"Alban still speaks of you."

It takes a great deal of love to create a dead man who never dies, to listen to him and to speak to him, and find out his wishes, which he will always have because one has created him.

— Elias Canetti

You are mine own.

— the words set in Alexander von Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony

Helene Karoline Nahowski Berg

The opera

Although Alban Berg first glimpsed Helene Nahowski at the Vienna State Opera, their formal introduction occurred on April 19th, 1907, a date that coincided with Good Friday. Alas, the two fell in love. Helene’s father worried about Berg’s physical health and asthma and maintained a firm opposition to their marrying until 1911, when he finally relented and allowed his daughter to marry the man she adored. To Helene, Alban was perfect, ideal—- his physical challenges and nervous ailments didn’t bother her. His daughter from a previous relationship was welcomed with love. She jettisoned her burgeoning career as an opera singer in order to focus on Alban’s career as a composer. This sort of tragedy wasn’t unusual in Vienna.

Fast forward to the year 1914, when the Bergs attended the first production of Georg Büchner’s play,Woyzeck, in Vienna. By the end of the evening, Alban knew he wanted to make an opera of it, and he worked to realize this desire for the next seven years, eventually settling on 15 scenes from the play that would be part of an opera with three acts (with five scenes each). He also adapted the libretto for Wozzeck, his first opera, which premiered in 1925.

Wozzeck (as sourced from the Alban Berg Villa)

A scene

In May 1925, Alban Berg began an affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the wife of a close friend. Elias Canetti knew her from shared social circles centered around the patronage of Hanna’s father, Rudolf Werfel, a wealthy manufacturer of gloves and leather goods.

How to set the scene for the tempests of 1925? Berg spent much of the year’s remainder navigating the popularity of his opera while composing Lyric Suite, which used a combination of his initials and those of Hanna (HF) as well as a melodic quote from Alexander von Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony, which originally set the words “You are mine own.”

the catastrophe

Alban died on the night of December 23-24, 1935, at the age of 50. In the foreword to the letters of Alban that she edited, Helene wrote: “I lived for 28 years on earth in the paradise of his love — and if I had the strength to survive the catastrophe of his earthly death, it was through the union of our souls — an alliance long since forged — across time and space — in eternity.”

Elias Canetti’s memories of Alban Berg

As usual, looking at photographs of an absent person stimulates the writer to memorialize them. So Elias Canetti recollects his relationship to Berg in his memoirs, from which I quote extensively:

Today I have been looking with emotion at pictures of Alban Berg. I don't yet feel up to saying what my acquaintance with him meant to me. I shall try only to touch quite superficially on a few meetings with him.

I saw him last at the Café Museum a few weeks before his death. It was a short meeting, at night after a concert. I thanked him for a beautiful letter, he asked me if my book had been reviewed. I said it was still too soon; he disagreed and was full of concern. He didn't quite come out with it but hinted that I should be prepared for the worst. He, who was himself in danger, wanted to protect me. I sensed the affection he had had for me since our first meeting. “What can happen,” I asked, “now that I've got this letter from you?” He made a disparaging gesture, though I could see he was pleased. “You make it sound like a letter from Schönberg, it’s only from me.”

He wasn't lacking in self-esteem. He knew very well who he was. But there was one living man whom he never ceased to place high abort himself: Schönberg. I loved him for being capable of such veneration. But I had many other reasons for loving him.

I didn't know at the time that he had been suffering for months from furunculosis. I didn't know that he had only a few weeks to live. On Christmas Day, I suddenly heard from Anna that he had died the day I didn't know at the time that he had been suffering for months from furunculosis; I didn't know that he had only a few weeks to live. On Christmas Day, I suddenly heard from Anna that he had died the day before. On December a8 I went to his funeral in Hietzing cemetery. At the cemetery I saw no such movement as I had expected, no group of people going in a certain direction. I asked a small misshapen gravedigger where Alban Berg was being buried. "The Berg body is up there on the left," he croaked. Those words gave me a jolt, but I went in the direction indicated and found a group of perhaps thirty people. Among them were Ernst Krenek, Egon Wellesz and Willi Reich. All I remember of the speeches is that Willi Reich spoke of the deceased as his teacher, expressing himself in the manner of a devoted pupil. He said little, but there was humility in his feeling for his dead teacher, and his was the only address that did not grate on me at the time. To others who spoke more cleverly and coherently I did not listen; 1 didn't want to hear what they said, because I was in no condition to realize where we were.

saw him before me at a concert, reeling slightly when moved by some Debussy songs. He was a tall man and when he walked he leaned forward; when this reeling set in, he made me think of a tall blade of grass swaying in the wind. When he said "wonderful," half the word seemed to stay in his mouth, he seemed drunk. It was babbled praise, reeling wonderment.

When I first went to see him at his home—I had been recommended to him by H.—I was struck by his serenity. Famous in the outside world, in Vienna a leper—1 had expected grim defiance. I had thought of him far from his home in Hietzing and didn't stop to ask myself why he lived here. I didn't connect him with Vienna, except insofar as he, a great com-poser, was here to incur the contempt of the far-famed city of music. I thought this had to be so, that serious work could be done only in a hostile environment; I drew no distinction between composers and writers; it seemed to me that the resistance which made them was in both cases the same. This resistance, I thought, drew its strength from one and the same source, from Karl Kraus.

I knew how much Karl Kraus meant to Schönberg and his students. This may have been responsible at first for my own good opinion. But in Berg's case there was something more: that he had chosen Wozzeck as the subject of an opera. I came to Berg with the greatest expectations, I had imagined him quite different from what he was—does one ever form a correct picture of a great man? But he is the only one I expected so much of who did not disappoint me.

I couldn't get over his simplicity. He made no great pronouncements. He was curious because he knew nothing about me. He asked what I had done, if there was anything of mine he could read. I said there was no book; only the stage script of The Wedding. At that moment his heart went out to me. This I understood only later; what I sensed at the time was a sudden warmth, when he said: “Nobody dared. Would you let me read it in that form?” There was no particular emphasis on the question, but there was no room for doubt that he meant it, for he added encouragingly: “It was the same with me. Then there must be something in it.” He didn't demean himself with this association, but he gave me expectation, the best thing in the world. It wasn't H.'s organized expectation that left one cold or depressed, it wasn't the expectation that Scherchen quickly converted into power. It was something personal and simple; he obviously wanted nothing in return though he had made a request. I promised him the script and took his interest as seriously as it was meant.

I told him in what state of mind I had come across Wozzeck at the age of twenty-six and how I had kept reading and reading the fragment all through the night. It turned out that he had been twenty-nine when he attended the first night of Büchner's play in Vienna. He had seen it many times and decided at once to make it into an opera. I also told him how Wozzeck had led to The Wedding, though there was no direct connection between them, and I alone knew how one had brought me to the other.

In the further course of our conversation I made some impertinent remarks about Wagner, for which he gently but firmly reproved me. His love of Tristan seemed imperturbable. “You're not a musician,” he said, “or you wouldn't say such things.” I was ashamed of my impertinence, but I wasn't too unhappy about it. I felt rather like a schoolboy who had given a wrong answer. My gaffe didn't seem to diminish his interest in me. And indeed, to help me out of my embarrassment, he repeated his request for my play.

This was not the only occasion when he sensed what was going on inside me. Unlike many musicians, he was not deaf to words; on the contrary, he was almost as receptive to them as to music. He understood people as well as he did instruments. After this first meeting I realized that he was one of the handful of musicians whose perception of people is the same as writers. And having come to him as a total stranger, I also sensed his love of people, which was so strong that his only defense against it was his inclination to satire. His lips and eyes never lost their look of mockery, and he could easily have used his irony as a defense against his warmheartedness. He preferred to make use of the great satirists, to whom he remained devoted as long as he lived.

I would like to speak of every single meeting I had with him; they were rather frequent in the few years of our acquaintance. But his early death cast its shadow on them all; like Gustav Mahler, he was not yet fifty-one when he died. It discolored every conversation I had with him and I am afraid of letting the grief I still feel for him rub off on his serenity. I am reminded of a sentence in a letter to a student, which I learned about only later. “I have one or two months yet to live, but what then? —| can think or combine no more than this—and so I'm profoundly depressed.” This sentence did not refer to his illness but to the threat of imminent destitution.

At the same time he wrote me a wonderful letter about Auto-da-Fé, which he had read in that same mood. He was in severe pain and in fear of losing his life, but he did not thrust the book aside, he let it depress him, he was determined to do the author justice. He did just that and conse-quently this first letter I received about the novel has remained the most precious of all to me.

His wife, Helene, survived him by more than forty years. Some people ridicule her for “keeping contact” with him all this time. Even if she was deluding herself, even if he spoke inside her and not from outside, this remains a form of survival that fills me with awe and admiration. I saw her again thirty years later, after a lecture given by Adorno in Vienna. Small and shrunken, she came out of the hall, a very old woman, so absent that it cost me an effort to speak to her. She didn't recognize me, but when I told her my name, she said: “Ah, Herr C!  That was a long time ago. Alban still speaks of you.” 

I was embarrassed and so moved that I soon took my leave. I forwent calling on her. I'd have been glad to revisit the house in Hietzing, where she was still living, but I didn't wish to intrude on the intimacy of the conversations she was always carrying on. Everything that had ever happened between them was still in progress. Where his works were involved, she asked him for advice and he gave her the answer she expected. Does anyone suppose that others were better acquainted with his wishes? It takes a great deal of love to create a dead man who never dies, to listen to him and to speak to him, and find out his wishes, which he will always have because one has created him.

other materials

The library of Alban and Helene Berg in Vienna contains the composer’s original Bösendorfer grand piano, the desk from his study, more than 3,000 books or scores, and other small objects . . . . including collections, memorabilia, etc.

Berg collected coins, rock crystals, and mineral specimens. As a young man, he drew crystals in his notebooks. As an adult, he groomed a collection of American minerals. Among the coins displayed in the Berg library, there is a 10 centesimi piece from Italy dated 1862, a 10c from the French Republic circa 1915; 2 florins from the Kingdom of Belgium circa 1866, 2 Austrian groschen circa 1929, and a token for the screening of the Threepenny Opera film at the Sascha.

glücksbringer

It is unclear as to whether Alban Berg enjoyed his superstitions, but it is certain that he had them.

Among the lucky charms depicted below, there is a particular significance to the netsuke figure, since Alban made Helene promise to hold it secretly in her hand during all of his performances.

1. A 19th century ivory netsuke of Jurojin, one of the seven Japanese gods of good fortune, representing a long life.

2. Intertwined rings as a symbol of Alban’s indissoluble marriage to Helene.

3. “Eberzahn” charm that Alban liked to carry with him.

4. Horseshoe for good luck that Alban kept near at hand.

“andante amoroso”

Alban Berg gifted Hanna an annotated copy of the Lyric Suite score, who then bequeathed it to her daughter Dorothea. Held in the Austrian National Library, the score’s annotation reads in part:

It has also, my Hanna, allowed me other freedoms! For example, that of secretly inserting our initials, HF and AB, into the music, and relating every movement and every section of every movement to our numbers, 10 and 23. I have written these, and much that has other meanings, into the score for you. ... May it be a small monument to a great love.

As the Nazis implemented their genocidal campaign for national greatness fascism, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin and her husband, Herbert, fled Prague for New York City. He died in the US in 1949; Hanna survived him by nearly 15 years.

In 1976, fourteen of Alban Berg's letters to Hanna were discovered among her papers. Some had been carried between them by his admiring student, Theodor Adorno. Others had been carried to Hanna by Alma Mahler-Werfel, the widow of Gustav Mahler who had married Hanna’s father, and whose daughter — Anna Mahler — would leave a lasting imprint on Elias Canetti’s life.

