The Arrival of the Future
“Flight”: This poem is a dramatic monologue inspired by a passage, used as an epigraph here, from George Steiner’s essay, “Humane Literacy,” in Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1977, p. 11) in which Steiner is paraphrasing Dostoyevsky.
“Groceries”: The lines quoted are from Louise Glück’s poem, “The School Children,” in The House on Marshland (New York: Ecco Press, 1975, p. 19).
The Art of the Lathe
“The Dumka”: Dumka is the name of the second movement of the piano quintet, Op. 81 in A Major, mentioned in the poem.
“A Model of Downtown Los Angeles, 1940”: Although the story of the Owens Valley/Los Angeles aqueduct is generally well known (and debated) in California, it may be less known elsewhere other than through the film Chinatown, which is not, obviously, a documentary but a drama loosely based on the incidents leading to the construction of the aqueduct. In 1905, encouraged by repeated headlines in the Los Angeles Times declaring a state of drought, citizens of Los Angeles voted for a bond issue to finance the building of an aqueduct from the Owens Valley 230 miles northeast of the city, a project of astonishing proportions successfully carried out by the brilliant, self-taught engineer, William Mulholland. But the aqueduct was brought not to Los Angeles but rather to the San Fernando Valley a few miles northwest of L.A., where a group known as the San Fernando Valley land syndicate—including the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Henry Huntington, Moses Sherman (a member of the L.A. water board), and other fabulously wealthy men—had purchased thousands of acres of cheap land that would now be worth tens of millions of dollars. Two years after construction was completed, the San Fernando Valley was annexed to Los Angeles (thus, Noah Cross’s famous line in Chinatown, “Either you bring the water to L.A., or you bring L.A. to the water”). Over the years, the effect upon farmers in the Owens Valley was disastrous, but the economic benefit to L.A. was beyond measure; it would be fair to speculate that without the aqueduct L.A. today would be a small city about the size of Tulsa, Oklahoma. In my poem, the story is told from the point of view of a former resident (and victim) of the Owens Valley. Other references: Gunga Din (1939) was filmed in the Owens Valley. Franz Werfel, author of Song of Bernadette and friend of Kafka, was a part of the European émigré community in L.A. during the late thirties and forties, along with Mann and the others named here. Manzanar was a prison camp for Japanese U.S. citizens during World War II; the Rodney King beating, widely televised, culminated in the L.A. riots of 1992.
“The Art of the Lathe”: Ramsden, Vauconson, and the others named here were major contributors to the development of the lathe and other machine tools. See W. Steeds, A History of Machine Tools 1700–1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
“Moses Yellowhorse Is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt”: Moses Yellowhorse played one and a half seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates, 1921–1922, always listed on the roster as Chief Yellowhorse. The famous game in which he struck out Gehrig, Ruth, and Lazzeri in succession occurred during spring training.
“The Blue Buick”: The Cendrars epigraph is my translation from the Folio reprint of the 1949 Denoël edition of Le Lotissement du ciel (The Subdividing of the Sky), edited and annotated by Claude Leroy, pp. 406–407:
. . . je lisais les Classiques dans une édition anglaise; mais il m’arrivait aussi, toujours pour me distraire, de dérouler une carte du ciel sur la grande table et de recouvrir chaque constellation avec des pierres précieuses que j’allais quérir dans la réserve des coffres, marquant les étoiles de premiere grandeur avec les plus beaux diamants, complétant les figures avec les plus vivantes pierres de couleur remplissant les intervalles entre les dessins avec une coulee des plus belles perles de la collection de Léouba, . . . Elles étaient toutes belles! Et je me récitais la page immortelle et pour moi inoubliable de Marbode sur la symbolique des pierres précieuses que je venais de découvrir dans Le Latin mystique de Rémy de Gourmont, ce livre gemmé, une compilation, une traduction, un anthologie, qui a bouleversé my conscience et m’a, en somme, baptisé ou, tout au moins, coverti à la Poésie, initié au Verbe, catéchisé.
In his notes, Leroy quotes Cendrars in Bourlinguer: “Le Latin mystique a été pour moi une date, une date de naissance intellectuelle.” In his journal, Roy’s first quote from the section of Sky entitled Le ravissement d’amour is his translation of “Le saint aussi a ses migraines et ses dégoûts de lassitude. . . . Il se méfie de l’illusion, du somnambulisme comme dans les rêves, des acrobaties comme chez certains intoxiques et des attaques du haut mal, et des crises de nerfs comme chez certains épileptiques et névropathes” (p. 247). Roy’s second quotation is also from that section: “L’oraison mentale est la volière de Dieu” (p. 244).
