Tell the Rabble that it’s Cabell

I had an odd night and I’ll be paying for it later. My nasal strips kept coming off which led to me waking up as I then had trouble breathing. That’s not what makes it noteworthy but it’s why I’m so tired and it’s my excuse for this not being brilliant. It should be, for that’s what I want to write about.

I had an unremarkable Christmas. I watched Spiderman 2 which I had never seen, and Avengers: Infinity War which I had. I enjoyed them both and think the second a classic. Throw me out of the cultural snobs and intellectuals clubs, but it was fine filmmaking. The key takeaway from the rewatch is that everything is going according to Dr. Strange’s plan. He straight out said so, “This is the only way.” He already said that of the 14 million possible futures he explored only one had them winning. The rest are on the path even if they don’t know it. He was not wearing the Time Stone around his neck during the final battle, where was it? That’s what End Game will reveal.

That’s not what I want to write about either, but felt it needed a mention. Now to the real point about what made the night noteworthy. Once I was in bed trying to sleep, I had not a moment of clarity, but an extended run. I have no idea how long it lasted but my mind was working at high efficiency. It was a heady experience, better than mild euphoria following being given propofol. My mind was racing so fast that I had to slow it down by meditating so I could get back to sleep. Good thing I’ve gotten good at that. I slipped back into my train a thought a few times but was able to clear my mind and get to sleep. Too bad not being able to breath woke me up.

What was I thinking about? It started the night before as I walking to the restaurant to meet Katherine. I realized that a friend of mine had fallen into a pattern described perfectly by James Branch Cabell.

The comedy is always the same. In the first act the hero imagines a place where happiness exists. In the second he strives towards that goal. In the third he comes up short or what amounts to the same thing he achieves his goal only to find that happiness lies a little further down the road. – Horvendile, in The High Place : A Comedy of Disenchantment (1923), Ch. XVI: Some Victims of Flamberge.

You might recognize Horvendile as my username on many online platforms. He is my literary spirit character. When someone keeps going through the same experience you should suspect that it is not chance, but something about the person. I am tempted to say, “The fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves.” I’m tempted but that’s not accurate. It need not be a fault. I too follow the pattern; it’s why the quote has always resonated with me. There is a reason that Cabell is my favorite author. I fear and suspect that the character trait that leads to my falling into the comedy is one that I like about myself, part of what makes me, me. I don’t know if I want to change it even though it causes pain.

I decided last night to be honest about this and though it’s difficult I’ll follow through with it. The place I imagine happiness existing is my relationship with a person, and one of those people is the person who set me on this train of thought. She is not the only one, the comedy repeats itself.

I wish I had written this last night; then the language came out just right. The thoughts fell into Cabell’s style, which I love. By the light of day my sleep deprived mind can’t come up with the poetry. I am like Coleridge after his thoughts were interrupted and he lost his vision of Xanadu. I can still feel it but I cannot envision it. As I can’t come up with the words for my vision I will give you a taste of the language by quoting Cabell. These are all from Wikiquotes. If they resonate with you, let me know.

