In quotes
“If anyone is going to carry a poem in their heart, I probably would prefer it to be an Emily Dickinson poem… there are great poems from the past that speak to our humanity.” – Lee Briccetti, Executive Director, Poets House

Conversations
At Umbra Poet David Henderson’s and Righteous Man-About-the-Village Poet Jeffrey Cyphers Wright’s Memorial Day party at Dias y Flores, South of the Border Community Garden, a beautiful leafy scene on 13th St. between Aves. A&B, I met the artists Amy Hill (fine Flemish-inspired portraits of bikers and bohemians) Lili White (8 pm Saturday, June 5, 2010, @ Millennium Film Workshop), Vernita Nemec (Vernita ‘Ncognita; June 30, 2010, @ Dance Theater Workshop), and Larissa Killough (@ Rockland Center for the Arts through June 13, 2010). We are truly in a renaissance of creativity – perhaps I shall meet you at one of these events.

A book for pleasure
Tropic of Cancer (1934), Henry Miller

Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, the must-read misadventures of an American in Paris – in the day, nicely rounds out a reading of intellectual erotica that includes Jean de Berg’s fetishistic L’Image (1956), Vladimir Nabokov’s (that’s Na-BO-kov to you) lifted Lolita (1955 Paris, 1958 New York; same time zone, ironically, as Atlas Shrugged [1957], the sex scene in which stopped me cold), Pauline Réage’s piercing Historie d’O (1954), Nin’s collaborative Delta of Venus (1940’s; published 1978), George Bataille’s predecessory, splendid if clerically flawed Histoire de l’oeil (1928), Huysmans’s decadent À Rebours (1884), Boito’s Senso (1882), Sacher-Masoch’s eponymously definitive Venus im Pelz (1870), and Sade’s masterful, educational, straight-setting Justine (1787, 1791), porn cloaking a serious moral tale debunking the just world fallacy (for reasons incomprehensible, this last not required reading for everyone everywhere). Now that’s a reading list (and not even to the moderns): You are so lucky if you haven’t read these yet.

Lexical meandering
from Tropic of Cancer
bombination = buzzing
cachinnation = guffaw
defalcation = embezzlement

Neologism
Infinitist = Believer in afterlife (see “Janus, gazing” and Essay below)
However, note Infinitism, an epistemological argument and variation on the Infinite Regress in contrast to Foundationalism and Coherentism. An example of the DFWD (Don’t mess with David) Principle.

Essay
On reading everything

My epiphany at middle age came as somewhat of a surprise: that I shan’t be around to find out how it all turns out. This was precipitated by my artist/educator friend John (aged 60 at the time), in response to the question of resveratrol and longevity, who told me that he’d like to live to be 140 (see e*sequiturs Sec 7: Centrism) for specifically that reason. Of course, this may surprise you, and even strike you as absurd, but rest assured that I had every subconscious confidence that I would, until I realized I wouldn’t. (As an exercise, ask yourself: If you could live to be 140, in good health, solvent, would you want to do so? Why? As an interlocutor of strangers and friends, I have received a surprising variety of answers. And note Nicholas Bakalar in the New York Times on happiness and aging.)

The finite span of human life (a shockingly brief 876,000 hours or 52,560,000 minutes if one lives to be one hundred) led me to write your life, in appliance billing units, a hortatory with reference to Paul’s letter to the Philippians to consider true things (this relating to the definitions of morality observed by cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, which – shocking to me – do not include truth as a moral value). In addition, I prescribe that you catch blossoms in your hair and attempt utopia, supposing that you could do worse. It’s an easy poem that you can read (at age 40, you’ll have 32 million minutes remaining to live; at age 30, you’ll have 37 million; at age 20, you’ll have 42 million, etc.).

The implications of not finding out how it all works out are not unprofound, placing us, as they do, as finite entities in a rather longish continuum (the universe about 13.73 Gigaanna old: OMG, that’s finite, too). This realization underpins, not doubt, many philosophies, including those at extremes – self-centeredness incorporating deceit as operating principles vs. altruistic communitarianism. We have choices within finite timeframes, with limited yet poignant impacts on ourselves, our families and our societies. We conduct and are part of, individually at microscale and collectively on this small, wet, spinning ball, a grand experiment.

Thoughts on mortality (Θάνατος, not morality: who thinks on that?), which Edward Hirsch, poet and author of How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, told me are frequently found in poetry, may be definitively morbid – or motivating. So little time, so much to know, as Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D., the Nowhere Man, observes in Yellow Submarine (1968), reminding us of Ogier P., Sartre’s likewise deprecated Self-Taught Man (Autodidact) – reading the canon in alphabetical order by author – in the deeply depressing Nausea (1938; although there will be French intellectual protests, you may skip this book with a clear conscience, and add 40 hours to your life!): Sartre apparently found life absurd (and we are shocked), an idée nouvelle at the time. Although these two characters imply futility or pointlessness in the accumulation of knowledge, rather we see them as gratuitously, pretentiously consuming knowledge for no reason and no benefit except as credentialing badges, of which populists disapprove and academics require. Less cynically, we see, rather, reading as enriching and culturally connecting us, and are motivated to read in part by awareness of mortality – and because we value time and knowledge.

Despairing my lateness to literacy in this late hour of my life, I lamented my under-read status to my writer friend Don, who told me that even for the most voracious readers, there are far more books than anyone will ever be able to read, so I shouldn’t despair (the war already lost). This came a relief  – one is not alone in this limitation – but also as a frustration as a writer. Virginia Heffernan recently reported in the “The Rise of Self-Publishing” in the New York Times magazine that there were 764,000 vanity published books in the US in 2009, vs. 288,000 traditionally (name publisher) published books. This is not to mention the estimated 126 million blogs, and the latest issue of John Tranter’s and Al Filreis’s UPenn Jacket, weighing in at 900-effing pages (good luck reading that, ever). If everyone is writing, how might a writer hope to be read, if one’s goal is to be read, say, in one’s lifetime? And I’m pretty sure, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass assertion notwithstanding (and poet Rosanna Warren’s touching eulogy-monody to her father, “A Kosmos,” of course intentionally referencing Robert Burns’s predated, displaced beastie [“To a Mouse”]), being dead isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Avoid it if you can, I say, and many infinitists optimistically (if not realistically) agree.

And to further complicate this point, the Venezuelan / New York artist Anita Pantin reminded me in obverse corollary that there are far more potential books inside than a writer will be able to externalize (those unwritten perhaps limbo-wandering shades, unfertilized gametocytes) – so write, my friends say, there being so little time. Hatch your world-eggs.

So in the end, you won’t read (or write) everything you have on your list, or wish to, and especially the books not on your list because you didn’t find out about them. So e*sequiturs shares with you a few books by the living and the dead (although the sometimes dark, romantic poet Lee Briccetti says that the dead ones are alive when we read them[!], and in a way she’s right).

Poem
There is no frigate like a book

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.

– Emily Dickinson

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Enhance your mind
As always, you are invited to rede the original e*sequiturs at http://www.esequiturs.com.

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