Glosses on Book I of Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan, “Of Man”

by Charles Tarlton

Politic man ordained

           Imagination as the fateful sin.                                                                                                                                            

                            ⎯Wallace Stevens  

I. sense/fact

And though at some certain distance the real and very object seems invested with the fancy it begets in us; yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another. So that sense in all cases is nothing else but original fancy caused (as I have said) by the pressure that is, by the motion of external things upon our eyes, ears, and other organs, thereunto ordained.*

the immaterial materializes in irony. For the fathers, history was the more sinewy stuff of poetry, but the form rejected all ideas an sich; we got actors speaking lines, instead, and the lines unrolled eventfully, flung out there, stripped of all theoretical hazard, no heartfelt effort to catch the illogical loose ends of what and how the eye does see.

Rembrant and Robert Motherwell, stepping back to squit in the brightness . (“for thirty years I never touched poetry, gave it up completely”) of the Zuidersee, the jagged skyline of New York, then take the running starts.

the thing about things is inscribed inside of our heads, sensations into nervous holograms, like this apple right here in my eye; nor is it clear where our talk fits

in such Discours qui se déroule comme prévu, and will not reveal reality; scent lets it ease along so we might better guess where the eye should fall . (or a friendly nudge confirm.

*Passages in italics are mainly from Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan  (Oxford, 1909); where otherwise, authors are identified by name.