Evidently, Helene Berg maintained an ongoing connection to her deceased husband. In her last will and testament, Berg’s widow forbade any perusal of the composition sketches for the opera Lulu or its performance in three acts.

“The more passionately thought denies it's conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible.”

— Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

“How do I (my eye) follow this sequence? I am present as if I were listening to music. How do these figures add up?”

— Paul Valery, notebook dated 1935

[postlude: Act 3 Wozzek]

*

Alban Berg, "Woyzeck, by Georg Büchner”
Alban and Helene Berg’s Library, as archived by Kulturpool
Alban Berg Villa
Dick Strawser, “Alban Berg's Lulu: Up Close & Maybe Too Personal (Part 3)”
Elias Canetti, The Memoirs of Elias Canetti
”Hanna Fuchs-Robettin” (Wikipedia)
Renée Fleming & Emerson String Quartet, Lyric Suite: A Musical Love Story
Thierry Raboud, “Alban Berg, notes secrètes” (La Liberte)

V.

“A day is a leaf on the tree of your life.”

— Paul Valéry, notebook dated 1941 (t. by Nathaniel Raduvsky-Brody)

“But who is to strike off the monster's head, now that it has itself lain long, with its fair locks, under the linden tree?”

- Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Morning on the balcony, the earsplitting din of shutters being opened; I create myself. I take my place in the day and I look out over all things. All— the unfolding of it all. The word and movement of Greetings!—

Salve, natura, come to mind. The birds speak and carve out their cries from untold silence. The angular nature of vision gathers, concentrates the gaze manipulates/ near and far. Everything in this presentation has its place, the palm trees, the smaller and smaller houses, the tops of the cypresses, the mountain, distinct, reserved, clear tall, and the sea, a band of pure color against which the Cap d’Antibes is painted in greenish black in geographical projection.

— Paul Valéry, notebooks dated 1924

There is a tall tulip tree in the little panes of my window.
My eyes come to rest there, imploring an idea
And a question makes its nest there among the leaves.
Paris is more or less behind those leaves.
This countryside crushes me- saddens me. 
And every countryside.
No matter how beautiful they are, they cause me pain.
I feel like crying out from so much solitude and like writing.
I clearly feel that I converse, even with myself,
as one eats out of politeness,- being invited but having no appetite.

— Paul Valéry, Delta [X, 217], 1924

Here is the man of questions and combinations before his idols. But sometimes they are lifeless dolls in his eyes, the dead and wooden pawns of an abandoned game, just as on other days they were winged and luminous powers. Empty and vain are the same words that were living and deadly weapons, organs of knowledge, grasp and enjoyment, instruments and acts of possession, treasures and keys to treasures, fine vessels and the extraordinary brews they contain, lights and also eyes.. Who will recount the variations of my faith in my thoughts?

— Paul Valéry, “Psalm M” / notebook dated 1922

I only speak for the man who is alone— he who rises in medias nocte, in the nakedness of his existence—as if resurrected on the other side of his consciousness, where all things seem real and strange to him— as if he had come with a lamp to a dark place crowded with unfamiliar objects that are illuminated and transformed at every step. At an hour when he was not expected, in a place that could be any other...

— Paul Valéry, notebook dated 1930

The living water, to be running after something;
The sun, to be slowly seeking step by step
The point from which
It will see something.

Another
Suddenly the moon breaks through
The murkiness of evening
As a curious woman in a crowd
Finds herself in the front row.

— Paul Valéry, notebook dated 1937

“How strange is what is good!” This fragrance— this creamy smoothness— the turn of this neck; and my hands moving downward over these shoulders to reach these breasts— to where they form the solidity of the bust with the continuous gentleness of touch, a series of modulations of the press of my fingers, of pressure and slipping at contact, which makes my soul the creator of what offers itself to this act from place to place and better and better. I make and remake you—I cannot abandon this ultimate act, lose this song of my hands.

— Paul Valéry, Untitled notebook [XX, 710], 1937

So many things you have never really seen, in this street where you pass 6 times a day, in your room where you live so many hours every day! —- Observe the angle the edge of that dresser makes with the windowpane. It must be reclaimed from the ordinary, from the visible and unseen,—- it must be saved,— and given whatever you give by mere imitation, from the insufficiency of your sensibility, to the most insignificant landscape, sunset, storm over the sea, or piece in a museum.

Those are ready-made gazes. But give to this man on the street, this corner, this prosaic hour and object —and you will be repaid a hundredfold . . .

— Paul Valéry, notebook [XXIII, 480), 1940

“...the saleable is itself subjectivity administrated by subjectivity.” (Adorno, MM)

“. . .  if even the freest of spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity…”

— Teddie, MM

*

Anna Calvi feat. David Byrne, “Strange Weather”
Angus & Julia Stone, “Nothing Else”
Paul Valéry, t. by Nathaniel Raduvsky-Brody, The Idea of Perfect: The Poetry of Paul Valery (Macmillan)

Images and music.

I think true poets are often in flight from their poetry, and it is only when they become fairly heroic that they can stand and look their own poetry and their own self in the face, because most of the big poets we know are monsters.

– A. R. Ammons

. . . multiplying defenses does nothing to mitigate defensiveness.

— Oliver Davis and Tim Dean

And the noise is as much as I can bear.

— P. J. Harvey

1 . . . true poets in flight . . .

And there is a poem in the stone, as there have been poems on the faces of stone from the earliest days of language.

The poem seeks a shape for saying something about what it means to live, to be a creature made and unmade by language, identified by words, chastised in verbs, lost in the “black wells of possibility” that A. R. Ammons will reference if you continue reading…

Poetics

I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper — though
that, too — but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.

A. R. Ammons

A shape is not quite a ‘form’, or should not be collapsed into the idea of form . . . it seems.

2 . . . become fairly heroic . . .

PJ Harvey’s ”Sweeter Than Anything” with poem by Alice Notley

Alas, no “little wizard” — but you can admire this little lizard instead. Take it with the scent of soap and lutes and then another poem, as spoken into text by Alice Notley in 2001, with her lecture titled “Instability in Poetry” —

3 . . . look their own poetry and their own self in the face . . .

Your hair is scattered light:
the Greeks will bind it with petals.

— H. D., “Chorus to Iphageneia”

Staring at my mother’s Antartica from the back porch, living in multiple lands and temporalities: the poet’s station is quantum. The place is somewhere between the islets and the stanzas: the how of the poem meets the hows of the house in the scaffolds of syntax. Nazim Hikmet’s poem, “On Living,” buries its song beneath the form of an utterance when the line breaks are abandoned . . . . as if to say: “I mean, you must take living so seriously that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees – and not for your children, either, but because although you fear death you don’t believe it, because living, I mean, weighs heavier.”

O, how “heavier” sounds.

How sounds lock horns with John Ashbery’s “love that is always like headlights” — how one queerly and ever-nearly hears the pen pausing on the flow chart:

Love that lasts a minute like a filter
on a faucet, love that is always like headlights in the glistening dark, heed
the pen’s screech. Do not read what is written. In time
it too shall become incoherent but for the time being it is good
just to tamper with it and be off, lest someone see you. And when this veil
of twisted creeper is parted, and the listing tundra is revealed
behind it, say why you had come to say it: the divorce. The no reason, as
the plane dives up into the sky and is lost. All that one had so carefully polished
and preserved, arranged in rows, boasted modestly to the neighbors about,
is going and there is nothing, repeat nothing, to take its place.

How the “listing tundra” lisps a little, as if to indicate the tongue limping.

The poet’s tongue must always limp a little, playing Eurydice to the beloved lyre-bearer known as the mind.

4 . . . because most of the poets . . .

How Marguerite Yourcenar wrote a testament to its abyss in L’oeuvre au noire: “Night had fallen, but without his knowing whether it was only within him or in the room: to him everything now was night. And night was also in motion: darkness gave way to more darkness. But this darkness, different from what the eyes see, quivered with colors . . .”

And the silence rang and rang and rang and rang and rang as Arthur Rimbaud invented the color of vowels from silences —

5 . . . we know are monsters . . .

The idea of pacing as applied to the velocity of curses coursing through Amy Gerstler’s "“Fuck You Poem #45”:

Fuck you puce and chartreuse.
Fuck you postmodern and prehistoric.
Fuck you under the influence of opium, codeine, laudanum and paregoric.
Fuck every real and imagined country you fancied yourself princess of.
Fuck you on feast days and fast days, below and above.
Fuck you sleepless and shaking for nineteen nights running.
Fuck you ugly and fuck you stunning.

Cut to the dreams that vary barely, repetitions that differ in number of centimes, as with those of Jacques Roubaud:

O bows and bows and bows and arrows — “Someone comes in,” per Roubaud. “I am in a cafe” where everything begins.

5. . . we know our monsters . . .

How the song haunts from inside the forest, where there is a monster who has done terrible things, the monster hides in the woods and this is the song it sings: Who will love me now? Who will ever love me? And a naked young man jumps into “the scrotumtightening sea” at the beginning of James Joyce’s Ulysses. And the date was October in the year 1905, when James Joyce sent a letter to his publisher, having already struggled to find a publisher for his much-cleaner book of short stories, Dubliners, and the curse words Joyce didn’t want to edit out of the text.

“It should be noted that the allusion to the stories they tell each other is made immediately after the mention of semen dropping in humus, which, in the Aristotelian phrase revived by Roland Barthes, is a particularly clear case of the “post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy” (McQuillan 326). The reader is made to sense that ‘story time’ is going to disturb the lovers’ blissful ignorance of each other. What is more, it is exactly at the same moment that James Joyce’s words to Grant Richards, his publisher for Dubliners, are echoed: “I think people might be willing to pay for the special odor of corruption which, I hope, floats over my stories.”

And the reader of Joyce’s book is given the sense that ‘story time’ will disrupt the lovers’ blissful ignorance of each other, as it did to Paolo and Francesca.

7 . . . multiplying defenses . . .

To quote Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, from Hatred of Sex:

Group identities are no less defensive than individual ones; possibly they are more so. To claim that I have dual identities or intersecting identities, in the lingo à la mode, is simply to declare that my ego presides over various territories that it will defend against incursion. If identity denotes the ego's colonizing designs on experience, then narcissism could be redescribed as the imperialism of the psyche. Beneath contemporary claims made in the name of group identity, no matter how ostensibly progressive or radical, one hears the insistent clamor of narcissism.

Identities pose a special problem when it comes to sex because, as prototypically bound forms, they remain antipathetic to the effects of unbinding that characterize sexual pleasure at its most intense. Sex undoes identity. The contemporary shibboleth of ‘sexual identity’ is, from the psychoanalytic point of view, a contradiction in terms. One cannot credit the concepts of both the unconscious and identity; they are mutually exclusive. The psychoanalytic unconscious spells the impossibility of each and every identity. In this light our cherished identities may be redescribed as desperate defenses against the polymorphousness of pleasure, the multiplicity of desire, and above all the centrifugal forces of unbinding. Trumpism has made abundantly evident that there exist no nontoxic identity formations.

To quote Johannes Göransson from a book I devoured during pandemic:

In Socrates’ erotic anxieties about the written word, we can sense the origins of the most pervasive metaphor for translation: the idea that a translation is either ‘faithful’ or ‘free’. For many critics, the degree of a translators’ ‘fidelity’ is the only way of even discussing the translation. Translation’s proliferation of language ruins the monogamous illusion of the original.

To think that nothing gets as close as this . . .

John Cassavetes during filming of Woman Under the Influence.

