Mark This Moment

[Image: partial screen capture of a page at Google Books. The worker scanning the pages of The Coquette has allowed his or her gloved finger to be recorded for posterity.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories. Your looks will go. Loved ones will die. Your body will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away. Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and no longer turning away.

But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realising this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude.

Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar.

(Jeff Foster [source])

…and:

The Good Life

You stand at the window.
There is a glass cloud in the shape of a heart.
The wind’s sighs are like caves in your speech.
You are the ghost in the tree outside.

The street is quiet.
The weather, like tomorrow, like your life,
is partially here, partially up in the air.
There is nothing you can do.

The good life gives no warning.
It weathers the climates of despair
and appears, on foot, unrecognized, offering nothing,
and you are there.

(Mark Strand [source])

Not from whiskey river:

If there is any machine that the prophet might have added — had he known anything about it — to “the way of the wind,” “the way of a serpent on rock,”* and other things noteworthily hard to find out, it would doubtless be the Jacquard loom… Each card represents one thread of the filling. A thousand ends of wires, more or less, press against each card as the machinery brings it in turn to its place where the holes are, the wires go through by of a spring at their other ends; and so a hook connected with each wire is allowed to come forward far enough to be caught by a rising blade of steel, and that pulls on strings connected with the lower ends of the wires, which in turn lift up selected threads of the warp and make at each moment new paths for the shuttles to travel through. The wires that have no holes to get through, of course, cannot bring their hooks forward far enough to catch the lifting bars, and the threads of the warp which they affect remain down until next time or some other.

To complete a pattern sometimes requires as many as ten thousand cards, all strung together by their edges, like “Jacob’s ladder,” going flippety-flop after each other up the head of the loom and down again. Ordinary portraits woven in ribbon silk require from 1,500 to 4,500 cards, and fine pieces of badge work, such as the Cardinal McCloskey bookmark**, or the splendid one gotten out at the latest Exhibition by the firm, about 6,000.

The weavers of Lyons used to hold pre-eminence over the rest of the world for their Jacquard loom productions, but their best work has been outdone by this establishment, and by comparison with some of the designs woven here most pretentious English works look like bad caricatures. The pictures or other designs which are to be woven are first drawn by Messrs. Alcock and Wood in the size they are to appear, then enlarged to scale upon paper ruled to minute squares, and finally the holes are punched in the cards in correspondence with the marked squares on the enlarge design… really it does look like a terrible thing as one views its enormous sheaf of twitching strings, and thousand rattling wires, and five thousand wriggling cards.

(Unknown author, Scientific American [source])

…and:

…many random systems evolving in time involve sequences of dependent random variables. Think of the outside weather temperature on successive days, or the price of IBM stock at the end of successive trading days. Many such systems have the property that the current state alone contains sufficient information to give the probability distribution of the next state. The probability model with this feature is called a Markov chain…

Markov chains are named after the Russian mathematician Andrey Markov (1856-1922), who first developed this probability model in order to analyze the alternation of vowels and consonants in Pushkin’s poem “Eugene Onegin”… The characteristic property of a Markov chain is that its memory goes back only to the most recent state. Knowledge of the current state only is sufficient to describe the future development of the process.

(Henk Tijms [source])

…and:

On Translating “Eugene Onegin”
(an illustration of the “Onegin”
stanza — meter and rhyme pattern)

What is translation? On a platter
A poet’s pale and glaring head,
A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O Pushkin, for my stratagem.
I travelled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza, patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose—
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.

Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana’s earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake;
I find another man’s mistake;
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task: a poet’s patience
And scholastic passion blent—
The shadow of your monument.

(Vladimir Nabokov [source])

______________________________

* This alludes to Proverbs 30:18-19, which says (King James Version, Cambridge edition): “There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.”

** There was approximately no chance that I’d let a phrase like “the Cardinal McCloskey bookmark” go by without action or comment. As nearly as I can guess, this would be the bookmark shown at right. I found it at the site of the WorthPoint Corporation, “the largest resource for researching, valuing and buying/selling antiques, art and vintage collectibles.” The specific page where I found it describes it thusly:

1870s Woven Bookmark, B.B. Tilt Co., Religious Memorial
This is a woven ribbon bookmark measuring 2 1/8″ by 11 1/4″, with an image of Cardinal McCloskey in the center and the words “His Eminence Cardinal McCloskey” at the lower end, surrounded by decorative architectural elements and some stylized flowers. On the back, the top edge has “B. B. Tilt & Son, N.Y. and Paterson, N.J.” woven in. The bottom, which is folded up into a point, is woven with the image of a spread-winged eagle and the words “Trade Mark”. Internet research indicates McCloskey became Cardinal on March 15, 1875 and died in 1885 — this bookmark could commemorate either event. B.B. Tilt was essentially the American competitor of England’s Stevengraph Company.

Note that the Jacquard loom described in the Scientific American piece stood in “the extensive mill of the Phoenix Manufacturing Company (formerly B.B. Tilt & Son) in Paterson, N.J. where in the busy season 1,000 hands are employed, and where, even in the present dull time, between seasons, 900 are at work.” All of which pretty much confirms that this is THE Cardinal McCloskey bookmark.

Okay, now I’m satisfied.