1

The mayor of Hudson, Ohio demanded that the members of the local school board members resign because high schoolers cannot write about sex, beer, or death.

To write about something requires us to consider it — to think about it — and to think about a thing involves a certain level of epistemological commitment.

2

Many things are unthinkable, or difficult to consider.

When I think of the book one doesn't want to write, I think of Emily Rapp's memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, about her son, Ronan, who was born with Tay-Sachs. The book journeys through the "terra incognita" of raising a child to die. From the beginning, Rapp centers the presence of death in their lives--she tells people her baby is dying. The presence of dying in the verb to be.

The death of a mother giving birth to a child: Rapp considers this while studying death as it draws closer to the life of her son.

Can we speak a death into existence?

Is manifestation an actual power or a means of self-soothing?

Mary Shelley Godwin's mother died while giving birth to her. Was there any relationship between her mother's death and 18-year-old Mary Shelley’s habit of reading ghost stories with her friends and then challenging each other to write their worst?

They sat with the dead and wrote. Mary's lover, Percy Bysse Shelley, Lord Byron, and his pregnant lover, Claire, were fascinated by recent attempts to "animate" dead matter. Mary's story was published the following year, 1818, anonymously. Was she trying to animate the mother she lost?

Maybe we are all writing to animate dead matter.

3

The line between memoir and fiction is so tenuous when it comes to dying or remembering. When asked about memorable images, Jorge Luis Borges remembered the tigers in illustrated versions of childhood encyclopedias better than “the eyes or the smile of a woman.”

4

A nest is a space we dream of returning to.

An empty nest is space that wants someone to return to it.

“Values alter facts,” wrote Gaston Bachelard. “The moment we love an image, it cannot remain the copy of a fact.”

There is the loss of a child, and then there is its aftermath.

5

Ralph Waldo Emerson grieved his son’s death in patches, across decades, through pages. The harrow in his tone is made conspicuous by his efforts to hold it back. There is a passage in “Experience” where Emerson attempts to qualify grief, to send a boundary on it, and something in me always breaks when I read it.

How shaky the ground he trods here. How wobbly his footsteps.

Here is the passage (adding my own italics):

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, —no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If to-morrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, —neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the para-coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, There at least is reality that will not dodge us.

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.

Grief does not teach — it simply lays claims which cannot be evidenced or substantiated — it throws us back upon eternity without leaving a recognizable notch in it.

6

In the space where Emerson declares "the evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest” to be "the most unhandsome part of our condition”, I met Stanley Cavell.

Or, I met Cavell’s own obsession, for this is the terrain to which Cavell returned in Emerson, again and again.

One of the few things I remember from my 21st year of life is Stanley Cavell’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. I know there were lakes, road trips, bagels with herring, walks in the cemetery with philosophy friends, a fiancee, two cats, two fifty gallon saltwater fishtanks— but Cavell is the part I remember most vividly.

Cavell was the text. And then he was the film. And then he was the next text, the one sitting to the left of Wittgenstein’s Tractautus. And then somewhere near Wittgeinstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

But Conditions came first. Conditions and the handful of other humans who met me in thinking through its words.

7

The conditions for speech are different than those of aesthetics. But thought is the way through a life.

Thoughtlessness is what a human can share with a red balloon.

I’m not interested in the Ohio mayor’s opinion on whether teenagers should be allowed to think through the most difficult, unspeakable, and humbling parts of human life. I am interested in how, and under what circumstances, we are encouraged to think — and what sort of thought is socialized in American high schools.

Problem-solving is a way of approaching a statement with an eye to lessening its claim on the mind. But a problem-solving approach doesn’t always require thinking; we approach the day’s tiny slights and bana; disturbances without falling deep into thought. Habit can get us across a street. Habit can regurgitate and recite. Reciting the pledge of allegiance is a habitual regurgitation. As is any anthem or ritual.

8

“I don’t think when I perform a difficult piece on the piano,” M. said tonight. “If I think, I lose my place— I lose my bearings in the flow. Performing is a strange alchemy of muscle memories, mathematics, and riding one’s nerve. You never know if the thought of someone’s feelings will rip you out of it. I think of nothing outside the music, and there are no words for how the mind operates when I am completely caught up in it.”

Is writing like this? I don’t know.

