A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings

DIARY: HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD (YOU WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE) CONTINUED 1966

Once one gets interested in world improvement, there is no stopping. I began the following text immediately after finishing the first one. I gave it a length approximately the same but slightly different. The notebooks in which I wrote it were with me wherever I went. I finished it early in September 1966 in Pontpoint (par Pont­Sainte­ Maxence) north of Paris in the country home of John de Menil and in the room where Montesquieu, I was told, had also written and on a not too dissimilar subject. It was accepted by Maxine Groffsky for publication in the Spring 1967 issue of the zy Paris Review. DIARY: HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD (YOU WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE) CONTINUED 1966 XXX. The most, the best, we can do, we believe (wanting tozyxwvu give evidence of love), is to get out of the way, leave space around whomever or whatever it is. But there is no space! Difference between pennilessness now and pennilessness then: now we've got unquestioned credit. "In the Beginning was the Word." Pupul Jayakar (straight from India), talking about computers, said: An explosion of the Word; communication without language! (We'll still speak: a) for practical reasons; b) for the pleasure of it; c) to say what should/shouldn't be done.)zyxwvu Bird up and overhead. Friends we no longer see. Gone. Some died. XXXI. Mexico, India, Canada (changing citizenship). Electronic democracy (instantaneous voting on the 52 part of anyone)zyxwvu .· no sheep. World zyxw credit. Hearing my thoughts, he asked: Are you a Marxist? Answer: I'm an anarchist, same as you are when you're telephoning, turning on/off the lights, drinking water. Private prospect of enlightenment's no longer sufficient. Not just self- but social-realization.zyxwvu Jutler spoke of Semantography, universal picture language devised by C. X. Bliss, said it was rich in nouns while what we need's verbs. Servant problem. What's what? (Russia, U.S.A.) Which is which? I mentioned drugs. Kremen said the human mind's interesting enough in the non-toxic state. XXXII. Asked about housing utility. Fuller pointed out electrically­lit roadside telephone booths, twenty­four hour use of facilities. (How this came about escaped our notice, no voting or purchase involved. Bed, food, bath to be expected, added to telephone or available elsewhere: decentralization of living.) Up by our bootstraps! Lost in two different ways. There was also a fire to put out. Alone (no one to disagree with). Chess. Asked what he did, he said he'd studied meteorology, passed examinations, graduated, that weather's simple to predict. (What had his teachers had in mind?) "There's no reason for the mistakes that are generally made." XXXIII. Changes in aquariums: all the fish in the same tank; no Latin information. Cross­Texas, eighty miles per 53 hour, radio rocks and rolls (now I listen): "If it's a game, I won't play it. Don't just stand there. Tell me what's, what's, what's, what's on your mind."zyxwvutsrq He registered as a conscientious objector. Drafted anyway, he was put on a train going south. He escaped, was caught, spent a year in service. Then, since he never cashed any of the checks they'd given him, he received an honorable discharge. (Russian chickens had diseased muscles. Chemical therapies failed. Suddenly, the chickens were healthy. The muscular tissues'd been reduced to chaos, disorganized by electrical means.) XXXIV. Boddhisattva Doctrine: Enter Nirvana only when all beings, sentient, non­sentient, are ready to do likewise. Couldn't believe my eyes (stopping for lunch in Red Bud, Illinois): a single photograph of nature (mountains. lake, island, forests) enlarged, printed twice, once left to right, once right to left, the two prints juxtaposed to form a single image, seam down the middle. Eugenics. Proposal: take facts of art seriously: try them in economics/ politics, giving up, that is, notions about balance (of power, of wealth), foreground, background. They will kill you, she said, with kindness. There's a temptation to do nothing simply because there's so much to do that one doesn't know where to begin. Begin anywhere. For instance, since electronics is at zyxwvu 54 the heart of the matter, establish a global voltage, a single design for plugs and jacks. Remove the need for transformers and adaptors. Vary not the connecting means but the things...