cheney epoch, seems to have come across solid Burkean creds of late, and is taking it out on a man-child of a president.) Not a momentous question, but a question nonetheless.

And my inner Review Board mulls it. I could put the question to my taxi squad of postscript cohorts gathered in the bullpen. Their views are always appended to these posts, but I think the answer would be unanimous. Yes, Slick should read himself some Suetonius and Juvenal, if only because in Suetonius, he will get himself a more trenchant “Daily Beast” with access to the imperial archives and the particulars of the Super Bowl half-time show. In Juvenal he will find a voice that will “culture” his “cancel” or shall I reverse-field the arc bending toward … did someone whisper justice? Never mind. We here do not care to cancel anything save fascism; we ask questions and sometimes, in brazen moments, attempt an answer or two, nothing too strenuous.

And I was reading along in a book about marsh Arabs circa the 1950s (the book entitled A Reed Shaken by the Wind, Gavin Maxwell, Penguin Press). I came across what might have seemed the description of an “eco-paradise”. It was marshland villagers and their relationship with water buffalos. How the beasts had pride of place in the villagers’ domiciles, how the animals could smother a child if they rolled the wrong way in their buffalo dreams. How they were treated as veritable gods for their dung (fuel for the fires, for a hundred other uses) and for their milk. (On occasion they might be eaten, if diseased or dying.)

On the other hand, wild pigs were slaughtered on sight and in as hideous a manner as a killing genius could hit upon. There were no fine sentiments with respect to these residents in the reeds, pigs malevolent. Indeed, if you found yourself on the wrong side of one, it could kill you with its tusk action. And if pigs are simple, humans are complicated. They are sadists. They are as gentle as lambs gamboling about on the more pleasant meadows of cause and effect until the next episode of carnage. But bringing this post back to notions of music and to dance as well, Maxwell witnessed an evening of the same, and it was yet another side to marshland village life.

An eight year old boy the balletic figure inside the reed hut, this boy began gyrating to various rhythms. The dance, after a while, got more and more erotic. It ended with the boy mimicking an orgasm. (Did he know what an orgasm is? Probably.) So there was no TV, no movie house, no radio, no stereo, no Carnegie Hall, no Apollo Theatre, no Just for Laughs, no open mic night, and Maxwell made no mention of books or magazines or yo-yos or rubik's cubes. That was all there was: a hut, a bit of space, onlookers, dreaming buffalos, and rhythms. What has been lost, if anything? What have we mislaid, we types that can be referred to as "suits' which no crow would ever approach? Someone will remark on an instance of child abuse with respect to the boy dancer, and carry a point. What I read on the origins of music defined it as that which coheres, creates bonds and perhaps relieves tedium. Apart from but not excluding sex. Or someone will get all Zorba the Greek or all sock hop and sentimentalize the "impactful", yet another over-buzzed word. Closer to home, what is lovelier than a woman in an evening gown seated in an orchestra, violin on the go, wrist curved to the instrument’s neck, fingers navigating it for each right note, attentions entirely focused, and sometimes straying? The answer is: 'Not much.' Even so, Current President is going to take over the arts, so I have heard it reported. Nero has returned to us. Perhaps he will treat us to a recital of his favourite passages from The Iliad all the while some fiddle saws away in the Lincoln Center.

And where I happen to be in my reading of The Past Recaptured by Marcel Proust, the man has either stepped out of the frame or put his foot in it. That is to say he has been willing to say that in the course of his discussion of “virtue” and “vice” he has been indulging in fictions, bringing on fictional characters, but that, war time (and war time was WWI), and there were “real” people he knew who were fomenting good acts, behaving with generosity to all comers, and he just thought he might mention it, and then he would get back to his “narrative” and its dubious luminaries. This part of the story sees the death of young Marcel’s buddy Robert de Saint-Loup at the hands of the Germans, the irony being that Saint-Loup was a Germanophile, his mind wrapped around Goethe and Nietzsche and Schiller et al. Albertine, the girl young Marcel had loved (or at least thought he had), was forever gone, too, while he, in and out of sanitoriums, remained alive. … …. But I felt an inconsolable regret that her life as well as his had been so short… …. And yet it was they who were dead, while I, both of the one and the other, could set side by side, separated by an interval which after all was really not very long, the final image—before the trench, in the river bed—and the first image, which even in the case of Albertine I valued now only because it was associated in my mind with that of the sun setting over the sea. … …. Another instance in which Proust slays the reader with a stock image …

