1
I want to write a poem.

2
I won’t know whether I’ve written a poem until I have written it.

3
Knowledge, in the case at least of having written or not written a poem, is not terribly important since I want to write a poem.  I am not particularly concerned to have written a poem or to know that I have done so.

4
When I have written a poem, I will have written a poem.  Whether I know I have done so is a matter of little concern.

5
These numbered segments are sub-objects of a greater object, a document entitled “In Favor of Modality.”  I shall call them apothegmata.

6
I presume the word apothegmata to be the plural of the word apothegm.  I don’t know Greek, so I can’t be sure. Whether I have used the correct plural of apothegm is a matter of little concern.  But how do I know whether a matter is of great or little concern?  Surely knowledge is a matter of great concern.  But is it?  Apothegm 3 seems to assert that it is not.  And surely “seems” seems to cast doubt, to undercut one’s possession of knowledge.  And if my lack of knowledge of Greek undercuts my presumption as to the plural form of a word, does it not undercut other presumptions of knowledge, as, for example what the word apothegm might mean?

7
I’m not sure what the word apothegm means, but here it refers to these numbered segments.  Why would I employ a word whose meaning I have not mastered?–There are several reasons.  One might be that I wish to employ a word that has not been the object of much definition–note the contiguity of define and confine.  Indeed, I wish to remain unconfined, as much as possible, even by my own mastery, such as it is.  Moreover, I wish to employ a word that, by virtue of its denotative indeterminacy, remains (again, to the extent possible, i.e., might [remain]) connotatively unconfined, that is, relatively free of social-emotional baggage.  Finally, I wish to address my reader with a certain rhetorical circumspection.  I wish to address my reader less as a (political, instrumental) audience to be persuaded and more like a child to be taught (as a child might be taught) or a lover to be wooed (as a lover might be wooed).  And I expect that my reader will understand, or come to understand, the limits of these analogies.  I intend to address my reader like a child or lover, not as a child or lover.  Do I need to add that I am well aware of the difference between children and lovers?

8
Since the numbers merely designate and differentiate each apothegm, the sequence of the apothegmata is a matter of little concern.  The reader, if any, of this document might find it amusing to scramble the apothegmata and judge how their effect is modified by such disruption of their sequence.  A more likely eventuality would seem to be that the reader, if any, has already tired and has put this document aside.

9
What effect would understanding modification have on our understanding of modality?  What is mode or mood? How is it that when I ask a question, I include an assertion?  For example, in the question above, I assert that understanding modification would have an effect.  The assertoric quality of the assertion is not diminished by the fact that the modal auxiliary would implies “if any.”  If the condition that we understand modification should obtain, [then] such an understanding would have an effect on our understanding of modality.  But everything depends upon the unusual and inelegant expression “should obtain.”

10
Words mean nothing outside their contexts, but context expands infinitely from each word.

11
I want to limit context to immediate context, as I define it, but this desire cannot possibly be satisfied since by its very nature context is illimitable.  Consequently, I have resented modality and suffered as a consequence of my resentment.  No doubt there are many steps between my desire to limit context and my resentment of modality.  Moreover, no doubt “consequently” is an overstatement.  Perhaps I fear expansion more than I fear contraction, or indeed, vacuum.

12
On certain occasions I am ready to accept the truth of the assertion that there are no firm boundaries.  On other, more frequent occasions, firm boundaries assert themselves with distinct preeminence.  I can’t be sure of the truth of either of these assertions.  As for the second, I must entertain the possibility that firm boundaries are not asserting themselves but that other agents might be at work, including my own readiness to accept them.  As for the first, I know what neither readiness nor acceptance has to do with anything.  Nor do I understand why readiness or acceptance might obtain only on certain occasions.

13
Lovers and children hate firm boundaries.

14
A professor of language, presumably a grammarian, once explained that mood in grammar resembles affective mood.  Hence, when I’m in a bossy mood, I use the imperative, and when I’m in an iffy, uncertain mood I use the conditional.  Are affective mood and grammatical mood merely homonyms, or are they the same word used in distinct senses?  Perhaps one mood is a metaphor for the other, but which one?

15
Blake employed grammatical mood masterfully, and in a way that shows the complexity of modality, at least in English:

     What immortal hand or eye
     Could frame thy fearful symmetry

and

     What immortal hand or eye
     Dare frame thy fearful symmetry.

The first example employs the modal auxiliary could.  This auxiliary verb is extremely ambiguous, with a meaning ranging from used to be able to to able to under certain conditions.  The verb in the second example is in the subjunctive mood, which, rarely for English, does not employ an auxiliary but effects a transformation of the verb directly.  (In the indicative, the phrase would be “hand or eye dares.”)  In the first example, the verb is frame, modalized by could.  In the second example the verb is dare, and frame is reduced to an infinitive acting as direct object.  To dare means something like “taking a risk without regard to its consequences.”  Daring thus involves both knowledge (of risks and consequences) and affective mood, namely daring, audacity, the willingness to take a risk.  Could might involve affective mood if affect is among the conditions under which one is able to.  But what does able to mean?

16
What is fearful, or rather fearsome, about modality is its capacity to obliterate firm distinctions, as for example, of true and false.  Or rather, among the fearsome qualities of modality is its capacity to obliterate firm distinctions.  But what is capacity?

