Third Day

And again, so far so good. 

Grateful this morning for Matute's magnificent Gudú. I just reread the scene in which Predilecto is sent to spy on the children, who discover him easily and pull him into their play, out of bonds of time. The immense sadness of leaving that, and forgetting that: tiptoeing out of the room when they have all fallen asleep. She's so good about forgetting. The epigraph of the book:

Dedico este libro a la memoria de H. C. Andersen, Jacob y Wilhelm Grimm y Charles Perrault.

A todo lo que olvidé.

A todo lo que perdí.

-----

I dedicate this book to the memory of H. C Andersen, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and Charles Perrault. 

To all that I have forgotten.

To all that I have lost.

Victoria Moul notes that ". . . anyone whose primary interest is literary is likely I think to reach a point in life after which most of your, let’s say, “top quality” literary reading, the really transformational stuff, is re-reading. When this point occurs surely varies and in a second or third language one might (happy thought!) never reach that point. But I think it’s reasonable to assume that any fairly committed reader of literature gets to this stage, in their mother-tongue at least, somewhere around mid-life."

Certainly this is true for me, and so the gift of Matute is doubly precious: it is both a transformational experience, and utterly new to me. It's new even in the simple narrative sense: this is the first time in years that I've read a narrative and genuinely not known where it was going. I read with some bemusement all these spoiler warnings attached nowadays to discussions of even the most formulaic fiction -- in fact, especially to the most formulaic fiction. Do you people seriously not know what's coming? That's just weird.

A long-spun tendril of cloud in the winter sky: and the morning backing in slowly, returning to the world.

I wrote a post about political hope the other day, and un-published it, because it made a claim of fact that I couldn't immediately back up, and I will not add to the noise and confusion, if I can help it. But in fact I am more hopeful than I used to be, in a number of ways. I may resurrect a more thoughtful version of that someday. Or perhaps not. Coming to terms with the new political reality is something we all have to do, but I am uneducated and naive about these things -- for one thing -- and for another thing, I think we are likely to be out of power for a good long time, and time invested in following the minutiae of U. S. Federal politics, by amateurs, is probably time wasted. I applaud those fighting the desperate rear-guard action, but someone also needs to go ahead and prepare the refuges we will take. I may be better suited to that task.

Anyway. Lots of love, dear ones. 

Second Day

So far, so good: but the first day, when the impetus is strongest, is easiest. The second and third days are generally the most precarious: and there's lots of destabilizing events coming along. Still, woke this morning with a grateful sense of peace. I will try to remember that, when besieged by false promises: the promises of this discipline are scant, but they're kept. 

-----

Why, I wonder, have the words fluvial and lacustrine never won currency in English, when so many other French/Latinate adjectives have swaggered into the language and made themselves at home? But it's a river boat and a lake house, never a fluvial boat, never a lacustrine house. Maybe something about the water generates a stubborn Dutch homeliness.

-----

Fog this morning, and a damp cold that seeps into the marrow. We're at the wicked time of the year, hovering around freezing, inviting ice storms. If I had an amulet against ice, I'd wear it. I have a large tolerance for most of the weathers and natural mischances of the world, but I don't like the ice, as I don't like the wildfires. You should be able to walk on the ground and breathe the air.

Wobbly and Out of Control

Hah! Well, no wonder I was feeling like everything was wobbly and out of control. Everything was wobbly and out of control.

So. For the food:

Breakfast is the Spanish omelet: leave half the hash browns. (And if the omelet is ridiculously huge, as it was today, you can leave some of it on the plate, too. But you never *have* to leave any of the omelet.)

Snacks available but not required: one apple and one banana.

Lunch is salad and 2/3 glass bowl of soup, and you must begin it by 11:30.

Dinner is salad, and 2/7 of a packet of ground 93% turkey, prepped with a big spoonful of olive oil, and 450 grams of potato, and you must begin it by 4:30.

In two weeks we'll know if this is a weight loss regimen or not: there's no need to guess. The numbers will tell us. At the moment that question is of no interest whatever. The first project here is simply to get aircraft out of its tumble and under control: nothing good happens until that has happened.

You may have to ask Martha to hide that white candy dish.

Throw out the rest of the bagels, unless Martha wants them.

Ipse dixi.