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar never far from a movie review: … …. ‘Well, I'm amazed: another splendid film. Ukrainian. Grey Bees is set in the Donbas region just prior to the invasion, where, in the grey zone, fighting had been going on for years, just two aging men left in this shattered village, one a Ukrainian beekeeper, the other Russian, friends although not without the one continually cursing the other, which is what makes the film so moving. Beautifully done, minimalist, subtle, and packed with unknowns that shall remain unknowns forever. Strange to think good films are still being made. Vermiglio, however, though likeable, is one of the films I am already struggling to remember… …. [The Brutalist]: Very good film even though you may not like the architecture, very timely and bitter: Hungarian Jewish architect survives the war and gets entangled with a wealthy American family - think Musk, think Trump, think Bezos - America the republic that never was, which has always been built on greed and exploitation and rape, a country, which, as the main characters say, is "rotten". Yes, the American Dream is given a karate chop. The only thing I've never understood is why people continue to have that dream. It has always been a cruel country and all that we have been talking about is just the latest form of excrescence. Actually in ways hard to define The Brutalist put me in mind of Chinatown. … …. Respighi's "Church Windows" is as deep as deep goes, a superlative work. Also the "Birds". I got a tad weary of "Pines of Rome" but no, there is some wonderful stuff of his. … …. Surely one of the sickest things I heard for a while is Netanyahu giving Trump the gift of a gold pager commemorating the pagers that blew up in the faces of the Hezbollah. There you have it, the utter contempt for the Arabs. Again, I doubt Gaza will be as Trump says it ought to be, but I do fear all this talk is the prelude for Israel's total annexation of the West Bank. Last night the Romanian Cultural Institute again, a beautiful performance of Schubert's great string quintet although one of the worst audiences I have ever seen, a stupid young couple who start chatting in the middle of the slow movement, people checking their mobiles. Would they be doing this if they had to pay to see the performance? We have people who simply no longer know how to behave and of course I am convinced that the coming of the mobile phone has everything to do with the deterioration of what was once upon a time known as grace. I would love to know how the Romanians put on these free performances. Canada and the USA don't have any cultural programmes at their embassies anymore, whereas plucky little Romania delivers the goods every time. By the way, the spruce tree is not sacred to Artemis. There. I’ve left you with a thought.’ … ….

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana which, so far as is known, has no fertility goddess about which to boast, is running silent, running deep. Still, he has managed to let me know that he predicted the blow-out outcome with respect to the latest Super Bowl, and not because he is a jock (he is a couch spud), just that he can smell fear at great distances, one nostril trained on Washington, the other on New Orleans. We are still animals, after all. We are not yet entirely devoid of instinct and sensory apparatuses. Therefore, I cut the man some slack. Male sybils are far and few between rocks and hard places.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘I caught a few minutes of the game. You could cut through the hype as if it were a very smelly cheese. There may’ve been some kind of poetry on the field as the combatants had at each other, and Philoctetes got off his arrows (I mean, as the quarterbacks vied), but all the delivery systems of hype and ads rendered the contest unwatchable. You know me: I don’t often get on my hindlegs and fulminate against the asinine, it amounting to an empty gesture, anyway. Look, I’m going to cut this short. John A. MacDonald is turning over in his grave. I know he was an ass, but I say again: John A. MacDonald, once a prime minister, is turning over in his grave. He’s got an ache in his knees, and it has nothing to do with rain and everything to do with the approach of a weather front.’

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘In response to your question about the empress Elisabeth, I can say with some confidence: “Sisi! She visited Eperjes (Presov) and picnicked somewhere near the salt works. There's a bust of her in the square near the Neptune Fountain. Allow me to quote from Homage to Marianne Moore as written by James Sutherland-Smith, estimable poet:

"West of the fountain under a linden and spruce
            is a bust of the empress, Sisi,
                        to recall her visit.
                        Corseted in bone stays
                        to a wasp waist of nineteen
inches and not as fertile as other Hapsburg wives, yet
                        loved in Hungary,
she picnicked outside Prešov close to the salt works."

As for Miss Moore [the poet] she worked out, at the same time as Elizabeth Daryush, 23 days younger, that the verse line could be counted as well as scanned. Daryush was helped [by the fact] that her father, Robert Bridges, a poet laureate, experimented with syllabics, a natural step beyond the iambic pentameter and blank verse line. My problem with syllabics is that it requires an odd number of syllables in English to avoid thumping iambics or soporific trochees and that neither metre nor syllabics copes with elision, vowel reduction and liaison. Moreover, one has to show that the line is syllabic by ending it half through a phrase or sometimes (for the half-witted and utterly incompetent poet) halfway through a word. English is a rhythmically slippery language.’ … …. No kidding, as per some true detective. But man, can the man verbalize. Rutilius for Secretary of State of no fixed address! Failing that, hawker of cure-alls. Presbyterian rugger in another life? But this is for sure: Rutilius would be the fastest versifier left standing in the west, and, chalk one up for hyperbole, smoking guns are his coat of arms.

