“A”-18
26 Dec. 1964-28 April 1966

 

389.1    An unearthing / my valentine…: this opening lyric through 390.8 was originally published in a limited edition for a reading at Harvard: An Unearthing, Adams House and Lowell House Printers in Harvard Yard, May 1965.

390.12  who won’t sense upper case anymore: Ahearn points out that all movements of “A” written after 1963 drop the convention of capitalizing the beginnings of all lines (149).

390.12  iyyob (jōb): Heb. Job; LZ used Iyyob as the title for the opening Job section of “A”-15 when it was published as a separate booklet in 1965.

390.13  swift would have known sobbing it every birthday: Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), wrote birthday poems to Stella (Esther Johnson, 1681-1728) each year, which rhymes with LZ’s habit of writing valentines to CZ and PZ.

390.14  yovad yom: Heb. birthday; from Job 3:3: yovad yom ivaled vo, veha’lailah amar horah gaver (Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived).

390.19  typee: Herman Melville (1819-1891) describes the art of native tattooing in some detail in Chapter 30 of Typee (1846).

390.21            mentula: L. a prick; Mentula is the pseudonym for a decadent character that appears in a number of Catullus’ poems; see particularly Carmina 115. See 8.50.9.

390.21  SWAN: see 407.24.

390.22  how charming how apt:

390.24  found in the debris of the acropolis / a long lost right leg…: referring to the full-relief sculptures on the East and West pediments of the Parthenon, the temple dedicated to Athena, goddess of wisdom, on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. These sculptures, like the temple, survive in a highly fragmentary state.

390.31  I Sent Thee Late…: from the second stanza of Ben Jonson’s lyric, “To Celia (‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’)”; see note at 391.2:
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope that there
It could not wither’d be;
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent’st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee!

391.2    Vast, tremulous; / Grave on grave…: This short lyric (through 391.8) was published independently as “I Sent Thee Late” by “LHS” of Harvard Yard in June 1965. As indicated at 390.33, the poem was originally written, without this title, when LZ was a student at Columbia, where it was part XXIV of a book-length sequence entitled The First Seasons (1920-1924) under the pseudonym Dunn Wyth (< done with) (Tim Woods online).

391.9    Death not lived thru: Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.4311 (qtd. Bottom 83): “Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit” (trans. C.K. Ogden and F.P. Ramsey).

391.9    big a sweeter fig: from concluding wedding hymn of Aristophanes’ anti-war comedy, Peace (qtd. in Bottom 368):
Happy, happy, happy you,
And you well deserve it too.
Hymen, Hymenseus O!...
Go and swell in peace…
He is stout and big.
She a sweeter fig. (trans. Benjamin Bickley Rogers)

391.10  greek gathering of early flowers: i.e. an anthology, < Gk. άνθολογία, a flower-gathering, hence a collection of small poems (CD).

391.12  For a Thing / by Bach…: this is the title of an uncollected poem LZ published in Pagany (Oct.-Dec. 1930), although in a letter to EP he states it was written in 1925 (EP/LZ 79). The following lines in italics (391.14-17), quote from the last of the four stanzas of this poem, which appears to be translated or adapted from the text of a Bach hymn, a couple of phrases of which appear in lines 309 and 311 of “Poem beginning ‘The’” (CSP 19):
Our God, immortal, such Life as is Our God,
Our God, if like to errant stars we flutter
In our passage ever, of thy source—
                        (as to the immortelle,
Form, color, long after the gathering, is given) —give. Our wish:
Give measureless your urge that is our strength still increate.

391.19  at 90 and 81: if they lived that long, CZ would be 81 when LZ became 90.

391.21  e.e.c. as a young man saw / an old man 3/3 dead: E.E. Cummings, who died in 1962; the reference it to the poem “suppose” from & [AND] (1925), about the perils of trying to impress a loved one with abstract talk:
"Do you see
Life? he is there and here,
or that, or this
or nothing or an old man 3 thirds
asleep, on his head
flowers, always crying
to nobody something about les
roses les bluets
yes,
will He buy? […]”

391.22  if one / third seems wandered for 2 left alone…: a recurring concern in “A”-18 is the fact that the now grown-up PZ is absent from home and pursuing his own separate life. LZ returns to this idea of incomplete thirds several times: see 401.13, 402.8.

391.26  ‘I have already met enough people’:

391.32            epicene stentorian: effeminately loud.

391.35  ‘the music saves / it’:

392.2            THRONGS OF / VIETNAMESE PILGRIMS VISIT POND…: this passage through 392.30 is from an article LZ found in The New York Times (Ahearn 140). The passage evidently refers to the Buddhist crisis of 1963 when there were wide-spread demonstrations against the religious persecution of Buddhists by the Catholic dominated government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, who forcibly put them down (see 15.365.29). However, soon after the president was assassinated in Nov. 1963.

392.4    Quang Nam: province of central Vietnam within which Danang lies.

392.20  Col. Le Quang Tung: Director of the Presidential Liason Office and Commander of South Vietnamese Special Forces, was assassinated with President Ngo Dinh Diem (see 393.11).

392.30  Ich hub dir / in bud: a colorful Yiddish idiom, which is effectively translated in the following; literally would be: I have you in the bathhouse, and more usually translated as something like: To hell with you.

392.31            Kentuckian: see 14.346.10-11.

392.36  Not that we digged original sin:

392.36            Gibbon’s / “an useful scavenger”: this phrase from Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in footnote 51 of Chap. 27: Civil Wars, Reign of Theodosius; Gibbon refers to Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1637-1698), French ecclesiastical historian, who “has raked together all the dirt of the [church] fathers; a useful scavenger!” The main text is discussing the origins of persecution within Christianity under the reign of Theodosius: “The theory of persecution was established by Theodosius, whose justice and piety have been applauded by the saints: but the practice of it, in the fullest extent, was reserved for his rival and colleague, Maximus, the first, among the Christian princes, who shed the blood of his Christian subjects on account of their religious opinions.”

392.39  Rather: Dan Rather, CBS reporter who was assigned to cover the White House in 1964.

392.39  hump TV- / free: Hubert Humphrey (1911-1978) Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vice President.