*

A R. Ammons, “Poetics”
Alice Notley, “Instability in Poetry” (2001 Talk given at Temple University)
Amy Gerstler, “Fuck You Poem #45”
H. D., “Chorus to Iphageneia”
Jacques Roubaud, “Two Dreams” tr. by Mary Ann Caws
Johannes Göransson, Transgressive Circulation, Essays on Translation (Noemi Press)
Marguerite Yourcenar, excerpt from The Abyss, tr. by Grace Frick
Nazim Hikmet, “On Living”
Nicole Cooley, “Poetry of Disaster”
Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, Hatred of Sex (University of Nebraska, 2022)
PJ Harvey, “Who Will Love Me Now?”
PJ Harvey, ”Sweeter Than Anything”
PJ Harvey, ”This Wicked Tongue”
PJ Harvey, “Angel”
PJ Harvey, “Stone”
PJ Harvey, “Horses In My Dreams”
Philip Fried, “A Place You Can Live: Interview with A.R. Ammons,” Terrain.org, October 22, 2009.

"Je suis turbulent . . . Je suis négatif"

Je rêve d'un printemps définitif . . .

The first of December.

Most leaves have abandoned their trees and settled upon the dying grasses in clumps of soft brown, or else lingering in patches of desaturated gold. Along the hillside of Avondale Park, the eye catches a series of blankets woven together from leaves, their colors blown into ensembles by a windy weekend. I am trying to think my way out of the slats and the slots of this month, battling a sense the usual sense of urgency that upends the annual.

leafpile 1

Still chasing Picabia through the prior weekend.

Andre Breton as sandwich man by Francis Picabia at Dada Festival, Paris, March 27, 1920.

leafpile 2

The subject is portraiture, or— more specifically — a portrait of Marcel Duchamp.

Exploring the relationship between optics and art, Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics) was one of Man Ray’s first kinetic art pieces, created by mounting five painted glass plates of diminishing sizes on a metal axis which was then spun by a motor. When activated, the spinning plates appear as a single flat spiral that creates an optical illusion.

leafpile 3

“A signature is more than a name but less than the trace of an entire absent body,” wrote Eugenie Brinkema in an essay addressing Sophie Calle’s work.

Claude Cahun, “Henri Michaux” (1925)

Claude Cahun took this photograph of Henri Michaux in 1925. The image lives at the Art Institute of Chicago. I love it dearly, and can’t quite explain why the fold of Michaux’s hand keeps catching my eye and drawing a line between the white crumpling of a handkerchief and the pocket and the expression hanky-panky.

leafpile 4

Uncanniess rippling through the year 1917, when the avant-garde dialogued through short-lived journals and art magazines that often vanished as quickly as they were created, so that Witkacy’s multiple self-portrait in mirrors speaks to that of Duchamp, as if to play upon the mode of being “in uniform” while also disputing the possibility of unanimity within a single subject.

To be of five minds about the war.

To play with pipe that will be used to challenge the notions of representativity in art.

leafpile 5

Margitte and his wife, the treachery of images soon to arrive in the late 1920’s as that series of word-images inspired by children’s books and his early career in advertising.

Magritte eventually laid out his rationale for word-image paintings in an illustrated text called Words and Images.

leafpile 6

Motion’s entanglement with futurist notions of progress through industrialization reminds me of our contemporary fetish for technology as the savior and redeemer of future time. Not industry but tech. Not Industrialists but Tech Bros and Billionaires. Not snake oil but Bitcoin.

Collected from the corners of this day:

• The theremin yowling from the corners of Biolay’s “Chère inconnue”

• The tiny creaking sound that appears in Ólafur Arnalds’ “Near Light” — and the reverb that cuts, claps, moves like light scissoring across a sofa in the afternoon.

• Face à l'étendue de ma peine que n'ai-je entendu les sirènes. Face à l'étendue de ma peine je me baignerai nu dans la Seine.

• John Cassavetes in an interview, pushing back against the (fairly common) interpretation of his films as negative or depressing: “The world is so downbeat, so cynical; people want something to believe in. At least, people do deep down, but they're afraid to admit to humanities out loud for fear their friends and neighbors will think they are square. I get awfully sick of the mass flip attitude. I wish we weren't so hard-boiled. The human spirit is really at a dangerously low ebb. We need to pump adrenaline into our sentimental values, which have become so badly depleted. In this age of war fears, the destruction of everything and the fantastic progress of scientific wonders, we seem to have adopted only the rasping emotions of nerves for feelings - not emotions of the heart and soul that speak for faith and kindness and understanding There is something important in people, something that's dying, - the senses, a universal thing. We can't agree on politics, but maybe we can agree on senses. We are dying of sadness. The whole world is dying of sadness. We are the enemy. People don't want to say, 'Yes, we are confused; we are nothing.' It destroys all kinds of entertainment. If you really observe and put within the framework of the story some more important facet of life, if you say something that is a positive statement rather than a negative one, you have confirmed somebody's belief. If you affirm somebody's emotion or ideas, they don't feel ashamed of feeling this belief. I want to stress the indomitable qualities of people, not the defeatism.”

• Jeanne Moreau’s shredded voice dueting with Etienne Daho in “Le Vent qui roule un coeur.”

• Aragon’s rant on a Saturday long ago.

• Still staring at Wim Wender’s statement from “Like flying blind without instruments….”, and circling it the way one circles an installation in a museum or a raised car in a body shop: “A lot of my films start off with roadmaps instead of scripts. Sometimes it feels like flying blind without instruments. You fly all night and in the morning you arrive somewhere. That is: you have to try to make a landing somewhere so the film can end.For me this film has come off better than, or differently to, my previous films. Once more, we flew all night without instruments, but this time we landed exactly where we meant to. From the outset, Paris, Texas had a much straighter trajectory and a much more precise destination. And from the beginning, too, it had more of a story than my earlier films, and I wanted to tell that story till I dropped.” Still thinking about how Wenders’ “I” is what drops rather than the story or its characters.

• “In its instantaneous desire, [intimacy] destabilizes the very things institutions of intimacy are created to stabilize and people are constantly surprised by this,” Lauren Berlant wrote.

• The futility of passionate love: the motif illustrated in/by Josef von Sternberg’s film, The Devil Is A Woman (1935), with its screenplay written by John Dos Passos and based on the 1898 novel The Woman and the Puppet by Pierre Louÿs.

• “If poetry didn’t limp, it would run. . .” per Jean Cocteau.
  
  

*

Alfred Schnittke, Cello Sonata No. 1 (1978)
Benjamin Biolay, “Negatif”
Benjamin Biolay, “Chère inconnue”
Claude Cahun, “Henri Michaux” (1925)
Francis Picabia, Portrait of Andre Breton as sandwich-man (Dada Festival, Paris, March 27, 1920)
Monica Fernandez, “Why This Is Not a Pipe” (Fusion Magazine)
Ólafur Arnalds, “Near Light” (Living Room Songs)
Rene Magritte, “Les mots et les images” (1929)
Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman, and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering” (New German Critique, no. 39)
Wim Wenders, “Like flying blind without instruments: On the turning point in Paris, Texas” (May 1984)

"The first three games were speed-chess warm up..."

Humiliation.

Unremitting shame. This is what Ivan experiences as his heartbeat slows to a wallow, “leaving between beats an abyss of  emptiness in his being, an emptiness he felt he was falling through.”

Immobilized in his own bed after waking from a nightmare that ejected him onto a city street with a flaming erection, buck naked, Ivan feels slightly “exhilarated” by this new state. He realizes his eyes are wide open, his body inaccessible to his mind. As Josip Novakovich tells it:

There was something coldly solemn about it, something extraordinary, a mysterium tremendum, something dangerous. Now instead of despising himself, he began to pity himself. Through pity he rose to the heights of respecting himself, nay,  loving himself. He continued breathing involuntarily, as though somebody else were doing it.

Ivan experiences his existence without shame. He is shameless. Unfortunately, he is also dead. From here on out, the story will be narrated by Ivan's corpse, as if from inside the coffin, but also in a continuing relationship to the world, his daughters, his wife, the afterlives of love and longing. 

The shadow of other shames.

In an earlier scene subtitled, “The Joys of Cuckolding Come to a Sorry End,” there is a moment when Ivan enters his office, and the staging as well as the affects seem to replay a scene from Gogol’s Nose, or else the drift of an overcoat…

Rewind to the staging of humiliation.

I keep returning to the way Novakovich builds into that moment of overwhelming shame that coincides with the subject’s death. A play-by-play of the staging.

To note, first, the sensory details indicating the ticking of time . . .

The Japanese alarm clock emitted a hiss as minutes rolled over each other. Ivan looked at the fluorescing green digits: 1:10, 1:11.

Followed by two brief sentences that locate duration within human flesh:

His wife began to snore. Then she stopped.

Immediately connected to a physical and mental experience of panic and terror for Ivan:

All of a sudden the terror of death pierced through his skin, infusing itself into his blood like cobra's poison. He smelled the incense of death, an acrid sensation in his nostrils. He remembered all the burials that he had ever seen, now unified into a single one: his own. He saw himself in a coffin, in a black suit, with his purple head propped up, giving him a permanently thoughtful air as becomes someone who is contemplat- ing being and nothingness. And he felt pangs of shame, shame which stank of old socks and genitals.

He was terrified that he would die, just suddenly vanish, without having done any- thing significant in his life, without understanding anything. He had not even had a single thought in the course of his life that could satisfy him aesthetically and fill his soul—if he had one. He had experienced only petty worries and vanity.

Followed by the usual existential dilemmas (which draw Ivan into an interesting relationship with his own subjectivity, or the character he makes of himself):

Now out of an additional vanity, out of wishing that he could think well of himself, he was worried that he had lived vainly.

In empty darkness, all his misery fell upon him. His hairs stood up on his arms and legs. His falling naked onto the pavement amidst a roar of laughter recreated itself in his head fluorescently, through a pinkish tint, with derisive echoes recalling his childhood humiliation: his head being whacked against the cement, children jeering.

Landing in the memory of childhood humiliation, or the return to that feeling of helplessness which destabilizes Ivan’s sense of himself as a husband, father, and employee.

The humiliation of death.

Ivan is dead— but the world keeps moving around him. In the section titled “A Death Certificate Speaks Up,” Ivan’s wife, Slava, calls the physician after discovering Ivan’s motionless body. Unable to reach a doctor by phone, she runs to the local pub in search of the doctor. This is where she finds him, at the tavern.

The doctor was there— a cigarette dangling from his lips, cards in his hands, a bottle of yellowish plum brandy on the table-surrounded by several yellow drunks and a blue policeman.

The doctor was clearly ill suited for his profession, good for nothing except the tavern. He had passed his university exams with the lowest passable grades; he had taken more than a decade to get his degree since his interests lay in whatever taverns were about: drinking, cards, women, and, now and then, a brawl—-though less and less frequently with his advancing age. But for that, he whored more and more routinely now at the spas

The doctor certifies Ivan’s death. And then, an uncanny sexual event begins between the doctor and the newly-widowed Slava, while her husband’s corpse sits on the bed.

Novakovich makes exquisite use of framing here: he repeats certain phrases and words to indicate a similarity between Ivan’s experience of death and Slava’s experience of ecstasy, beginning with the word “Suddenly.” So the doctor is doing his regular thing when:

Suddenly he seemed to wake up from his routine performance, for he was very sensitive to female warmth. Under the guise of further solace, while saying, “Everything's gonna be all right, he began to touch her neck and press her against his body.

