Wisdom for the Ages

"My mind is aglow with whirling transient nodes of thought, careening through a cosmic vapor of invention."

—Blazing Saddle, 1974

So now I add some schmalz I just reread in an old journal. When I lived in Venice, I knew the guy who lived in Ezra Pound’s house. Here’s what I wrote:

“Cedric [pseudonym] lives in Ezra Pound’s house. Three floors. All worn wood and white paint. In the attic are paintings by T---- and a Rauchenberg. Cedric hung the Rauchenberg. In the entranceway, so if you look immediately right in the narrow hall, it is right there, otherwise you’d miss it. Nearly in his lease, but in the end, just in a verbal agreement, Cedric promised Pound’s daughter that he would maintain the grave on San Michele. In the rest of the house hang geometric brown and orange paintings of laced windows, in-your-basement-‘70s-style-you-forgot-they-were-there and other grandma-y things, all by Cedric. F. once asked him if his color scheme had been affected by living in Venice. With a blank stare, he replied, “No.”

This man has a pale, spotty face and duck feet. I asked him if he had yet attended to Pound’s grave, and with a loud [fill in nationality] accent, he guffawed, “No.” And then: “His daughter came to Venice a month ago and I’m sure she went there.”

So now we know a man is neglecting Ezra Pound’s grave.”

The next page in the journal is a long quotation from The Colossus of Maroussi, by Henry Miller, which I remember crouching in a Barnes & Noble copying some years ago.

Here’s part of it:

“The mastery of great things comes with the doing of trifles; the little voyage is for the timid soul just as formidable as the big voyage for the great one. Voyages are accomplished inwardly, and the most hazardous ones, needless to say, are made without moving from the spot. But the sense of voyage can wither and die. There are adventurers who penetrate to the remotest parts of the earth, dragging to a fruitless goal an animated corpse.”

Etc.