393.5    We warm us may ah Lesbia what cue / may maim us: homophonic rendition of the first line of Catullus, Carmina 5: Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus (Gordon, “Zuk on His Toes” 135). LZ’s rendering of this line in Catullus is: “May we live, my Lesbia, love while we may” (CSP 247), a rendering that echoes a famous poem by another Catullus enthusiast, Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”: “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”—a favorite of LZ’s.

393.7    a friend writes ‘the song preserves / recurring saves us’:

393.10            MacArthur: General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), U.S. military commander of Pacific theater during WWII, but dismissed by President Truman in 1951 as commander of U.S. forces during the Korean conflict.

393.11  Diem Phu on Nhu: Dien Bien Phu was where Vietnamese communist forces under General Vo Nguyen Giap decisively defeated French colonial troops in May 1954. Ngo Dinh Diem (1901-1963), first president of South Vietnam from 1955-1963; his younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu was his chief political advisor and in charge of the secret police; both were assassinated in the 1963 coup.

393.26  (N. ‘they will all think they deserved it’): Lorine Niedecker (?).

393.28  Man and Sheep: Odysseus with the Sacrifice: a major sculptural work by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is “Man with Sheep” (1943/44); although it is not clear that the allusion to Odysseus was in fact a sub- or alternative title, the image of a man holding a struggling sheep is suggestive enough.

393.29            Pablo— / ‘art begs disrespect…: Picasso (see preceding note); following quotation unidentified.

393.34  eight words a line for love: throughout most of “A”-18, LZ uses an eight count line.

393.34  y-eye, yigh…:

393.35  light lights: Cf. 7.40.17, 8.43.2.

393.36  an order out of hiatus joining a chain: / “An”: faring no cause to an unowned end: these lines are a comment on the procedure and process of “A” itself. On “an,” see 14.315.9.

394.1            Doughty: ‘the Semites are like to man…: Charles M. Doughty (1843-1926), English traveler and poet, best known for Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888): “Two chiefly are the perils in Arabia, famine and the dreadful-faced harpy of their religion, a third is the rash weapon of every Ishmaelite robber. The traveler must be himself, in men’s eyes, a man worthy to live under the bent of God’s heaven, and were it without a religion: he is such who has a clean human heart and long-suffering under his bare shirt; it is enough, and though the way be full of harms, he may travel to the ends of the world. Here is a dead land, whence, if he die not, he shall bring home nothing but a perpetual weariness in his bones. The Semites are like to a man sitting in a cloaca to the eyes, and whose brows touch heaven. Of the great antique humanity of the Semitic desert, there is a moment in every adventure, wherein a man may find to make his peace with them, so he know the Arabs. The sour Waháby fanaticism has in these days cruddled the hearts of the nomads, but every Beduin tent is sanctuary in the land of Ishmael (so there be not in it some cursed Jael).” A cloaca is a sewer or latrine.

394.4            Schönberg Hollywood…: Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), fleeing from Nazi Germany, settled in Hollywood in 1934. In 1935 the Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg of MGM offered him the job of composing the music for the film version of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, but then would not agree to accept Schoenberg’s demands.

394.6            Shahnamah: or Epic of the Kings by Persian poet Firdosi; see 12.227.17.

394.8    my friend: probably Basil Bunting, who for many years worked on a translation of the Shahnamah, although in the end only a few fragments were published; Bunting also spent most of the 1940s in Iran, where he no doubt would have heard Firdosi recited.

394.9    da capo: It. from the head; in music indicates repeat from the beginning.

394.11            Klamath floods: in Dec. 1964 devasting floods of the Klamath River nearly wiped out the town of Klamath in Oregon. The Klamath are a major Native American tribe in the area.

394.16  the nation’s draft my window’s: the draft or military conscription rose dramatically in 1964 due to the Vietnam conflict; LZ was notoriously sensitive to drafty rooms, as he himself admits at the beginning of his Wallace Stevens lecture (Prep+ 24).

394.20  Curia kidnap:

394.23  alter ego jünger ego: jünger = Ger. younger; with possible pun on Karl Jung.

394.26  fool horse Sophi:

394.31            ‘overcome by / undue sense of right’: whistler: ‘no desire…: James McNeil Whistler (1834-1903), American artist; the full subtitle of his book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (2^nd ed. 1892) is: “As pleasingly exemplified in many instances, wherein the serious ones of this earth, carefully exasperated, have been prettily spurred on to unseemliness and indiscretion, while overcome by an undue sense of right.” The dedication of the book reads: “To the rare Few, who, early in Life, have rid Themselves of the Friendship of the Many, these pathetic Papers are inscribed.” And in the “Ten O’Clock Lecture,” he remarks: “Alas! Ladies and gentlemen, Art has been maligned. She has naught in common with such practices. She is a goddess of dainty thought—reticent of habit, abjuring all obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others.

            She is, withal, selfishly occupied with her own perfection only—having no desire to teach—seeking and finding the beautiful in all conditions and in all times, as did her high priest Rembrandt, when he saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in the Jews’ quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks.”

394.38            Emanuel’s 4 Angels with Hats / on their Heads: Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), Swedish mystical philosopher and theologian; apparently this refers to a drawing LZ sent to EP in the early 1930s; see EP/LZ 140.

394.40  Old Tacit: EP who in the 1960s fell into his silence; see index.

395.7    B’s Notenbuch: a keyboard work Bach compiled with and dedicated to his second wife, Notenbuch for Anna Magdalena Bach (1725) (Terry 139); they married in 1721.

395.9            ‘between order and sensibility in its power at / once to suggest all complexity…: this quotation appears to be a description of the fugue form, although the source is as yet unidentified.

395.14            ‘Horses, horses I’m / crazy about horses’:

395.15: Luvah: In the Book of Thel (1789) by William Blake (1757-1827), Luvah represents the Sun; in the following passage the Cloud is speaking to Thel:
“O virgin, know’st thou not our steeds drink of the golden springs
Where Luvah doth renew his horses? Look’st thou on my youth,
And fearest thou, because I vanish and am seen no more,
Nothing remains? O maid, I tell thee, when I pass away
It is to tenfold life, to love, to peace and raptures holy: […]”
(See Prep+ 42 where the same phrase is quoted in LZ’s piece on Blake).