And the next paragraph begins with that evocation of the delirium in mysterium tremendum:

In her near delirium, Slava hadn't paid any attention at first to the doctor's reassurances. The shivers of fear began to mix with some warm streams. She leaned her head quite freely on the physician's chest, and he began to rub his stubbly cheek against her hair, making her scalp shiver. He slid his hands down her back. “Everything's gonna be fine,” he said in his mesmerizing baritone. He buzzed these words into her ears, the warmth of his breath sending a stream of fire into the base of her brain, so that she lost her senses momentarily. The doctor pressed his fingers into her flesh beneath her skirt, sliding his palms up the back of her cool thighs.

Slava began to sigh, gasp, and moan. The doctor pressed her against the table, and she sat right on the crumpling death certificate, which rustled most disapprovingly. The doctor slid her skirt up, and with his hand kneaded her thighs and sent his pre- penile emissaries, his fingers, further into the foreign terrain. His fingers teased Slava, manipulating her electricity. She moaned as if she were falling through an abyss. The doctor kissed her and reached to unzip his pant.

“As if she were falling through an abyss.”

Ritual redress.

Slava must prepare Ivan for burial. She must dress him for the final time, while also addressing his physical body intimately.

As a verb, “redress” means to remedy or set right.

In its noun form, “redress” indicates a remedy or compensation for a wrong or a grievance.

When ending her two-year affair with Jean Mounet-Sully, Sarah Bernhardt blamed herself. “Dear Jean,” wrote Sarah, you must realize that I am not made for happiness.” Being so made, or not-made, Bernhardt continued to list her limitations: “It is not my fault that I am constantly in search of new sensations, new emotions. That is how I shall be until my life is worn away. I am just as unsatisfied the morning after as I am the night before. My heart demands more excitement than anyone can give it. My frail body is exhausted by the act of love. Never is it the love I dream of.” I suspect this is how every writer feels about the book they are writing, or the book they have finished, or the manuscript in progress.

I keep wondering what I owe my words in terms of life, or living in the readings of others—- and then distracting myself with the stories of others. . . . Novakovich’s next subtitle, “Messages from the Galaxy of the Dead,” indicates that we will be hearing from Ivan in his posthumous version. Panic seems to be a condition of the dead as well as the living. Ivan’s body is laid out on the table, dressed for the funeral:

Slava and his daughters came to see him. "Daddy is asleep, and won’t wake up anymore," said Slava.

The daughters shrieked.

Ivan was happy. They love me! he thought. Who would have suspect But his enthusiasm slackened as, against his will, he thought that they screamed out of fright— not because of losing him. You can feel the terrifying reality of death when somebody close dies— not necessarily somebody you love but somebody you are used to as a part of your experience. When a part of your experience vanishes from life (to become nothing), you feel that just as that part of your experience vanishes, the totality of your experience— you yourself— will vanish into nothingness. So the daughters may have screamed for themselves.

Ivan tries to interpret the responses of loved ones in a manner that satisfies the hunger for love and recognition that marked him as a child. He wanders towards the naturalization fallacy in an effort to dignify the unthinkable position in which he finds himself.

Friends come to pay their respects. His brother gets into an argument with a friend he knew well in his younger years. The two men begin throwing insults at one another: “Ustasha Croat pig!” “Serb chetnik!” Novakovich gives us the fracture of his own life in the absurd antics near the corpse. “The two childhood friends reverted to childhood and broke into a fist fight, cutting their lips and knocking out porcelain tooth caps, which they then, in a temporary truce, looked for on all fours in the floor cracks.”

The problem of narration hesitates at this edge of the impossible situation Novakovich elected to depict. We are in Ivan’s head but also in the world that refuses the existence of Ivan’s head, or of Ivan. As with life, perhaps, in death, Ivan seeks to be understood.

The wood creaked in various frequencies. Many people gathered in the room, whispering. The hissing of the whispers terrified Ivan, as if a giant octopus's limbs were engulfing him. Some whispers were not whispers, since some people were incapable of whispering. “When did he die? How?”

The corpse named Ivan observes this moment in which some of the main characters involved in his life are gathered to observe the event of his death. He listens: because he cannot respond or speak. He is condemned, as it were, to listening.

Again, he thinks back to childhood:

He thought that around him, out of respect for death, the visitors wouldn't say anything embarrassing—- and honest—- about him. Too bad I can't hear what they really think. Still, aren't I lucky? Most men after dying couldn't hear their wives and daughters cry for them— either for love or terror. And I've heard mine.

Ivan recalled his childhood daydreams about how it would be if he died right then, how sorry his friends would feel for him. He had thought that suicide was worth committing just in order to elicit compassion in his friends, to show him how much they had really loved him. The desire for suicide stemmed from a vague impression that after death you could be present at a gathering of your lamenting friends, at least present through their sorrow, which would lift you into the comforting and succoring oceanic infinity. If you knew that you would be missed among the living, life would become meaningful and lovable, and so would death.

Even as a boy, though, Ivan had known that that line of thought was grounded in bad faith. You'd have to experience it to know.

And now Ivan did experience, and he believed. Even if people didn't talk about him right now, hadn't they organized a party because of him? It was fantastic. Paradisiacal! His life was worth living just for this moment.

I suspect we never get over the fathers . . . but certainly, the fantastic is central to Novakovich’s prose and the stories he tells about the eastern europe that ejected him and so many others.

“As to the fourth method—that of interesting—it also is frequently confused with art. One often hears it said, not only of a poem, a novel, or a picture, but even of a musical work, that it is interesting. What does this mean? To speak of an interesting work of art means either that we receive from a work of art information new to us, or that the work is not fully intelligible and that little by little, and with effort, we arrive at its meaning and experience a certain pleasure in this process of guessing it. In neither case has the interest anything in common with artistic impression. Art aims at infecting people with feelings experienced by the artist. But the mental effort necessary to enable the spectator, listener, or reader to assimilate the new information contained in the work, or to guess the puzzles propounded, by distracting him hinders the infection. And therefore the interestingness of a work not only has nothing to do with its excellence as a work of art, but rather hinders than assists artistic impression.”

— Leo Tolstoy on “interestingness” as a barrier (can’t say I agree with him at all on this)

*

Duane Michaels, A Letter From My Father
Josip Novakovich, “Subterreanean Fugue” (PDF)
Morphine, “Hanging on a Curtain”
Morphine, “Swing It Low”

The "Guilty" demo.

“How can you see your life unless you leave it? It is already late when you wake up inside a question. Pilgrims were people who got the right wish. I'm asking you to study the dark.”

— Anne Carson, The Anthropology of Water

Prior to leaving Europe I was engrossed in presenting psychological studies through the mediumship of forms which I created. Almost immediately upon coming to America it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is machinery, and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression...

— Francis Picabia, 1915

Francis Picabia’s machine portraits resemble closed systems: forms of being where possibility is automatically limited. Against the porosity of flesh and paper, these portraits give us indeterminate circuits that cannot be understood or penetrated.

De Zayas! De Zayas! (1915) is a caricature of the artist that announces its own emptiness. Picabia’s quotations and text juxtapose an allusion from Xenophon’s Anabasis (“Glimpsing the shores of the Black Sea after their long, arduous retreat from Persia, Xenophon's soldiers burst into cries of 'Thalassa! Thalassa!” ) with rendering of Pont-Euxin in French (“Je suis venu sur les rivages / du Pont-Euxin.” For the soldiers, the sea represents a highway that leads back to their homes.

Francis Picabia. Zayas! De Zayas!, 1915.
Ink on paper.

Following a tortuous journey through war-torn France and across the ocean, Picabia had finally found refuge in New York with his old friends. This greeting— 'De Zayas! De Zayas!,' — echoes the Greek outburst, exhibits the same joy. How to reconcile this quotation with the sewing machine and the machine portrait?

The exclamatory and exuberant expression . . . (I’m riffing here, or trying to find my thoughts) as if uttered by one who has arrived at a place, and needs to announce that arrival. The empty corset withholds the flesh, but it also withholds the representation of the flesh. Costumes only; no human subject with skin in the game.

Is the corset connected by a piece of thread to the bobbin in the upper right corner?

I see it as a bobbin; it evokes the interior of my sewing machine, just as the thread which descends from the corset’s crotch seems connected to interior gears and pulleys that also resemble a sewing machine. Surely that is button. Sewing makes and brings forth: it creates the subject that will be created by the costume, so there is double-creation here, or a duplicity that constitutes the modern subject.

“I have seen you in action and here you are”: this is how I would translate the tiny script located in the upper right corner. The striptease cannot satisfy the viewer?

Francis Picabia, Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity (1915)
Ink on paper.

When asked by The New York Times to comment on his work, Picabia replied:

I do not produce the original. You will find no trace of the original in my pictures. Take a picture I painted the other day, while here in New York. I saw what you call your ‘skyscrapers.’ Did I paint the Flatiron Building, the Woolworth Building, when I painted my impression of these ‘skyscrapers’ of your great city? No! I gave you the rush of upward movement, the feeling of those who attempted to build the Tower of Babel— man’s desire to reach the heavens, to achieve infinity.

*

Francis Picabia, Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity (1915)
Francis Picabia, Zayas! De Zayas!, (1915)
Louise Nevelson, Ferocious Bull (1942)
P. J. Harvey, “Guilty” (demo)

The letters of Sylvia Warner Townsend and William Maxwell.

Earlier this summer, I snuck away from the house and sat on my favorite hill with a pen, my orange notebook, and The Element of Lavishness: Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1938-1978. Warner and Maxwell are irresistible in their arguments, witticisms, and the passing back and forth of vignettes, but — as the epigraph below reveals — the overall tone is one of good faith, mutual admiration, and (for lack of a better word) trust.

Someone abandoned their red cardigan at the foot of my favorite oak. I haunt that tree religiously. What to do with the unplanned and unclaimed flustering red thing?

November 11, 1969

On the day of November 11th, 1969, in the century prior to the one wherein P. and I, between laughter and tears, would select this date to marry, Sylvia began her letter to William Maxwell with the announcement of her longtime partner’s death. “Valentine died on Sunday morning,” Sylvia wrote. “She was deeply under morphine. I was with her to the last and laid her out, helped by our kind Sibyl who had shared the nursing." No stranger's hand touched her fastidious reserve. This evening her coffin was carried out of the house and put in a forget-me-not blue van —which would have surprised her. I heard her spirit laughing beside me.”

After sharing this new way of relating to Valentine, Sylvia feels she has prepared him for what neither could truly know, namely, how she would deal with losing her lover and occasional muse: “I am passionately thankful that she is out and away, and that in a fashion we are back where we were, able to love freely and uncompromised by anxiety and doubtful hopes and miseries of frustration.”

I can hear the rustle of Sylvia’s shoulders turning slightly as she shifts her torso towards the large window and looks out upon the garden, seeking the familiar trees and scenes, noticing a broken birdfeeder, and— finally— failing in this effort to orient herself at home, where ‘home’ indicates the place she shared with Valentine.

(O window, you make her a stranger!)

Sylvia discovers herself molded queerly, rendered as the ghost of Valentine’s love.

On the desk below, the letter lies open. “One thinks one has foreseen every detail of heartbreak . . .” she tells William, “I hadn't. I had not allowed for the anguished compassion and shock of hearing her viola voice changed to a pretty, childish treble, the voice of a sick child.”

“Death transfigured her,” Sylvia says, using a religious word against its usual meaning, asserting the near-irreverence typical of her novels, perhaps even hoping to see what might happen if she can live this one out as text. Like the saints and mystics, Valentine became more beautiful after death: “In a matter of minutes I saw the beauty of her young days reassert itself on her blurred careworn face. It was like something in music, the reestablishment of the original key, the return of the theme. Don't think I am unhappy and alone, dear William. I am not. I am in a new country and she is the compass I travel by.”