Roy’s critique of Los Angeles refers to the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which, through “false droughts and artful title transactions” and the passing of a bond issue in 1905, diverted Owens River water from the Owens Valley and its farms and small towns and brought it 235 miles southwest to the San Fernando Valley, where Chandler and other members of two land syndicates had recently “bought or optioned virtually the entire valley.” As Joan Didion further notes in After Henry (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 222–23:
The extent to which Los Angeles was literally invented by the Los Angeles Times and by its owners, Harrison Gray Otis and his descendants in the Chandler family, remains hard for people in less recent parts of the country to fully comprehend. At the time Harrison Gray Otis bought his paper there were only five thousand people living in Los Angeles. There was no navigable river. . . . Los Angeles has water today because Harrison Gray Otis and his son-in-law Harry Chandler wanted it, and fought a series of outright water wars to get it.
“A Wall Map of Paris”: The epigraph is from Sonnet XXVI in the Second Part of The Sonnets to Orpheus (New York: Modern Library, 1995), translated by Stephen Mitchell, pp. 512, 513. Mitchell’s translation of the entire passage is “—Oh compose the criers, / harmonious god! let them wake resounding, / let their clear stream carry the head and the lyre.”
Usher
“Usher”: Known as the “master builder,” Robert Moses, Arterial Coordinator of New York City, enjoyed unprecedented power as an urban designer, radically altering the landscape and urban sociology of the city through his mammoth freeway projects, including the Cross Bronx Expressway, the construction of which (from 1948 to 1963) destroyed hundreds of blue-collar and middle-class neighborhoods, many of them predominantly Jewish. Arguably two of the four or five most important Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr taught at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan during the 1950s. Tillich’s most widely read works for a popular audience were The Courage to Be and Dynamics of Faith. “The Heraclitean way” refers to the statement in the fragments of Heraclitus that “the path up and down is one and the same.” In his reference to the Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar, France, at the Musée d’Unterlinden, Nathan is thinking of the right side panel depicting Christ risen from the tomb.
“The Cottonwood Lounge”: George Cantor, German mathematician (1845–1918), created set theory as well as the very controversial theory of transfinite numbers. He died in a mental institution.
“Wittsgenstein, Dying”: “Trakl” refers, of course, to Georg Trakl, the Austrian poet, whom Wittgenstein admired and to whom he gave a small portion of his inheritance though he confessed himself unable fully to understand Trakl’s poems. Although World War One was “the nightmare of the earth” for all involved (and through a long line of historical connections continues to be), it was especially so for Trakl, who died from a cocaine overdose in 1914. Wittgenstein’s On Certainty was written partially in response to G. E. Moore’s argument against skepticism, which begins with Moore holding up one hand, pointing to it with the other, and saying, “This is one hand.” “Paul” is Paul Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s brother, a concert pianist who lost his right arm in World War One but continued performing, commissioning works for the left hand from such composers as Ravel, Strauss, and Britten.
“Gödel”: Kurt Gödel, Czech-born American mathematician and philosopher, who worked with Einstein at the Princeton Institute for Advance Study, was best known for his incompleteness theorems. Nowhere did Gödel say that “no life contains its own clear validation”; that is solely Ira Campbell’s inference. “Lansky” refers to Meyer Lansky, the legendary American mobster known especially for his financial shrewdness.
“The Beauty of Abandoned Towns”: My loose, colloquial translation of the Latin epigraph is, “Work defeated everything, back-breaking work, and the grinding need of hard times.”
“Nathan Gold”: The American Objectivist poet, Charles Reznikoff, published his long poem, Holocaust, in 1975. Material for the poem was based upon transcriptions of court proceedings of the Nuremburg trial and the Eichmann trial. Eichmann’s “use” of Kant is discussed at length in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. The Malach HaMavet is the Hebrew angel of death.
Hart Crane’s lines quoted here are from the final two stanzas of “To Brooklyn Bridge”:
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the Curveship lend a myth to God.
“Maria”: Maria Rasputin, oldest daughter of the infamous Grigori Rasputin. “The mansion of the Railroad King” refers to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, a center for research on the poet William Blake. Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) was a French philosopher born in Russia who exerted an immense influence on both European and American intellectuals, including the political philosopher, Leo Strauss; Alan Bloom (Strauss’s student who later studied with Kojève); Bloom’s student, Francis Fukuyama; and many others in both academic and political life. Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man, incorporated ideas and themes from Kojève.
“Poem”: Formerly entitled “The Problem” and owing much to Professor Richard McKirahan’s classes on Heraclitus at Pomona College and to Philip Wheelwright’s commentary on the Fragments in Heraclitus (Oxford University Press, 1959), in particular this comment on Fragment Six: “. . . there is at least an overtone of suggestion that we come to know reality not by merely knowing about it . . . but by becoming of its nature.” I am also indebted to comments on Parmenides and on Stephen MacKenna’s famous translation of Plotinus which were given in a lecture by Donald Sheehan at the Frost Place, Franconia, New Hampshire, in August 2001.