Marginalia, no.80

There never was a man more amusing or fanciful than Giovan Francesco Rustici, nor one who delighted more in animals.  He had a porcupine so tame that it stayed under the table like a dog and sometimes it rubbed against people’s legs so that they drew them in very quickly.  He had an eagle, and also a raven which could say a great many things so clearly that it was just like a human being.  He also applied himself to the study of necromancy by means of which, I am told, he gave strange frights to his servants and assistants; and thus he lived without a care.

~ Vasari, Lives

It’s all in that “thus” of the final clause.  A prickly lapdog, a conversational bird, and enough proficiency in the dark arts to prank one’s servants and friends: the best description of the carefree life I’ve read in years.

Novelistic Imprecision

Philosophical exactitude is not required of novels, though novels are by nature philosophical.  Precise theories and grand conclusions are suspect in works of fiction in the same way they are suspect in real life: too strictly adhered to they’re symptomatic of willful delusion or at least wishful thinking.  But personhood and experience (being this thing rather than that -and knowing it-, and suffering change over time) are the stuff of novels, just as they’re the stuff of every human life –and these defy systematization.  If there is a final synthesis beneath it all, it tends to elude us, or the certainty of it does.

Perhaps that’s why among philosophers I prefer Montaigne to Spinoza, for example.  Spinoza is undoubtedly the more precise and systematic thinker and his scope is broader than Montaigne’s, but Montaigne is no less keen an observer of human nature while also being an appreciator of those things that don’t lend themselves so easily to system.   Spinoza’s perspective (with faint irony, perhaps) is godlike: all things fall under his gaze, and he is not surprised.  Montaigne has the spirit of a novelist, and his view is the more human: he is surprised by everything.

In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes writes that “Memory is identity.”  Being a positive statement, it sounds more philosophically definitive than Joseph Butler’s contention (uttered 250 years earlier in response to Locke) that “Memory may reveal but cannot constitute personhood.”  Both are right.  Like Gregory Peck in Spellbound, Barnes’ amnesiac loses his identity along with his memory (“It’s like looking in a mirror and seeing nothing but mirror”).  Despite that loss of memory, however, Butler’s amnesiac is no less himself as a discrete object or package of DNA.  But where Butler, as a theologian and philosopher, describes the view from above, from the perspective of God or science, Barnes as a novelist describes the scene from below, from the perspective of human personhood and experience.

Totalizing schemes of all kinds tend to live only by perpetual expansion, and sooner or later most fall prey to Bonini’s Paradox: in order to accommodate an infinitely diversifying host of disparate facts and observations, they become as unintelligible and unsystematic as the world they want to define. The only perspective natural to us – and the only one finally satisfying – is the philosophically inexact ground-floor view through a smudged window.

Epistemology

I.
Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

II.
We milk the cow of the world, and as we do
We whisper in her ear: ‘You are not true.’

~ Richard Wilbur

Marginalia, no.79

He walked noiselessly, like a fish.

~ Jules Renard, Journal

Nicely done.  A category mistake (a species of non-sequitur) masquerading as metaphor. But, of course, everyone knows that fish don’t walk, they ride bicycles.

Marginalia, no.78

Witness the elephant who was rival to Aristophanes the grammarian in the love of a young flower girl in the city of Alexandria… They tell also of a dragon in love with a girl, and a goose smitten with the love of a boy in the town of Asopus, and a ram that was suitor to the minstrel girl Glaucia; and every day one sees monkeys furiously in love with women.

~ Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond

Could it really have been every day in sixteenth-century Bordeaux that one saw monkeys ‘furiously in love’ with women?  To borrow L.P. Hartley’s famous phrase, the past is a foreign country.  And so is France.  Of course, French women are famous lookers, so one can hardly blame the monkeys.  But perhaps Montaigne had in mind local men who were uncommonly grabby and hairy.