November 26, 1969

A few weeks later, Sylvia ended a letter to William by mentioning that Valentine had bequeathed various smile items to William, among them, a clock: “She left you, as well as a folder of S. T. W. and her set of my books, her small table-clock. It chimes hours & half-hours with a pretty treble voice. It must wait to be professionally packed. And a small brooch apiece to Kate and Brookie. 'My two dearest' she says of them: both were given to her by me, love-tokens. These are so small that if you had a flying friend coming to or going from this country, they could be conveyed without adding an ounce to his luggage. Otherwise, they can travel with the clock.”

As for adjusting to the new absence, Sylvia refuses to admit the loss as complete. “No, I am not alone,” she tells him. Valentine is near—a muse to her hours and dreams: “She is more living, more real, than I am myself. She pervades my days. But I can't talk to her, tell her of this thought, that bird which flew by; I cannot consult her, nor ask her to put a new flint into my lighter. These trivia stab my heart. And I can no longer serve her. That is most annihilating of all.”

December 16, 1969

In her letters to William, Sylvia affixes traces of scents and shadows that testify to Valentine’s ongoing presence in the world of the living. But there are lapses, memories, places that conspire to disarm her, as she confides: “With a heart as normal as a stone I went to spend this last weekend with friends in Berkshire because they wanted to change my air. Their telephone rang. It was a telephone on which Valentine had often rung me. With an idiot intensity I thought, She will never telephone me again. And for a moment the whole of my grief was comprised in that deprivation. There is no armour against irrationality.”

They talk about Lord Byron and Proust, the horrifying war against Vietnam, mushrooms and fairies and travels.

March 1970

Less than a year after Valentine’s death, William mentions the clock that Valentine bequeathed to him, a tock that has woven itself into his life, in a lengthy letter to Sylvia. He tells the story with delight, for stories are what they do, these two writers, they imagine and read and study and write: “When I got home with the greatest delicacy I approached the clock, wound it a little, and waited —no, first I set it and was ravished by the little chime, then I wound it and nothing happened. And while I was looking for a lever that could be released and start things, the second hand began to move: it moved twice round the dial, just long enough for me to fall in love with the clock, and stopped. And would not, having captured my heart, do another thing. I went to the phone and called an opera singer who has a clock somewhat like it, which belonged to her Aunt Clara, and therefore it is always referred to as Aunt Clara's Clock, and she said to clasp it to me lovingly as if it were a child and then bend forward so that the child's head touched the floor. I did, and nothing happened. She used to take her clocks to a Swiss firm that was most dependable, but they sold out to a Pole who was not, she said, but if I would bring it to the country we would go together to a man in Croton who is very confident... If there is one thing that fills me with misgivings, it is a clock in the hands of a man who is very confident. So bright and early the next morning I put it in my briefcase and went to Tiffany's, thinking that any number of elegant women, friends of Edith Wharton, must have gone there with just such beautiful mechanisms; and was given a card with the address of a firm on grd Avenue that Tiffany's felt to be most reliable. By now quite late to work, I went back the went to Tiffany's, thinking that any number of elegant women, friends of Edith Wharton, must have gone there with just such beautiful mechanisms; and was given a card with the address of a firm on ard Avenue that Tiffany's felt to be most reliable. By now quite late to work, I went back the way I had come, found the shop, saw at a glance that there was not a timepiece in the place that didn't antedate the sinking of the Titanic, and put Valentine's clock on the counter and the man said ‘How charming!’ Then he turned it sideways once and said ‘I will get in touch with you in a couple of days.’ It is a long time to be separated from something you have just fallen in love with, but at least I have the key, in my left hand coat pocket.”

Something you have just fallen in love with: these words would be confetti to Sylvia. Vietnam enters the conversation, as does terrible policy and the prison-industrial complex. William laments the imbecility endemic to the American political class: “The Attorney General of the United States is asking for permission to take prints of the soles of the feet and specimens of the handwriting of people who might have criminal tendencies. I could have known that we were due for a revival of phrenology. We have had everything else. Pity this unfortunate country.”

Later in the same month, William sends a short note of despair to Sylvia, replying to her statement that she will never write another novel. Look Sylvia, he says: “When you say I feel pretty sure I shall never write another novel, I feel like what Thomas a Buile said in a pub (in the poem by James Stephens). I know that everything you wrote was directed toward Valentine, and that she was your climate, but please don't forget that I am here. If you stop writing you will hurt my feelings terribly.”

April 13, 1970

On my birthdate in April, before I was conceivable to the parties involved in my conception, Sylvia tells William that she is writing again. “I have begun to write again—” she says, before qualifying: “No, not a story, not a novel, and nothing for now. An archive. I found that Valentine had kept quantities of my letters, as I had kept quantities of hers. Reading through them, and putting them into sequence, I realised that it is a notable correspondence and the sort of thing that should be put away in a tin box for posterity. So now I am entirely absorbed in writing the narrative links and explanations and so forth. I am mid-way in the prologue. It is far the best thing I have ever written— and an engrossing agony. I am terrified that I should die before I have finished this. A month ago, it was the only thing I had the least inclination for. And you, dear William, must be the tin box, since it will count as my Literary REMAINS —absurd phrase. It can't be let out till there is a safe margin for every one to be dead in.”

August 2, 1970

The archive of correspondence between herself and Valentine becomes an obsession for Sylvia. In August, she admits this to William. “I am lost to the world in those letters”; and William imagines her face upon reading these words. He recognizes the goulash where ecstasy mingles with self-abandonment, where relinquishment resembles sacrifice, where flavors emerge from the mire of shared boiling.

Absorbed in this project, Sylvia is recognizable, busy, distracted, alive. “Annotations have always been my setting delight,” she tells William. “Some of them, I find, need to be extended into snatches of narrative.” And perhaps she drops a name in order to say what she wanted to say anyway: “David Garnett said to me long ago 'What you write best out is love.’”

November 1970

They joke about winter. William tells Sylvia how deeply touched him to read Valentine’s letters, to linger in the angles of light and resonances of the “supplemental narrative” Sylvia had written to contextualize her lover’s poetry: “The last cluster of letters set me to thinking how there are two fears and most people have one or the other and maybe they are the same fear: that they are afraid to call their soul their own, or that they are afraid it will be seen.”

Exposed souls make us blush. They resemble the curve where the human back meets the ass:

Maxwell wrote his own ghost stories in a manner that permitted him to maintain plausible deniability about his supernal beliefs. But here, on the page that will be read by an ailing Sylvia, William balances friendship’s tandem desires, conversation and kindredship, alongside the hope of comforting her. “The effect of Valentine's letters is of the soul unsheathed,” he writes, “in utter and final fearlessness. I have never read anything like them.” He wants to sound insistent. And his sentences are structured to realize this insistence as he moves from the true thing to the overly-affirming one. William moves quickly, hastily, in a manner that preserves intimacy; the momentum of his compliments doesn’t hesitate or falter. “Such style, and without a moment's thought to it,” he says ofValentine’s poems. “I will never again read the word happiness without thinking of them.” (This can be true and yet too much, as death and friendship tend to be.) “And in the supplemental narrative — what I started to say is that all my life I have been confidently watching you outdo yourself, and you have again, but by so far—the night ride, and the simple summation of all the aspects to her love, simply exceeds, as prose, anything you have ever written,” William tells Sylvia, before attaching the words she most wanted to hear from her dear editor-peer-fan: “It is as if you were possessed.” Amen.

*

Michael A. Steinman, ed., The Element of Lavishness: Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1938-1978 (Internet Archive)

Workshop of Silence.

… but I wonder if this constant announcement of pain, putting one's subjection to work isn't a sort of gimmick, a trafficking in a type of disaster capitalism.

— Roger Reeves

under the bridges what springs up rises
out of a name more tragic than the absence
of lovers above

— Jean D’Amérique, “under the bridges what springs (up)

This is to confess my untold delight in the postal service’s delivery of a book titled workshop of silence, containing poems by Jean D’Amérique, as translated by Conor Bracken.

In his translator’s introduction, Bracken notes that Jean D’Amérique’s lived experience is unsettled by the boundaries of nation-states: “As a transnational person who splits his time between Haiti, France, and Belgium, not to mention a Black transnational person transiting through and living in historically white countries, he is subject to the rough, reductive, and at times lethally armed gaze of bureaucracy.” Borders, as written by this poet, “are not meant to be stopped at”; their existence is arbitrary and alienating.

Since D’Amerique began as a slam poet, Bracken says that “retaining this transgressive, playful, and dexterous attention to sound” was one of the primary goals of his translation— a goal that frequently leads him to slight departures from the denotative meaning of the original words. Translation is an art. As such, translators make choices about what to emphasize and convey across languages. Bracken elects the “enlivening of language” that restores “its fundamental slipperiness,” or, in his own words:

It is based as much in play and wit as it is in the political dimensions of the work that he's doing with these poems, which sometimes announces itself without embroidery, as in “moment of silence,”  wherein he situates his poems in the  political tradition of Nazim Hikmet, and at other times is more recondite, as in “under the bridges what springs (up),” where he points out through elaborate wordplay the continued but unexamined presence of the lexicon of shipping and chattel slavery in economic chatter. 

I hear this subversive jouissance trickling upwards through the sap of “solar brass,” a poem that tingled all the way to the tips of my fingertips when I first read it.

solar brass

my rhapsody
a cactus in the night-call’s port

for sale for tropical cents
I am a solar

powered brassy jacket
the horizon
looks punk to me

D’Amérique’s poems have a purpose in daily life: they process the banalities and polish the repetitions.

A day spills between the materials of living as found in the grocery store. . .

poem for running errands

to be recited aloud while
going up and down the aisles

coffee filters
daybreak mouth agape
onions shallots
fresh bread hitched to mornings
omelet of youthfully innocent sun
beans verging on green
dusk

a little olive oil
for sopping up memory grated cheese

poem running against amnesia
don’t stop
until you bail the basket out
and pay the register with tenderness

As if to welcome the small details of the day in each purchase by turning the grocery list into a way of loving the world.

The quantum of D’Amérique’s “building the burden” strikes me as the teens unpack boxes filled with decorations.

building the burden

flesh dressed in awareness when the blade appears
fills the absence we defies

here where the hour
finds the guts to weep for its childhood
the ditch brimes with future
interrogating a life
whose reply is a stele

here is a curtain
an ulcer on the sight
lacking passerby the window’s unfinished

forever metal the mouth exalts the eclipse
parallel sentences brooding over what’s withheld
if you want a burden
take this poem run aground by boundaries

The possibilities inherent in D’Amerique’s poems remind me of the energy inherent to the act of “calling a thing,” which is to both name the thing and to summon it into being while imagining one’s self in relation to it.

[Yes, what is a self? the poet wonders.]

Certainly, a self is something kinned to the selfing described by Roger Reeves in his essay, “Poetry Isn’t Revolution But a Way of Knowing Why It Must Come”:

A self that might like to lie down in a field in the rain and take a nap. A self that might want to cuss and cut up on a Saturday night and go to church on Sunday morning and be holy all in it. A self touching and seeing a self in a way that a self wants to be seen, touched —without the veil. In lowering the veil for our children and for ourselves, we allow them, we allow ourselves, to see, to know, to diagnose power and its abuse. We give ourselves a world, a sound for the sense and tense of our lives.