• If we assiduously cultivate our powers of exaggeration, perhaps we, too, shall obtain the Paradise of Liars. And there Raphael shall paint for us scores and scores of his manifestly impossible pictures … and Shakespeare will lie to us of fabulous islands far past ‘the still-vex’d Bermoothes,’ and bring us fresh tales from the coast of Bohemia. For no one will speak the truth there, and we shall all be perfectly happy.
• Some few there must be in every age and every land of whom life claims nothing very insistently save that they write perfectly of beautiful happenings.
• Oh, do the Overlords of Life and Death always provide some obstacle to prevent what all of us have known in youth was possible from ever coming true?”
• I have made at worst some neat, precise and joyous little tales which prevaricate tenderly about the universe and veil the pettiness of human nature with screens of verbal jewelwork. It is not the actual world they tell about, but a vastly superior place where the Dream is realized and everything which in youth we knew was possible comes true. It is a world we have all glimpsed, just once, and have not ever entered, and have not ever forgotten. So people like my little tales. . . . Do they induce delusions? Oh, well, you must give people what they want, and literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.”
• Kennaston no longer thought of himself as a man of flesh-and-blood moving about a world of his compeers. Or, at least, that especial aspect of his existence was to him no longer a phase of any particular importance.
• Love, I take it, must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood.
• You embody all that I was ever able to conceive of beauty and fearlessness and strange purity. Therefore it is evident I do not see in you merely Count Emmerick’s third sister, but, instead, that ageless lovable and loving woman long worshipped and sought everywhere in vain by all poets.
• You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.
• Religion, of course, assured him that the answer to his query was, in various books, explicitly written, in very dissimilar forms. But Kennaston could find little to attract him in any theory of the universe based upon direct revelations from heaven. Conceding that divinity had actually stated so-and-so, from Sinai or Delphi or Mecca, and had been reported without miscomprehension or error, there was no particular reason for presuming that divinity had spoken veraciously: and, indeed all available analogues went to show that nothing in nature dealt with its inferiors candidly.
• To-day alone was real. Never was man brought into contact with reality save through the evanescent emotions and sensations of that single moment, that infinitesimal fraction of a second, which was passing now — and it was in the insignificance of this moment, precisely, that religious persons must believe. So ran the teachings of all dead and lingering faiths alike. Here was, perhaps, only another instance of mankind’s abhorrence of actualities; and man’s quaint dislike of facing reality was here disguised as a high moral principle. That was why all art, which strove to make the sensations of a moment soul-satisfying, was dimly felt to be irreligious. For art performed what religion only promised.
• I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are…
• The man was not merely very human; he was humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.
• You are now a famous champion, that has crowned with victory a righteous cause for which many stalwart knights and gallant gentlemen have made the supreme sacrifice, because they knew that in the end the right must conquer. Your success thus represents the working out of a great moral principle, and to explain the practical minutiae of these august processes is not always quite respectable.
• I shall never of my own free will expose the naked soul of Manuel to anybody. No, it would be no pleasant spectacle, I think: certainly, I have never looked at it, nor did I mean to. Perhaps, as you assert, some power which is stronger than I may some day tear all masks aside: but this will not be my fault, and I shall even then reserve the right to consider that stripping as a rather vulgar bit of tyranny.
• I am Manuel. I have lived in the loneliness which is common to all men, but the difference is that I have known it. Now it is necessary for me, as it is necessary for all men, to die in this same loneliness, and I know that there is no help for it.
• I seem to see only the strivings of an ape reft of his tail, and grown rusty at climbing, who has reeled blunderingly from mystery to mystery, with pathetic makeshifts, not understanding anything, greedy in all desires, and always honeycombed with poltroonery. So in a secret place his youth was put away in exchange for a prize that was hardly worth the having; and the fine geas which his mother laid upon him was exchanged for the common geas of what seems expected.
• “But what is my destiny?”
  “It is that of all loving creatures, Count Manuel. If you have been yourself you cannot reasonably be punished, but if you have been somebody else you will find that this is not permitted.”
• The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label.
• Nothing … nothing in the universe, is of any importance, or is authentic to any serious sense, except the illusions of romance. For man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. These axioms — poor, deaf and blinded spendthrift! — are none the less valuable for being quoted.

Cabell was a southern gentleman who wrote in the first half of the 20th century. He was a man of his time and place. He wrote of race and gender in ways that make us cringe. But he didn’t write of these things often, he wrote of what he knew, the parts of reality he saw clearly. Like other literary heroes, Terry Pratchett and Jane Austen he saw clearly people’s capacity to deceive themselves. It’s no wonder he sometimes deceived himself. Acknowledging that we deceive ourselves is a large part of seeing ourselves clearly.

The magic is gone and I’ll put this to bed, even if I couldn’t put myself to bed last night. I have ambitions for today, to get my phone’s camera fixed and to go to the Bronx Zoo. On Wednesday it’s pay what you want. I would love for someone to join me but I’m afraid that I live to far from my friends and none wish to make the trip. If you do on some Wednesday let me know. If in the next three weeks you want to go to the New York Botanical Gardens model train exhibit I’d be delighted. I live a short walk from it.