Journal Entry from the Plague Year

• Go for jog.  Unusually many pedestrians, many cars, the which is a surprise when the state is officially on lock-down.  Return home, shower, and at table with the other four, conjecture, that Perrysburgers more than Ann Arboreans feel not the urgency of the plague; for, whereas the latter, minded by the return home of thousands of university students and by the now raging epidemic in Detroit, practise caution and keep the streets largely empty of traffic, the former are more insulated and likely feel themselves less vulnerable.  The which sentiment, one notes, prevailed in Defoe’s account of many London parishes which, having initially escaped the plague, blithely congratulated themselves, only to be latterly devastated by its swift and merciless descent upon them.  So might we expect Perrysburgers to be complacent until we begin to hear first of friends and kin, then of neighbors, infected and perished.  To emphasize this point, I told them what I had earlier learned through Facebook, that Adam Nowland, the star speaker of Perrysburg’s first speech and debate team and one of my coaches in Mock Trial, is now quarantined at a Columbus hospital with the Wuhan ’flu.  Even in just the past two months, never mind the last three hundred and fifty years, we have had repeated examples of communities vainly reassuring themselves of their safety from the plague: for at first it was widely assumed that the plague was only Wuhan’s problem, then only China’s, then only the Far East’s, then a problem overseas, before it became Seattle’s problem, then the two coasts’, now all the cities; and yet, judging from the crowded stores to-day and the cars jaunting hither and yon, one would guess, since the weather would hardly elicit joy-riders, that we were approaching an holiday.  To watch, moreover, the vacillations of the market, which surged earlier this week merely on the news that there would be massive stimulus from the Senate, and briefly again to-day when the House ratified the same, one would think that all will end well, despite that perhaps one fifth of the work-force is now disemployed and that international commerce is no less altered than by a world-wide war.  In fact, one suspects that there is an unrecognized trauma in this swift and universal disaster, which has left almost everyone stunned, prompting him either to vociferous denial, as made by the President and his satellites, or to silent and grievous longing for the familiar usages of daily life so abruptly lost, whose vestiges might be as if resurrected by an increase in the stock market or by the frequenting of grocery stores.  These blind stumblings into calamity, I say, were already visible in the Far East, and yet nobody recognizes them: the Chinese government has lied repeatedly, and yet even the New York Times reports the official count of the dead from Wuhan for comparison with those in New York, Milan, and elsewhere as if they were veridical data and not the conjurations of Communist propagandists.  The plague is all but certain to return thither whence it came, and yet journalists write as if it has quit China like an ejected guest.  If China has truly succeeded in eradicated a pernicious and invisible threat that has baffled the better part of the world, it will only be at a calamitous cost to its economy.  Blindness prevails even among those who should know the most.  But let it be recorded her, to remind whoso would remember the first months of the first plague year in over a century, that already, before our lives have become truly difficult, being as yet mere inconvenienced, there are none who have displayed themselves so shallowly and feebly loathsome, so craven and incompetent, as those in the orbit of Donald Trump.  I say not Republicans all, for Ohio’s governor, Michael Dewine, is earnest and true.  But the charlatans of Fox News, who lately enunciate that “The Cure Is As Bad as the Disease” to decry the stay-at-home enactments, insist that the nation’s economy is worth dying for.  By which they mean—Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and others—that it were better that other people than themselves die, lest themselves be inconvenienced and their idol dethroned because of the economy that his policies had weakened years before the plague.  Let history remember that these two-bit school-yard bullies, with Trump as their doltish ring-leader, represent an evil not ingenious or conniving, not perversely principled or callously systematic, nay not a respectable and efficient evil, as it were, but rather an evil that is lazy, incompetent, and dazzlingly obvious even to an idiot.  May they everyone of them perish by this plague, and may their fœtid smoke waft over future generations of Americans as a repugnant memorial to the depths of disgust which in their own day they elicited in the fair-minded.

That that that that that that that that

See to it, at that, that that that that ‘that’ that that man had written be more clearly expressed.  Write it as ‘this.’

See to it at that that that that that that that that man had written be more clearly expressed.  Write it as ‘this.’

Tu autem fac ut id quod illud ‘illud’ quod ille scripserat sit clarius. Id ‘hoc’ scribatur.