There are notes scribbled in pencil all over M.’s sheet music. He guards his notations, his marginalia, as one would guard a secret.

Composer Anton Rubinstein had his music seized at the border because Russian officials thought its notes were a kind of revolutionary code. Under the Tsar, if one signed a letter of love, it shouldn't imply insubordination to one's First Love for God or the Tsar. What Mikhail Bakunin called the Black Beast (the Russian empire’s combination of church and state) dragged Russia along behind them in a yoke. The Tsar's coronation was literally a sacrament equal to those services accompanying baptism, marriage, and extreme unction.

At 17, Arthur Rubenstein appeared at Scriabin's door and offered himself as an acolyte. He would be the first to introduce Scriabin's Fifth Piano Sonata to Londoners.

In Nexus, Henry Miller extols Scriabin as a divinity, a holy distraction from the world.

Scriabin's Sonatas use Italian for the general tempo markings and French for the intimate particulars. I am writing a novel about this.

“That is why I acquired a taste for misanthropy; why I nurtured hypochondria; why I became the most (leaden-like) miserable of men,” wrote Erik Satie in 1924. “It distressed people to look at me — even through hall-marked gold eye-glasses. Oh yes.”

Oh yes.

9

Here’s a small excerpt from my imaginary version of 642 Things to Write About for high school students. There are no questions or puzzles to resolve. There is a human, a pen, a notebook, a rephrasing of the statement or argument followed by a response to it.

The response cannot be anything except one’s own.

There is no correct answer. There is no grade or score. There are only thoughts to be thunk, and unspeakable things to consider, closely. More closely. Again and again, and more.

Albert Camus: “The only fundamental philosopical question is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories –comes afterwards.”

Stanley Cavell: “Death, so caused, may be mysterious, but what founds these lives is clear enough: the capacity to love, the strength to found a life upon a love. That the love becomes incompatible with that life is tragic, but that it is maintained until the end is heroic. People capable of such love could have removed mountains; instead it has caved in upon them. One moral of such events is obvious: if you would avoid tragedy, avoid love; if you cannot avoid love, avoid integrity; if you cannot avoid integrity, avoid the world; if you cannot avoid the world, destroy it.”

Theodor Adorno: "On Popular Music".

Gaston Bachelard: “So there is also an alas in the song of tenderness. If we return to the old house as to a nest, it is because memories are dreams, because the home of other days has become a great image of lost intimacy.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I think that philosophy is still rude and elementary. It will one day be taught by poets. The poet is in the natural attitude; he is believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons for believing…The poet sees wholes and avoids analysis; the metaphysician, dealing… with the mathematics of the mind, puts himself out of the way of inspiration; loses that which is the miracle and creates the worship.”

Stanley Cavell: “What I require is a convening of my culture's criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture's words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets me.”

David Nowell-Smith: "The Art of the Fugue: Heidegger on Rhythm".

Douglas Shadle: "Classical Music and the Color Line".

Igor Stravinsky: “If one only need break a habit to merit being labeled revolutionary, then every musician who has something to say and who in order to say it goes beyond the bounds of established convention would be known as revolutionary. [...] The quality of being revolutionary is generally attributed to artists in our day with a laudatory intent, undoubtedly because we are living in a period when revolution enjoys a kind of prestige among yesterday's elite. Let us understand each other: I am the first to recognize that daring is the motive force of the finest and greatest acts; which is all the more reason for not putting it unthinkingly at the service of disorder and base cravings in a desire to cause sensation at any price. I approve of daring; I set no limits to it. But likewise there are no limits to the mischief wrought by arbitrary acts.”

Charles Baudelaire: "It is evident that rhetorics and prosodies are not arbitrarily invented tyrannies, but a collection of rules demanded by the very organization of the spiritual being, and never have prosodies and rhetorics kept originality from full manifesting itself. The contrary, that is to say, that they have aided the flowering of originality, would be infinitely more true."

Robert Temple: "The Philosophy of the Fugue".

Tyhembia Jess: "Sam Patterson, Harlem, NY: Dec. 12, 1924".

Stanley Cavell: “Appropriating” seems to have the same stress put on it in relating the individual to the world through the ownership of property as “belief has in relating the individual to the world through the acquisition and power of knowledge.”

Emily Dickinson: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?”

Aaron Copland: "A Modernist Defends Modern Music".