17
I think I’m writing a poem right now, but I won’t know until I (might) have written it.  I truthfully do think I’m writing a poem now, but it looks like no poem I have ever seen before.  It looks a little like “On Certainty,” but that’s not a poem.  Or is it?  How do I know what a poem is, particularly one that doesn’t exist yet or exists only partially.  (I have a few more apothegmata in mind, which I haven’t written down yet.)  What “mind” might mean is a matter of little concern.

18
What a word means out of context is not a question.  Why do I concern myself with this non-question?

19
When I write, I am unconcerned whether I can write.  However, when I am not writing, the question of whether I can write is matter of great concern and indeed of profoundest dread.  No, that’s not true.  I do not fear whether I can write.  What my writing will turn out to be is the source of my anxiety.

20
Among my greatest fears is vacancy or emptiness.  For example, when I’m not writing I fear that I have nothing to say—or write.  Naturally, I overcompensate with logorrhea.  Or do I fear repletion?

21
We do not fear the unknown, but rather we fear what we think we know.  If there is a tiger in the hallway and we do not know it, we are unafraid.  If, on the other hand, we think there is a tiger in the hallway, we are afraid even if there really isn’t one.  Knowledge and affective posture are thus closely intertwined.  Both knowledge and affective posture are inclined toward something.

22
If words without context are meaningless, what did I mean when I employed the sentence in parentheses(!) “I have a few more apothegmata in mind, which I haven’t written down yet”?  Was I lying?  Spouting nonsense?  I certainly did not have them “in mind” as perfectly formed sentences ready to be written down.

23
“I’m ready,” like “I’m certain,” has more to do with affect than with knowledge.  Affect and knowledge are intertwined, but they remains distinct properties.

24
So far, although sequence is supposedly a matter of no concern, I have been summarizing my fear and antipathy to modality.  When will I make the turn that I promise with this document’s title?  And if sequence is a matter of no concern, why numbers instead of meaningless sigla?

25
The assertion “No firm boundaries exist” is nonsense since it claims a firm boundary between existing things, with firm boundaries, and inexistent things without.  No doubt the assertion “All things have firm boundaries” is also nonsense.  Perhaps only a few things have firm boundaries, and perhaps these things are a matter of great concern.  Perhaps among the greatest concerns is the interplay of things with firm boundaries and things without.  To acknowledge “the dignity and worth of human personality” (–King) defines as firm a boundary as I know of, but are all persons capable of acknowledging it?  And there is no firm boundary between persons.

26
Why have I suffered a nostalgia for the Arcadia of firm boundaries?—Almost certainly because as a human organism I have sought to maintain a barrier between my organic self and the hostile forces in the environment outside myself.  Even on a practical level, however, this program ignores the manifest fact that not all forces outside oneself are hostile and that some, like food and oxygen, are vitally necessary.  Moreover, this prerational program of barrier-maintenance ignores the rationally-derived fact that as a human organism I depend upon other humans.  And yet there is a boundary—one wants to maintain a firm barrier—between otium and negotium.

27
Homo sapiens is a social species, and its necessarily social existence is mediated and enabled by language.

28
The actual is merely a subset of the possible.  A less-than-firm boundary between the two obtains.

29
The actual might be an occasion for fear, but it can never be an occasion for aspiration.  Similarly, “what now is proved was once only imagined” (–Blake).

30
Infinite expansion is fearful only when considered from a particular standpoint, posture, attitude.  “Eye altering alters all” (–Blake).

31
Professor Marvel asserts that “we” must get in contact with “the infinite.”  But Professor Marvel is a con man.

32
What changes when I modify a noun with an adjective?  A horse is no less a horse when I qualify it as a blue one.  Is to modify in the sense of qualifying the same word as to modify in the sense of transforming something?  Or are they homonyms?  Metaphors?”

33
Could is a modal auxiliary, that is a “helping verb” that indicates mood in the grammatical sense.  Why then not call it a “moodal auxiliary”?  (The spell checker just balked.)  Are mode and mood the same word?  The same concept?  If not, how firm is the boundary between them?

34
Perhaps there are only two moods in the grammatical sense, the indicative—the particular mood of the actual—and the other, general, nameless mood—the mood of the possible.  One could, would, must, may, might, can, ought to, perform some possible action or achieve some possible state.

35
Can I want something without feeling anxiety?  No: because between wanting and having is the possibility of not having.  Hence, the proposition that desire, in the sense of wanting, is the source of suffering is plausible.  But wanting is certainly no synonym for lacking or not having.  I do not have cancer, so far as I know, but I don’t want it.  So wanting is an affective posture in relation to not having.  I could truthfully say, “I want to remain free—to continue to have freedom from—cancer.”  The object of my wanting is something that I regard as good for me.  That I don’t have it is a source of anxiety, for I must acknowledge, if I’m honest, the possibility that I shall never have it.  Thus, the assertion “I want to write a poem” is an unexpectedly “moodal” statement.  Nobody doubts that wanting is an affective posture, but how are desire and anxiety related?  Are they always two sides of one coin as they are in the case of wanting?  And “I want to write a poem” is also an unexpectedly modal statement.  One side of the coin is assertoric and actual: It is the case that I desire to write a poem.  But the other side is more problematic: I hereby state my acknowledgement of the possibility that I might not write a poem.  In what sense is desire less problematic than acknowledgement?  Or perhaps the determinacy—the actuality—of the object of desire makes desire less problematic if the object of the acknowledgement is merely a possibility—and I cannot tell whether to end this sentence with a period or a question mark

36
In my anxiety toward emptiness (or “vacancy”) I have overestimated the baleful possibilities and underestimated the beneficial ones.  Hence, I have overemphasized the preference for firm boundaries.

