the monkey speaks

In 1939, five years before William Carlos Williams said, “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words,” Paul Valéry writes in his essay “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” that “A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words.” 

“The effect of this machine is uncertain, for nothing is certain about action on other minds. But whatever may be the result, in its uncertainty, the construction of the machine demands the solution of many problems. If the term machine shocks you, if my mechanical comparison seems crude, please notice that while the composition of even a very short poem may absorb years, the action of the poem on the reader will take only a few minutes.”

More here.

The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done - men who are creative, inventive and discoverers.

Jean Piaget

Desire without obstacles is merging or incest, and so the death of desire; and obstacles without desire are literally unthinkable, or surreal like Magritte’s doors suspended in the air.

Adam Phillips

From Mother’s Milk, by Edward St Aubyn:

The truth was that he hated the very rich, especially since he was never going to be one of them. They were all too often only the shrill pea in the whistle of their possessions. Without the editorial influence of the word “afford,” their desires rambled on like unstoppable bores, relentless and whimsical at the same time.

From a 1993 New Yorker profile of Ricky Jay, the great magician:

A guy comes up and starts telling me he’s a fan,” he recalls. “I say thank you, that’s nice to hear. He says he used to see me perform in Boulder, Colorado. That’s nice, too, I say. Then he starts talking about this wonderful piece I did with a mechanical monkey—really one of the most bizarre routines I ever worked out—and I thank him, and he says, ‘Yeah, I get a tremendous response when I do that. Audiences just love it.’ And I say, ‘Let me ask you something. Suppose I invite you over to my house for dinner. We have a pleasant meal, we talk about magic, it’s an enjoyable evening. Then, as you’re about to leave, you walk into my living room and you pick up my television and walk out with it. You steal my television set. Would you do that?’ He says, ‘Of course not.’ And I say, ‘But you already did.’ He says, ‘What are you talking about?’ I say, ‘You stole my television!’ He says, ‘How can you say that? I’ve never even been to your house.’

I have always felt that a grape held very close to the ear should make some kind of music.

Salvador Dali

“We hold these truths to be self-evident…” is the ringing phrase that opens the most famous sentence in the American Declaration of Independence. I have long loved the story behind it. It’s the supreme example of good editing, and a lesson in good writing. This is from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Franklin:

On June 21, after he had finished a draft and incorporated some changes from Adams, Jefferson had a copy delivered to Franklin…Franklin made only a few small changes, but one of them was resounding. Using heavy backslashes, he crossed out the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” and changed it to read: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

Genius. By sweeping away those big, windy adjectives (‘sacred and undeniable’) and replacing them with the unadorned simplicity of ‘self-evident’, Franklin makes the phrase, and the sentence, a hundred times more powerful. But there’s a deeper point, too, that I hadn’t heard before. Isaacson tells us about the philosophical outlook underlying Franklin’s modification:

The concept of “self-evident” truths came…from the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume. Hume had distinguished between “synthetic” truths that describe matters of fact (such as “London is bigger than Philadelphia” ) and “analytic” truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition. (“The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees” or “All bachelors are unmarried.” ) When he chose the word “sacred,” Jefferson had suggested intentionally or unintentionally that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religion. By changing it to “self-evident,” Franklin made it an assertion of rationality.

The good news is it’s a spectacular country. We’ve been around for 230 years in spite of human nature, because that’s what the Constitution is all about. It’s saying, of course everyone’s gonna try and take control. Of course they’re gonna subvert every law that’s supposed to keep them in line. Of course the president is gonna want to be imperial, of course Congress is gonna want to become obstructionist, of course the judges are gonna be activist. Duh. They figured this out in 1787 and drew up a few sheets of paper that have kept the country in line. It’s a great place to live.