Building his essay through repetition of a line from Solmaz Sharif’s poem, “Look,” Reeves repeats: “It matters what you call a thing.” And again:

“It matters what you call a thing.” When calling a child child in a Black household, it means so many things. It is calling them love, young, be here with me. It is calling forth a hedge of protection around them not as a way of absconding from danger but because of the awareness of it, because there is no out from danger. In this way, a Black parent is a poet; they call a thing into being. Child. But they have also called their child into language. In this way, a parent is always their child's first poet; an announcement of liberation- “not less of love but expanding / Of love,” to borrow from T. S. Eliot's “Little Gidding.” The parent becomes the child's first instantiation of ecstasy, of know— knowing how to use language, to author, an invisible future into being.

In the year of my unmooring, I could not have imagined that Roger Reeves’ Dark Days would mean everything to me— and this is precisely the joy of it. The reminder that I can be astonished; the muddle in my head turned to mush; the smallest syllables reconnecting into utterances.

And so, what follows is a length excerpt from an essay by Reeves aptly titled, “Reading Fire, Reading the Stars” — because we are still reading the worlds that need imagining in order to inhabit a future. . .

As Frederick Douglass noted in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, reading promotes an imagining, a worldmaking that can directly and emphatically contradict one's present circumstance, contradict the language weaponized against oneself-slave, three-fifths, chattel, property. When reading, one does not passively receive the words of others, one makes — makes a sentence, makes a paragraph, makes a book, makes a world, makes an argument. One authors. And sometimes in the reading, in the authoring, one creates a counter-narrative and counterargument particularly when reading something like Thomas lefferson's assessment of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley or reading the pathologizing of Black families in the Moynihan Report.

In other words, one makes a possibility, a possibility that hitherto did not exist. In reading (which is also an act of interpretation), one finds language for what is possible, what is untenable about the present, what must persist beyond the present. Reading, therefore, is always an act of making a future, an act of speculation. Even if one is only speculating about what one wants at the grocery store later. I should explain. In graduate school, I took a course on performative rhetorics with a brilliant rhetorician and philosopher named Diane Davis. In the class, we were discussing the prognosticative nature of language, how we never write for who we are but for who we will be; that language is always imagining us in the future. And she gave the great example of the grocery list. We sit down and write a grocery list in order to remind our future self of what the past self wanted. The list anticipates our forgetfulness, our future self being somewhere else, in some other headspace, after waiting for the bus, for example, or working all day. In this way, writing anticipates need, what the future self needs even if, for a moment, unaware.

This is why reading is dangerous— because it points.

Reading points to the necessity of pleasure, of longing, of desire—- even if in the words of others, even if desire is nowhere in the text that one is reading.

Reading itself is desire, desirous, a playing in and with the illicit because reading allows one to occupy a dream, the not-yet inhabited. Reading points to the invisible, to what must be created that doesn't exist.

Reading can also point to what exists but is not always acknowledged—one's freedom, for example.

Again, think of Frederick Douglass—his coming into literacy as an enslaved boy. In the act of resisting his master's desire for him not to learn to read, in disobeying the slave codes that made it illegal for enslaved people to learn how to read, Douglass began to cultivate not just literacy but the stuff of his abolition, his self-making. Reading became the introduction and practice for his personal revolution. Reading helped to prepare Douglass and his imagination for the question, What might my freedom look like? And, the practice of reading helped him answer it. Reading points to that which is against genocide. Or at least the reading I'm interested in doing, the reading that begins on the edges of plantations, in small groups of study, away from the eyes, appetites, laws, and codes of the masters and their policing patrollers; reading that announces the future, reading that disobeys, critiques the present through pointing, pointing away to the swamps and marshes where we might convene something like freedom.

Maybe we begin here— at the end, at what feels like the end of a certain type of America, the end of a certain type of democracy, a certain type of truth or at least an allegiance to it. Maybe this troubling of truth has been the question of art, art in America, all along— how do we begin democracy, how do we extend democracy to all the animals?

And if you can bear one more subjunctive statement, maybe a poem will show us how to begin or extend democracy to all the animals.

(Note: some italics in the excerpt are mine, as is the dissolution of Reeves’ paragraph including the sentences that begin with “Reading” into separate lines or celestial trajectories.)

Sophie Calle.

“Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places. There is a goal, but no way; what we call a way is hesitation.”

— Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

*

Decostruttori Postmodernisti, “Gnossienne n°1” by Erik Satie
Decostruttori Postmodernisti, “If the Theremin was Pavarotti”
Eleni Karaindrou, “Ulysses' Gaze”
Jean D’Amérique, workshop of silence, translated by Conor Bracken (Vanderbilt University Press)
Roger Reeves, “Poetry Isn’t Revolution But a Way of Knowing Why It Must Come” (from Dark Days: Fugitive Essays)
Roger Reeves, “Reading Fire, Reading the Stars” (from Dark Days: Fugitive Essays)
Sophie Calle, “Silence”

Listening to music while reading Bataille's "A Story of Rats."

“The problem proliferates in Nabokov, banality and longing chasing each other. Perhaps a real life is not an existence, however solid and undeniable, but the best or most memorable moments of an existence, instants of exaltation or insight, times when the self is most itself: real life rather than mere living. In The Eye, 1930, Nabokov's narrator glosses what is real for him as oppressive and tender, provoking excitement and torment, possessed of blinding possibilities of happiness, with tears, with a warm wind'. Or - we now approach one of the most subtle and urgent suggestions of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - what is real is the life we lead when we lose ourselves, when we abandon or are driven from the rational fiction of our identity; when we fall in love, for example, and especially when we fall deeply, hopelessly, brutally, stupidly in love.”

— Michael Wood

An overcoat, winter, a man facing no “imaginable” return. A “trembling” he equates to “cowardice.” A specific cowardice, a cowardice suitable for this “half-bearded man” wandering through the ice-cold corridors of train station hotel, “ready to weep,” ready to fall to his knees— there, in a snow-covered nowhere, unable to distinguish between being and not-being, “reduced in this world to that trembling.”

He makes a phone call to the castle whose owner is absent. A voice unmoving (SP?) his absence. A desperation to communicate with this person, to know if he is alive, to tell him that someone alive is calling him. The sound of dishes breaking inside a voice. The moment Bataille felt Kafka understood the “endless time” in writing for the operator to return and confirm no one was there. “Nobody is talking. Nothing can be done.” The line is busy. The person who wants to find the man forgot about the man on the line who seeks him. A series of groans rising from the chest as if from a frozen well. Hopeless. Even “the shadow of hope” is obliterated by this. And the man in the overcoat realizes a liberation: “I was dominated by the idea of knowing — at all costs.”

Snow falling across the station building. Nostrils prickled by the scent of the virgin snow crunching underfoot. The helpless accordion of chattering teeth. The sound emerging from his throat, “tremulous…oh…oh…oh…” – and the cello. The violin. The question of whether to continue and risk losing himself in the snow. The sound of things freezing: the silence of a world whose breath has been turned to ice. The man reminds himself that now, in this condition, “the only thing left for me to do is beyond my strength.” The blinding lashes of wind against the skin of his face. The curse raised “in the darkness against” the black of a “doomsday silence.” The crunching of shoes through ice. Snow quietly covering his tracks. The soothing realization that all bridges to the past had been cut, severed, slashed–there was no recognizable path backwards. Only forward. “In the night.” Only into the building with a lit interior. A body drawn to the heat of the stove, laughing with pleasure. Three railroad workers playing billiards. The bar owner pouring a grog. The humiliation of launching a joke that matches the ambiance. The feeling of degradation, finding oneself “the accessory of these people who expected nothing.” The slow dissociation, becoming “unreal, light,” a species of sight. Existing near a game of football players. Stimulated by caffeine pills and alcohol. Feeling courageous. Leaving the bar and setting out on the road to the castle, encountering the cold air. The stopping of the snow. An absurd “test” now avoidant, but with no metaphysical justification. Not willed by God. Not ordained by a choir of angels. Simply an effort to pursue his own “mania for questioning to the end.” Life gave him oranges. Life gave him what he loved. The world had given and taken away. The wind lifted the snow in small spirals and tunnels. No imaginable way out apart from the castle, the delirium of his days, all energy “strained to the breaking point,” a bit lip, a laugh cutting the air like a cry. “Who knows B’s limits better than I?”

At this inconceivable distance from “the world of calm reflections,” the man in the snow discovers that “unhappiness had that empty, electric sweetness which is like fingernails turned back.” The cold slowly drains his energy. The fact of “desiring” that “miserable” cold — drawing the cold deep into one’s lungs in order to keep moving —  “transfigured these painful moments.” The wind coiling through the surrounding air, tracing a resemblance to that “eternal senseless reality known only once, in the room of a dead woman: a kind of suspended leap.” And so Diane meets Laure in the snow, in the misery of Bataille’s desiring.

*

Claude Debussy’s Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon, L. 150
George Bataille, A Story of Rats

"Likely Images"

*

Likely Images

With Pelléas and Mélisande, Claude
Debussy turned to sleeping figures:
the garden was growing cold, its trees
pancake hatted, leaned Orient-
wards: but otherwise bare chested:
gesture absented melody,
gesture absented memory.
No mirrors. No history.
Voices alive to themselves alone.

Music can’t be itself
like a thought can be itself the gesture
in the glass shaped like itself: music
wakens the heart, skips or weakens the head.
He said: me too at times its charm rubbed raw:
its wayward grace wronged,
distracted, was made indistinct, pallid
as a boat or bar of soap
glistening where it rises to the surface
and floats sitting up.

His legs outstretch doll-like, while Chou-Chou
beside him on the lawn busies herself in prayer;
she is a child and it is understood prays for herself
alone and doesn't know someone takes this photo,
nor why Daddy’s eyes and heart and hands grow cold.
It would be simple now for him to pay his debts,
but in a short while he won’t have to.

— William Hunt

II est des nuits où je m'absente
Discrètement, secrètement...
Mon image seule est présente

— Jean-Roger Caussimon

*

Dan Ward, “(Tell Me, Your Name) Is It Up In Lights”
Jean-Louis Murat, “Aimer” (Live)
Jean-Louis Murat, “Cours Dire Aux Hommes Faibles”
Jean-Louis Murat, “Charles & Léo: Trois titres”
Léo Ferré, “Avec le temps”
Mark Lanegan, Jack Bates, Jeff Schroeder & Shane Graham, “Disorder” (cover of Joy Division original)
”Nuits d'absence” de et par Jean-Roger Caussimon
”Nuits d’absence” Lyrics by Jean-Roger Caussimon; Music by Léo Ferré; Singing by Jean-Louis Murat

Notes on intonation.

These are not recollections. They are words written, published, spoken, recounted, recorded during the period from early January 1933 to May 1945. They all have an unintentionally familar ring. Each image of those years, whatever its origin, has something hypnotic about it. This was the peak of black and white, in cinema and in life. When Technicolor appeared it seemed a hallucination. Time seemed to have been shaped into an ever narrower spiral, which ended in a bottleneck.

— Roberto Calasso, a preface

There is no viewpoint from which the box has the appearance of a cube: one always sees only a few sides, the corners do not seem right angles, the sides do not seem equal. No one has ever seen, no one will ever see a cube. For like reasons, no one has ever touched nor will ever touch a cube. If one moves around the box, an infinite variety of apparent forms is generated. None of these is the cubic form.

— Simone Weil, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”

1

Yoko Tawada’s “Barcelona: Stage Animals” . . . the meaning of the text depends on how it is read. Halting readings make the text seem ambiguous; opening the gaps leaves more space for making meaning. Repetition read for sound makes language 3D rather than simply reading it for meaning. “There are multiple voices inside each person,” to quote Kierkegaard, king of ‘autofiction.’