395.16  The Horses of Lu: in the Confucian Book of Odes (Shi Jing), one of the subsections of Part IV is entitled “The Horse Odes of Lu” (EP’s translation in Shih-ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964). Lu was the ancient state where Confucius was born, south of the Yellow River in what is now Shandong Province.

395.18  The Adirondack Trust Company of / Saratoga…: bank in Saratoga Springs in up-state NY, which became famous in the 19th century for the medicinal qualities of its springs and still today for horse racing, as alluded to at 395.20 (see 405.29).

395.21  Bottom a weaver: the character in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; see 12.133.20.

395.22  ‘we laugh at that elixir…: through 396.17 from Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), Preface to the Dictionary of the English Language (1755):
            “When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation. With this hope, however, academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.
            This recommendation of steadiness and uniformity does not proceed from an opinion, that particular combinations of letters have much influence on human happiness; or that truth may not be successfully taught by modes of spelling fanciful and erroneous: I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.
            To explain, requires the use of terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained, and such terms cannot always be found; for as nothing can be proved but by supposing something intuitively known, and evident without proof, so nothing can be defined but by the use of words too plain to admit a definition.
            If of these the whole power is not accurately delivered, it must be remembered, that while our language is yet living, and variable by the caprice of every one that speaks it, these words are hourly shifting their relations, and can no more be ascertained in a dictionary, than a grove, in the agitation of a storm, can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water.
            Words are seldom exactly synonimous; a new term was not introduced, but because the former was thought inadequate: names, therefore, have often many ideas, but few ideas have many names.
            These complaints of difficulty will, by those that have never considered words beyond their popular use, be thought only the jargon of a man willing to magnify his labours, and procure veneration to his studies by involution and obscurity. But every art is obscure to those that have not learned it: this uncertainty of terms, and commixture of ideas, is well known to those who have joined philosophy with grammar; and if I have not expressed them very clearly, it must be remembered that I am speaking of that which words are insufficient to explain.
            Such is the exuberance of signification which many words have obtained, that it was scarcely possible to collect all their senses; sometimes the meaning of derivatives must be sought in the mother term, and sometimes deficient explanations of the primitive may be supplied in the train of derivation.
            My purpose was to admit no testimony of living authours, that I might not be misled by partiality, and that none of my cotemporaries might have reason to complain; nor have I departed from this resolution, but when some performance of uncommon excellence excited my veneration, when my memory supplied me, from late books, with an example that was wanting, or when my heart, in the tenderness of friendship, solicited admission for a favourite name.
            To deliberate whenever I doubted, to enquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained: I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chace the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them. I then contracted my design, determining to confide in myself, and no longer to solicit auxiliaries, which produced more incumbrance than assistance: by this I obtained at least one advantage, that I set limits to my work, which would in time be finished, though not completed.
            I have not promised to myself: a few wild blunders, and risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity was ever free, may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and harden ignorance in contempt; but useful diligence will at last prevail, and there never can be wanting some who distinguish desert; who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and sometimes faint with weariness under a task, which Scaliger compares to the labours of the anvil and the mine; that what is obvious is not always known, and what is known is not always present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprize vigilance, slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual eclipses of the mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall often in vain trace his memory at the moment of need, for that which yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come uncalled into his thoughts to-morrow. In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the authour, and the world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that which it condemns; yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow: and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed.
            I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquility, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.”

396.19  ‘Thou that do cover’: from a poem by PZ, “oh ivy green,” quoted in full in “A”-20 (436).

396.20  as T / answered…:

396.24  L (who?) ‘witness his hand’…: Charles Lamb (1775-1834), British essayist, wrote a brief autobiographical sketch dated 18 April 1827, which concludes:
He died _____ 18__, much lamented.
Witness his hand,
CHARLES LAMB.

396.29  ‘there is / a march of science…: from Charles Lamb, 20 Dec. 1830 letter to George Dyer.

396.33  ‘seed-time till fire purge…: from John Milton, Paradise Lost XI (the concluding lines):
                        yet those remoov’d,
Such grace shall one just Man find in his sight,
That he relents, not to blot out mankind,
And makes a Convenant never to destroy
The Earth again by flood, nor let the Sea
Surpass his bounds, nor Rain to drown the World
With Man therein or Beast; but when he brings
Over the Earth a Cloud, will therein set
His triple-colour’d Bow, whereon to look,
And call to mind his Covenant: Day and Night,
Seed-time and Harvest, Heat and hoary Frost,
Shall hold their course; till fire purge all things new,
Both Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell.

396.35  sleep hand in hand who to blot out’: these words and phrases can be found scattered throughout Book XII of Milton, Paradise Lost.

396.36  ‘o’er the marish glides / to the subjected plain’: from Milton, Paradise Lost XII.624-640:
So spake our Mother Eve, and Adam heard
Well pleas’d, but answer’d not; for now too nigh
Th’ Archangel stood, and from the other Hill
To thir fixt Station, all in bright array
The Cherubim descended; on the ground
Gliding meteorous, as Ev’ning Mist
Ris’n from a River o’re the marish glides,
And gathers ground fast at the Labourers heel
Homeward returning. High in Front advanc’t,
The brandisht Sword of God before them blaz’d
Fierce as a Comet; which with torrid heat,
And vapour as the Libyan Air adust,
Began to parch that temperate Clime; whereat
In either hand the hastning Angel caught
Our lingring Parents, and to th’ Eastern Gate
Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast
To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer’d.

397.3    Lincoln (who said of the preacher’s sermons…: Abraham Lincoln apparently made this remark while an Illinois state legislator in response to a long-winded colleague: “It’s like the lazy preacher that used long sermons and the explanation was he got to writin’ and he was too lazy to stop.”

