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at antiquity can furnish or furbish; for tablet to save the wear and tear of weak Memory, and, in short, for all the various purposes and utility, real or imaginary, which are usually comprehended under that comprehensive title Common Place book .
    In another entry, from March of the same year, he imagines himself in a library, “costly, splendid and magnificent,” where he
    would “let my soul sail away delighted into . . . wildest phantasies.” Emerson is interested in the possibility of furthering motions of the mind: “imaginations of enchantment.” He hunts around for figures whose writing can help him find how to inscribe thought; he assesses the early journal: “It has prevented the ennui of many an idle moment and has perhaps enriched my stock of language for future exertions.”
    As if there were in fact a first place always in wait, like the sky. This desire for an initial encounter; it spins out of the actual reality—this stuff, these years—like a moth from its cocoon.
As if one could shed everything: a sense of panic and excitement, anticipatory, exactly against the stasis of calm and yet anchored by recessed attachment. Trust as always the crucial element.
    There are patches of blue; the clouds are thick and white with dark gray underbellies; the river, a dull pewter. The inadequacy is obvious: “blue,” etc.
    34.
    Barges are plying the Hudson.
    I don’t like looking up and out and ferreting for the possible occasion of the poem. O poem, where are you? Years ago I wrote a poem called “East River Barge,” written after a taxi ride up the East River Drive, but the Hudson does not want to offer a sequel, maybe because I am static as it moves. Poems as iterations of interactive motion.
    What we retrieve hallucinates uneasily into morning.
    Julian Barnes, in The Sense of an Ending , barely mentions the weather, or anything phenomenological; the book is scant on visual description, nearly void of sensuous detail. The protagonist
    doesn’t seem to register these elements. This makes the writing both clear and arid.
    35.
    Last night looking out the south windows into the darkness, a huge light in the sky; Star? I wondered. Star? Huge and bright. At its side, the familiar three stars of Orion’s scabbard. But the big light moved, it came closer, it had tiny red sidelights, it passed over, humming to itself. Am thinking this morning about restoration, about how the Occupy Wall Street became a holding place, marking the disquiet and unhappiness brooding across the country, the countries. You see it mentioned often in stories that are not about it; it points, the name seems so far to escape the ideological impasse that has immobilized the political landscape.
    Malfeasance, indifference, cruelty, hidden under the tarp of self-interest and greed.
    Awake in the night, trying to formulate something about Gertrude Stein’s relation to description, wanting to come up with a phrase for what she does with the physical, material, visual world; her resistance to normative forms or linguistic structure which has fascinated into the postmodern poetic imagination. There is a way in which she proposes a radical interiority . (You see this in Picasso’s portrait of her: the static monumentality, the obsidian eyes.) She seems to have experienced the world and all its objects as a vast interior structure that her writings somehow externalized: exact resemblance to exact resemblance , but not mimesis. Something about her dissolution of syntactical relation, subject-predicate, that haunts us. The myth of the pure materiality of language .
    36.
    Emerson, age seventeen, 25 October 1820:
    I find myself often idle, vagrant, stupid and hollow. This is somewhat appalling and, if I do not discipline myself with diligent care, I shall suffer severely from remorse and the sense of inferiority hereafter. All around me are industrious and will be great, I am indolent