The Orientation of Babel

I am beginning to think the Librarian is deranged. Not only does he construe what must be a tower as a sphere, he claims also that "a few miles to the right the tongue is dialectical and ninety floors farther up, it is incomprehensible."

At first I let this draw my tower hypothesis into question, suggesting as it does a vast horizontal distribution of hexagons, but then I realized that it is nonsense to talk of "a few miles to right". To the right of what?

Even compass directions would be hard to imagine in this "universe".

In Borges's "The Secret Miracle", Jaromir Hladik's play The Enemies (or Vindication of Eternity) is set in a library and "the drama never [takes] place; it is the circular delirium that Kubin lives and relives endlessly."

The Floor Plan of Babel

[Update: Jamie Zawinsky has great post on this theme in which he rejects my proposal that assumes that Borges knew what he was doing and had a clear image in mind. I think he meant us to suspect that the librarian is deranged, of course. HT, Carey Dunne.]

[Update 2: It's good to know one is not alone. Jonathan Basile has been puzzled too.]

Any ass can assimilate the main points of Tolstoy's attitude toward adultery but in order to enjoy Tolstoy's art the good reader must wish to visualize, for instance, the arrangement of a railway carriage on the Moscow-Petersburg night train as it was a hundred years ago. Here diagrams are most helpful.

Vladimir Nabokov
Interview in Vogue, 1969

To clarify the ideas in my previous post, I have produced the following floor plan.

I have decided to render Borges's "gabinetes" as "cabinets", not "closets", i.e., as fixtures rather than rooms, and I have installed bookshelves as furniture. Both may of course be more "built in" without changing the main point. Keep in mind that this is one of very, very many floors in what therefore comes to look like a tower. I lean to the interpretation that it would not be infinitely tall, but I sometimes indulge in the "elegant hope" that it is a giant ring suspended in space, so that if you ascend the staircase long enough, you arrive back where you started. The gravity of this situation, as it were, would be a mystery.

I have no idea where the Librarian gets the idea that the Library might be "a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible." Then again, I am also not convinced that the principle that determines the contents of the library is fully known, i.e., I am not sure that "the Library is total". I believe these two issues help us to refute the Librarian's speculative "dream that [the mirror in the hallway] represents and promises the infinite."

The Architects (Translators) of Babel

[Updated on 8 May 2007]

I recently reread Borges's "The Library of Babel" and realized that the physical layout of the library is unclear, at least to me.

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between [en el medio], surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite ... Light is provided by some spherical fruits which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.

That is James Irby's translation. Anthony Kerrigan, to my mind more plausibly, puts the ventilation shafts "in the middle [en el medio]" of the hexagons, not between them. What I hadn't noticed until now is that the galleries seem to be connected by the stairwell, two-by-two: each gallery is connected to only one other gallery, i.e., only "one of the free sides ... opens onto another gallery". This would apply also to this other gallery, which thus opens onto the first. These two galleries are connected to the others only by means of the stairs. That is, the Library is a tower.

Given the height of such a tower, however, it would be impossible to "see ... the upper and lower floors". This leads me to think that this, too, is an error in the translation. Borges had written, "Desde cualquier hexágono se ven los pisos inferiores y superiores: interminablemente." Though I have no independent understanding of Spanish, I think his meaning would be better captured by, "From any hexagon the floors above and below [i.e., the superior and inferior floors] can be seen: interminably."

Andy Wilkins seems to agree with me about this point, though not the previous one. Kerrigan, it seems to me, botches this point completely by rendering "y" as "or" rather than "and", which my Spanish-English dictionary, in any case, does not license. That is, Kerrigan is suggesting a very finite height for the Libary so that from any gallery one can see either the top or the ground floor.

If anyone has any thoughts, I'm all ears.

[Continued here.]

Roundness

"When I began my earlier book to talk about the 'world' (and not about this tree or table)..."

Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Redacted from the Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough)

A reader of this blog emailed me about a quote I had posted from Borges's "An Investigation of the Word", one of his "disowned" early works. While I can see why he might have thought it was unsuccessful, I like the approach he takes. "What is the psychological process whereby we understand a sentence?" asks Borges. And his approach to answering it is to analyse a single sentence from the Quixote ("In a place in La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall ...") word for word in order to locate "the content its words yield to the reader". It is a naive approach, but one I have great respect for. There is too much philosophy of language that produces apparently sophisticated theories without providing a single detailed application, a single complete analysis.

I called my PhD dissertation Likeness and wanted to call the follow up Composure, but I think both words subscribe to a vain philosophical profundity. (That probably won't stop me in the end, of course.) I'm now thinking of calling it Roundness. In it, I want to provide a full answer to the question, "What is the experience of the roundness of a plate?" We are all capable of having this experience; but in what does it consist?

Composure and likeness are, I think, part of what Wittgenstein called the illusory "super-order of super-concepts". That is, one imagines that the task of philosophy is not to analyse specific compositions or specific likenesses but to provide a theory of composition and likeness "as such". But if these theories are to mean anything to us they must usefully guide our practical investigations (note that Borges and Wittgenstein used the same word). "If the words, 'language', 'experience', 'world', have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words 'table', 'lamp', 'door'." (PI§97) It is in the spirit of that humility that I want to write my first real book.

Composure

The empirical concept of a plate is homogeneous with the pure geometrical concept of a circle. The roundness which is thought in the former can be intuited in the latter. (KRV A137/B176)

That's how it looks from the point of view of "pure reason". Passion would demand the introduction of a craftsman of some sort, an artist.

The normative (e)motion of the potter's wheel is homogeneous with the pure[raw] sculptural emotion of the cylinder. The spinning that can be felt in the former can be instituted in the latter.

The book I want to write, called Composure, would begin with this image of a plate on a wheel, this homology (a homology of two homogeneities), and then develop about twenty-five of its moments of reason and their twenty-five homologous moments of passion. E.g.,

concept/emotion
intuition/institution
seeing/doing
thought/feeling
perception/action
fact/act
given/taken
appearance/surface
sensation/motivation
thing/person
space/time
relation/position
object/subject
picture/diagram
world/history

.../...

I will confine each moment to the space of a single page, and arrange the homologous expressions on facing pages (a "parallel edition" of reason/passion). I know that such symmetry does not appeal to everyone, but I need to see how it works out on the page.

[Update: Either I or Norman Kemp Smith seem to have mixed up "former" and "latter" in the above quote. I've fixed it now and it makes much better sense. Also, I think it might help to rewrite Kant's formula as follows: Our empirical grasp of a plate is homogeneous with the pure geometrical concept of a circle, for the roundness that is thought in the former can be intuited in the latter. This allows us the following variation: The normative motion of the potter's wheel is homogeneous with the pure sculptural emotion of a cylinder, for the turning that can be felt in the former can be instituted in the latter.]

[Update 2: Norman Kemp Smith's 'misreading' follows Vaihinger. It appears in the footnotes to both the current German (Felix Meiner Verlag) edition and the Guyer & Wood (Cambridge University Press) edition. Presskorn has a plausible explanation for Vaihinger's reading in the comments below.]

Motivation, Surface, Image

The Pangrammaticon posits a Critique of Pure Passion to serve as a shadow cabinet (of horrors) to the Kantian critique.

Separate from any possible representation, people impinge upon our lives as motivations.

In so far as people are "represented" to us (in conation*) as subjects, whether correctly or incorrectly, we call our relation to them surfaces.

A surface with its motivation removed is an image.

Now, such immobile images of course don't actually exist. But the image is that component of the surface that is separate from the motivations that occasion it.

Literature is the cultivation of imagery through the very minimal motility of letters.

The white page with black marks on it is all the "motivation" we are offered.

This is still not pure imagery. Reading involves anticipation: projected motivations.

The image is "sticky", as Kasey might say. It will always be composed in a field of motivation. And yet, each image will have its own degree of articulateness. It will occupy experience more or less intensely, i.e., it will be a better or worse product of the imagination.

Even as we acknowledge that images owe much to motivations, it is important to keep the possibility of a life of minimal imagery in mind: the complete absence of any artifice in our motivations (and thus the dissolution of the difference between a person, a motivation and a surface). Such a life might, of course, be fun. But it would be demonstrably illiterate; it would be inarticulate.

