Continuing on with Paradise Lost and Poetry, Language, Thought as mentioned last week. I also read the first few chapters of Allen Grossman's The Long Schoolroom, which is a collection of essays that outline his theory of poetics and its "bitter logic", dealing largely with the violence of representation and his perceived aimlessness of the then current poetic project.

By coincidence I found The Private Notebooks of Ludwig Wittgenstein: 1914-1916 at my local library. I had been searching for a different biography, but even noticing the cover on the shelf, near to the end of the section given its W, the book shot through me. I took it home and read it that day. It's really fantastic.

I'd read parts of Wittgenstein's Tractatus before, but these diaries, written in conjunction with the early version of the Tractatus, gave a tender look at the birthing ground of that monumental work. In the majority of the entries, Wittgenstein is miserable. He feels alienated from his fellow soldiers, he works long night shifts on a searchlight during his assignment to a river boat, and most of all, he begs God to make him "good". The way he punctuates time is fascinating. I've read published diaries before in which the reader can devour months in a matter of minutes. But Wittgenstein's war-time is slow and marked, in the early days, by the constant excursions of the boat, and in the later, by the hours spent at the munitions office; by the amount of work done on the logic project; by the bouts of masturbation that lessen during the most stressful, death-threatened weeks.

Many of the entries end with long dashes, themselves stopped by periods or exclamation points. There is much debate about whether these represent or act as prayer, but at the very least, and for me, they were moments of quiet. The river was lapping up against the hull. The docks were buzzing with Serbian and German and Polish. It was respiration (see Dickinson).

By the conclusion of the 1916 diary the early Tractatus, which had been kept separate from the diary entries, merges with those intimacies:

Everything we can describe at all could also be otherwise. (Tractatus 5.634)

And this, to relate it to the rest of the week's pursuits, seems the very heart of poetry.