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

In Doubt We Trust

“It’s certainty that makes one mad, not doubt.”―Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

A hae ma doots! * And well I might

—necessity has doubt in sight;

I doubt myself, I doubt the times,

I'll doubt soon now these stumbling lines!

I doubt my very doubting, too:

self-doubt is up there, near ahead,

for like unto the green bay tree,

the irradicable wicked spread,†

the quick who doubt the hallowed dead,

neutrinos, viruses, and apes,

mountains, stars, and galaxy,

. . . thus, prima facie, also me.

Consider, if not well and true

made dubious by all that,

physics's notorious undead cat.

Epigraph: Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: “Nicht der Zweifel, die Gewißheit ist das, was wahnsinnig macht.”

* “I have my doubts,” Scottish expression of skepticism.

† "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree."—Psalm 37:35 (King James Version).

Thursday, April 10, 2025

Bullet doux

Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia, engraving, 1514

Disoriented, brain-fogged, down at the mouth,

I consulted Dr. Despair, my longtime quack,

who swiftly put a finger on the case,

an acute autoimmune reaction to Western Civ.

Aside from aspects of the global South,

there’s not much left that I can hack or face

—I'm allergic, above all, to all talk of “race.”

“No worries!” grinned the furibund toubib,*

prodding me amiably under my missing rib.

“No fear that you'll for very long suvive!”

*French slang for “doctor,” from Arabic ṭabīb.

Thursday, April 10, 2025