The next post will introduce a book-length project I'm working on under the title Composure. My aim is to provide a complete pangrammatical articulation of a single image, viz., Kant's plate. "The empirical concept of a plate," he says, "is homogeneous with the pure geometrical concept of a circle. The roundness which is thought in the latter can be intuited in the former." (KRV A137/B176) In the shadow critique of passion, we would read the following: "The normative emotion of a sling is homogeneous with the pure chronological emotion of a cycle. The revolution that is felt in the latter can be institutionalized in the former."

------------
*My Concise Oxford Dictionary is remarkably "pangrammatical". Conation is the homologue of cognition. The COD defines the former as "the desire to perform an action" and that latter as "knowing, perceiving, or conceiving as an act or faculty distinct from emotion and volition". The homologue of the COD definition of conation (and thus a definition of cognition) is "the belief in the representation of a perception"; the homologue of the definition of cognition (and thus a definition of conation) is "mastering, acting, or emoting as a fact or activity distinct from conception and intellection". It's a bit rough, but it provides a useful analysis of the "stickiness" of the imaginary field.

Sensation, Appearance, Image

I think the following determinations are vaguely Kantian.

Separate from any possible representation, things impinge upon our lives as sensations.

In so far as the things are "represented" to us (in cognition) as objects, whether correctly or incorrectly, we call our relation to them appearances.

An appearance with its sensation removed is an image.

Now, such insensate images of course don't actually exist. But the image is that component of the appearance that is separate from the sensation (in fact, sensations) that occasion it.

Literature is the cultivation of imagery through the very minimal sensibility of letters.

The white page with black marks on it is all the "sensation" we are offered.

This is still not pure imagery. (To my mind, the Critique of Pure Reason fails precisely to establish the "purity" of any of the faculties convincingly.) Reading involves memory: recollected sensations.

The image is "sticky", as Kasey might say. It will always be composed in a field of (in part) sensation. And yet, each image will have its own degree of articulateness. It will occupy experience more or less clearly, i.e., it will be a better or worse product of the imagination.

Even as we acknowledge that images owe much to sensations, it is important to keep the possibility of a life of minimal imagery in mind: the complete absence of any artifice in our sensations (and thus the dissolution of the difference between a thing, a sensation and an appearance). Such a life might, of course, be fun. But it would be demonstrably illiterate; it would be inarticulate.

The next post will repeat these determinations in terms of motivations and surfaces. An image is a surface separate from its motivation.

ABC of Imagery

From Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading:

Date says: 'A canzone is a composition of words set to music.'

I don't know any better point to start from.

Coleridge or De Quincey said that the quality of 'a great poet is everywhere present, and nowhere visible as a distinct excitement', or something of that sort.

This would be a more dangerous starting-point. It is probably true. (31)

To tonight's post:

Wittgenstein says: 'We make ourselves images of the facts.'

I don't know any better point to start from.

Kant said that 'the image is a product of of the empirical faculty of reproductive imagination', or something of that sort.

This would be a more dangerous starting-point. It is probably true.

Sense, Image, Motive

The image is an artifice between sensation and motivation.

It is sense imitating motive.

And vice versa.

More later.

Anstalt und Anschauung

In German the difference between a perspective and an intuition is gently blended (at least for me) in the word Anschauung, which can mean "view" (as in Weltanschauung) and intuition (as Kant uses it). Likewise, the German word Anstalt blends the difference between facilities (like asylums, prisons, homes and schools) and institutions (like madness, punishment, family and education).

A perspective is an order of visibility, while a facility is an order of manipulability. Intuitions and institutions are the immediate moment of perspectives and facilities respectively.
A perspective determines what things can be seen, while a facility determines what people can do (mainly in the sense of who can carry our particular tasks). But intuitions and institutions determine the immediate meanings of the available perceptions and actions, their use if you will.

I think they are interdependent. There is no home without a family; there is no asylum without a madman. There is no "what" without a "who" to find it shiny, fresh, salient, and profitable. There is nothing to see if there is nobody to do something with it. There is nobody without nothing comes of it.

