In Lieu of an Introduction

. . . he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work properly secured from damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death-beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends, who in their turn were to send down the tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation; and thus . . . the knowledge that here and there the truth lay buried . . . and was to rise again in some distant age . . . —this knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to generation.

—Thomas De Quincey, “Walking Stewart”

Livius Andronicus: An Odyssey is peregrinatory, and an Iliad, no doubt, genocidal, but an Idyssey is gestational as regards idiosyncrasy--or oddness.

Dr Johnson: Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.

Mrs Thatcher: There is no such thing as a womb with a view.

Ben Jonson: By G—, ’tis good, and if you like’t, you may!

—Petrus Tornarius, Imaginary Conversations

Snatched from the great gulf, like oysters by bibliomaniac pearl divers, . . . they first rot, then what was pearl . . . may be seen as such, and continue as such.

—Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, ch. 5, “The Fourth Estate”

Ingenium

Lacking ability,  a power greater than my own urges me on.—Ovid, Fasti 2.123 (8 CE)

Thus Ovid's Calendar, his Book of Days.

How to account for present ways?

The sown whirlwind bears no fruit,*

Nothing lasting, nothing stays.

But we must play this as it lays.

You will know dudes by their loot.

Folks' habitus is life's pursuit.

Much greater than the vibe, its root.

*Hosea 8.7, KJV: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.”

Wednesday, August 6, 2025

The Cyclist in the Apple Tree

Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem, The Fall of Ixion (ca. 1588). Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

“Lucretius could not credit centaurs:

Such bicycle he deemed asynchronous.”

— William Empson, “Invitation to Juno.”

The sapsucker in the apple tree

might conceivably be me. What with

AI’s oxymoronic science,*

relentless pecking fills the world.

Grab an umbrella, keep it furled

—even the rain now makes no sense!

The cyclist embedded in this wood

sought symbiosis, as he should, but

"Ixion rides upon a single wheel.”**

Seek an answer, cop a feel—

to countless nothings lately flew

the many arts that Tully knew.***

* Cf. Ignorance Unmasked: Essays in the New Science of Agnotology, ed. Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (Stanford University Press, 2025).

 ** Empson, ibid. Ixion, king of the Lapiths, sought to seduce Hera (aka Juno), wife of Zeus, who, however, substituted a cloud for her. From that copulation the half-horse, half-human race of Centaurs was born. Ixion was condemned in punishment to be bound to an eternally spinning wheel of fire. The first-century BCE Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius questions this tale, inter alia, in his De rerum natura [On the Nature of Things].

 *** Marcus Tullius Cicero, De senectute [On Old Age], 78: “Tot artes tantæ scientiæ.”

Tueday, December 1, 2025