397.5    Twenty minutes to whittle one / peg…: Beyers identifies the chairmaker as Chester Cornett (1913-1981), who received national attention in 1965 for his traditionally made rocking chairs. Poor Pork, Kentucky is near Hazard (see 14.346.10). LZ was at the University of Kentucky for a few days in Sept. 1965 at the invitation of Guy Davenport (Scroggins).

397.16            ‘gathers ground fast’: from Milton, Paradise Lost XII.631: see 396.36.

397.18  (Hen Adams): presumably this identifies the “A” of the preceding line, which possibly is a remark of PZ’s.

397.18            schlissel to key: schlissel is Southern Ger. dialect for key or wrench.

397.18  H.J. intensely in / New York…: Henry James describes his visit to NYC in 1904-1905 in The American Scene (1907); see 12.148.21, 13.283.4.

397.20  60 gone, my son…: LZ turned 60 in 1964, the year “A”-18 was begun; PZ turned 20 in 1963.

397.20  Ives 20: Charles Ives (1874-1954), American composer, who worked American themes into his compositions. PZ has made various recordings of Ives’ compositions, including the four Sonatas for Violin and Piano with Gilbert Kalish on piano released in 1964.

397.24  Eric The Red: 10th century Norwegian Viking exiled with his father to Iceland, from where he was the first European to discover and colonize Greenland. The first chapter of WCW’s In the American Grain (1925) is on “Red Eric.”

397.28  The Great Fugue: J.S. Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue for organ in G minor (1708).

397.29  look back, an, a, the–: LZ recalling his poetic work backwards from “An” songs (see 14.314.1) to “A” to “Poem beginning ‘The.’”

397.32            Savage: Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), probably referring to concluding sentence of “The Poems of Catullus” (see quotation at  402.12).

397.34            Celtiberia still Spain: L. designation for general area of central Spain; mentioned by Catullus, Carmina 37 and 39.

398.1    marron glacés: candied chestnuts.

398.3    the theologian’s pastorate “two / Xians both Jews”: apparently this is the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) who early in his career took up a pastorate in Detroit, about which he made the remark that there were only two Christians in Detroit, both Jews.

398.4    Valé:

398.7    West / Less Land: < Westmoreland; General William Westmoreland (1914-2005) became leading U.S. military commander in Vietnam in June 1964 and dramatically raised troop levels. He was relieved of his Vietnam command in 1968 following the Tet Offensive.

398.8    Ia Drang: first major battle between the U.S. Army and the North Vietnamese Army in Oct. 1965.

398.8    more less safe: < Morley Safer (b. 1931) opened CBS News office in Saigon in 1965 and in Aug. 1965 reported on the torching of Cam Ne village by U.S. troops.

398.10  ‘but / we’ve stopped the little bastard VC’s’:

398.12            Secretary Offense: < Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara from 1961-1968 was a key architect of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

398.14  “The stupid war…:

398.15            afterthought of an earlier stupid / Frog’s thought…: alluding to the American involvement in Vietnam as a vestige of the French colonialization of Indo-China.

398.17  Mac—gee! Resigned for a “Cadillac” job…: probably McGeorge “Mac” Bundy (1919-1996), National Security Advisor under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson (1961-1966) and was a strong advocate of escalating American involvement in Vietnam. He left to take over as head of the Ford Foundation, which he headed from 1966-1079. “President’s basement” < Cabinet.

398.20            Ecumenical Council: the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II lasted from Oct. 1962-Dec. 1965 and implemented various reforms, including the use of the vernacular in the Mass; see also 15.369.14.

398.21  Cyrus, rusk / (twice baked): Cyrus Vance (1917-2002) was Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1964-1967 under LBJ and initially was a strong supporter of military action in Vietnam. Dean Rusk (1909-1994) was Secretary of State from 1961-1969 under both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He was a strong advocate of U.S. military action in Vietnam to combat communism. “Twice baked” may refer to the fact that Rusk served under two presidents involved in the war (JFK and LBJ) or to the fact that he had been a strong advocate of military action in Korea as Assistant Secretary of State under President Truman. 

398.22            Remorse…: probably Wayne Morse (1900-1974), Senator from Oregon, who was one of only two Senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on 7 Aug. 1964 that dramatically escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Morse continued to challenge the legality of the resolution and American military involvement in the conflict. Poins calls Falstaff “Monsieur Remorse” in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 I.ii.107.

398.23  ‘one Senator—imperialism?...: probably quoting Senator Morse (see above), who accused U.S. military involvement in Vietnam to be “stark, ugly imperialism” and against international law.

398.25  Rock well:

398.28  ‘I understood whatever was unintelligible…: from Charles Dickens, American Notes, Chap. 3: “The fruits of the earth have their growth in corruption. Out of the rottenness of these things, there has sprung up in Boston a sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists. On inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly transcendental.”

398.29  . . Broadway . . pig . . only one ear …: from Dickens, American Notes, Chap. 6; Dickens describes a stroll in NYC along Broadway: “Here is a solitary swine lounging homeward by himself. He has only one ear; having parted with the other to vagrant-dogs in the course of his city rambles. But he gets on very well without it; and leads a roving, gentlemanly, vagabond kind of life, somewhat answering to that of our club-men at home.”

398.30  ‘Bach / or the Devil’: the exclamation of someone who overheard Bach improvising on the organ (Terry 114).

398.31            laughed as to mastery ‘nothing / wonderful…: another Bach anecdote; his remark continues, “… and the organ does the rest” (Terry 115).

398.32            POWER / FAILURE…: there was a major power blackout that effected most of the northeast including NYC on 9 Nov. 1965.

398.35  Watts: a predominately African-American area of Los Angeles where there was almost a week of rioting in Aug. 1965.

398.35            Harlem: there was a major riot in Harlem, NYC in July 1964.

398.38  ‘Fond of listening to other players’: again Bach (Terry 115).

398.39  Life: weekly US magazine that highlighted photo journalism.

398.40            Lumumba: Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961) became the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo in June 1960; deposed in a coup in Sept. 1960 by Joseph Mobutu and executed in Jan. 1961. A monument to Lumumba in Stanleyville consisted of a portrait in a glass case.

