Success is like some horrible disaster
Worse than your house burning, the sounds of ruination
As the roof tree falls following each other faster
While you stand, the helpless witness of your damnation
Fame like a drunkard consumes the house of the soul
Exposing that you have worked for only this—
Ah, that I had never suffered this treacherous kiss
And had been left in darkness forever to founder and fail
Featherstonehaugh - Fanshaw
Cholmondeley - Chumly
Berkeley - Barkly
Mainwaring - Mannering
Belvoir - Beaver
Trottiscliffe - Trozli
ἀτύφος
by William H. Gass
One
When Ben Jonson was a small boy, his tutor, William Camden, persuaded him of the virtue of keeping a commonplace book: pages where an ardent reader might copy down passages that especially pleased him, preserving sentences that seemed particularly apt or wise or rightly formed and that would, because they were written afresh in a new place, and in a context of favor, be better remembered, as if they were being set down at the same time in the memory of the mind. Here were more than turns of phrase that could brighten an otherwise gloomy page. Here were statements that seemed so directly truthful they might straighten a warped soul on seeing them again, inscribed, as they were, in a child’s wide round trusting hand, to be read and reread like the propositions of a primer, they were so bottomed and basic.
Jonson translated or rewrote the quotes and connected them with fresh reflections until their substance seemed his own, and seamlessly woven together, too, which is how the work reads today, even though it is but a collection of loose pages taken, after his death, from the defenseless drawers of his desk. The title, extended in the manner of the period into an explanation, reads, ‘Timber: or, Discoveries; Made upon Men and Matter: as they have flow’d out of his daily Readings; or had their refluxe to his peculiar Notion of the Times’; and it is followed by an epigraph taken from Persius’ Satires: ‘To your own breast in quest of worth repair, and blush to find how poor a stock is there.’ With a flourish whose elegance is lost on our illiterate era, Jonson fills his succeeding page, headed Sylva, with a justification of his title in learned Latin, which can be translated as follows:
[here are] the raw material of facts and thoughts,
wood, as it were, so called from the multiplicity and
variety of the matter contained therein. For just as
we are commonly wont to call a vast number of
trees growing indiscriminately ‘a wood,’ so also did
the ancients call those of their books, in which were
collected at random articles upon various and
diverse topics, a wood, or timber trees.
In the beginning, people remembered things.
The world saturated the life that lived in it to such an extent that a kind of consubstantiation took place. The world and its sequences became beached inside the life that experienced them, long after the sensations that represented those sequences had drained back into nothingness.
Memory.
Can you think of a pure memory? Do the common features of all memories have any shape, taken alone?
No.
Memory, like remembrance, is a process. The common features that all memories share, and because of which they can be called memories, are an essence out of time. The world is the opposite of an essence. We are so drenched in the world that it is all we can do to point to the common features of something like memories. It’s all we can do to point to an essence.
The fascination with bulk goods is a thrall to essences. Plunging your hand into a sack of coffee beans allows a glimpse of their essence. ‘These are Beans.’ The salivary look of tourists gazing at money being printed. ‘That is Money.’ The mettle-testing stare of young men regarding footage of bodies being bulldozed into trenches. ‘This is Evil.’
Memory has always been more expansive and humane than the puncturing dart of the essence-hunter. In memory the hide of the world is stretched out in us without a hole to betray how it was subdued.
And then, speech.
From the world, to remembrance. From remembrance, to the mouth. From the mouth, to someone else. And then the world blooms in them. The only lineage worth caring about.
But then, writing.
The thread of speech from the mouth of a mind is exiled now. The threads are set down in lines, pushed into a surface by an implement, bled in ink by a reed.
The world is hunted down with a pen, and left to desiccate.
The facile image of speech as a line of text grows into the scroll. The sequential nature of speech is misapprehended into a sequential method of storage. A picture is worth a thousand words only because images roam an area unimaginable to the line of text. Like an unhunted animal.
The arbitrary and playful access to the world that memories preserve is paralyzed by the scroll. The free motion of a person in the world is reduced to directions on a line, up or down. See above, see below.
Everything brilliant drips with a kind of ephemeral liquid. Drops of this liquid dissolve the artifice and compromise of the made thing. They reconstitute the freedom of being in the world.
The scroll is not brilliant. The effort required to operate it is a dismal inheritance of the fecklessness with which text captured speech. Memory comes from an intense cohabitation with the world. Just as the one dimension of text mocks the freedom and flow of a voice, so is the scroll a parody of memory.
The book is brilliant.
A scroll accordion-folded, sliced on one side and bound on the other.
How long is a book? If a book has 350 pages, each six inches wide, the book is 175 feet long. A scroll as tall as an apartment building. Wet by the brilliance of the book this scroll suddenly fits on half as much paper and into your hand. The scroll’s entire length is silently indexed along three edges.
If freedom is the product of an unencumbered will, the book has performed the miracle of making the shackle of text resemble the freedom of memory.
But I still write on a scroll. And you still read this on one.
I hike into the hills and sit in a graveyard. The stars are blinking like cat’s eyes and burned blood is pouring from the slaughterhouse chimney. My crotch is cold with the pee and the breeze. The moon goes behind a cloud and six pale forms start down from the foothills. At first I think they’re ghosts but they’re only starving pronghorn come down to lick salt from the headstones. I sit there trying to write Simone off. No more guys oogling her and no more dippy theories on world hunger. Then I think of her and Leon watching the test pattern together nude and sweaty and I moan and double over with dread, and a doe bolts away in alarm.
1.
In 1935, three years before his death, Edmund Husserl gave his celebrated lectures in Vienna and Prague on the crisis of European humanity. For Husserl, the adjective “European” meant the spiritual identity that extends beyond geographical Europe (to America, for instance) and that was born with ancient Greek philosophy. In his view, this philosophy, for the first time in History, apprehended the world (the world as a whole) as a question to be answered. It interrogated the world not in order to satisfy this or that practical need but because “the passion to know had seized mankind.”