37
It is possible that I might not write, and therefore will not write, a poem.  It is possible that I might write, but what I write will turn out to be something other than a poem.  It is possible that both conditions will obtain: I will write, and what I write will be a poem.  It is a source of considerable relief that I have never asserted, at least not in the document entitled “In Favor of Modality,” that I want to write a good poem.  On the other hand, one should not suppose that only absolutes or extremes are worth considering.  How much range is there between empty and full to overflowing!

38
What would happen if one apothegm should contradict another?  For example, if progress is possible, then sequence would be a matter of great concern.  What if an apothegm contradict itself?

39
The expression “to make a mountain out of a molehill” makes sense only (in the sense of “exclusively”) as metaphor.  If affective mood is a matter of little concern, then that is what poetry does: makes mountains out of molehills.  But everybody knows that affective mood is a matter of great concern encompassing as it does the panoply (the full set, the great range) of joy and sorrow.  And it is nearly equally obvious that expression of affective states requires metaphor.  Furthermore, every metaphor, even those in, say, proverbs and not poems, express affective mood.  “To make a mountain out of a molehill” is to effect a pointless exaggeration, an act toward which the proverb expresses a frown, a negative affective posture.  And what force would induce this frown?  Nevertheless, a range is a continuum, lacking firm internal boundaries.

40
An elementary school teacher once said that she forbids her students to say “can’t.”  What would her motive have been?  It might have been that she was extorting compliance: “Don’t say that you can’t obey my command.”  More likely she had her students’ best interest in mind–though her estimation of their best interest might have been faulty.  She may have been saying something like, “For your own best interest, I want you to believe in your own capability, so don’t deny that capability by saying that you can’t do something that I request (or require or command) you to do.”

41
If we actually perform an action (present tense) then the action was possible (past tense) before we perform(ed?) it.  Capability, the modality of can, must be something like a confidence regarding a possible (future) performance.  The meanings that cluster around posse, potent, and power: something that drives, pushes, forces, moves.  “A quantum of force” (–Nietzsche).

42
What immortal hand or eye might have (or might have had) a certain power.  Might: the modality of uncertain power.  Might as a noun simply means power or strength.  Will?

43
Can I want that which is impossible?  Certainly.  And it’s possible to develop a taste for disappointment just as it’s possible to develop a taste for the decadent, the enfeebled.  Do only decadents have a taste for the decadent?  Not necessarily.  The fine line between stimulation and irritation is a matter of only modest concern.  A modern poet wants the impossible: originality.  This desire is, paradoxically, a sign of decadence: one guarantees feebleness and unsuccess by yearning after the impossible.  Nevertheless, yearning (wanting with a certain intensity) guarantees freshness, a kind of strength.  So in medieval times some thought to recapture youth by drinking “mummy.”   

44
We know much more than we imagine, and what we don’t know we can discover.  All people know how to take action, and all people know how to coordinate action with others, though some are better than others at the latter.  Unfortunately, all people are subject to the acquired ignorance of prejudice, superstition, and provincialism.  Furthermore, many are consumed by thoughts of self-interest and ignorantly imagine themselves to be knowledgeable judges of their own self-interest.

45
To say that knowledge is power is a crass oversimplification.  Knowledge is indeed a force, a capability, since all actions require knowledge.  However, few actions of any consequence can be performed in solitude.  Even writing, which requires solitude, anticipates the possibility of a reader.  Indeed, anticipation is among the most arousing of stimulations.  Hence “the reader” is contiguous with “the beloved.”  Contiguity effaces boundaries to a certain extent.

46
When I perform an action, especially an action whose performance I have determined in isolation, I must consider, or rather I ought to consider, the possibility that my action might affect another person or persons for good or ill.  The modality of this possible effect is essential for the modality of what I ought to consider.  What would happen in the world of objects if I carry out this act?  What would happen in the world of persons?

47
Humans cannot see into the future, but they can imagine possible futures (what might be) just as they can imagine how it feels for another person to suffer an injury.  Modality is essential for reason, and reason is essential for interpersonal communication and hence for social comity.

48
Why did I insist for so long that modal auxiliaries were meaningless or worse, deleterious to understanding?–Because there are no firm boundaries separating any number of possible futures,–because you cannot be certain of what might happen.  But all people know more than they imagine they know.  But they might know less about themselves than they think they do.  In some cases–many cases?–the claim that “you don’t know what you can do until you try” is true.  Origin and desire seem related in some obscure way.  Accounting for the indeterminacy of origins and for the poverty of English in words for love, one might speculate that erotic love originates in the biology of the sex act.  But the actuality of the beloved: the most intimate of several sources of the sublime.

49
In at least some cases modality resembles temporality.  Can, for example, implies a future possibility.  In one sense, could implies an imperfect possibility: “used to have the power to.”  In another sense could implies a double modality: “might have the power to,” or, as it were, “might can.”  In a splendid pleonasm I once heard a triply modal idiom: “I might could”: “I might might can.”  Should  has taken on the meaning, obligatory modality, of ought to.  Previously, however, should was simply the first-person form of would as shall was the first person form of will.  The idiom “I should think . . .” does not mean, “I ought to think.”  The Mikado sings:

     My object all sublime
     I shall achieve in time
     To let the punishment fit the crime

(And his subjects respond:)

      His object all sublime
      He will achieve in time
      To let the punishment fit the crime

That should and shall follow the same pattern in their respective transformations as would  and will indicates the family resemblance of modality and temporality.  The obsolescence of should and shall as indicators of person has caused them to take on new meanings.  The modal auxiliary should has taken on the modality of ought to, thereby rendering the latter expression possibly moribund (it might die out).  And shall has taken on the modality of the imperative: thou shalt not commit adultery.    At one time ought was the subjunctive of owe, but it follows the Indo-European pattern of temporal transformation with the addition of a lingual stop (compare buy and bought).   In at least some cases no firm boundary obtains between modality and temporality.