399.8    Gemini capsule: NASA’s Gemini program (announced Jan. 1962 and completed 1966) was the successor of Mercury with the mission of further developing manned space flight in preparation for a moon landing, which would be accomplished by its successor program Apollo. The space capsule is the sealed chamber or vehicle in which the passenger rides.

399.8            cryobiology: the study of the effects of very low temperatures on living organisms, such as the possible preservation of cells, organs, sperm for later use.

399.11            Sumeria’s recipe / ‘Grind to a powder pear-tree wood…: although the precise source is unidentified, this is a prescription for illness from what is believed to be the oldest surviving medical text in Sumerian cuneiform.

399.17            between Ti and Ki: punning on TV, Kon-Tiki, tea and key (?)

399.18  danang cryochore: Da Nang is the major city of central Vietnam and a major base of U.S. military operations. Cryochore is an obscure technical term designating a region of perpetual cold or snow (cryo- < Gk. cold; see 399.8). The word also perhaps suggests a crying choir.

399.18            intervention in santo domingo: President Johnson ordered a U.S. military invasion of the Dominican Republic in April 1965, ostensibly to prevent a communist takeover.

399.21  Lady Clio: Clio is the muse of history.

399.25  dong xoai: on June 10, 1965 the Viet Cong attacked Dong Xoai, 60 miles northeast of Saigon, inflicting heavy casualties on the South Vietnamese army.

399.27  roger allen la porte 5 a.m. at u.n.: Roger Allen LaPorte immolated himself in front of the United Nations Building in NYC on 9 Nov. 1965.

399.28            (seminarian briefed chrystie street…: the street in the Lower East Side where LZ grew up and went to school. Ahearn quotes from the report on Roger LaPorte’s death in The New York Times: “[LaPorte] was a member of the Catholic Worker movement, a charitable and pacifist organization with headquarters at 175 Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side” (“Two Conversations” 120).

399.29            norman morrison: on Nov. 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a Quaker and father of three, burned himself to death outside Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

399.30  an older lady / whose name was hushed: Alice Herz was the first American to immolate herself in protest against the Vietnam War on 16 March 1965 and died ten days later; she was 82.

399.33            honesty: see 14.356.12; 15.375.26.

399.38  spirits would not return…: this foreshadows the long passage beginning at 400.5, but here set in the context of the atrocities of the Vietnam War.

400.1    marine with the cigarette lighter: Morley Safer’s report on the burning of Cam Ne village (see 398.8) showed a U.S. soldier setting houses on fire with a cigarette lighter.

400.5    Here an old woman weeps / as in the Melanesian tale…: through 401.11 is taken from two early monographs by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), “Myth in Primitive Psychology” (1926) and “Baloma; the Spirits of the Dead” (1916), both collected in Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (1948). Malinowski famously did “participant-observation” fieldwork among the Melanesian peoples of the Trobriand Islands, between Papua New Guinea and Australia, during WWI. LZ is using material concerned with the baloma or spirits of the dead, which return to their villages each year during the harvest festival.
            402.5-22: paraphrased from “Myth in Primitive Psychology”: “But although there was a time when people grew old and died, and thus became spirits, they yet remained in the villages with the survivors—even as now they stay around the dwellings when they return to their village during the annual feast of the milamala. But one day an old woman spirit who was living with her people in the house crouched on the floor under one of the bedstead platforms. Her daughter, who was distributing food to the members of the family, spilled some broth out of the coconut cup and burnt the spirit, who expostulated and reprimanded her daughter. The latter replied: ‘I thought you had gone away; I thought you were only coming back at one time in the year during the milamala.’ The spirit’s feelings were hurt. She replied: ‘I shall go to Tuma [island of the dead] and live underneath.’ She then took up a coconut, cut it in half, kept the half with the three eyes, and gave her daughter the other. ‘I am giving you the half which is blind, and therefore you will not see me. I am taking the half with the eyes, and I shall see you when I come back with other spirits.’ This is the reason why the spirits are invisible, though they themselves can see human beings” (133).
            402.23-401.11 from “Baloma; the Spirits of the Dead”: “When the baloma has grown old, his teeth fall out, his skin gets loose and wrinkled; he goes to the beach and bathes in the salt water; then he throws off his skin just as a snake would do, and becomes a young child again; really an embryo, a waiwaia—a term applied to children in utero and immediately after birth. A baloma woman sees this waiwaia; she takes it up, and puts it in a basket or a plaited and folded coconut leaf (puatai). She carries the small being to Kiriwina, and places it in the womb of some woman, inserting it per vaginam. Then that woman becomes pregnant (nasusuma).
            This is the story as I obtained it from the first informant who mentioned the subject to me. It implies two important psychological facts: the belief in reincarnation, and the ignorance of the physiological causes of pregnancy. I shall now discuss both these subjects in light of the details obtained on further inquiry.
            First of all, everybody in Kiriwina knows and has not the slightest doubt about the following propositions. The real cause of pregnancy is always a baloma, who is inserted into or enters the body of a woman, and without whose existence a woman could not become pregnant; all babies are made or come into existence (ibubulisi) in Tuma” (216).
            “Another cycle of beliefs and ideas about reincarnation implies a pronounced association between the sea and the spirit children. Thus I was told by several informants that after his transformation into a waiwaia, the spirit goes into the sea. The first version obtained (quoted above) implied that the spirit, after having washed on the seabeach and become rejuvenated, is taken up immediately by a female baloma and carried to Kiriwina. Other accounts state that the spirit, after being transformed, goes into the sea and swells there for a time. There are several corollaries to this version. Thus in all the coastal villages on the western shore (where this information was collected) mature unmarried girls observe certain precautions when bathing. The spirit children are supposed to be concealed in the popewo, the floating sea scum; also in some stones called dukupi. They come along on large tree trunks (kaibilabala), and they may be attached to dead leaves (libulibu) floating on the surface. Thus when at certain times the wind and tide blow plenty of this stuff towards the shore, the girls are afraid of bathing in the sea, especially at high tide. Again, if a married woman wants to conceive, she may hit the dukupi stones in order to induce a concealed waiwaia to enter her womb. But this is not a ceremonial action.
            In the inland villages the association between conception and bathing is also known. To receive the waiwaia whilst in the water seems to be the most usual way of becoming pregnant. Often whilst bathing a woman will feel that something has touched her, or even hurt her. She will say, ‘A fish has bitten me.’ In fact, it was the waiwaia entering or being inserted into her” (217-218).
            “Besides the belief in reincarnation by action of the sea, the view that the waiwaia is inserted by a baloma is prevalent. […] Such knowledge [of which waiwaia is responsible for conceiving the child] is possible only in the cases when the baloma actually appears in a dream to the woman and tells her that he will insert a waiwaia into her” (219).
            “Beginning with ignorance of the father’s share, to direct questions as to the cause (u’ula) of a child being created, or a woman becoming pregnant, I received an invariable answer, ‘Baloma boge isatika [the baloma gave it]’” (221-222).
            “When I asked who was the father of an illegitimate child, there was only one answer, that there was no father, as the girl was not married. If, then, I asked, in quite plain terms, who is the physiological father, the question was not understood, and when the subject was discussed still further, and the question put in this form: ‘There are plenty of unmarried girls, why did this one get with child, and the others not,’ the answer would be: ‘It is a baloma who gave her this child.’ And here again I was often puzzled by some remarks, pointing to the view that an unmarried girl is especially exposed to the danger of being approached by a baloma, if she is very unchaste. Yet the girls deem it much better precaution to avoid directly any exposure to the baloma by not bathing at high tide, etc., than indirectly to escape the danger by being too scrupulously chaste.
            Illegitimate, or according to the Kiriwinian ideas, fatherless children, and their mothers are, however, regarded with scant favor. I remember several instances in which girls were pointed out to me as being undesirable, ‘no good,’ because they had children out of wedlock. If you ask why such a case is bad, there is the stereotyped answer, ‘Because there is no father, there is no man to take it in his arms’ (Gala taitala Cikopo’i)” (222-223).
            Malinowski continues at considerable length concerning the disconnection in the Triobrianderian mind between physical copulation and conception, mentioning in passing a myth in which a woman is impregnated by “water dripping from the stalactites” (228) and another story of a woman impregnated by “digital manipulation” (229).