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla (Montrealer-NDGer, and she wears tennis shoes in the snow): … ….’Soon enough, pennies are no longer going to drop as they are no longer to be minted. The man has said: "Make it so." But, as in the words of Madame Sévigné redirected and reapplied to a varmint in one of her missives: "He is not a man, not even half a man; he is not so much as a woman, but a little weakling of a woman. “Shut that window; light a fire for me; give me some chocolate; give me that book [no, don’t, as I eschew reading]; I forsook God [and, hey, look, I’m high maintenance].” … …. Well, you’ll have to make-do with that. I’ve got a French horn to practice, fellow tenants to drive around a bend who’d ordinarily be watching a yoga channel in between bouts of being pensive, given what the hell is going on. Hasta la vista, guys.’

February 5, 2025: I am reading an account of a trek through the marshlands of Iraq. The year is 1956 or thereabouts. A big wind is on the blow. The going is dangerous, the canoe-like boat loaded down with supplies, but two inches of freeboard showing. It is liable to capsize at any moment whereupon the craft will sink like a stone. Meanwhile, the boat’s VIP passenger is expected to bag some “coots” (water birds that resemble ducks) for supper, and he does manage that, though the men who act as guides and baggage-handlers and oarsmen know he has “fluked” it and so, they view him somewhat as a burden to bear. Perhaps they sense he has no stomach for slaughter, but that he does not wish to be held responsible for the crew starving. In any case, I am reading the book (A Reed Shaken by the Wind) for its own sake, for the fact of the marsh region and the people it has supported for thousands of years. A people now disappearing. I am reading this book to see if there was, in fact, something to be said for having been “civilized” once upon a time, that a man could have one foot in the library and another on the ground (or an earth all water and reed and root and clay island) of a remote world populated by a malady-plagued people who have no interest in, say, London or Paris or Cincinnati. But there is never a kinder, more gentler time in comparison to one’s own time which, in itself, seems abysmal enough for its carnage and barbarism and willful ignorance. The author of the book had a great deal of sympathy for the people he encountered, though he found their ways hard.

All of the above is but a way to say that, as strange as the author’s experience may have been to him, perhaps even stranger, were he around to "live" it, would be the past three or so days that Canadians have just passed through, as if through a comet’s tail, the Episode of the Trade Wars our cross to bear, (subheading “51st state”, sub-subheading a certain man’s feral narcissism). So that, speaking of coots or duck-like creatures, I feel somewhat Daffy-ish, rubber-necked. One minute I am expecting drones in the sky, tanks at the border, and the next, The-Firer-in-Chief seems to be backing down from a retaliatory response: Canadian and Mexican tariff blowback. Some pundit in economics declares on the news that the Firer-in-Chief got “rolled”, seeing as the Canadians and Mexicans conceded, pssst, very little as it turns out in the interests of a "deal", so let that oddity of a person declare his little victories if it suits him. And then I thought I would be done with it on the news or in that part of my brain reserved for anomalies that logic fails to explain, but that politics “gets it” because politics is all about inventing and reinventing reality as one goes along to get along. For a little while at least, I could breathe, only to catch on CNN some snippets of a Trump-Netanyahu presser, and well, my spinning head snapped right off in some quantum fashion. Ah, it is the turn-Gaza-into-a-riviera-gambit-just-frog-march-the-inhabitants-off-their-little-patch-of-hell. Natch. A job for a bunch of Marines. Wounded Knee? A flea bite compared to what this will be if certain parties follow through. The biggest real estate coup in modern history and then some, the biggest slice of transactional, the loudest “we break wind but it all smells sweet” cherry bomb of all time, never mind Nebuchadrezzar and Babylon on its inter-state.

So yes, on page 107 of my Vintage Book Edition 1973 of Marcel Proust’s The Past Recaptured, the seventh and concluding volume of his seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu which I do hope to finish someday, Proust does seem to be suggesting that people grow comfortable with evil over time. As I made my way home, I reflected on the speed with which conscience ceases to be a partner in our habits, which she allows to develop freely without bothering herself about them, and upon the astonishing picture which may consequently present itself to us if we observe simply from without, and in the belief that they engage the whole of the individual, the actions of men whose moral or intellectual virtue may at the same time be developing independently in an entirely different direction. Clearly it was a gross fault in their education … &c. And the man merely had a bordello in mind, men pursuing their pleasures in a time of war (WWI), ethnic cleansing an echo yet to disturb a few candlelit suppers. I had expected to remark on the qualities of a songster name of Conchita Supervía, a mezzo-soprano Barcelona-born, who in the early part of the 20th century performed in opera (notably the role of Carmen), who kicked off a Rossini revival, who could not be bothered with “expressing” herself but who was most expressive. Another way of putting it, I could listen to Billie Holiday forever, Janis Joplin not so much. But as you can see, I was derailed. Yes, I was going to suggest that one reason for “finding oneself” is to get it – oneself – out of the effing way when it comes to doing “awt”, but then, after all that has been going down, how am I going to hang on to my a-s?