50
Can implies power as such, but other modals, notably must (necessity), may (permission), and ought to (or should, obligation), imply power over.  This fact probably contributed to my sometime hostility to modality.

51
Many predicative words express an inherent modality even prior, as it were, to any modal transformation.  Verbs like want, wish, and try, and adjectives like certain and ready all highlight possibility over actuality.  Hence they are particularly susceptible to double modalization: “I might try” or “I would be certain.”  Sometimes such metamodality can boggle, as in Wordsworth:

     I could wish my days to be
     Bound each to each by natural piety.

Under what conditions might one wish (with the usual ambiguities of could)?  Or rather, why on earth shouldn’t one wish?  Why doubly modalize the already inherent modality of wish?

52
Might implies uncertain possibility, a double modality.  In some cases, this metamodality subsumes the meaning of an entire sentence, as in the idiom “It might rain.”  The subject is a pronoun without a referent.  One is reminded of Nietzsche’s citation (in Genealogy of Morals) of another meteorological idiom to expose the unimportance of the subject: “Lightning flashes.”  As this example shows, the subject is unthinkable without the predicate, and hence, the subject is an error always-already inscribed in language.  (No doubt another source of antipathy toward modality.)  Nietzsche argues that the sentence he cites exposes that there is no subject separate from the action, but only a “quantum of force,” an expression of power (posse), a modality.

53
One should not ignore the affective modality latent in the temporal auxiliary will.

54
Possibility connotes optimism and liberal-bourgeois aspiration.  Power connotes oppression and naked force.  Strongbad asks, “What are your special powers?  And will you use them for good or for awesome?”  Connotation, the modality of every word, exposes the narrowness, the feebleness, of denotation.

55
To want epitomizes the inherently modal verb.  An “action” verb, it expresses neither an action nor a state of things, but only an affective mode or mood.

56
I have suffered a nostalgia (homesickness, painful yearning for homecoming) for the Arcadia of firm boundaries, but Schiller, author of the “Ode to Joy” (“Daughter of Elysium”), says, “For whom the way back to Arcadia is blocked, forward to Elysium!”  Certainly the connotation of Elysium is too slack and static.  I want to substitute Utopia: probably still too static, but more taut than Elysium.

57
Why should will (as a temporal, not modal, auxiliary) express an actuality (albeit an as-yet-inexistent one) while might expresses a mere possibility, and an uncertain one at that?  Why do I grant pride of place to actuality over possibility?—Probably because possibility sounds bourgeois and Pollyannaish while actuality sounds realistic, hard-headed, and coldly unsentimental.  But what is an inexistent actuality?

58
Yeats defined sentimentality as “The will doing the work of the imagination” and certainly an affect to be rejected by modernists who “cast a cold eye on life, on death.”  But perhaps imagination is a configuration of will.

59
Fear, like lust, is an affective posture toward something.

60
Following Leibniz, many have regarded necessity as a benevolent force.  But those of independent spirit find the modality of necessity (must), like the modality of obligation (ought to or should), distasteful.  Cognitive-behavioral psychologists disparage musturbation  and shoulding all over oneself.  It is revealing that they conflate onanism and coprophilia with modality.

61
Only a profoundly immature person would deny the facticity of necessity and the necessity of obligation.

62
I am trying to modify (in the transformative sense) my affective posture toward modality.  I recognize modality as an inherent and hence ineluctable quality of language.  But is my program of modifying my affective posture merely a compensatory attempt to make a virtue of necessity?  And what if it is?  And how responsive is affect to will?  It seems that will follows affect and not the other way around.  Perhaps a Cognitive-behavioral psychologist could explain.  I swear I did not intentionally—that is, as an act of will—echo Stephen Daedalus’s “ineluctable modality of the visible.”  I do confess that my learning style—which is probably influenced both by my affective posture toward learning and by certain (ineluctable?) neurological features—is more auditory than visual.  I feel that I know more about my affective posture than about my neurological function.

63
Style and mode are often confused.  They might be synonyms, but I doubt it—there are no perfect synonyms anyway.  Part of the problem is that I have a good idea what style is, at least historically, while I’m still pretty clueless about mode.  It may be, indeed I hope it is the case, that style is simply a more compact, or perhaps more firmly bound, concept than the more sprawling concept of mode.  Style originates with the invention of the pen, the stylus, and with early literate societies’ intoxication with well formed-letters—good penmanship, even calligraphic penmanship—and by extension elegantly constructed sentences.  Mode is more generally a way of doing something: arranging diatonic tones, categorizing the properties of things, placing scoops of ice cream on slices of pie.  There is a grand style, but not a grand mode, so far as I can tell.  Modishness is trivial, not grand.

64
Concerning temporality and modality: After we have performed an action, we do not question whether we were capable—whether we could have performed that action.  While we are performing an action (note the semi-modality of the progressive form), we may have our doubts.  Before we perform (note the reference to the past in the present tense.  Or is it the subjunctive?) an action we may devote considerable thought to the question of our own capability.  Undoubtedly reflection is a wiser posture than impulse, but at what point does reflection tip into narcissism?