401.14  ‘I stumble you stumble Istanbul’: Woods points out that this is a mock conjugation, which he assumes is spoken by CZ (186), although PZ appears an equal possibility. CZ was primarily responsible for PZ’s home schooling, which included Latin, Greek and other foreign languages, but also during the time “A”-18 was written, CZ and LZ were working on their Catullus translations.

401.15  ‘as when an upright woman…:

401.19  Isaac iliad: presumably the Old Testament story of the patriarchs as analogous to Homeric epic.

401.19  ‘they live for memory: / with them in the sense that they think…: through 401.25 from Henry James’ story “Maud-Evelyn” (1900):
            “Well,” my young friend explained, “that’s just what he meant—they live for her memory. She is with them in the sense that they think of nothing else.”
            I found matter for surprise in this correction, but also, at first, matter for relief. At the same time it left, as I turned it over, a fresh ambiguity. “If they think of nothing else, how can they think so much of Marmaduke?”
            The difficulty struck her, though she gave me even then a dim impression of being already, as it were, rather on Marmaduke’s side, or, at any rate—almost as against herself—in sympathy with the Dedricks. But her answer was prompt: “Why, that’s just their reason—that they can talk to him so much about her.” […]
            “Well,” he replied, positively gay in his black suit, his black gloves, his high hatband, “the more we live in the past, the more things we find in it. That’s a literal fact. You would see the truth of it if your life had taken such a turn.” […]
            But I only said to Lavinia on this first occasion that I would immediately go; which was precisely what brought out the climax, as I feel it to be, of my story. “He’s not now, you know,” she turned round to admonish me, “in Westbourne Terrace. He has taken a little old house in Kensington.”
            “Then he hasn’t kept the things?”
            “He has kept everything.” She looked at me still more as if I had never understood.
            “You mean he has moved them?”
            She was patient with me. “He has moved nothing. Everything is as it was, and kept with the same perfection.”
             I wondered. “But if he doesn’t live there?”
            “It’s just what he does.”
            “Then how can he be in Kensington?”
            She hesitated, but she had still more than her old grasp of it. “He’s in Kensington—without living.”
            “You mean that at the other place—?”
            “Yes, he spends most of his time. He’s driven over there every day—he remains there for hours. He keeps it for that.”
            “I see—it’s still the museum.”
            “It’s still the temple!” Lavinia replied with positive austerity.
            “Then why did he move?”
            “Because, you see, there”—she faltered again—“I could come to him. And he wants me,” she said with admirable simplicity.
            Little by little I took it in. “After the death of the parents, even, you never went?”
            “Never.”
            “So you haven’t seen anything?”
            “Anything of hers? Nothing.”

401.28            ‘silences that cause the thought to flow’:

401.34  Let The Hermit sing I do not know…: “Hermit Songs” from anonymous Irish texts with music by Samuel Barber (1910-1981), Op. 29. The complete text of the song “Promiscuity” is: “I do not know with whom Edan will sleep, / but I do know that fair Edan will not sleep alone.”

401.38            Malbrook gone to war: this is the English version of a popular French ballad, “Malbrough [also Malbrouk and Marbough] s’en va-t-en guerre,” which mocks the English general Sir John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), who repeatedly defeated the French in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714); see following note.

