Life

At birth, one is sentenced to life with no time off for good behavior. Parole? It’s the one case where it would not necessarily be desirable. Commutation is tantamount to death.  No one has the benefit of awareness of the birth or death which bookend existence. Supernal events inevitably convey mystery since they traffic in both the invisible and ineffable. Time is a light spectrum filled with signposts such as the advent of consciousness—which however elusive tantalize with their potential knowability. Personhood follows the vacuum which leads to nothing.

Read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy with a painting by Hallie Cohen in The East Hampton Star

Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson

Here is what Boswell says about Samuel Johnson: "He had, from the irritability of his constitution, at all times, an impatience and hurry when he either read or wrote. A certain apprehension, arising from novelty, made him write his first exercise from College twice over; but he never took that trouble with any other composition; and we shall see that his most excellent works were struck off at a heat, with rapid exertion." Much is made of rewriting, but the fact is most writing is unconscious, occurring not in the mind but the fingers. The idea is to get ahead of the reasoning function which buries thought in notions.  Encapsulating a creative impulse is akin to taming a wild horse. The manageability is inversely proportional to its richness and unpredictability. 

read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy (with a painting by Hallie Cohen), The East Hampton Star

Nabokov's First Poem

 "A moment later, my first poem began. What touched it off? I think I know. Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordite leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando dow the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent."--Speak, Memory. Nabokov would go on to write Pale Fire, a 999 line novel in poetry form by the fictional John Shade, with commentary by Shade's neighbor, Charles Kinbote--the Boswell of the tale. Nabokov's own description of his first prosody sounds a bit like Stephen Hawking: "Tip, leaf, dip, relief--the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes..."

read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy (with a painting by Hallie Cohen), The East Hampton Star

Two Pianos

You may take a look at the image of Charlotte Rampling in the Kino Lorber promotion for a movie named Two Pianos and ask yourself, do I look that old? The Night Porter (1974) was one of Rampling's most controversial roles and one which could leave an ineradicable memory, ("Walking on Broken Glass") on an already tortured post-adolescent imagination. The real shock is age. It becomes increasingly difficult to see oneself as the years go by and you may even find yourself dumbfounded when your college roommate comes up to you at the class reunion. At first the response to the hug may be to step back, then suddenly you see the familiar old face embedded in a mess of tired flesh. Preconception is similar to the shock absorber on a car and the process by which nature spares us from the shock of recognition.

read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy (with a painting by Hallie Cohen), The East Hampton Star

The Origin of Species

The Origin of Species was published November 24, 1859. You might calender that date as man’s fall—at least from an evolutionary point of view. No more were they made in the image of God. Rather apes turned out to be the forebears. But when and how did reason and consciousness arrive? Was it by way of the toolmaking of the Australopithecine era 3.2 million  years ago of which the fossilized Lucy is the prime extant remnant? How does Stephen J. Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium fit in?” It’s nice to look at life as a temporal food chain curiously similar to the Elizabethan world’s “great chain of being” but nature is more about accident than intention. Is this literally and figuratively a new Ice Age?

read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy (with a painting by Hallie Cohen), The East Hampton Star

Mimicry

 

Howdy Doody and Buffalo Bob

Remember when you were a little kid and you mimicked your parents. "Johnny brush your teeth!" would be met with a reiteration of the same instruction. "Be careful or you will bump your head!" another and of course "watch out for bones!" Back in the 50s, everyone was choking on bones. If you're a baby boomer, you remember your parents making chicken dinners into fearful ordeals. The funny thing is that everyone is mimicking everyone else though they don't often notice it. Try to think about the first person who said "sounds like a plan," "at the end of the day" or  averred they were glad you were "on the same page." Widely used turns of phrase don't come out of nowhere. Yet it's curious why some have a longer half life than others. You may have heard someone say "I don't feature..." meaning they don't prefer or like something. Where did that come from? Oh, ye gods and little fishes" is another. You probably don't own one original phrase, yet you'd have to hire a linguistic private eye to figure the roots of your own way of talking--and thinking too 

read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy (with a painting by Hallie Cohen), The East Hampton Star

Persona

 

What is it about logorrhea that’s so disconcerting. Eloquent speakers and tyrants have prolixity in common. The core of the pathogy and what makes it so disconcerting to those who are forced to endure it, is that it’s an attack by way of imperviousness. It’s Procrustean. The speaker is mowing you down with words an intruder. Make no mistake that's the point. From the point if view of etiology you may have noticed that mourners justifiably unload their grief. Underneath the wave of sadness is also anger that you have lived while their beloved is dead.

read "Boudu Saved From Drowning" by Francis Levy (with a painting by Hallie Cohen) in The East Hampton Star