The Wind Rises

The movie is very misleading upon the first viewing, seeming, at least to me, to be a biographical picture about a renowned aeronautical engineer of national significance to Japan and of personal significance to Hayao Miyazaki, whose father’s company supplied parts for the Zero during the War. Perhaps, as I did, you saw the film at first as little more than a pet project to lionize a childhood hero while perhaps celebrating a national figure. And even if one is alerted to some higher objective than an entertaining biography by the epigraph by Valéry, the rather self-contained sequences of the movie's first half have the episodic feel of a biographical picture. Jiro is withal a pleasant, congenial fellow with not only talent but vision and love. He seems a child's hero, possessed of determination, love, vision, passion, decorum, and boyish innocence. But part of the genius of the movie is that the first half seems to be going steadily in a certain predictable direction, when the final third changes course, not radically, but enough to see the preceding scenes having been cast, so to speak, in a new light. Thus there is a coherent light shining forward bearing the biographical logic of the movie, and a light shining backward bearing what I should call the moral and aesthetic logic.

In the light of the end, what seemed biographical episodes—such as of his defending the young boy from bullies near the beginning, his heroics during the earthquake—, and those strange and even eerie parts near the end become part of a coherent unity. That unity is of Jiro not as an innocent and boyish engineer sadly deprived of his dream by the war, but as an idealist who is gradually induced to moral indifference, if not indeed to moral corruption.

However simplistic he may be, Jiro is neither stupid nor shallow. Rather, Hanjo, his friend, is our archetype of the unimaginative but competent engineer, and it is he who designs the unimaginative and serviceable, albeit deeply flawed, heavy bomber, the Betty, whose fuel-filled wings are wont to explode when strafed. It is he who laments Japan's backwardness, he who marries in a presumably arranged marriage, he who despairs of the future, and he who merely plods along. Morally and politically, he is cynically realistic, observing that the Japanese government could feed starving Japanese with mountains of sponge cake with the money being paid to the Germans for military technology.

Jiro on the other hand is, as you observed, sentimental, and is, I would venture, far more than that. Recall my observation of the Zero’s first appearance, in Jiro’s dream land---how embryonic, how organic, like a flower-bud or a pupal butterfly. Surely this lifelike design embodies a much higher and abstract level of thought than the rickety canvas planes of Caproni and the brutally metallic planes of Junkers. If from a mackerel bone Jiro could design a plane, then the Zero is a work of art, manifesting the nature's mathematical perfection. And that is what most defines Jiro: perfectionism. His sentimentality is merely part and parcel of his general absorption in the abstractions of engineering.

And it is in this behalf, of Jiro's perfectionism and idealism, that the film becomes quite depressing. Jiro is a perfectionist with vision, but he grows ever less able, or perhaps disposed, to match great vision with good deeds. We are shown time and again that that he is naturally benevolent, never wishing harm to anyone, but he is not always beneficent. In fact, I believe that his beneficence declines throughout the movie. Early on, he confronts the a clique of bullies and defends a small boy; after the earthquake, he saves Naoko and her servant; a little later, he tries to feed some starving children, but becomes depressed when they refuse his offer of sponge cake. He thenceforward becomes progressively less effective in his beneficence until at last he commits the horrendous crime of abandoning his terminally ill wife to perfect his warplane. Did you not wonder why in God's name was he smoking next to his consumptive wife? And why did he not insist upon her returning immediately to the sanatorium to recover, as his sister and Mr. Kurokawa, his boss, suggested?

Which elicits, to my mind, an interesting answer: Jiro was, however innocent his ultimate intentions, weak, and moreover, in so far as he paid attention to the outside world, fatalistic. He knew and lamented that his aeroplane would be used for war, and he even knew that Japan was doomed to lose, but he preferred to ignore the broader reality and to absorb himself in his plane; he knew Naoko was seriously ill, he knew he ought not smoke in her presence (his first inclination is still to go outside), but he preferred to have her with him. Even worse for him morally, he ultimately cared more for the plane than for her. He recognized his errors with the plane---that its engine was too weak, that it needed to be lighter and more aerodynamic---and he corrected them forthwith. He knew Naoko was ill, but he did not consider just how ill. His native benevolence, it seems, was simply overwhelmed by negligence. And Miyazaki is at pains to show that, even in Jiro's difficult situation as an engineer for an evil government, a government which had sicked its thought police against him, he need not so exert himself on their behalf. Junkers, we are told, is resisting the Nazi's, even if futilely, and Honjo does what is expected of him and no more.