401.38            ‘bribing neighbors / to fight…: from Samuel Johnson, the life of Jonathan Swift from Lives of the Poets (1779). Detesting the Duke of Marlborough (see preceding note), who was of the pro-war Whig party and eventually fell from power in 1711 due to egregious war profiteering, Swift was active in the Tory campaign against the general (for his final word on Marlborough see “A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General”):
“Swift now attained the zenith of his political importance: he published (1712) the ‘Conduct of the Allies,’ ten days before the Parliament assembled. The purpose was to persuade the nation to a peace; and never had any writer more success. The people, who had been amused with bonfires and triumphal processions, and looked with idolatry on the General [Marlborough] and his friends, who, as they thought, had made England the arbitress of nations, were confounded between shame and rage, when they found that ‘mines had been exhausted, and millions destroyed,’ to secure the Dutch or aggrandize the Emperor, without any advantage to ourselves; that we had been bribing our neighbours to fight their own quarrel; and that amongst our enemies we might number our allies. That is now no longer doubted, of which the nation was then first informed, that the war was unnecessarily protracted to fill the pockets of Marlborough; and that it would have been continued without end, if he could have continued his annual plunder. But Swift, I suppose, did not yet know what he has since written, that a commission was drawn which would have appointed him General for life, had it not become ineffectual by the resolution of Lord Cowper, who refused the seal. […]
            If it be said that Swift should have checked a passion [for “Vanessa”] which he never meant to gratify, recourse must be had to that extenuation which he so much despised, ‘men are but men’; perhaps, however, he did not at first know his own mind, and, as he represents himself, was undetermined.”

402.4    Dart: Dodge Dart car.

402.12  ‘What nature delights in’ says Savage ‘the observer…: through 402.17 from Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), from the concluding remarks of a long review-essay, “The Poems of Catullus” (1842, 1853), from which LZ also quotes in Bottom 111. LZ’s source was an 1888 volume that included The Pentameron, Citation and Examinations of William Shakespeare, Minor Prose Pieces and Criticisms:
             “Poets ought never to be vext, discomposed, or disappointed, when the better is overlooked, and the inferior is commended. Much may be assigned to the observer’s point of vision being more on a level with the object. And this reflection also will console the artist, when really they are only more ordinary and common. In a palace we must look to the elevation and proportions; whereas a low grotto may assume any form and almost any deformity. Rudeness is here no blemish; a shell reversed is no false ornament; moss and fern may be stuck with the root outward; a crystal may sparkle at the top or at the bottom; dry sticks and fragmentary petrifactions find everywhere their proper place; and loose soil and plashy water show just what nature delights in. Ladies and gentlemen who at first were about to turn back, take one another by the hand, duck their heads, enter it together, and exclaim, ‘What a charming grotto!’
             In poetry, as in architecture, the Rustic Order is proper only for the lower story.
             They who have listened, patiently and supinely, to the catarrhal songsters of the goose-grazed commons, will be loth and ill-fitted to mount up with Catullus to the highest steeps in the forests of Ida, and will shudder at the music of the Corybantes in the temple of the Great Mother of the Gods” (this final allusion is to Catullus’ Carmina 63).

402.17  ‘A / man who hates children…: W.C. Fields’ famous quip: “Any man who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad.” Mâle vicieuse, Fr. vicious or depraved male (but the adj. is feminine), mal = bad.

402.21  His Friday pun / Good: see 12.145.12.

402.23  ‘Bye-Bye Brook-a-leen-a’: LZ appears to be recalling a song from his youth, but possibly relevant that the Zukofskys, after more than 20 years in Brooklyn, moved to Manhattan in 1964.

402.28            ‘Kwanon, sine qua non’: kwanon is phonetic transliteration of qua non; sine qua non = L. without which not, that is, an essential element or condition.

402.30  ‘Job’s city of Kratz…: Gratz or Graz, which can sound like Kratz, is the second largest city in Austria after Vienna. However, it seems likely there is some word-play here: Job was from Uz, which in Jerome’s Latin Bible (the Vulgate) is translated as Ausitis.

402.34  the seventh / decade comes…: LZ had turned 60 on 23 Jan. 1964, the year he began writing “A”-18.

402.37  ourari: same as curare and other variants; a resinous substance used by South American Indians for poisoning their arrows, especially small arrows shot from the blow-gun (CD).

402.38  Our Pickaninny painting…: by the Hungarian-American painter Dometer Guczul (b. 1886); in his essay on the painter, LZ mentions this title as among “his finest work” (Prep+ 153). The original publication of this essay in View 3.3 (Fall 1943) included photos of seven of Guczul’s paintings, including “The Pickanniny.” LZ met Guczul in 1942 at Diamond Point on Lake George in upstate New York, where the painter lived and where the Zukofskys spent the summer that year (see WCW/LZ 305-306). Pickaninny refers to a black child, usually disparagingly, so here “civil rites” < civil rights.

403.13  “the one permanence change.” / ‘Think my dear of Heraclitus’ fee were he alive’: probably CZ’s witticism in response to the stock ad alluding to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus’ assertion of perpetual change: “you can’t step into the same river twice.”

403.20  ‘the spring’s / one white crocus Eden…:

403.25  ‘the fashion to draw eyes…: from a letter by Japanese artist Hokusai (1760-1849) complaining to a publisher: “I suggest that the engraver should add no lower eyelids where I did not draw them. As to noses: these are my noses (and he draws two examples) and the noses usually engraved are the noses of Toyokuni which I do not like at all and which are contrary to the laws of the art of drawing. It is also the fashion to draw eyes like this (he provides a sample with a black point in the center) but such eyes I like no more than such noses.” Qtd. from James A. Michener, The Floating World (1954), on Japanese prints and printmakers of the Edo period; however, this is not likely LZ’s source as some if not all of the following through 404.4 is also quoted from Hokusai.

403.30  mit fühlung: Ger., literally, with feeling; to be sympathetic or compassionate.

403.35            Katsuhika Hokusai: see 403.25, 14.333.7.

404.8    red / pipecleaner Valentine: see 13.263.29

404.17  f-holes of spruce: see 12.157.6.

404.21  “Ste. Maria”: Christopher Columbus’ flagship the Santa Maria.

404.22            Brancusi: Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), Romanian modernist sculptor.

404.32  eskimo sold refrigerators: see 8.62.15.

404.37  Gay Street: small street in Greenwich Village between Christopher Street and Waverly Place that does indeed curve; original row houses, some still existing, were built in the early 19th century.