Another Love Poem

With this

Facility

That becomes

Impotence

A Love Poem

From my

Perspective

You are

Ignorance

The Lyre and the Lamp

Working on a slightly different problem over a year ago, I said in passing that I would like to find a word that is for philosophy what "lyric" is for poetry. I think I have now found it.

Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms tells us that "a lyric is usually fairly short ... and it usually expresses the feelings and thoughts of a single speaker in a personal and subjective fashion." The philosophical unit that resembles the lyric in size is the aphorism. Interestingly, it expresses the thoughts and feelings of any speaker in an impersonal and objective fashion. The lyric is an emotional specificity, I want to say, while the aphorism is a conceptual generality. They are staples of poetry and philosophy respectively. As Cuddon notes, while there are other kinds, "lyric poetry, which is to be found in most literatures, comprises the bulk of all poetry." I'm not sure that aphorisms comprise the "bulk" of philosophy in the Western tradition (though certainly its popular reception), but it is iconic of philosophy in an important sense.

Etymology offers an interesting insight here. Lyric can of course be traced back to the lyre that accompanied the lyric (a song) in ancient Greece. Aphorism, meanwhile, can be traced to the horos, meaning boundary. An aphorism is the use of words to mark off an area with boundaries. A lyric is the use of words to sing a tune accompanied by a lyre.

So the question of the correspondingly concrete "instrument" of philosophy became clear to me. A lamp. Philosophy consists in the construction of "elucidations", Wittgenstein said.

"I am looking for an honest man," said Diogenes, holding up his lamp in broad daylight.

The light that a lamp spreads marks a boundary. This also grants philosophy a suitably spatial orientation, while poetry, in its association with song, is oriented in time. All this is working out quite nicely. But there's more.

The lamp is to the eye what the lyre is to the hand. (Roughly. Bit more work to be done there.) Finally, expanses are the pangrammatical homologue of vibrations. A vibrating string in a circle of light. There is an ideogram of the relation of poetry to philosophy in that image.

Curiosity and Sincerity

At the end of the "Immediate Need of Confucius", Ezra Pound offers the following observation, which I think remains relevant.

We are bedevilled with false diagnoses. We are obfuscated with the noise of those who attribute all troubles to irrelevant symptoms of evil. We are oppressed by powerful persons who lie, who have no curiosity, who smear the world and their high offices with Ersatz sincerity. (SP, p. 94)

Now, real sincerity, Confucian sincerity, if you will, was for Pound the key to decent social order, and amounted to "precise verbal definition" (good grammar, I like to say). But I've always found Pound's disappointment with the curiosity of our leaders to be the most profound insight in this passage.

The two intersect in the expression "what's the word?", i.e., the sincere statement of the limit of one's knowledge, accompanied by the desire to overcome one's ignorance, or at least a "willingness to move away from one area of semi-ignorance" (cf. ABC, p. 35).

I want to propose that sincerity--the pursuit of the "right word"--is located at the intersection of hope and faith, courage and curiosity. I believe that the urge to create, the artistic motive, the urge toward innovation in form, arises because of a very, very subtle imbalance in the pull of these influences. It is not that artists are especially "unbalanced", however. On the contrary, non-artists (or artists in a creative slump) are precisely that because they are dominated by only one moment: they live on hope or faith or courage or curiosity, often serially. Artists, by contrast, will (at the crucial moment) not let faith extinguish their curiosity, nor let their hope render their courage irrelevant.

Their sincerity is therefore very complicated. That, I think, is what Pound was complaining about. Our leaders, as it were, "honestly don't care" what is going on. Mainly because it's all happening so fast. "An age-old intelligence is not lost in an age of speed," however (Pound, SP, p. 94). Poetry unwobbles the pivot, rectifies the heart.

One last thing about curiosity. Heidegger dealt with it as a dimension of "everydayness" and therefore saw it as a "deficient" mode of Being. But what he understood by curiosity (Neugier) was a desire for novelty, a longing, if you will, for news. Gossip. He did not mean a longing for news that stays news. But that is what we mean. We mean the result of tempering our curiosity with hope, faith and courage. And all the reciprocal effects of this: form.