65
The spurious firm boundary, the membrane of the ego.  Writing resembles lovemaking in the accretion of intimacy.  Even when the writer is, as I usually am, absorbed with self-expression, the writer envisions (with varying degrees of focus, granted) a reader.  The writer’s task is rather absurd, as are the mechanics of sex.  If one thinks to know what she is doing, as it were, the whole affair becomes awkward and frustrating.  Fortunately, with experience (innocent experience, as it were) one learns how not to think too much.  Even so, the writer might be daunted and frustrated by the ineluctable fact that the author never knows what the reader doesn’t know.  Presumably, everybody wants to know, and certainly in ethics it is better to know than not to know, but the act of writing, like the act of love, shows that knowledge only gets one so far (I know the modifier is misplaced).  A perfect, tiny poem by Nash shows the lover’s dilemma, to know or to accept the inevitability of not-knowing:

           Do you love me or do you not?
           You told me once, but I forgot.

Lovers typically deny the inevitable, the brutally factual.  The wise lover like the wise writer seeks not knowledge but the accretion of intimacy from table talk to pillow talk.  The stripping off of the membrane, of the layers of the membrane, to reach the nakedness past nakedness and the commingling of whatever it is that the membrane is supposed to enclose.

66
For me writing is a matter of only modest concern, for I am manifestly writing.  Lucky me, who am never blocked.  (Beware denial!)  Achieving a poem is a matter of great concern, however, and indeed, of direst anxiety.

67
No poem has ever looked like this, but then no poem is supposed to resemble any other poem.  Bloom has declared that originality is the modern poet’s holy grail.  Never mind that it is impossible ever to obtain an inexistent thing.  In short, whether “this” looks like a poem is a matter of little concern.  However, the early numbered segments are sadly wanting, what with that nonsense about apothegmata and knowing whether I have written a poem.  Had I accidentally come upon this document I severely doubt that I would have read past the first two numbers.  The “Ode to a Nightingale” also begins quite weakly, but the foibles of the great can’t justify the defects of the small, can they?  On the other hand, there seems to be some wrong in changing those early segments or deleting them altogether.  Clearly, sequence is a matter of great concern, but my historical hostility toward sequence matches nicely with my historical hostility to modality.  Must sequence qualify as progress or its opposite?  The “Ode,” which begins so weakly, builds to an astonishing climax:

     Away!  Away! for I will fly to thee,
     Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards
     But on the viewless wings of Poesy . . .

Now here is a quantum of force, naked power!–To present the most glamorous image in English poetry and throw it away in favor of a non-image.  The epitome of the sublime.  Ah, but after this peak, the poem’s inevitable decline, which is not a defect.  Far from it!

68
Writing resembles pedagogy in the relation of innocence and experience.  Innocence wants experience, and experience wants to bring innocence into experience.  Thus two speakers in Blake, commander (a child!) and complier (an adult, paying a pipe, surrounded by sheep):

           Pipe a song about a Lamb
           So I piped with merry cheer

Unfortunately and usually, experience unreasonably seeks to exploit innocence by issuing commands for innocence to give experience what experience wants.  But in the lines above, innocence does the commanding: pipe a song.  Innocence commands experience to do what experience is already doing!  Never mind that it is impossible to pipe a song “about” something, a lamb or anything else.  Experience obeys innocence because the command coincides with what experience already wants.  Nobody was ever motivated by considerations of compliance.  Nobody ever truthfully said, “I want to do this because you have commanded it.”  Lovers frequently comply, but from motives richer than that of obedience.

69
And so we come to the fatal hand of the imperative.  Here no doubt is where my troubles with modality began, though the word fatal evokes not the beginning but the end.  The imperative seems primary in a couple of ways.  In English it’s the one mood that doesn’t employ a modal auxiliary.  Of course the indicative, which also uses no auxiliary, is a mood, but the great preponderance of statement in discourse makes the indicative almost invisible as a mood.  The simple subjunctive is moribund and practically negligible in English. (I fear I shall come to regret that last remark, but it would be vicious to delete it.  But why?)  But the imperative: the shock troops of modality.  Thus, clean your room, pay your taxes, appear at 9 o’clock.  The affective modality is that of underlying threat: comply–or else.  And underlying the underlying threat is that essential characteristic of modality: possibility, posse, power.  Comply or experience the baleful exercise of my power: the imperator speaks.  The imperative is a primary mood in that it nakedly, as it were–without a modal auxiliary–asserts power.  And the assertion of power always begs the question of legitimacy.  The parent who issues the command clean your room claims the authority to issue such a command.  Whoever complies with the command implicitly submits to the authority that the issuer (the imperator, the commander) claims.  But authority and legitimacy are not quite the same thing.  The power to author a command and issue it with authority presumably comes from some authorization.  Thus, the issuer of the command clean your room no doubt believes that the fact of parenthood confers the authority to issue the command; that is, parenthood authorizes the command.  (Belief is a shabby affect.)  But does parenthood indeed legitimately confer such authority?  And so the question becomes not, what authorizes, but what legitimates.  The question is a significant one especially considering the enormous possibilities for illegitimate commands.  The mugger who issues the command give me all your money–or I’ll blow your head off might well imagine that poverty or desperation or whatnot authorizes the command with its explicit (not underlying) threat.  Can an affective state like desperation legitimate a threat?  And finally, the imperative is primary in that it arises early in ontogenetic cognitive-linguistic development.  It’s an empirical question, I suppose, whether most toddlers issue commands like gimme dat before or after forming simple statements.  And of course an infant’s (pre-verbal) cry usually constitutes a demand for some mammalian ministration.  Interestingly, nobody doubts that an infant is authorized to cry.