The hardest part of the movie is understanding the relation between Jiro's love for aviation and his love for Naoko. The two seem very closely intertwined, visually and thematically. Naoko and the plane both are closely associated with the wind; and remember that it is Naoko who inspires, or is at least the first to witness, the initial realization of Jiro's future Zero, as the paper airplane that he throws to her at the Magic Mountain-like resort. She thus witnesses the birth of his plane. Remember, too, that near the film's end, on the very day of the completed Zero's first successful flight, amid the rejoicing of his victory, he alone is of a sudden enveloped in a rather chilling silence, and he looks to the mountains, I suspect sensing that Naoko has just died.

Thus Naoko and the Zero are closely related in Jiro's mind, but while the ultimate nature of his love for them both is unclear, the tendencies of the two loves are somewhat clearer. His love for the Zero is that of a perfectionist, and thus inhuman and uncompassionate. The more he tends toward this ethereal ideal, the farther he strays from compassion, and hence the decline in his benevolence and beneficence. The Zero dehumanizes the love which Jiro so quickly displayed as a boy and a young man, and it turns what should be compassion and charity into the pursuit of mechanical perfection. Naoko, I think, was Jiro's chance to humanize this love with compassion. Howsoever it was, she seemed to possess for Jiro the same fascination as aviation, so I think we may speculate that, without the War, he might have chosen his wife over his plane. As it happened, though, the demands of the fascist government pressed him toward the plane. Still, he chose not only to meet the Navy's demand for a carrier plane, but to exceed them.

Such devotion hardly recommends Jiro's morality, for shifting the focus of his love from the Zero to Naoko would in no way have been a perversion or adulteration of his perfectionism. He and Naoko shared what can hardly be thought a vulgar physical love. Had he given his love wholly to her (and it seems all his love had to be put in one place) he might have attained a more transcendent and purer perfection. The Zero was a perfection of sorts, but in the end it was both futile, as Japan could only lose the war, and it was reduced to blackened wreckage on the ground. In a sense, of course, Jiro was doomed whichever he chose, for that Naoko, while she may have lived longer had she been more prudent, could hardly be expected to live long with tuberculosis. Even still, Jiro chose the easiest option, to enjoy her love for him as an ancillary to his perfectionism. He is surely guilty of that.

I should stress that I do not think that Miyazaki would have us censure Jiro as a totally unfeeling monster, but I do think that we are meant to mark his moral decline. Indeed, two parallel scenes rather neatly summarize this decline: Did you notice that the shot of Tokyo burning after the earthquake and the shot at the film's end of Tokyo burning after the firebombing were almost identical? The two scenes together show the progress of Jiro's twin inclinations, of flight (or the inhuman ideal) and of compassion (the human ideal). At the earthquake, his first instinct is heroism, but the aeronautical inclination is there, as we see when he looks up to the sky and imagines for a moment that he sees Caproni's planes among the airborne cinders of burning Tokyo. The final sequence introduces burning Tokyo in almost exactly the same way, with the crown of a billowing smoke cloud, then panning down to show us people on the hillside watching their city burn. The difference now is that there are actual planes in the sky, planes which Jiro himself designed, which are shooting down an American bomber. In the last instant before they move off-screen we see one of the Zeroes burst into flames, too. It is a futile struggle. I said before that the the wrecked planes on the ground were Japanese and American, but upon review I see that only two planes are represented in all the wreckage, both Japanese, being Jiro's and Honjo's.

I might add that the allusions to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain seem meaningful, too. Although the character Hans Castorp, the anti-Nazi German, shares his name with the protagonist of The Magic Mountain, the better parallel is certainly between The Magic Mountain's Hans Castorp and Jiro. Both are simple-minded but not in the least stupid, and both are generally benevolent, and both become diseased with a poisonous but very tempting idea. In The Magic Mountain, Castorp is more or less induced to become sick and stay at the sanatorium for years, during which time actual disease sets in and weakens him physically and morally before he ultimately decides to leave the sanatorium to fight in the Great War, in which he presumably dies. And it occurred to me also that Winterreise, which Jiro remarks upon while out for a walk in Berlin, tells the story of a young but utterly disappointed romantic.