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: It has been said to me that, of late, I have become “too political an animal”. Curious remark. I am not particularly political, meaning I am on the street a lot, but I do not do the streets. Do not care for megaphones. Said Lunar: … …. ‘Yes, things are bad, but it is not exactly Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot or even, for that matter, Putin. It is a new bad to be sure. It is new and it is inevitable because the human race is in mental and spiritual decline and has opted instead for what is the ultimate TV reality show’… …. And: … …. ‘People have been behaving in extremely [bizarre] ways. Maybe Covid entered the spirit as well as the body’… …. And: … …. ‘I still think Canada is being hit because Trump can't bear Trudeau and, as we well know, he acts on his prejudices. Never was there a moment that this country [England] needed to be back in Europe’… …. And: … …. ‘Surely he'd only invade Mexico in order to annex it but he doesn't want the people he is kicking out now back again nor does he want the South American drug cartels. I suppose it is more likely that there might be air strikes specifically aimed at them. As for invading Scotland, there, too, he has failed. With all the power he had at his disposal when he tried to extend his regular golf course there was an old fellow who simply refused to budge. Neither love nor money could make [him] surrender his land and, lo and behold, he won. Don't underestimate Scottish intransigence. If that fails, then I'll speak to people about conjuring up a [sluagh] to carry him off. I think what is much more worrying is the foreign policy (if there is such a thing) and what will happen to the Ukrainians, the Palestinians and anyone else you'd care to name’... …. That was Lunar with his war games cap on. On occasion, he makes perfect sense, and, on other occasions makes a kind of less perfect sense, but sense nonetheless.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, ask again what day it is because, who knows, Trump might have changed it: … …. ‘You're not too political. You just prefer not to see the world set on fire’ … …. ‘And yes, it does seem that T [rump] is running through his stage show performance [and] he'll have nothing left in short order except this country and an entire world thoroughly pissed at him. But he can't see that because he really does believe he's a monarch of divine rule. Which is to say, he's an even bigger idiot now than three months ago. Jesus I'm exhausted. Going to gulp some trazodone and try to sleep’… …. Which invites a Drake encore: … …. ‘May sound a little [bananas], but probably the best thing that's happened to Canada in decades. You're right, the world would unite if it were invaded by aliens. Canada and Mexico are [united]. I envy you. It'd be fun organizing "non-protest" groups at border crossings, mass demonstrations of "We don't want you, need you, or care to ever see you again," that sort of thing’… …. Has Drake reconstituted no-fault divorce? A change of rules on the dance floor, them guys on one side, us guys on the other, Guy Lombardo still auld lang syne-ing with the magic wand?

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘You’re right: JM (Sir John A MacDonald) was terrified of an American invasion because everyone up to and including Secretary of State William Seward was advocating it as right and proper. Non-sequitur: BTW, the Fiddlehead (literary rag) is now running content warnings before their stories. Publishers running scared? More MacDonald, Johnny A: In point of fact I am now reading Patrice Dutil's Sir John A. MacDonald & the Apocalyptic Year 1885, which, as you might glean from the title, focuses on the year 1885, during which much happened, from the Northwest Rebellion to Johnny Mac lobbying heroically for giving the vote to both women and Indigenous folk. Yes, that's right, in 1885 he was doing all he could on their behalf, only to run into the brick wall of the Liberals and not a few of his own Conservatives. The jaded suggest that he was more interested in the votes this would win him, which is likely true. At any rate, Dutil's book quotes extensively from his speeches and offers a much more nuanced reading than most of the dismissive attacks of the past decade, including such details as that when JM initiated the insidious residential school system attendance was not in fact obligatory but voluntary; it was only after his death that attendance was mandatory. Not that this makes me a fan, or exonerates him, but it is not utterly uninnerestin'. Pierre Polyvinyl (Poilievre) wanting to bring JM back from his exile has more to do with assuaging the indignation of old white guys--and getting their votes--than any actual research into the truth, whatever that is. Meanwhile, first snowfall of the year this morning, all of a half inch and melting. Percival (the goat) says hello.’

Postscript V: Rutilius is above it all, perhaps because he is metaphysical, and not in any mountaineering sense. Canada as the Great Experiment #51? The man does not much care. Nation-states are feckless things; there is only truth in the blue scarab bug (Hoplia coerulea) which, in profile, kind of looks like a frontend loader….

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla who may well become the newest addition to our ranks regrets to say she cannot make it due to unforeseen circumstances, chief among which is the fact that she of a sudden has jewellery to make, rush job. Oh, and that she is lagging behind on her French horn practice with which she is driving everybody in the building nuts. She does have a trenchant observation or two to make, having lived in various world capitals, and that she is a fan of Graham Greene novels and cinnamon whisky of Canadian origin….