70
For a long time I believed, shabbily, that the innocentest statement harbored a hidden imperative: (I hereby command you to accede to my authoritative claim that) Helena is the capital of Montana.  Movie villains sound more threatening when they whisper.  Histrionic frisson.  Artificial stimulation.

71
Buffering the imperative.  Because of the contiguity of command and threat, cultural norms require people in many (most?) social situations to buffer the commands they issue.  The concept of a request, for example, is that of a command that the recipient of which is authorized to refuse.  That is, I, the imperator, want you to do something, but you may–that is, I (or some other authorizing agent) grant you permission to–refuse.  Thus, I hereby request that you clean your room, and not I hereby command that you clean your room.

72
Of course nobody uses that hereby stuff, and so we have grammatical markers and polite formulae as signals for the buffering of commands.  Thus, a doubly modalized interrogative: Would you clean your room?  The imperator will be displeased if the recipient responds as to a question: Yes I would, under certain to-be-specified conditions, clean my room.  Indeed, the interrogative mood (assuming that the interrogative is a mood: at the very least it is a modalization) is itself a kind of buffered command: a request for, say, information.  It seems not too great a stretch to claim that overmodalization is the typical method for buffering commands.  Imperatives other than the second person (“you understood”) provide instructive examples.  The first-person plural imperative, for example, (Let’s eat!) uses the peculiar modal auxiliary let.  “Peculiar” because this word already implies a double modality: a command that one grant permission, as if the modal auxiliary may should have an imperative form: I hereby command you to grant me (“us”?) permission to eat.  But who is you?  In its unexploded form, Let’s eat, with its informal contraction, expresses the affective modality of democratic bonhomie.  

73
Buffering the imperative by disguising it as a request expresses a peculiarly obsequious affective modality: Please, sir, if you are not too busy and it isn’t too much trouble and I’m not exceeding my authority by asking such a question would you, please, but only if it is convenient for you, please, pass the potatoes?  In contrast, buffering the imperative with a temporal, rather than a modal, auxiliary intensifies, rather than softens, the imperative affect: All prisoners will proceed immediately to the delousing station.  Not a prediction, most effective when whispered.  Similarly, the temporal auxiliary shall has taken on the modal function almost exclusively, and specifically that of the imperative.

74
One should always adopt a circumspect affect when making claims about origins, first instances, sources.  One could say that knowledge of the imperative mood stands as the origin of my troubles with modality.  However, one could just as easily say instead that a guilty affect stands at the source of those troubles.  I did what I could, but I didn’t do much, enough, what I should have, etc.  One could say that that the anxiety provoked by the imperative constitutes little more than a troubled affect in reference to the future just as guilty feelings constitute a troubled affect in reference to the past.  However, the contiguity of modality and temporality suggests that time and perhaps even space originate in the affective postures of predators, herbivores, and omnivores.  Perhaps one should say that affect, even troubled affect, constitutes a virtual starting point, since no actual starting point ever obtains, at least so far as one can tell.  Hence, just as sleep provides a starting point for wakefulness, immaturity provides a starting point for maturity, and ignorance provides a starting point for knowledge, so too guilt and anxiety–affective postures in relation to illusory time–might provide virtual starting points for freedom–freedom precisely from guilt and anxiety.  No doubt guilt and anxiety constitute sources of suffering–or are they the product of suffering?  And just as one can never escape the illusion of time (nor, possibly, the illusion of space), one might never evade, once and for all, the suffering related to troubled affects such as guilt and anxiety.  Please don’t give me any nonsense about what I really mean.  The fact that these numbers contradict each other militates against such a conclusion.

75
How I love those modalizing adverbs such as nevertheless, however, no doubt, hence, precisely, certainly, most importantly, ect.!  And their modalizing power influences even conjunctions (among the mechanically infrastructural members of language) and such notoriously trivial devices as punctuation, typography, abbreviations, etc.

76
If I were you: a transcendentally beautiful meta-modal buffering.

77
I have been considering here verbal modality, but the concept invokes close analogues in the musical and, no doubt, in the visual realm.

78
Listen to Kind of Blue, how the players, supremely eminent practitioners, supplement the conventional diatonics and pentatonics of the blues with the musical modes, both historical and original.  The brilliant improvisations open a window upon a horizon of ever-expanding possibilities.  The commonplace experience of seeing or hearing something new upon returning to a favorite artwork bespeaks this infinite expansiveness, which is a hallmark of the grand style.  (Or if grand gestures disagree with you, the Free or Untroubled style.)  Interestingly, great art works often treat matters of pettiness, confinement, or trouble magnificently, expansively.  Look at Wheatfield with Crows.  The achievement of decorum always delights even when the matter of it evokes fear or disgust or the pains of sympathy.  Further suggestions of the possibility of greatness in a decadent age.