405.3    Cöthen . . the Schloss . . offered a more intimate setting for the first Brandenburg…: through 405.33 various details from J.S. Bach’s period at Cöthen from the end of 1717 until 1723, following his time at Weimar (see 15.366.13-367.20) and preceding his move to Leipzig (see 8.43.12-45.23). Again, LZ’s primary source is Terry’s biography.
405.3-10: The “more intimate setting” of the Cöthen Schloss (Ger. palace) is compared with Weimar’s (118) and is where Bach first performed the Brandenburg Concertos as well as conducting the private orchestra for which he was paid “in seinem Hause” (Ger. in his house; “his” being Prince Leopold of Cöthen) (121). A “Comödien-Theatrum” (Ger. comedy theater) performed for a season in 1718-1719, and Terry comments on the meagerness of the music library that included work by Baldassare Galuppi (1706-1785) but not of Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713), important in the development of the concerto (no mention is made of the absence of Claudio Monteverdi); this and further details through 405.10 in Terry 122-123.
405.11-13: Terry makes the point that Bach’s greatest contemporary Georg Friederich Händel (1685-1759) enjoyed a degree of royal patronage and popularity that Bach never matched, and whereas Händel never seemed much interested in meeting Bach, the latter was always eager to meet his greatest peer. The remark at 405.11-13 was made by Count von Flemming in a 1719 letter to one of Bach’s students in an effort to arrange a meeting between the two masters; despite Händel’s apparent disinterest, Bach set out for Halle in an effort to meet him but Händel had already left for England (Terry 129-130).
405.14-18: details from Terry 123-124.
405.19-20: quotation, “‘the window .. behind the organ…,’” from a detailed report on the condition of and recommendation for an organ at the University Church in Leipzig quoted in full by Terry (125-126).
405.20-25: Bach passed up a chance for a new position in Hamburg in 1720, declining to compete for the position or to pay the expected acceptance fee; his disappointed supporter, Erdmann Neumeister, supposedly made the sarcastic remark at 405.21 about the fairness of the competition unless a fee was paid (Terry 134). Bach performed “An Wasserflüssen Babylon” (By the Waters of Babylon) in 1720 for the elderly Jan Adam Reinken (1623-1722), the great organist who Bach had heard a number of times as a youth, eliciting the remark at 405.24-25.
405.25-27: Bach completed the Brandenburg Concertos in 1721 and attached a dedicatory note in French to Markgraf Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg who had commissioned them; Terry remarks that there is no record of acknowledgement from the Markgraf, and the work seems never to have been performed by its recipient (134-135). The phrase, “sometimes one purrs” (405.26), is added by LZ in response to Bach’s salutation in his letter, which LZ slightly abbreviates: A son altesse royale, Monseigneur Crétien Louis, Marggraf de Brandenbourg, &c., &c., &c. (Fr. To his highest noble…).
405.27-29: On first taking up his post at Cöthen, Bach composed a Serenade for the Prince’s infant son, which contains the lines, “Sight and seeing, breath and singing, / One and all together joining, / Loud exalt his splendid name” (Terry 128).
405.29-30: Prince Leopold’s trip to the waters of Carlsbad took place in 1720, accompanied by Bach, during which his first wife abruptly died, adding to his growing sense of wanting to leave his situation at Cöthen (Terry 127). LZ compares Carlsbad with Saratoga Springs in upstate NY, which also was world-famous for its mineral waters and spas (see 395.19).
405.31-33: Terry describes in some detail the exercise book Bach wrote for his eldest son (age 9 at the time), Wilhelm Friedemann, which is typically inscribed with scrupulous care by Bach (135-136).

406.1    torahs: the body of Jewish religious literature, law and teaching primarily contained in the Old Testament and Talmud; the parchment scrolls upon which these teaching are written.

406.2            Chagall: Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Russian born Jewish artist whose fantastic paintings often feature flying or levitating people and objects.

406.3    the trembling / string the lighted ha’: from Robert Burns, “Mary Morison,” second stanza:
Yestreen, when to the trembling string
The dance gaed thro’ the lighted ha’,
To thee my fancy took its wing,
I sat but neither heard nor saw:
Tho’ this was fair, and that was braw,
And yon the toast of a’ the town,
I sigh’d and said amang them a’:—
‘Ye are na Mary Morison!’

406.4    red-head priest tempered / The Seasons Johann Sebastian his clavier: the red-head priest is Antonio Vivaldi and his Four Seasons (see 12.137.7, 12.158.10); J.S. Bach and his Well-Tempered Clavier (see 12.130.4). In music, tempered refers to adjusting the musical intervals of an instrument to equal temperament (Bach’s “well-tempered”).

406.8            Pegasus: winged horse of the muses; see 19.422.21.

406.18            Vietnamese story: Kung Buddha Christos…: the Cao Dai religion was founded in Vietnam in 1926 as a synthesis of all major religions, claiming they were all worshiping the same underlying spirituality.

406.20  ‘If it be now, ’tis not to come / if it be not to come…: from Shakespeare, Hamlet V.ii (qtd. Bottom 46, 106, 302, 358):
Hamlet: Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special providence in fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.

406.23  ‘As dry pumps will not play…: from Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” (dated 1 Dec. 1720): “Or, if it be necessary, as the case is with some barren wits, to take in the thoughts of others in order to draw forth their Own, as dry pumps will not play till water is thrown into them; in that necessity, I would recommend some of the approved standard authors of antiquity for your perusal, as a poet and a wit; because, maggots being what you look for, as monkeys do for vermin in their keepers' heads, you will find they abound in good old authors, as in rich old cheese, not in the new; and for that reason you must have the classicks, especially the most wormeaten of them, often in your hands. But with this caution, that you are not to use those ancients as unlucky lads do their old fathers, and make no conscience of picking their pockets and pillaging them. Your business is not to steal from them, but to improve upon them, and make their sentiments your own; which is an effect of great judgment; and, though difficult, yet very possible, without the scurvy imputation of filching; for I humbly conceive, though I light my candle at my neighbour's fire, that does not alter the property, or make the wick, the wax, or the flame, or the whole candle, less my own.”

406.28