ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  SUMMA THEOLOGICA, THOMAS AQUINAS (1265–74)

  “It seems that those who see the essence of God see all things in God. For Gregory says: ‘What do they not see, who see Him Who sees all things?’ But God sees all things. Therefore those who see God see all things….Further, whoever sees a mirror, sees what is reflected in the mirror. But all actual or possible things shine forth in God as in a mirror; for He knows all things in Himself. Therefore whoever sees God, sees all actual things in Him, and also all possible things….Further, whoever understands the greater, can understand the least, as Aristotle says. But all that God does, or can do, are less than His essence. Therefore whoever understands God, can understand all that God does, or can do….Further, the rational creature naturally desires to know all things. Therefore if in seeing God it does not know all things, its natural desire will not rest satisfied; thus, in seeing God it will not be fully happy, which is incongruous. Therefore he who sees God knows all things.” Use the Ctrl key to find and replace “God” with “Google,” “Apple,” or the “Five Eyes” (the United States, U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand: the five nations that share signals intelligence), throughout.

  INDEX LIBRORUM PROHIBITORUM (FIRST EDITION 1559, FINAL EDITION 1948)

  A book necessitated by books: Gutenberg’s invention stilled the copyist’s hand, and ensured that texts were no longer the exclusive possessions of the aristocracy and Church. The democratization, along with the secularization, of “content,” suggested the establishment of institutional controls—if governments and ecclesiastical bodies had ceased to be the primary sources of reading material, they could at least license the printers who were, and regulate the materials they published. The first edition of the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum—Index of Prohibited Books—was superintended by Pope Paul IV, and blacklisted over five hundred works for reasons not just of heresy or blasphemy, but also of anticlericalism, and obscenity; further, it set rules regarding book distribution that curtailed the influx of illicit texts from outside the Holy See’s dominion. The Index’s second edition, authorized by the Council of Trent and so referred to as the Tridentine Index, relaxed the standards of its predecessor, in that it distinguished between books to ban, and books merely to censor, and was more forgiving toward scientific works, except for those by Protestants. Taken in all its editions, the Index was both a guide to the evil opinions of heliocentrists (Kepler and Newton), pantheists (Bruno and Spinoza), Romantics (Balzac and Zola), and fascists (Alfred Rosenberg and Gabriele D’Annunzio), as well as a registry of the occulted holdings of the Vatican Library, which was required to obtain a copy of every book it proscribed. Paul VI abolished the Index in 1966—and in doing so appended it to another Index: that of Church books the Church has repudiated. Still, the list lives on, and has now been made searchable, at beaconforfreedom.org.

  EPISTOLAE HO-ELIANAE, JAMES HOWELL (1645–55)

  An all-over-the-map, four-volume autobiography—which, because it’s semifictionalized, and because it’s written as correspondence, qualifies it for the distinction of the first epistolary novel in English—Epistolae Ho-Elianae is more regularly referred to by its more regular title, Familiar Letters. Its Anglo-Welsh author, Howell, was arguably the first English-language author to earn his living solely from writing. He was the quintessential freelance, producing histories, political tracts, polyglot dictionaries, and wisdom miscellanies (English Proverbs, 1659, noted: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”). The variety of Howell’s interests—and the variety of his prefreelance-writing employment: as a tutor of and secretary to the nobility, and as the traveling representative of a glass manufacturer—accounts for the varied settings of his Letters (Germany, Italy, Poland, prison), and the varied nature of Letters’ addressees (family, friends, ambassadors of the British Crown, fellow belletristic hacks, and chummy sea captains encountered along the way). The only aggregating premise to this P.O. box of prose is Howell’s naïve but endearing conviction that life and writing were synonymous and that everything that ever happened to him deserved to be written down. Beyond that: that everything that ever happened to him deserved to be communicated (published).

  GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, JONATHAN SWIFT (1726)

  A “projector,” to Johnson’s Dictionary, is “one who forms schemes,” and, in its second definition, “one who forms wild impracticable schemes.” In Lagado, capital of Balnibarbi, Lemuel Gulliver is given a tour of the Academy of Projectors, an organization dedicated to “putting all Arts, Sciences, Languages, and Mechanics upon a new Foot.” Which is to say, dedicated to putting them onto, or through, a computer, with which “the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks, and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study.” Gulliver relates: “It was twenty Foot Square, placed in the middle of the Room. The Superficies was composed of several bits of Wood, about the bigness of a Die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Paper pasted on them, and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language, in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order. The Professor then desired me to observe, for he was going to set his Engine at Work. The Pupils at his Command took each of them hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the Edges of the Frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the Lads to read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame; and where they found three or four Words together that might make part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes. This Work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn the Engine was so contrived, that the Words shifted into new places, as the square bits of Wood moved upside down.”

  THE TELEPHONE DIRECTORY, CONNECTICUT DISTRICT TELEPHONE COMPANY (1878)

  In 1877, an inventor from New Haven named George Coy witnessed a telephone demonstration by Alexander Graham Bell and immediately went about founding the Connecticut District Telephone Company—the world’s first commercial telephone exchange. In 1878, the company published its first directory—neither a white pages nor a yellow pages, just a single sheet of stiff cardboard. The company’s fifty subscribers were listed only by name. Numbers weren’t required or even useful: An operator connected, and was privy to, all calls. The second edition of the directory, published a year later, was a bound affair, listing nearly four hundred names, alongside directions for telephone operation, guidelines for telephone etiquette, an advertisement for Watkin’s Automatic Signal Telegraph (a business that took telegrams via telephone dictation), and informative essays on “Progress in Electric Lighting” and “The Microphone.”

  “STATISTICAL MECHANICS AND IRREVERSIBILITY,” ÉMILE BOREL (1913)

  Not the first version of Swift’s scenario (which has also been imagined by Leibniz, Pascal, Cicero, and Aristotle), but the first to involve singes dactylographes—“typing monkeys.” Borel, the French probabilist, cracks his knuckles: “Let us imagine that a million monkeys have been trained to strike the keys of a typewriter at random, and that…these typist monkeys work eagerly ten hours a day on a million typewriters of various kinds….And at the end of a year, these volumes turn out to contain the exact texts of the books of every sort and every language found in the world’s richest libraries.” The implication being that, given enough monkeys, typewriters, paper, and time, even Borel’s sentences are destined to be written again, as is this sentence, and so on.

  THE FOUNDATION PIT, ANDREI PLATONOV (1930)

  “To change the world”: Half a century before this became the sanctimonious mantra of Silicon Valley, it was the violent imperative of Soviet Russia. Platonov’s darkling novel concerns a pit being dug to accommodate the foundations of a vast residential tower that will ultimately shelter the entire population of an
anonymous city in the USSR. Once the tower is finished, all the people’s former dwellings will be destroyed. “And after ten or twenty years, another engineer would construct a tower in the middle of the world, and the laborers of the entire terrestrial globe would be settled there for a happy eternity. With regard to both art and expediency, Prushevsky could already foresee what kind of composition of static mechanics would be required in the center of the world, but he could not foresense the psychic structure of the people who would settle the shared home amid this plan—and still less could he imagine the inhabitants of the future tower amid the universal earth. What kind of body would youth have then? What agitating force would set the heart beating and the mind thinking?”

  FROM THE DIARIES

  WHAT’S IN THE BAG?

  The man stood barefoot at the security checkpoint and said, “Cancer.”

  OVERNIGHT FLIGHT WC

  “That toilet’s sure going to feel it in the morning.”

  SHOOTING

  When they go to shoot something set in the city, but in the past, they tend to use certain neighborhoods as “locations.” There are “locations” for every century, for every decade, for every year. This is what my cousin tells me. My cousin who earns her living renting out her apartment for shoots and so who lives on permanent vacation. Her apartment, she says, is very December 26, 1986, which was the date her husband left.