79
Many, many artists have achieved the grand style.  But the expression “great artist” is next-to meaningless.  On the other hand, great artworks, like the act of teaching a child, like the touch of the beloved, might make life tolerable.  Art, eros, and pedagogy have in common interaction of the most intimate sort, and they all open the horizon of possibility.  Eros and pedagogy involve human persons, so far as I can tell, and the experience of great art also involves a virtually personal interaction.  The artwork “gazes back.”  It expresses infinite depth (or less histrionically, extent or expansiveness) as does a lover or a child.  Though great art is often quiet, it is rarely still.

80
Matter often infects manner surreptitiously.  Have I devised a highly, even excessively, modalized style?  If so, does that guarantee that manner fits matter?  “All art aspires to the condition of music” since in music the matter is intangible and almost, pleasingly, illusory.  The grand style is the free style insofar as its manner is unconfined by the brute facts of the matter.  Indeed, great art typically exalts style while trivializing substance.  Hence, beauty is truth, and we err when we look for meaning in topics.  This is not to say that artworks are socially uncritical or irrelevant.  On the contrary, in its kaleidoscopic refraction of matter, manner (style, significant form) portrays actuality more saliently, more precisely, and more movingly than it could ever be experienced in quotidian circumstances.  Note that profoundly intimate interpersonal activities and the witnessing of pristine natural phenomena produce similar effects, namely that of the sublime.  Achievement = eminent practice.

81
I want something: I will that some power in the universe make (note the ineluctable subjunctive) the condition that I will the case.  Whatever I want is possible.  Much, much more than anything is possible.  Moreover, there is too little I and too much.  Most of I remains unknown to me.  And yet I am large and contain bewildering multitudes.  I can’t comprehend the modality of want since I can’t conceive of the power that will actualize that which I want.  And what is this I of which I speak?  On the other hand, in those situations in which I becomes less salient, so too does want.  It would seem, therefore, that gratification is less important than reducing the ego in one’s affective mode (or mood).

82
It is extremely difficult to use will as a verb other than as an auxiliary.

83
I hereby retract the designation of these numbered sections as apothegmata.  I don’t know what I should call them, or whether I should call them anything.  I could pretend that the word apothegmata has constituted some sort of “enabling fiction,” but that would be untruthful.  The truth is–or appears to be–that I was trying to impress somebody, probably myself more than my reader.  And why would one want to impress himself?–To reassure himself that he is impressive.  In short, to deflect anxiety.

84
To write: to perform an action (by no means the only possible such action) that brings the possible into the actual and the actual into the possible.  Writing, like many other, similar activities such as pedagogy and lovemaking, elides possibility and actuality.  We imagine that knowledge is power,  but nothing could be farther from the truth.  To write requires summoning the courage (the will, the power) to act despite one’s full knowledge of an ineluctable ignorance: the writer never knows what the reader doesn’t know.  An enormously salutary effect of such an action, compositional, pedagogical, or erotic, is to dissolve the confining membrane of ego.  Any action that effects the convergence of actuality and possibility defies totalization.  No all.  All “evermore about to be” (Wordsworth).  

85
Anything and more is possible, but much is, and ought to be, forbidden.  Note that while ought is sometimes demeaned as a mere derivative of the imperative, it has at least as much to do with value as with the binding and generally arbitrary force of command.

86
Error discovered is by definition instructive.  Grammatical mood and affective mood are historically, that is etymologically, distinct, and it is an error to link them too closely.  Nevertheless, they are psychologically and socially intertwined.  Verbal art, say poetry, is largely a matter of generating pleasing patterns out of this intertwining of grammar and affect.  At least the artist hopes to generate such pleasing patterns.  (The generalization of hope is aspiration, which is perfectly compatible with pessimism.)  The essence of achieved art is decorum: the fitting of matter and manner.  Matter is largely a matter of objective, that is, sensible, states.  Manner is largely a matter of intelligibly expressed affective states.  At any particular moment the artist is not conscious of either sensible or affective states–allowing, of course, for the immense range between “full consciousness” and “unconsciousness,” both probably unrealistically absolute extremes.  Moreover, the word states understates the dynamism of both grammar and affect.  But for the artist, intelligible expression is a primary consideration.  From the verbal artist’s standpoint an achieved (verbal) artwork expresses affect largely through the management (which is an exercise of power) of grammatical, or shall we say, objective modality.  However, because the achieved artwork emerges through the artist’s sensibility, it incorporates much more than the artist’s affective states, which are, after all, modified by translation into material form.  That is, the artwork is more than the artist knows.  Specifically, the artwork incorporates social and historical affect incomparably greater (i.e., more comprehensive, more capacious) than that of an individual artist.  The artist who achieves the grand style might, in fact, cherish the most modest of aspirations: merely to translate affect into material form, say, or even merely to achieve a significant form without particular reference to affect.  But what is mere translation or device for the artist might turn out to be a kaleidoscopic refraction for multitudes of persons, each of whom comprises a multitude.   One must certainly adopt a skeptical attitude toward claims of universality.  Nevertheless, greatness in an artwork exhibits, among other virtues no doubt, this comprehensiveness, this capaciousness concerning the affective postures of a great many people.  The grand style is thus the achievement of a particular decorum, which varies, to be sure, from great artwork to great artwork.  Greatness in an artist is a matter of no concern.  Greatness in an artwork is everything–or rather, it is infinitely expanding possibility in actual, material form.  Greatness in an artist is nothing.  Poor artist, who can experience the grand style in any artwork that exhibits it except the one of his own devising!  Eminent practice is worthy of admiration, but greatness in art demands reverence.  The artist who should be so supremely fortunate as to have achieved the grand style would be so knowledgeable of the artwork’s genesis as to be insensible of its grandeur.  On the other hand, what matters in this regard is that anybody, somebody experience the grand style.  Is it possible to fear infinite expansiveness?–Certainly.  That may well be part of its charm.  But everybody can experience the expansiveness of bliss and the bliss of the experience of the sublime.   Does anyone actually experience the grand style?–only a few, perhaps.  It is, however, eminently possible, and indeed eminently desirable, that anyone experience (beautiful subjunctive) exalted, sublime works of art.  No doubt the great works of nature are the original source of the sublime, but how touching it is that the sublime should also have been devised (not discovered) by the invention of naked apes!