-----

For the exercise:

Okay. I must work out 4 days out of 7. An easy mnemonic for that while I'm working 3 days per week is simply that any day that is not a work day is a workout day. But really I want the basic pattern to be upper body day, lower body day, rest day. With some latitude: sometimes no rest day, sometimes two rest days. But never three rest days in a row, and always, if I'm looking backward six days and see only three workouts, I'm due to work out. (This sounds much more elaborate than it is: in practice it's pretty simple. Upper, Lower, Rest.)

Until I get the cardio where I want it, I'm going to stop increasing the rev lunges when I get to two sets of 30 reps (each side) at 5 lbs. (Which is nearly where I am? I think?) The cardio is going to stress the knees: I don't want to pile too much on them.

The cardio is actually the focus: building back the stamina I lost to Covid last year. The program is going to look like this: 

To begin with, short walks every day that is not a lower body day.

Every week, increment the walks by two, where an increment means taking no walk to short, or short walk to regular walk, or regular walk to long walk.

We stop this progression when we're at a weekly regiment of daily regular walks and two long walks. We might or might not at that point progress the long walks, or we might just go back to increasing the weight on the rev lunges. Leave that decision for when the time comes. 

So we're starting at 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 5

We're going to 2 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 2 = 16

At +2 per week, this will take five and a half weeks. That seems about right. We should get there around the end of February.

Ipse dixi.

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For the study: yes, you want to be doing BOTH the Spanish and the Greek. And maybe you can do that. Maybe it has to wait until you're no longer working at the Foundation. Maybe it doesn't happen at all, because time and attention are not infinitely elastic. Just relax and get over yourself, young Dale. It is not the most important thing. It is far more important to be doing hard and interesting reading, and to write stuff that is worth reading. THAT is what you actually want to do. The languages are tools for that, not ends in themselves. (Well, actually they're ends in themselves too, and always have been, and always will be: but you don't need to be doing two at once if it just. doesn't. work. Twenty years from now you'll be stone cold and in the ground, Mr Favier. None of this matters THAT much. It is now required of you that you a) get a grip, my good man, and b) relax and give yourself a break. Yes, both those things, and yes, this is a contradiction, and yes, you're just going to have to deal with it.)

New Year's Day

Sly the winds that wrap around
flew the tremor underfoot
scree the love that shifts and shoots
and all these things forgotten.

Tell me, of all the prophecies you've made,
how many came to pass? You are doing nothing
but chewing the chalk of your old classroom,
laboring over lessons too well learned.
How wrong do your masters have to prove
before you give them up?

Stutter and rattle of flags in the wind, and
rotten cloth tears from the pole;
older than we hoped
and younger than a new mouse
naked in the nest:
we have three days. Use them. 

Olvidado Rey Gudú

The Goblin and the Magician have been directed by the Queen to remove young Prince Gudú's capacity to love, since it constitutes an unacceptable vulnerability:

Then the Goblin very carefully took hold of the boy's head and blew on his forehead, which opened with the sweetness and gentleness of a flower. He did the same to his breast, and when the heart blossomed, the Magician deftly closed it up in a chalice, transparent but strong.

The boy's forehead presented dreams of horses, a great coarse red sun, a clash of swords, and a poplar tree rocked by the wind. "Nothing dangerous," said the Goblin. "Say, while we're at it, shall we take out anything else? Intelligence? Innocence?" Suddenly the Queen felt a great grief, and covering her eyes with her hands, burst into tears. 

"Enough," she said. "Enough. That's fine."

Well, I'm loving this novel. 

Hurry

It's going to be brute force for a while; forcing the solitude. Slowly, as if moving a huge weight, I close the laptop. At some point the mechanism (which I've never discovered) engages: the light clicks off when its face is an inch or two from its chest. It doesn't want to go. Beyond hearing, it keens and moans. It summons the dead, and they cluster behind me. How can you shut down the whole breathing world? What will be left if you do? A full hour later than I'd planned; now I am going to hurry to get my evening things done, setting up hurry for tomorrow morning, hurry for the day, hurry for evening, hurrying forever and never getting anywhere. Stop, you've got to stop, you old fool!

I woke this morning to surprising light. "The moon must be nearly full," I thought. I padded through the half-lit house -- I never turn on lights first thing in the morning, if I can help it -- and went to the window. There was a gleam in the cloud cover to the west: as I watched the full moon's disk slide into ghostly view, and recede again. It was gone, but the whole flannel of the western sky was soaked in moonlight. I could see well enough to start my day. Still: compromised by last night's hurry. Today will be hurried and incomplete, like all the other days. For God's sake stop, Dale. Get a grip.