See also "Li and/or Ethos" and/
or "Form and/or Grammar"

Hope and Courage

for Tony Tost

What I am thinking of is the man of imagination and science, whose courage is infinite because his curiosity surpasses his courage.

Vladimir Nabokov

Hope and courage are, arguably, emotions. That is, they are conditions of the possibility of action or, where opportunities for action are lacking, they are conditions of the possibility of feeling. As such, however, they seem to be at least provisionally opposed in force. Given sufficient courage, an action may be possible without much hope. Likewise, given sufficient hope, the deed may require very little courage. Intellectuals will no doubt speak of "the courage to hope", but I think this is often a sophism, and, no doubt just as often, a well intentioned philosophical error.

We are interested in form. And form is an aspect of experience that comes to light in the juxtaposition of pangrammatical homologies, in the passage between the people that pertain to our power and the things that pertain to our knowledge, in the interstice between the emotion and the concept.

Faith and curiosity are, arguably, concepts. That is, they are conditions of the possibility of perception or, where opportunities for perception are lacking, they are conditions of the possibility of thought. As such, however, they seem to be at least provisionally opposed in force. Given sufficient curiosity, a perception may be possible without much faith. Likewise, given sufficient faith, the vision may require very little curiosity. Moralists will no doubt speak of "the curiosity of faith", but I think this is often a lyricism, and, no doubt just as often, a high spirited poetical mistake.

Wittgenstein said that genius is merely talent exercised with courage. Pound said that the measure of a man's civilization is his hope. It is under these conditions that we pursue the forms. (Our invisible brides? Tony's eternal pursuit of Agnes?) With curiosity and with faith.

Case Notes 2

In my now very tattered Basic Kafka, there is a chronology of events in Kafka's life. The entry for 1917 reads:

First half: Writes "The Hunter Gracchus." Learns Hebrew. Spring: Writes "The Great Wall of China." July: Second engagement to Felice Bauer. August: Begins coughing up blood. September 4: Diagnosis of tuberculosis. Moves in with sister Ottla in Zürau. September 12: Leave of absence from office. November 10: Diary entries break off. End of December: Breaking of second engagement to Felice Bauer. Autumn and winter: Writes aphorisms (octavo notebooks).

There is an (Ambrose) Biercean chuckle in me that rears itself at the sequence "July: [gets engaged]. August: Begins coughing up blood." I always imagine that the graduate student who compiled the chronology arranged the facts intentionally to achieve this effect, and that Eric Heller either didn't notice it or allowed it. It may also have been perfectly unintentional, of course.

In any case, a lot of other things no doubt happened to Kafka in 1917. And other arrangements of the details already presented are obviously possible. Consider the following list:

Begins coughing up blood. Leave of absence from office. Moves in with sister. Diary entries break off. End of December. Writes aphorisms.

It is obviously this sort of sensibility that lies behind Kate Greenstreet's case sensitive. It produces wonderful passages like the following:

Several glass ashtrays, the panther lamp. The light
bent toward the map. I spent a long time under the table, learning
to recognize wires. How we could change her.

How the bullet is scraped as it moves through the barrel.

The subject is distant, and dark.

It's not who dunnit that matters here, but how rooms look in detective novels. Not what surveillance uncovers but what it feels like to watch. There is an aesthetics of private investigation that is here freed from the plot. Also here:

There might be a group of people who meet every year at a summer house.
All that nature. A single mouthful can kill a man.

The poems concentrate our attention on what makes a whole range of mediocre movies succesful (it isn't the suspense, nor the action, nor the sex). Toxicology and balistics and nobody really dies.

Case Notes 1

New Formal Homologies

poetry

{ courage , power , hope }

::

{ curiosity , knowledge , faith }

philosophy

Form and/or Grammar

There is nothing more human (that is, less mineral, vegetal, animal, and even angelical) than grammar.

Jorge Luis Borges



I am a grammarian.
We will or we will not cry together.

Getrude Stein



What I'm desperate for, from myself and others, is a poetry & poetics that pushes its innovative & expressive powers, and new forms, towards the invention, or construction, or even the fabrication, of things like courage & hope.

