'TIL TUESDAY (PATTERN RECOGNITION)

Last night, Jim and I talked in the lobby for about an hour after dinner about all sorts of things.  It was wonderful seeing him; real one-on-one, face-to-face contact is so much better than any amount of phone calling or time spent emailing each other articles we’d found interesting and thought the other would enjoy.  Even though in the background, my internal call-and-response mantra/catechism  continued to cycle like a perpetual-neurotic-motion-machine, our talk cut through some of the recurring patterns that wallpaper my mind.

Shortly after midnight, very sleepy, I climbed to the room where Caroline and Jane had already gone to bed.  It was practically pitch-black, but the heaven-colored and textured cream-white bedding shone through.  Because I am known for my pattern-recognition ability, which I am told is the mark of the truly intelligent, the survivors, I headed toward the sleeping form closest to the room door.  If I couldn’t discern my wife’s sleep-posture from my daughter’s, I must not be the man I thought.  I’m not.   Seen simply as shapes, Jane now sleeps like Caroline and Caroline like Jane.  I didn’t get into the wrong bed, but I nearly did.  I had forgotten that Jane always takes the “best bed” on trips, which for present purposes was the “other one.”   Now awake – they’re still asleep – my thoughts are totally disordered and I can’t figure out next Tuesday at all.

Morrissey: The More You Ignore Me The Closer I Get (Link)

THE MORE YOU IGNORE ME (HOSTIS HUMANI GENERIS)

Juan Gris, Fantomas (Pipe and Newspaper), 1915,  Oil on canvas, 23 1/2 x 28 7/8 in, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 

The More You Ignore Me -- Morrissey (Link)
 

THE OLD, OLD RECORD

 To be fair to Nicholas, although he had no clear conception of the enormity of the events of 9 January, he at last began to see that problems had arisen which could not be solved by simple police action.  At the same time he rejected the urgings of some that he should publicly dissociate himself from the actions of his troops.  Svyatopolk-Mirsky was immediately replaced by Count Bulygin, a colourless orthodox bureaucrat whose thinking had reached much the same level as his master’s – namely that straight repression would no longer do, but what to put in its place?  What indeed?   

 Nicholas was to display the poverty of his imagination almost immediately.  He accepted the suggestion of his new Governor-General of St. Petersburg, General D.F. Trepov, a heavy-handed but honest police-chief, that it would be a good idea for  him to meet a deputation of factory workers to assure them that in spite of appearances  to the contrary he felt for them; but when the deputation appeared before him amid the eighteenth-century splendors of the Tsarskoe Selo he found himself chiding them like children, quite unable to change the old, old record;  they had been led astray by wicked men, but he, Nicholas, knew that they were good and loyal at heart and would strive to make up for the harm they had done.   

 

 This meeting, and the Tsar’s words, made no impression at all, but Nicholas himself was so moved by his own unprecedented act of condescension that he easily believed Trepov (who himself believed what he had said) that it had been an epoch-making occasion.

VIEWS:

First:  Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine Palace with a view of the Cameron Gallery, Luigi Premazzi, ca. 1855.

Second:  Tsarskoe Selo, Tsar Nicholas II’s working study, Alexander Palace.

Third:  Tsarskoe Selo, March 1917 photograph of Tsar Nicholas II following his abdication, capture and confinement.

Fourth:  Tsarskoe Selo, Alexander Palace, 2010.

TEXT:

Edward Crankshaw, The Shadow Of The Winter Palace – The Drift To Revolution 1825-1917 (“Impossible to live thus any longer”), London, Penguin, 1976.

SOUNDS:

The More You Ignore Me The Closer I Get -- Morrissey (Link)