But I hurried again to get ready, left my morning stretches and breathing undone, scrambled to get out of the house before the morning traffic. If I leave at 7:00 it takes ten minutes to get to Tom's; if I leave at 7:15 it takes half an hour. Long enough for even an aged fool, wagging his beard at the steering wheel, to realize that driving like this is madness, participating in the bonfire.

But it's the only piece of reality I have hold of, these mornings; I'm not going to loosen my clutch on it. I can sit there and work two hours. Real work. The rest of my day dissolves in a meaningless ebb and flow of hurry and avoidance, one driving inevitably to the other, both pushing toward a mindless stupor. Yeah. Whatever I was born for, it was not for this. 

I must go at it blind, my fingertips searching for any unevenness that might give purchase. I'm not special; I'm not alone. We're all doing this. You can hear the rattling buzz of the snare drum, if you listen for it; the beat of money pulsing through the economy, of coffee pulsing through the veins. It has its own agenda. Its fingers are delicately searching in turn for my weaknesses. Its fingers are not as strong as mine: but there are more of them, and they never rest. 

Believing In

C. S. Lewis was a glib son of a bitch, but he nailed it when he spoke of how disastrous it is to embark upon believing something "not because it is true, but for some other reason." The existentialist project as conceived by Camus strikes me as simply impossible. Certainly impossible for me. "I'll just decide that all people are important, and then they'll be important because I have decided they are important, and their importance will sustain my devotion to them --" No. No, the whole thing collapses under the slightest pressure. (for example, what the hell is important about some of these individuals? Not much that meets the eye.) For exactly the same reason, I am not going to be a Christian without a good reason, no matter how much a life of service and devotion appeals to me. (And I have always recognized that I am a servant, by temperament and inclination.) I would become a Christian simply and only because I thought it was true that Jesus was the unique human incarnation of the one God. Full stop. I'm not going to believe it because it's pleasant (and anyway, it's terrifying, if you take it seriously) or because it will make me mentally healthy. I don't know how other people are built, but I'm simply not built for that: I couldn't do it if I wanted to. I believe things that I think are true. 

Once upon a time I believed in the metaphysics of reductionist materialism. What's real are subatomic particles, and they bang into each other in deterministic ways, determining what the atoms do, and that determines what the molecules do, and that determines what cells do, and that determines what creatures such as us do, including -- somehow -- generating subjective experience and a sense of self, at some arbitrary threshold of neural complexity. Okay, well, maybe. Maybe free will is a delusion. Maybe subjective experience is a delusion: some people argue that, though it's a rather desperate move. I think it's more likely that what seems obvious is actually true: that we have intentions and make decisions. I suspect that even cells have intentions and make decisions: that mind and life are coterminous. This is I guess some kind of pantheism. It doesn't particularly leave me "believing in" God, which is a formulation that I suspect is self-subverting in precisely the same way as the Existentialist project. A God you have to "believe in" is not much of a God.

Nevertheless, my intuition is that there is Something to which one can orient, that you can know "where" it is as a blind man knows where the sun is, and turn towards it. (This is a METAPHOR, people. If you don't know what a metaphor is, look it up.) And that intuition is based partly on the surprising intelligibility of the world. It's weirdly explicable. It has rules it plays by, and we can figure some of them out. And, as the Stoics maintain, you can line yourself up with it, and swim with its current, in which case you will be happy (in an ultimate sense, not to be confused with gratified), or you can struggle against it, in which case you will be unhappy, unlucky, clumsy, and conflicted. This being so, the most fruitful thing to practice is orienting to this Sun. Listening for it.

This will distress those who insist that you must know what something is before you investigate it, which is to say most modern people most of the time. How do we know, ahead of time, that what we are orienting to is The Good (a.k.a God?) Well, we don't. But if you agree that we are not now exactly where and what we want to be, then you have to give yourself permission to look for where to go and what you would want to be, in places that are presently unknown. (Once again, this is a metaphor, Deal with it.) And it is actually not that hard to tell, most of the time, whether you are orienting yourself more properly. Are you more unified, more graceful, more at ease, more effective? Someone who is oriented more properly ought to be all of those things.