  IMPROMPTU FANTASIAS

  ON BENJAMIN DE CASSERES

  I have thought of writing the life of some great artist—Shelley, Manet, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Chopin, Keats, Sappho, Emerson, Nietzsche, Redon, for instance—directly from a complete inhalation of and meditation on their work without any regard to the facts. Wherever the known facts conflict with my mythus, I shall reject them or flatly deny them. It would be a fascinating undertaking—the lives of Shakespeare, Chopin, Verlaine, for instance, as I conceive them to have been from their faces and work alone.

  SUCH AN ENDEAVOR WOULD TAKE considerable egotism, and that Benjamin De Casseres was possessed of that quality is no “mythus” but verifiable fact. In this essay, we will try to be more responsible, though the sources are obscure. Given that De Casseres wrote regularly for newspapers and magazines in the most public city in the world, New York, during the heyday of the most public century before ours, the twentieth, it’s troubling that so little is known, and so little is the desire to know. There is hardly any scholarship about him (besides footnote mentions in a handful of doctoral dissertations regarding interwar New York literary society); none of his books are in print; and the manuscript of his thousand-page diary, Fantasia Impromptu (which is the source of my epigraphical paragraph), reposes in the basement of the New York Public Library, where I might have been the first person to read through its pages since they were interred there by De Casseres’s widow, Adele “Bio” Terrill, following her husband’s death in 1945.

  Benjamin De Casseres was born April 3, 1873, in Philadelphia, to a Jewish family of Sephardic descent. And so, an outsider: This man so vocal about his Manhattan credentials was born out of town, in the sixth borough. Not Ashkenazi like the majority of American Jewry, he was a nonimmigrant from comparatively exotic stock, taking on an Anglo-Saxon and Puritan literary establishment “with a genius that is profoundly Latin to my latter atom.” The family name derives from Cáceres, the ancestral capital of the same-named Spanish province, and De Casseres himself liked to speculate that he was related to a hero of his, Spinoza: One Samuel De Casseres married Spinoza’s youngest sister, Miriam, became a rabbi and scribe, and offered the funeral eulogy for his teacher, and Spinoza’s excommunicator, Rabbi Saul Levi Mortera of Amsterdam.

  De Casseres moved to New York by the turn of the century, began losing his hair, smoking cigars, drinking. Physically, De Casseres writes of himself: “I am strong meat; false teeth and babies, lay off! Fat and Jewish; bedroom eyes; voluptuous flesh.” Surviving photographs by Arnold Genthe show a paragon of sly dissolution, tempered by self-seriousness, in precariously situated pince-nez, dark worsted suit, and patterned, probably colorful, tie. (Genthe’s nitrate negatives date from 1925.)

  However, the most telling autobiographical detail might be that of the outsized ambition De Casseres did his narcissistic best to conceal. If the man was, as he weekly reminded himself in print, the equal if not better of any writer who ever lived, then he was so unwittingly, as if against his will. He was, he said, like Rip Van Winkle of the Catskills, in that he “grew famous while [he] slept. I slept all day and worked on a New York newspaper all night (1900 to 1920), and almost precisely at the end of twenty years I was astounded to find out that I was famous not only in my own country but that I was being translated into French by no less a person than Remy de Gourmont, who was writing about me in the Mercure de France and La France.”

  From his back rooms at 11 West 39th Street, a building that no longer exists, De Casseres mass-produced articles for dozens of publications: to begin with, The American Spectator, The Bookman, The Boston American, Chicago Examiner, Fra Magazine, Gay Book Magazine, The Greenwich Village Quill, Haldeman-Julius Monthly, Los Angeles Examiner, Metropolitan Magazine, New York Evening Post, The New York Herald, New York Journal-American, The New York Times, New York World, People’s Favorite Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philistine, Reedy’s Mirror, The Revolutionary Almanac, The San Francisco Examiner, The Smart Set, The Sun, The Washington Herald; he wrote for Alfred Stieglitz at Camera Work; at the American Mercury he was edited by H. L. Mencken. On a typical day, De Casseres might write a column on literature to be syndicated by the Hearst Service, ad copy for a cheesecake manufacturer, and the script of a radio commercial for “health syrup”: “I am a one-call salesman. If I don’t succeed at first, I never try again.”