Tony Tost

The Philosophical Image

Kasey's recent post made me think of this footnote to an old poem of mine.

We lift images from appearances and apply them to surfaces never the other way round. A surface is that to which an image may be effortlessly applied. An appearance is that from which it is lifted without strain. To imagine is sometimes to see and sometimes to do. The image may equally well be seen or done. The same image is equally compatible with surfaces and appearances. There are not some images that go better with surfaces than with appearances. But we must keep in mind that we cannot impose an image on an appearance; we must lift it from there. Nor can we lift an appearance from a surface, we must put it there. Thus, we lift an image off the appearance of the closed door and apply this same image in opening its surface. This whether in imagination or in experience. That is, the door appears closed as we run into it, and it surfaces in its openness as we pass through it. Note here that the door's openness is nothing to the door but belongs to you and me (the subject), i.e., that which is in motion. Its closedness, on the other hand, is the door’s imposition on our motion (and is objective).

The key passage in Kasey's post is this:

These poems do not "use" or "contain" images so much as they are images, images formed by language shaped into a "rested totality," as Zukofsky puts it. The attempt is to simulate the contours of a mental/perceptual experience through words, drawing on those words' referential function as well as the irrationally evocative sub-qualities of their morphemic and phonemic makeup (it is probably impossible not to do both at the same time in some proportion). The challenge facing the poet is then to translate a personal, subjective experience of language/reality into a textual message that will communicate itself, however incompletely, to another reader, by means other than simple reportage. This challenge is always doomed to at least partial failure...

This advances my understanding of poetry, philosophy and imagination. The step I want to take from here is to reject the challenge: why begin with "a personal, subjective experience" and then translate, convert or transform it into a "message" that can be "communicated" (though the phrase "that will communicate itself" indicates a bit of answer, an immediacy)?

To take two examples. Is there any (useful) sense in which "Message to the Department of the Interior" (Glenum) and "Social Life in Western North Carolina" (Mohammad) translate their authors' personal experiences of language/reality into messages that are then made more or less available to readers? It seems to me that these poems begin with the imagery already formed in an impersonal "outside". These poems will communicate as "imperfectly" with their creators as with any other reader, which is to say, they are perfectly, resolutely imaginary.

Obit Imitating Art?

When Albert Camus died, the literary journal X (I, 2, March 1960) ran an obituatry by Michel St. Denis. He writes:

The theatre was not for him a distraction: he used to say, in his warm and cheerful way (I knew him as a theatre man), that he loved sharing in group work, simply as a member of the team; his solitude as a writer, concerned with the plight of man, was fed and helped by his daily contact with the difficulties, failures and achievements, passions, generosity and pettiness of a company of actors. What to others is trouble and unbearable agitation was food and excitement to him. He wrote that the stadium and the auditorium of a theatre were the only places in the world where he did not feel guilty. (113)

In his 1956 novel The Fall, Camus did in fact write what St. Denis says he wrote. Here is the relevant paragraph:

To be sure, I occasionally pretended to take life seriously. But very soon the frivolity of seriousness struck me and I merely went on playing my role as well as I could. I played at being efficient, intelligent, virtuous, civic-minded, shocked, indulgent, fellow-spirited, edifying ... In short, there's no need of going on, you have already grasped that I was like my Dutchmen who are here without being here: I was absent at the moment when I took up the most space. I have never been really sincere and enthusiastic except when I used to indulge in sports, and in the army, when I used to act in plays we put on for our own amusement. In both cases there was a rule of the game, which was not serious but which we enjoyed taking as if it were. Even now, the Sunday matches in an overflowing stadium, and the theatre, which I loved with the greatest passion, are the only places in the world where I feel innocent. (87-8)

Now, those words may of course have been as true of Camus as they were of Clamence. But it seems to me that this is an unhappy coincidence in an obituary on the life of the author of The Myth of Sisyphus (an essay on the absurd). It would be a bit like using words originally (or even just also) "written" by Charles Kinbote or Humbert Humbert in an obituary for Nabokov. Wouldn't it?