Immortality

Nur einen Sommer gönnt, ihr Gewaltigen!

  Und einen Herbst zu reifem Gesänge mir,

Dass williger mein Herz, vom süssen

Spiele gesättigte, dann mir sterbe.

Die Seele, der im Leben ihr göttlich Recht

              Nicht ward, sie ruht auch drunten im Orkus nicht;

Doch ist mir einst das Heil'ge, das am

        Herzen mir liegt, das Gedicht, gelungen,

Willkommen dann, o Stille der Schattenwelt!

      Zufrieden bin ich, wenn auch mein Saitenspiel

Mich nicht hinabgeleitet; einmal

                          Lebt' ich wie Götter, und mehr bedarf's nicht.

Lou Reed (age 71), who died a few days ago, of whom and of whose work I have never heard in my life, is generally being granted a deathless, breathless undying fame by my countrymen and my contemporaries.  Three of his songs, at least ('Candy says,' 'Temporary Thing,' 'Street Hassle'), in particular--as hasty, belated research informs me--will go on bringing Heaven to Earth for those with ears to hear for the rest of the millennium.  So says today's homage to L.R. in the New Yorker, 'A Clipper Ship of Lou Reed Songs,' posted by Ben Greenman--whoever that may be.  Greenman says the first two songs are "lovely," and that the third "is an urban melodrama about life on the fringe, filled with violence and pornography, etc."  Why am I not surprised?  I might, if I but would, listen to all of these ineffable treasures on YouTube--and maybe, if my mood darkens, I will.  But first, let me just say, I do not expect to be pleased by these songs, or to like them, or to be in the least interested in them:  I will hate them, everything about them, the way they sound, their vulgarity, nastiness, and infinitely crass "smartness"--and I will resent having wasted my time giving them a hearing.  But here goes.

[Next day] And done.  I'm happy, with dour, bitter satisfaction, to find my snarky, sneering premonition (and, in a backwards kind of way, Hölderlin) totally vindicated by the unpleasant, heroïn-infused, repulsive and pretentious less-than-nothingness of Another Major Cultural Icon.  Seriously, I hadn't known about the patent, smart-ass/defensive heroïn-pervading/imbuing, but once I'd tumbled to it it wouldn't let me alone: at once cloying and numbing--just as it does, for example, in William Burrough's smart-alecky, tedious and vapid Naked Lunch.  The second YouTube version of 'Candy says' (an ugly, vicious, stupid ditty) that I listened to, recorded in Paris before an audience which hated-hated-hated it, is funny almost, in that you can barely hear it, over the derisive catcalls and whistles of those bored, impatient and fed-up Parisians.   Ah, mes chers méchants sujets! 

Civilisation

This is the American and the French spelling--singular in the French way to emphasize the coherent unity of the idea of civilization as being more important than any of its many diverse material manifestations.  Skimming the Wikipedia entry on the subject, I am astonished to see how diverse, how heterogeneous, how empirical, and frankly, how fatuously puerile are most definitions and conceptualizations of Civilisation--most writers and thinkers on the subject having apparently imbibed a tall glass of Postmodernist Sewage before they began to consider this, which is arguably, in our time, the most necessary and important of all questions which our species must answer--and answer soon--or face extinction:  What is Civilisation?

Upon consideration of the question, first, from an historical perspective, and after much reflection, I have arrived at several linked, suggestive, but not in themselves definitive answers:

1.  First of all, Civilisation is Sewerage, Waste Management, absolute Mastery of an Adequate Water Supply--with all this implies of Free Access of all citizens to Flush Toilets and Pure

Hot and Cold Running Water.

2.  Secondly, Civilisation is Antisepsis and Microbiology.

3.  Thirdly, Civilisation is Anesthesia and Modern Medicine and Surgery.

4.  Fourthly, Civilisation is Antibiotics.

5.  Modern technology and the Internet have rendered obsolete the Ceremonial and Cultural  Centers, and the Literacy, which previous generations of historical philosophers and Italians have judged necessary for there to be Civilisation.  Non c'è centro.

Somewhere in Chinatown,

on the doorpost of a Chinese grocery--I was in a hurry to catch a bus, and I didn't notice particularly which store--a petition is pasted up which says:  "End Chinese Traffic in Forced Organ Donations!"

To which, belatedly, I say Amen!

Un Coeur Simple

boingboing.net/2013/10/07/the-devil-and-antonin-scalia.html

This date in History, October 10th

1.   In 19 A.D. , Germanicus (father of Caligula?) was poisoned by the Syrian Governor Piso, by order of the good, sad, desengaño, fearsomely debauched Emperor Tiberius.  ¿To provide a nearer, untrammeled access to the Imperium for his depraved sweetheart of a nephew, Caligula?  On ne sait.   [Tiberius Caligulae:  Unus catulus morbidus enim es--Et te amo.]