The Great Dictator

 

Cut to the famous scene in the Charlie Chaplin classic where Chaplin, impersonating Hitler, is throwing the world around like it's a rubber ball. Trump vows to nationalize elections in violation of the constitution. He declares war on Venezuela and Iran without the consent of congress. He attempts to grab Greenland, a relatively minor gambit whose failure he sloughs off. Emoluments. His current earnings as president are nearing 1.8 billion and he has sent the FBI into the office of Fulton County to illegally vet ballots. Is that Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, making a guest appearance? The FBI under $Cash Patel and the DOJ under Pam Bondi, whose past role was in Surfer Girl, have now been merged with The White House, whose East Wing has been torn down to build a $300 million ballroom, without wasting time to confer with the NCPC (National Capitol Planning Commission). Who cares?

The Phone

"Midway upon the journey of our life
  I found myself within a forest dark,
  For the straightforward pathway had been lost."--Canto I, The Inferno

"Lasciate ogni speranza, voi' ch'intrate"--reads the sign above the gate--Canto III

But what is hell? Is it everyday life with its disillusion, disappointments and boredom? And with the ephemeral pleasures of the flesh like eating and passion. Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso all have 33 cantos each. So hell doesn't dominate existence, but for the unrepentant sinner it's the last stop. Tolstoy ran away from Yasnaya Polyana and died alone in the Astopovo Station "He who is without sin cast the first stone"--John 8:7 . Waiting is the human predicament. No one is free of it and salvation is rarely what is sought.

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