In sum, while The Wind Rises is too well made to be unambiguous and to have any one obvious message, I see at least four reasons to feel pessimistic:

1. Beautiful dreams can be made the tools of destruction and evil, and are perhaps especially prone to such misuse.
2. An object of perfection or beauty may be an instrument of death and destruction. Perfection is amoral.
3. The benevolent and innocent may be moved by their dreams to moral indifference.
4. The way to highest beauty was neglected, and the way to corrupted beauty taken instead.

Picardian Humanism.

     I am not one to advocate identity as a concern to which we should devote much attention, and I see relatively little concern with it in texts before the last two hundred years, at least so far as cultural and ethnic identity are concerned.  Far greater was the concern with the nature of truth and goodness, or of God.  "Who am I?" was far less a concern, and was, I believe, largely subordinated to the concern with those larger, and I suppose worthier, concerns.  (Tangentially, I suppose "Who am I?" is a subsidiary question, seeing as it presupposed "I am."  I take comfort in that at least.  I am.  What matters it who I am, so long as I know the way to be good and right?)  I am wary of labels and group identities.  Let us interpret by the criterion of our reason, all the while recognizing that no one possesses absolute or infallible Reason.  Let us strive to find what is right and good, and recognize the right and good by their marker–beauty.
     But I will apply one label to myself proudly.  I will make it my project henceforward to elaborate this train of thought with references to the man himself as I rewatch TNG.  Sooner or later, though, the schools must recognize this as a potent and well-formed system of belief, articulated over seven years by the archrepresentative of the human race, that compassionate intellectual, that tried and true paragon of humanity, Captain Jean-Luc Picard.  In his honor, I shall call my own meager strivings at systematic belief "Picardian Humanism" (copyright 2016 Marshall C. Buchanan).  Let's see if I can add quotations and episode references later. Picardian humanism, in brief, though, is surely the belief in the fundamental, universal value of human life and betterment, and elaborated by the good captain of three centuries hence.

Stylistic Principles in Writing

     As I proceed with my thesis, it may be helpful, mainly for myself, to put into writing, the principles that I follow in developing my formal style.  Use of language is highly personal, I know, and so, while I find these principles reasonable, I should not

1.  Use all grammatical tools that English has to offer: Subordination.
• Subordinate clauses should be balanced.
• Periodic sentences should be reserved for emphasis.
2. Prefer Anglo-Saxon words to foreign.
3. Prefer shorter words.  Polysyllaby is a defect. 
4. Fewer words is preferable to more to express the same idea (this will often conflict with '3' and '4', especially with words of Greek origin). 
5. Avoid symbols.  Hyphens, slashes, dashes,
6. 1
7. 1
8. 1
9. 1
10.  

De Naturis Animantium

     A friend and I recently came upon a fragment of Suetonius (fr. 161), called the De Naturis Animantium, which gives in Latin the sounds of many different animals. I do not know whether others have done this already for an Anglophone audience, but I give a list below with the animals' names translated. I suspect, albeit waveringly, that a Latin ear would hear the root word as the imitative portion, the remainder as suffix. So if rugire is of lions, then I suppose the lion's sound is 'rugi'. For those without Latin, the various X-re endings indicate an infinitive (e.g., to roar, to chirp). Hence a lion trained in grammar would, I speculate, conjugate in the first person singular present, saying 'fremo' or 'rugio'. Surely this would be more an urbane declaration than a bestial exclamation.

     I believe that I am further supported in this proposition by Aristophanes's The Frogs, in which the eponymous animals do not conjugate their cry, βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ; thus, for those writing comics in Latin, the root should suffice for onomatopoeia.