2

In a conversation with Edward Said, Daniel Barenboim said the primary difference between a Shakespearean sonnet and a symphony by Beethoven is that the text serves a realization for one but not the other. The words are “a notation of Shakespeare's thoughts —in the same way that the score is nothing but a notation of what Beethoven imagined”, and so the words are “the thoughts existed in Shakespeare's mind and in the reader's mind.” He argues that this is different from Beethoven’s symphonies, where one is faced with the “added element of actually bringing these sounds into the world: in other words, the sounds of the Fifth Symphony do not exist in the score.” Although I’m not sure I agree entirely (since the performance of the play, or the sonnet, is also central to its existence and relies on performance for this aspect, which is to say, our minds make sound for the textual languages we can read, and the presence of this sound is not that dissimilar from the saying of a text …), I love Barenboim’s phenomenological description of sound’s relation to silence. Thus do I excerpt a chunk of it below:

That is the phenomenology of sound—the fact that sound is ephemeral, that sound has a very concrete relation to silence. I often compare it to the law of gravity; in the same way that objects are drawn to the ground, so are sounds drawn to silence, and vice versa. And if you accept that, then you have a whole dimension of physical inevitabilities, which as a musician you try to defy. This is why courage is an integral part of making music. Beethoven was courageous not only because he was deaf but also because he had to overcome superhuman challenges. The sheer act of making music is an act of courage since you are trying to defy many of the physical laws of nature. The first one is a question of silence. If you want to maintain the sound and if you want to create the tension that comes from sustained sound, the first moment of relationship is between the first sound and the silence that precedes it, and the next one is between the first and the second note, and so on ad infinitum. In order to achieve this, you are defying the law of nature; you're not letting the sound die as it naturally would tend to. And therefore, in the performance, besides knowing the music and understanding it, the first important thing for a musician to understand is how does sound operate when you bring it into this world, when you bring it into this room. In other words, what is the reverberation? What is the prolongation of the sound? And the art of making music through sound is, for me, the art of illusion. You create, on the through sound is, for me, the art of illusion. You create, on the piano, the illusion of being able to let the sound grow on one note, which the piano is totally incapable of doing, physically. You defy that. You create the illusion through the phrasing, through the use of the pedal, through many ways. You create the illusion of growth of a tone, which doesn't exist, and you can also create the illusion of slowing down the process of decreasing volume. And I think, with the orchestra, it's different because some of the instruments can sustain it. But the art of illusion, and the art of defying physical laws, is the first element that strikes me in a performance. And this is what one has to prepare and rehearse—not, however, to arrive at a formula for performance, which is, unfortunately, in my opinion very often the case.

Phrasing, tone, and other “illusions” you create. Two questions that continue buzzing through my notebooks: “In other words, what is the reverberation? What is the prolongation of the sound?”

3

Intonation in epistolary punctuation and titles of address: the combustible exhalation of an official appellation. As in perhaps this passage from a book by Roberto Calasso:

. . . which made me think of Augustine’s statement: “You’ve put off the day of reckoning a bit, but not canceled the debt.”

4

Intonation as a facet of the footstep, or the pace. The breath between steps.

I blame George Bataille’s “Big Toe" for expressing his view of feet and the foot fetish. As Bataille tells it, the foot is what treads on the ground and connects us to base reality it is despised, whereas the head, which is nearest to the sky and clouds is venerated. Of course some people will take the contrary view and worship what is generally held in contempt. Hence the thrill of the profanation. Notably, there is nothing akin to the “halo” for feet.

5

Of course I blame Luis Bunuel’s tracking shot of Catherine Deneuve’s black pumps as she climbs the stairways to Madame Anais brothel for the first time in Belle Du Jour, which makes us hyperaware of the relationship between her thoughts and her steps.

6

I also blame Meret Oppenheim’s My Nurse (as well as the traditional Turkeyfication of the present) for this train of thought with no endpoint or destination.

Meret Oppenheim, My Nurse

As for My Nurse, with its white leather heels gussied up and tied together like a turkey on a silver platter, Oppenheim said “it evokes for me the association of thighs squeezed together in pleasure. In fact, almost a 'proposition. When I was a little girl, four of five, we had a young nursemaid. She was dressed in white. Maybe she was in love, maybe that’s why she exuded a sensual atmosphere of which I was unconsciously aware.”

It’s the wear of the sole that fascinates me: the particular shape that indicates the tread. We never see each others’ soles; it is an expected part of being in relation to others, this underside that marks our own particular movement through the world.

7

I lined up the shoes in the house and stared at their soles.

None of the kids “walks like me,” if I read the markings on our shoes as a vague score for the music of made by our feet. But these intonations of wear — of wearing and tearing and where-ing — strike me as a sort of portrait. A series of secret portraits that involve reading a part we rarely see in each other. A sonnet series. . .

*

Augustine, Book 3, 15.1
Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society
George Bataille, “Big Toe” (Documents)
Jeanne Balibar, Rodolphe Burger, and Pierre Alferi, “Le tour de monde”
Luis Bunuel, Belle Du Jour (1967)
Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force
Yoko Tawada, Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, t. by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions)

Our way to fall.

Canetti tells a tale of an arsonist, someone, that is, who follows the urge to become fire. She begins as a young child and spends many years in penitentiaries. She likes fire, but she also likes confessing. When she starts a fire, people come to watch, and so when she confesses, she reconstitutes that scenario—people come to watch her, and she becomes the fire. “She must, early in her life, have experienced fire as a means of attracting people,” writes Canetti. “She keeps it alive by suddenly transforming herself into the fire. This she achieves very simply: she confesses that she caused it.”

— Lesley Stern, “Lighting Up”

"A history of imaginary films”

Wim Wenders served as guest editor for the 40th issue of Cahiers du Cinéma devoted to “A history of imaginary films.” His editorial begins by thanking his peers for the honor and adding an apology for lateness, or for being “out late.” The issue will be late, he says. “As with everything I write, it will be late and miss its deadline. It's the only way I've ever written. Writing is fear: a script, an article, a letter, it's always the same, the words are inevitably late; it seems to be in their nature.”

Many films remain unmade, or “locked up in scripts that are never shot,” at a particular point in the process. Wenders admires the paradox quietly: “films begin with words . . . words determine whether the images are allowed to be born. The words are like the headland that a film has to steer round to reach the image. It's at that point that many films go under.”

Words fail the image at every level. Words are the land mass that stand between the image’s motional fluidity and its existence. Wenders explains the adapted theme, divulges logistical diddles, and then begins thinking with the reader. “At what exact moment is a film born?” he asks. “Or perhaps it would be better to say conceived?” Conceived strikes him as closer to the energy of the making. His own films seemed to emerge from “the meeting of two ideas or two complementary images.” If each film is a tree, then their respective roots “seem to belong to one of two great families: images (experiences, dreams, imagination) and 'stories' (myths, novels, miscellaneous news items).”

But, Wenders says:

I don't know anything about the way a film is born, nothing about the manner of it, the lying-in, the 'big bang', the first three minutes. Whether the images in those first three minutes are born out of their author's deep desire, or if –  in an ontological sense –  they merely are what they are. I wake up one morning with my head full of images. I don't know where they come from, or how or why. They recur in the following days and months; I can't do anything about them, and I do nothing to drive them away. I'm happy to contemplate them and I make notes in my mind, which I write down in a book some time.

And the conclusion is Wenders, falling and marveling at the opportunities he has been given, agog at imaginings that have been realized, grateful and perhaps uncertain:

The childish panic still upsets me.

“Like flying blind without instruments”

Speaking of Paris, Texas in May 1984, Wim Wenders said:

A lot of my films start off with roadmaps instead of scripts. Sometimes it feels like flying blind without instruments. You fly all night and in the morning you arrive somewhere. That is: you have to try to make a landing somewhere so the film can end.

For me this film has come off better than, or differently to, my previous films. Once more, we flew all night without instruments, but this time we landed exactly where we meant to. From the outset, Paris, Texas had a much straighter trajectory and a much more precise destination. And from the beginning, too, it had more of a story than my earlier films, and I wanted to tell that story till I dropped.

. . . and I wanted to tell that story till I dropped.

“Reverse angle”

Wenders again:

“It was night, it was another arrival at another airport, in another city. For the first time in his life, he felt he'd had enough of travelling. All cities were as one to him. Something reminded him of a book he must have read in his childhood. His only dim memory of it was this feeling of being lost somewhere, which he felt again today..”

A story or a film might begin with those words, or words like that. Cut to a close-up of the hero. But this film can't start like that. This film has no story. What's it about, then?

— What's it about, then?

— This she achieves very simply: she confesses that she caused it.

“Who am I? If I were to rely on a proverb this once, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I haunt… who makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be WHO I am. “

— Andre Breton, Nadja

*

K. Jacobson, K. “I will open my mouth in a parable”: ‘History’ and ‘metaphor’ in the Psalms.” (Acta Theologica, 41)
Lesley Stern, “Lighting Up” (from The Smoking Book)
Tod Marshall, “Why Do You Write Poetry? (Four answers I wish that I'd given.)” (from Because You Asked)
Wim Wenders, “Like flying blind without instruments: On the turning point in Paris, Texas” (May 1984)
Wim Wenders, “Reverse angle: New York City, March 1982”
Yo La Tengo, “Our Way to Fall”

Ekphrastic speculations: Stephen Goss.

”We used to live in a cloud of unawareness, in delicious complicity.”

— Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt

”Poi piovve dentro all’alta fantasia . . .”

— Dante, Purgatario XVII.25

1

“CINEMA PARADISO”

Commissioned for Zoran Dukić on solo guitar, Stephen Goss’ Cinema Paradiso is a 14-minute piece of “music about film.” Each of the six movements pays homage to an aspect of cinema that has stayed with Goss. Dukić premiered it at the Koblenz International Guitar Festival on June 3, 2017.

I think Goss’s work often lingers at the borders of the temporal, where nostalgia dialogues with form and discontinuity. His profligate use of quotations and stylistic references calls to mind the intellectual self-portraiture buried beneath the heaps of artistic and literary references in Jean-Luc Godard’s films . . .

2

A FUTURE ANTERIOR FEEL.

“Mandalay” opens a conversation with Lars von Trier’s Dogville, which disgusted my peers when it came out in 2003 — and still disgusts many who watch it in 2025. As usual, von Trier’s emotional brutality is unsparing, unbuffered by luscious scenography, aesthetic solace, or spectacle. The world falls apart in variations, as von Trier depicts them, and Dogville’s world calls upon the self-annihilating community in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. In this Weimar-echolucting movement, Goss quotes Weill’s screwy accordions and then distorts them as if through a double mirror, situating von Trier’s nihilistic sparsity alongside the vague cabaret of glasses past, darkly.

3

“YOU’RE WRONG, SHERIFF.”

Halo this moment in Godard’s Breathless, where the dialogue comes from voices offscreen, and Man’s Voice recites a poem by Louis Aragon that fascinated Godard, who also quoted it in a written review of Max Ophuls’s La Ronde in 1950 and again – nine years later — in a written review of Jacques Rozier’s Blue Jeans. Then Woman’s Voice quotes a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire. A duet after my own heart, this. A mode I still love dearly: the (off) (off) like a pair of monosyllables that may be moon-shoes.

4

LIGHT AND NOIR: CONTRASTS.

The “Paris, Texas” movement draws on the unforgettable atmospherics of Wim Wenders's film. According to Goss, this movement explores “the similitude between the vast open spaces of the Texan desert and the internal emptiness of solitude through loss” and “alludes to Ry Cooder's haunting soundtrack.”

The “Noir” movement, on the other hand, pays homage to the film genre known as Film Noir. The mood is Miles Davis’s score for Asenseur pour l’échafaud (1958) and Duke Ellington’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). “A sleazy, seedy, smoke-filled room music of dark corners,” Goss calls it.