To Helvetica in a Handbasket

Umberto Eco has noticed that children aren’t learning penmanship anymore.  (This is not true in my son’s case, since he was taught to write in cursive before he learned to print, but I know it’s true for many.)  Perhaps, Eco speculates, the art of penmanship will evolve into a sort of boutique hobby or extra-curricular activity like stamp collecting or fencing.  ‘Humanity,’ he says, ‘has learned to rediscover as sports and aesthetic pleasures many things that civilization had eliminated as unnecessary.’

It very much makes a difference, when reading something written by hand, whether the words are composed in block letters or cursive.  The performance of a sentence on a page is like the performance of a musical composition.  The same series of notes might be played on either clarinet or violin, but we will hear and interpret them differently.  Skill in execution will count for something too: pianists delivering notationally-identical glissandi may by their skill or lack of it whip up a confectionary delight - or a frothy mess.  Penmanship works in the same way.
 
And so does typeface.  Wounds are still seeping over the Futura/Verdana kerfuffle that made news recently.  And it’s a fact that Moby Dick printed in Caslon is a much better book than Moby Dick printed in Rockwell.  (Variations in typeface can result in variant readings and may, I think, account for the bibliophile’s need to collect favorite titles in multiple editions.)  It’s ironic I should hold forth here in godless Arial, I know.  Someday I’ll have to improve my style guide for The New Psalmanazar and do my part to avert the awful doom of a sans-serif world.

Marginalia, no.77

One day he saw that he was older than he had ever been before.

~ Cynthia Ozick, The Cannibal Galaxies

Thirty-six times round the sun today.  But chronological advancement and age (as implying maturity) are two different things.  There were moments in childhood when the latter outstripped the former, like the hare racing ahead of Aesop’s tortoise.  Somewhere along the course, I think, the hare has fallen asleep.

Marginalia, no.76

All moments of time have coexisted simultaneously…

~ W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Late September bluffs its way to a reprise of summer’s dog days.  The weather prophets promise a triple-digit apocalypse tomorrow.  I only hope it will be the Last Judgment and that autumn will arrive near schedule.  Half asleep at midnight I can almost believe in the simultaneity of things.  I hear out-of-season visitors in the willows: the mockingbird, the storm.  By noon I’ve lost my faith.

Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico

One hundred and fifty years ago today Joshua Abraham Norton donned the purple robe of empire. I keep a portrait of him on the wall of my cubicle, near Cervantes, who despite the lapse of years might have been an appropriate godfather to him.

He had two mutt dogs, Bummer and Lazarus, who followed him about. When Bummer died in 1865, Mark Twain wrote the dog’s obituary.

“In what other city,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “would a harmless madman who supposed himself emperor … been so fostered and encouraged?”

The Chronicle commemorates his reign today.  Wikipedia article here.

Marginalia, no.75

The concentration of mouth-filling, meaty glutamic acid rises ten- to twenty-fold, and as in cheese, so much of the amino acid tyrosine is freed that it may form small white crystals… The unsaturated fats in pig muscle break apart and react to form hundreds of volatile compounds, some of them characteristic of the aroma of melon, apple, citrus, flowers, freshly cut grass, and butter.

~ Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking

It’s a charming accident of our language that the word ‘cure’ has come to refer both to a method of preserving meat and to regaining physical or mental health after a period of sickness.  Curing meat is a process of dehydration, and when the theory of humors still held in medicine bloodletting and emetics were prescribed to drain excess fluids and return the patient to healthful semi-aridity.  Heraclitus cautioned against a moist soul and called a dry soul “a gleam of light…wisest and best.”  The secret of both sublime hams and the dry-cured soul is therefore the removal of excess moisture.  One of the oldest methods for curing meat is by prolonged exposure to smoke.  Smoking my pipe in the evenings I wonder if I’m not curing my soul a little.  There’s something almost alchemical about it: firing (cured) tobacco leaves in the retort of the bowl to release all the volatile compounds of the day and summon buttery golden aromas of the philosophic mind.