Lion: fremere or rugire [the O.L.D. does not give the former as onomatopoeic]

Tiger: rancare

Leopard: felire

Panther: caurire

Bear: uncare or saevire

Wild boar: frendere

Lynx: urcare

Wolf: ululare

Snake: sibilare

Wild ass: mugilare

Stag: rugire

Cow: mugire

Horse: hinnire

Donkey: rudere or oncare

Swine: grunnire

Boar, uncastrated pig: quiritare

Ram: blatterare

Ewe: balare

Goat: miccire

Kid: bebare

Dog: latrare or baubari

Fox: gannire

Puppy: glattire

Hare: vagire

Weasels: drindrare

Mouse: mintrire or pipitare

Shrew-mouse: desticare

Elephant: barrire

Frog: coaxare [brekekex co-ax co-ax]

Crow: crocitare

Eagle: clangere

Hawk: plipiare

Vulture: pulpare

Kite: lupire or lugere

Swan: drensare

Crane: gruere

Stork: crotolare

Goose: gliccire or sclingere

Duck: tetrissitare

Peacock: paupulare

Rooster: cucurrire or cantare [latter simply means 'to sing']

Jackdaw: fringulire

Night bird, owl: cuccubire

Cuckoo: cuculare

Blackbird: frendere or zinziare

Thrush: trucilare or soccitare

Starling: passitare

Swallow: finitinnire or minurrire

("However, they say that minurrire applies to all of the smallest little birds")

Hen: crispire

Sparrow: titiare

Bee: bombire or bombilare

Cicada: fritinnire

The Egyptian dog licks and runs.








Suet. fr. 161

De Naturis Animantium

Leonum est fremere uel rugire, tigridum rancare, pardorum felire, pantherarum caurire, ursorum uncare uel saeuire, aprorum frendere, lyncum urcare, luporum ululare, serpentium sibilare, onagrorum mugilare, ceruorum rugire, boum mugire, equorum hinnire, asinorum rudere uel oncare, porcorum grunnire, uerrium quiritare, arietum blatterare, ouium balare, hircorum miccire, haedorum bebare, canum latrare seu baubari, uulpium gannire, catulorum glattire, leporum uagire, mustelarum drindrare, murium mintrire uel pipitare, soricum desticare, elephantum barrire, ranarum coaxare, coruorum crocitare, aquilarum clangere, accipitrum plipiare, uulturum pulpare, miluorum lupire uel lugere, olorum drensare, gruum gruere, ciconiarum crotolare, anserum gliccire uel sclingere, anatum tetrissitare, pauonum paupulare, gallorum cucurrire uel cantare, graculorum fringulire, noctuarum cuccubire, cuculorum cuculare, merulorum frendere uel zinziare, turdorum trucilare uel soccitare, sturnorum passitare, hirundinum fintinnire uel minurrire - dicunt tamen quod minurrire est omnium minutissimarum auicularum - gallinae crispire, passerum titiare, apum bombire uel bombilare, cicadarum fritinnire. Canis Aegyptius lambit et fugit.

Species of Sound: Raindrops and Wristwatches.

     Music is of two species.  At least, there are two sounds which to me bring ineffable pleasure––I am sure for personal and largely forgotten reasons, though I might retrace these through their web of associations: They are the sound of the rain, and the sound of my wristwatch.

     The one is a cadence, and marks time, but unevenly, accidentally, and determined by unseen and unpredictable fate. Lyrical music, ballads, all songs sentimental and impassioned call this to mind.  Chopin is a soft drizzle, Wagner a roaring storm.  Teresa Teng is the warm rain of early Summer, Meng T'ing-wei the finest mist of the melancholic early Spring.  The other is unmistakably artificial, both with the metallic regularity of its sound and the refinement entailed in its purpose, of demarcating the seconds with precision.  It sculpts time.  Bach above all is the clock of the greatest intricacy, his songs making a sculpture of perfect similarity (I think of the enormous symmetry of his Mass in B Minor).  Vivaldi is an eccentric little wristwatch, ticking merrily; Palestrina an old grandfather clock, its pendulum swinging slowly and sonorously.

     And both of these species, by their frequency and consistency, create a sort of sonic "ritual space", as a mat may be used to demarcate the ritual space for making tea.  These sounds create a self-contained universe, especially in the case of the wristwatch, whose spring, gears, and escapement one can picture working indefatigably in a universe of mathematical perfection.  But one is nature raw and powerful, the other man's attempt at distilling nature's perfection.