87
Why have I treated the subjunctive so dismissively?  Theoretically, the following might stand as a world-shaping fiction: It were so.

88
Would you learn anything from reading this document?  How close are writing and pedagogy?  Writing and lovemaking?  And as soon as I address you, Dear Reader–I should have written thou (I mean thee), I have opened an erotic possibility.  Moreover, I don’t know how to correct what I have written.  Instead, I comment on my error(s).  That I regard correction as a vice indicates that I still suffer issues with (self-)command and (self-)control.  I should have addressed my reader as thou.  Addressing the reader directly was once permitted but now is, if not forbidden, then certainly frowned upon, and if one is going to violate a social nicety, at least do it truthfully.  Nevertheless, I know that error-avoidance is no way to write, or to live.  Hence, I err joyfully.  Problems are good.  They give us something to talk about.  I have not intended this document as a didactic instrument, but my intentions are both too plentiful and too obscure for me to register, much less comprehend.  One should not know too much to write.  In any case, one does not know too much.  How virtuous is it to make a virtue of necessity?  Truth and poetry are odd bedfellows, but bedfellows they are.

89
A poem: a made thing, an achievement.  A possibility brought into actuality by (the) power (of, call it, imagination, or more modestly, invention, too modestly, device).  Have I made a poem, now or ever?  Not my call.  The question is one of degree, and hence of modest concern.  I have most assuredly written, and it would be fatuous or the height of affectation (false affect) to deny the fact.  Having written is an achievement, but a modest one.  The written product, this written product, seems unlikely to have achieved the status of poem.  But who am I to say that having written I have achieved a product of any sort, much less a poem?  What nonsense: the total package.  Mere context expands infinitely.  It is, however, a matter of great concern whether I affirm or deny.  Negation is truly the most powerful of modalities, and not to be trifled with.  Where nothing is forbidden all is permitted.  Nihilism is the ugliest of errors, to deliberately believe–to command oneself to suppose–that all truth is falsehood, all value worthless.  (Split infinitives were once forbidden, but now are permitted.)  One must be exquisitely selective as to denials.  A poem is a something, not a nothing, but infinity lies between the actual and the possible.  Have I achieved a poem?  Have I made one?  Not yet, certainly not finally.  Having written is as close to the truth as I can, in this infinitesimal moment, imagine.  Achievement, it is said, emerges from Negative Capability, and remains, so far as I can see, which is not far, exclusively in the future, or more accurately, in possibility.  A sort of doing without doing.  One may certainly aspire to an eminent practice.  Would I have the power?  A question of great concern. Would I know?  A question of only modest concern.  Who am I?  A maddeningly, frustratingly ambiguous question of some concern.  I know that I is mortal, but that is a matter of no consequence in an infinitely expanding cosmos.

90
Why on earth would I have made the claim, “I won’t know whether I’ve written a poem until I have written it”?  My reader must consider me a fool!  I feel good that I am writing, and yet . . 

91
I fear the tiger that might be in the hallway, yet I know that there is not the slightest possibility that a tiger actually is in the hallway, yet I fear.  Why?–Because I can master and expel the impossible actual tiger, but I can never fully master the possible possible tiger.  Actual impossible tiger, no fear.  Possible possible tiger, fear.  But not all possibilities induce fear.  Many possibilities delight.  Many more are matters of no concern.  But fearful possibilities are always a matter of great concern and demand attention.  But shouldn’t delightful possibilities demand at least as much attention?

92
Other worlds, alternative universes delight, even fearsome ones.  Why?–Possibility.  The slimmest of fictions–There once was a man from Nantucket–delivers a significant enhancement of power–for the reader.

93
Who speaks?

94
I know so little, and I want to know more.  Or rather, I wish I knew more.  I chastise myself for my ignorance, which I feel to be culpably great.  I know so little about my own affective states, my own sensibilities.  I worry that my sensibilities are stunted, that I have neglected them.  I envy others who seem so full of feeling, and while I sometimes feel a great welling of passion, more often than not I feel dull and lethargic.  I know that knowledge only gets you so far.  I suppose that I care, I imagine that I care a lot, but how can I know what a lot is if I don’t know how others care?  I know even less about the affective states of others than I do about my own.  Moreover, I fancy myself a grammarian, but I know that a more authoritative grammarian than I would find many errors in this document.  I cover my doubts with bravado.  I know that I don’t know which matters are of great concern and which are of little.  I chastise myself for my egotism and narcissism, which burn brightly in each of these pages, for the confining force of my ego.  I have wanted to express my feelings about modality, but how valuable an enterprise is that?  Do I even know what modality is?  What feelings are?  What is the appropriate limit of reflection, of self-examination?  Why am I a bottomless pit of want?  Is everybody like that?  I do know that whom I love, I love indeed.

95
Behold: I have written a poem.

96
There is no I.  There is no poem.  There is no thou, beloved reader.