  In 1913, he ran for mayor of New York, on a platform that called for Manhattan’s secession and the “legalization of human weakness.”

  De Casseres also amassed reams of drama and fiction: “And some days I love to write lines for poems I’ll never write.” His books and booklets include: The Adventures of an Exile; Anathema!: Litanies of Negation; Black Suns; The Book of Vengeance; Broken Images; The Chameleon; The Comedy of Hamlet; The Communist-Parasite State; The Complete American; Don Marquis; The Eighth Heaven; The Elect and the Damned; Enter Walt Whitman; The Eternal Return; Finis; Forty Immortals; I Dance with Nietzsche; The Individual Against Moloch; James Gibbons Huneker; The Last Supper; The Love Letters of a Living Poet; Mars and the Man; Mencken and Shaw; Mirrors of New York; The Muse of Lies; My New York Nights; The Overlord; Robinson Jeffers, Tragic Terror; The Second Advent; The Shadow-Eater; Sir Galahad: Knight of the Lidless Eye; Spinoza: Liberator of God and Man; The Superman in America; When Huck Finn Went Highbrow; Words, Words, Words. A more selfless preoccupation was editing The Sublime Boy, a volume comprising poems by his younger brother Walter, a depressed homosexual who committed suicide at the age of nineteen by hurling himself into the Delaware River. (Poet Edwin Markham, in a letter to De Casseres: “I am touched by your brother’s failure to fit himself to this tragic existence, touched also by the pathos of his fate”; other of the surviving De Casseres correspondents: British sexologist Havelock Ellis, French writer Maurice Maeterlinck, science-fiction writer Clark Ashton Smith, paranormal investigator Charles Fort, Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, poet Edgar Lee Masters, novelist Damon Runyon, and “Nietzschean” Oscar Levy.)

  But De Casseres’s posterity mainly rests on a single poem, “Moth-Terror,” first collected in the Second Book of Modern Verse in 1919, edited by journalist colleague Jessie Rittenhouse. The poem was subsequently recycled into numerous reprints that proliferated in schools, colleges, and book clubs even after WWII (nothing ensures a future like the lassitude of anthologists):

  I have killed the moth flying around my night-light; wingless and dead it lies upon the floor.

  (O who will kill the great Time-Moth that eats holes in my soul and that bur
rows in and through my secretest veils!)

  My will against its will, and no more will it fly at my night-light or be hidden behind the curtains that swing in the winds.

  (But O who will shatter the Change-Moth that leaves me in rags—tattered old tapestries that swing in the winds that blow out of Chaos!)

  Night-Moth, Change-Moth, Time-Moth, eaters of dreams and of me!

  All these elements of a life—the journalism, the interminable pamphleteering of poesy, the feverish letterwriting to more celebrated contemporaries—can be bound between two covers that don’t exist: De Casseres’s Fantasia Impromptu, subtitled ridiculously The Adventures of an Intellectual Faun. Unlike the preciously polished texts of the chapbooks and broadsides De Casseres self-published, sent around to friends for free and offered for sale to the general public for 50 cents apiece, this daybook—and, often, late-night book—could never be collected into finished form. Excerpts last appeared in an unedited 1976 Gordon Press Selected Works reprint of a privately subvented 1935 Blackstone edition (Blackstone seems to have been De Casseres’s own venture). “I can see the standpoint of the American publishers: an American thinker must be a fakir of some sort because fake is a national trait. They simply will not believe in the possibility of my existence—as an American. They can, and do, conceive me as a Spaniard or a Frenchman, but as a Philadelphia-born original—Jamais!”