1402. “And I am out on a limb, and it is the arm of God”
Frank O’Hara, “Olive Garden”
I wouldn’t have imagined being out on such a limb when I was younger. Whatever had to go missing to get here—well, I don’t miss it now.
Note: “I cannot miss my way” (Wordsworth, The Prelude).
1418. “They just look at me blankly”
The Author’s Mother
Raised Protestant, the mother of the author of these notes is also a firm believer in the separation of Church and State. For many of her generation, no matter their theological or ideological stripe, the Establishment Clause was as Sacred as the Ten Commandments.
I mention this by way of Prologue to a brief Exchange that took place between the author and his maker (aka his mother), not more than twenty minutes ago:
Jeff Nunokawa: “Wow, Ma! It’s Good Friday!”
The Author’s Mother: “I’m perfectly aware of what day it is. You know it’s a State Holiday here?”
Jeff Nunokawa: “Isn’t that a violation of the Establishment Clause?”
The Author’s Mother: “That’s what I’m always telling people at work. I say to them, ‘What the Hell!? This is Unconstitutional!’ They don’t care. They just look at me blankly. They just want the day off!”
Notes:
1. The Establishment Clause—the first clause of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
2. A Perspicacious Reader will remark that the Mother of the Author of These Notes cleaves to the Work Ethic historically associated with certain schismatics clustered on her side of the so-called Reformation. Thus, while contracting the reach of her Piety with one hand, she extends it with the other.
3. See M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
4. My brother and I like to remember how, when we were ill as children, our ma would say, “Get up and work off that fever!”
1422. “He began to repeat the same stories more than once a day”
The infirmities of age now began to steal upon Kant, and
betrayed themselves in more shapes than one … he began to
repeat the same stories more than once on the same day. Indeed
the decay of his memory was too palpable to escape his own
notice; and, in order to provide against it, and to secure himself
from all apprehension of inflicting tedium upon his guests,
he began to write a syllabus, or list of themes, for each day’s
conversation, on cards, or the covers of letters, or any chance
scrap of paper. But these memoranda accumulated so fast upon
him, and so easily lost, or not forthcoming at the proper moment,
that I prevailed on him to substitute a blank-paper book.
De Quincey, “The Last Days of Kant”
So did the book remain blank—a placebo, in place of the social steroid (all that “prepping,” as if for another Critique or Seminar, rather than anything like casual conversation)—that Kant, who had always prided himself (and by accounts of those close to him, for good reason) on his lustrous powers of talk, felt, near the end, he required to compensate for their weakening?
I hope that De Quincey, who acted as a kind of go-between that helped the easily mortified philosopher negotiate the real world, was as kind to him in his decline as his brief memoir of those last days suggests he was. I hope that others were as well. If they were, I have a pretty good idea of what was written in that book, written or read or written and read by that most consequential reader and writer, written in more or less invisible ink: it doesn’t matter.
Notes: None.
1440. “The mind, intractable thing”
even with its own ax to grind, sometimes
helps others. Why can’t it help me?
Marianne Moore, “The Mind, Intractable Thing”
I think it must be a step in the right direction, a step toward the help she wants, to think of the mind as the mind and not her mind. It’s like one of those working relationships where you don’t expect your girlfriend to be exactly the same person as you, or to be exactly “yours,” even if you wish it were so sometimes, and even when you can’t imagine why she isn’t.
Note: “years that bring the philosophic mind” (Wordsworth, “Intimations” ode).