Agape Agape

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Authors: William Gaddis
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purple didn’t even have to bang it, must have just pressed my weight on it got to get some, get my breath avoid stress just get my mind off the, back on the pantomimics and clones and mechanization of everything in sight, entertainment and the binary system and all-or-none computer where its technology came from in the first place, don’t really give one damn for it, for any of it, like this dangerous demon you can’t control not really part of you but can force you to do things you, head’s splitting grinding my teeth if anybody heard me they’d think I was losing my, that I’ve lost it yes maybe I have why I’ve got to get back to the, to things you can weigh and count and measure the technology good God yes the technology! A hundred years ago measuring the time it took the hammer on the last eighth of an inch of tape down to fifty-one hundred-thousandths of a second? Not for some great breakthrough in medical science no, not for advanced weapons design or aero, for aerodynamics no, for entertainment, for pleasure in its highest form for music to entertain Plato’s educated elite, widening the gap yes, between Huizinga’s eighteenth century, when aesthetic pleasure in the worship of art was the privilege of the few, and this democracy of every man his own artist where we are today, this democracy of Plato’s chance persons and having art without the artist because he’s a threat, because the creative artist has to be a threat so he’s swamped by the performer by the, by the pantomimic by the imitative who is not a threat see it right here in the, right here in Jung yes from the depths of his Swiss hypocrisy he’s an inveterate democrat he says but nature is aristocratic, that it’s elitist and so is he, Quod licet Jovi he quotes, non licet bovi draws the line right there doesn’t he? An unpleasant but eternal truth he called it what’s so damned unpleasant about that? Eternal truth that’s what it’s all about isn’t it? The poet, the artist set apart from the common herd by some inner illumination that Plato thought was, because that’s not even Plato no it’s Dodds damn it where’s Dodds? Had it right here didn’t I? I know I brought it, brought some Flaubert some Nietzsche Huysmans Heidegger some Tolstoy even brought Friedrich and The Physics of Baseball but, didn’t I bring it? Because it was Democritus, right there in Dodds it was Democritus saying the finest poems were composed with “inspiration and a holy breath” I remember that phrase, inspiration and the holy breath that sets us apart from reason and above reason, some inner revelation, some inner ecstasy even some abnormal mental state why they’re out to eliminate us, why they’d say I’m afraid of the death of the elite because it means the death of me of course I can’t really blame them, I’ve been wrong about everything in my life it’s all been fraud and fiction, let everybody down except my daughters maybe I can still rescue them, not their fault is it? Fact that I’m forgotten that I’m left on the shelf with the dead white guys in the academic curriculum that my prizes are forgotten because today everybody’s giving prizes for that supine herd out there waiting to be entertained, try to educate them did they buy those “Educator” piano rolls teach them to play with their hands no, went right on discovering their unsuspected talent playing with their feet here’s Flaubert yes, “The entire dream of democracy” he says, “is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity.” You want the essence of elitism there he was, his idea of art that “the artist must no more appear in his work than God does in nature, that the artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed” good God, the rate things change a generation lasts about four days what posterity?

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