5

THE PRODUCTION OF TIME.

The movement titled “Modern Times” plays with a scene from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, where Chaplin's character is working on a factory production line and the music shifts gear as the camera switches attention from one machine to another. Soon, or “before long,” Chaplin “can't keep up” with the conveyor belt and “ends up being swallowed by a large machine.” After “racing out of control,” the “machine” “grinds” to “a halt.” Then, as “it starts up again” Chaplin is “gently regurgitated” and “production” “can” “continue.”

6

BIRDSONG AS SCOPE AND HOPE.

The “451” movement converses with François Truffaut’s dystopian Fahrenheit 451 (1966), set in a world where reading is banned and all books are burned. The auto da fe is continuous. Truffaut’s film follows the “the book people” who live on the fringes of this society learning books by heart and teaching them to one another to keep the books alive. To keep with this idea of absented texts, guitarists who wish to perform the 451 movement must be taught how to play it from someone who knows it, or else learn it from a recording or video. Goss burned the original score.

7

DANCING TO DEATH.

Form is the fire here. For the “Tarantino” movement, Goss wrote a tarantella, an Italian musical folk dance form based on a couple’s dance linked to the belief that dancing could cure the bite of the tarantula spider. For the condition known as “tarantism,” the cure is a “dance to death.” Yes, Goss is shadowing the spider bite and the prick of the heroin needle in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

*

“The imagination is a place where it rains inside.”

— Italo Calvino, 1988

Compass and gauge.

Art can be understood in a masked way, but at the same time it cannot be so idiosyncratic that it becomes impossible for someone to see what you have at stake.

— Kiki Smith said, reflecting on a quote from Lauren Berlant’s “Intimacy”

2

This past weekend, I spent a lot of time trying to locate the transactional self of late capitalism, as given in contemporary literature and art, only to find myself distracted by shadows on the mantle, a sidereal provoked by Svetlana Boym’s formulation of the “off modern” as a method of inquiry that engages Walter Benjamin’s reading of history against the grain. Against the grain we are given. Against the ways “into” the popular and significant. Against the speedy realm of accelerationism and profuse verbiage. Against every part of me that is tempted to fake it in order to “make it” — which is to accede to being the very thing I hate.

2.1

Having pledged my troth to self-division and diversions, I could not very well erase the sort of train passing through Peter Schjeldahl’s “Gauge,” and “the romance of the verb” in the ache of his stanzas, a disaster I bring to this screen where it may apprehend others in their relationship to trains or music or poetry or the revival of “bespeaking” amid the unforgivable beauty of hems and hemmings.

2.3

Marcel Proust’s search for lost time shapes the form of his novel. The Proustian character is estranged from the memory that re-creates him. The mind wakes up from sleep disoriented, having "lost the plan of the place where it finds itself," as Proust writes in the preface to Contre Sainte-beuve. 

But being lost always occurs in relation to place. 

One must be somewhere to know one is lost. 

One must have something to lose.

2.4

By giving evocation a claim on our imaginations, Proust asks us to inhabit our own estrangements. strangeness. Familiar places disappear; they abandon their geographic location only to visit as a fragment we notice in the late afternoon light burnishing an empty bleacher at the high school. Like Proust in the "unknown country" of music being played at Madame Verdurin, we wonder who created this place. Who invited us inside it?

“In the work of what composer did I find myself?” wonders the Proustian narrator.

The moment of recognition relies on the first place, or the moment it recognizes: “Thus, suddenly, I recognized myself in the midst of this music that was new to me. I was in the middle of Vinteul’s Sonata.”

The lost place has been named; the name has been secured within duration through the act of localization.

Recollecting Elstir's paintings provides access to “the places where I found myself so far from the real world,” Proust tells us; he wouldn’t be startled if he bumped into a myth as he walked to the courtyard. (Does art make us more ‘receptive’ to ghosts?) The artist brings the flower into himself as Elstir's transplant, the flower “into the interior garden, where we are forced to live always.” Each person has his secret garden, but also the garden he unknowingly inhabits in the interior of others. Gilberte exists to him as the thought which appears when he imagines her “before the porch of a godly cathedral, explaining to me, the significance of the statues, and with a smile that spoke kindly of me, introducing me as her friend to Bergotte.” The first impression acquires that statuesque significance.

As for Albertine, she is “the young girl” fluttering in a group of girls at the sea resort called Balbec. She wears a beret, “her eyes intent and laughing, mysterious still, slim, like a silhouette profiled upon the wave.” This first image comes to replace the last image, or the image of the leave-taking. Humans are apprehended in the gaze which moves from exterior to hidden interiority, like a secret. 

. . . .

“Proustian persons never let themselves be invoked without being accompanied by the image of sites that they have successively occupied,” wrote Georges Poulet in Proustian Space.  And the sites we occupy are not limited to the sites in which we were encountered; the sites also include places where you dreamed of seeing us. These places are alive in new narrative forms. In this way, a place participates in the knowing of a person.

2.5

In baseball, “home base” refers to the home plate consisting of a rubber slab where the batter stands; it must be touched by a base runner in order to score.

In popular slang, reaching “home base” (or fourth base) refers to”'consummating the relationship by having sex, making love or fucking.”

To “finish in home base” refers to the act of “ejaculating inside your girlfriend.”

2.6

TEXT 1

“Not everything is a text, but a text is a good image for much of what we know - for everything we know that is beyond the reach of our own immediate experience, and for most of what we imagine is our immediate experience too. Literature is practice for, the practice of, such knowledge.”

2.7

HE: When you say that you don't remember fainting and losing consciousness, which part of the memory can't you recall? 

ME: That memory is so overloaded that it requires a self, or acquires a selfhood, by virtue of its continued existence. 

HE: Does the memory exist if you can't remember it?

ME: How could I answer that? Certainly, the expectation that such a memory exists shapes my relationship to knowability, and makes me less confident in claiming to know things about myself. If that memory exists, you are just as likely to be able to access it as I am. So it isn't my memory . . .

HE: You don't like talking about dizziness.

ME: It's not very interesting to me. 

HE: Why?

ME: If I had blue eyes, they wouldn't be interesting to me either. The lack of blue eyes is what makes them intriguing. People who haven't experienced serious unrelenting vertigo bring it to the page as metaphor for a fantastic sensation they can't quite imagine. Or can't imagine entirely. We 'try on' those blue eyes. But trying on blue eyes doesn't require as much imagination when you google for affect and details. One risks less than not even bothering to imagine it.

HE: So vertigo is 'interesting'?

ME: Anything is interesting when one can choose the nature of our relation to it.

HE: What do you want the vertigo-borrower to do?

ME: I want them to be destroyed by vertigo. I want them to feel it.

HE: That is very mean.

ME: And yet, it fails to be ‘meaningful’ somehow. Much of artistic preference is interiority that projects itself onto a screen.

2.8

Walter Benjamin recounts a story from the third book of Herodotus's Histories in order to show us the “nature of true storytelling,” as distinguished from the mere recounting of information or data:

“The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.”

ME: See? A story does not expend itself. 

HE: How is this related to Proust?

ME: Well, the Proustian world is obviously unstable; its topography is mapped by the mind wherein each place partakes of the same space between remembering and imagining. And each border is that of a fragment, a piece in the blurred puzzle of proximity and relationships, like that “electrical projection"“on the wall in his childhood, the magic lamp that reveals only the illuminated patch. —- So the Albertine of the past seeps continuously from the gestures of the Albertine of the present. There is the tension between her personhood and her value to the author.

2.9

Perhaps this is just a species of metaphor, as when Vladimir Nabokov fashioned himself as “the shuttlecock above the Atlantic” admiring the blues of his “private sky”— a playful figuration that resists naming the game that is being played. Badminton gave us the shuttlecock. It was popular among the leisured upper classes who made use of dachas. In this metaphor transplanted from Russian soil, Nabokov provided a means for the exile to remain “at home” in the space between homes. Diplomacy, too, is a game. And N’s diplomacy often involved to scoring points through what Adam Thirlwell called the “militant literalism” he applied to translation.

3.0

HE. But you take words too seriously.

ME. Only by taking them seriously, and with a certain melancholy, do I discover the laughter in them. Seriousness can be funny.

HE. Not funny to me.

ME: Very funny to Me, actually. Maybe not funny to He. Literature has many ways of getting around its Alberts.

Art gives you an experience that you didnʼt have before. You get to discover and experience something, even though you do the same things over and over again. Time presents itself as new at each moment, as long as we are here. It does continue, with or without us, but it has the opportunity inherent in it that our perceptions can change. We canʼt change timeʼs trajectory, but we can change our relationship to time and to everything else. We can change our minds about time and love. Time is always the same, but it can move. There is a lot of space in time.

— Kiki Smith

*

Amy Millan, “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” (cover of Death Cab for Cuties song)
Amy Millan, “Lost Compass”
Lavinia Meijer and Phillip Glass, “Night on the Balcony”
Peter Schjeldahl, “Gauge” (The Paris Review)

Nominations in Christian Lehnert's poetic forms.

Paul Celan to Gisèle Lestrange Celan
Paris, 28 March, 1966

My Darling,

Here I am again, with two poems that have ripened 'between the day before yesterday and today. Take them as a hello thrown by a heart. I love You.

Paul

*

Swung high over the heads
the sign, ignited with the strength of dreams 
at the place that it named.

Now:

Give a signal with the sand leaf, 
until the sky is smoking.

The name and “the memory plant”

The butterbur (Petasites hybridus) or The memory plant

This the enigma: Of all the dogged / lilac names
Of the dead / this blossom tells / their escape.

— Christian Lehnert translated by Richard Sieburth

*

Petasides hybridus, or butterbur, is a perennial shrub that grows throughout Europe as well as parts of Asia and North America. It was used to treat plague and fever during the Middle Ages— and now is mainly used for prophylactic treatment of migraines. Often found in wet, marshy ground, damp forests, and the shorelines of rivers or streams, butterbur plants can rise to a height of three feet with its downy, fur-covered leaves extending to a (unusually large) diameter of three feet as well.

The genus name, petasites, comes from the Greek word “petasos,” referring to the felt hat worn by shepherds, while “butterbur,” the common name, comes from how the plant’s large leaves were often used to wrap butter during warm weather. Other common names include pestwurz, blatterdock, bog rhubarb, and butter-dock.

Naming conventions

For composers, there is a certain significance in the 8th opus. And Christian Lehnert gestures towards this significance in the titling of his eighth poetry collection, Opus 8: Wickerwork.

Designating itself “a nature book,” Wickerwork is now (partly) available in Richard Sieburth’s English-language translation, and in his tantalizing prefatory essay that supplies context and enriches Lehnert’s wickers. The book is divided into seven linked chapters or movements, overseen by a unique epigraph.

And each of the seven movements is composed of seven contrapuntal poems that face one another across the page’s seam. On the left: the solo voicings of a couplet in alexandrine meter. On the right: the chorales of an octave in iambic tetrameter. Sieburth likens Lehnert’s distichs to the “phanopaeia” that Ezra Pound defined as “a casting of images on the visual imagination.”

Names

The name is an herb / a seedling and a shaft /
Risen from the sound / of wood and oil and sap.

In these poem, Lehnert uses a virgule to indicate a pause or breath within the line, thus connecting the poem’s way of being — and breathing— to a convention in German baroque verse, namely, the use of a separatrix to serve as a guide for oral reading and performance.

Naming by posthumous cherubs

Lehnert’s earlier poetry collection, Cherub Dust, also made use of the distich.

Drawing on a 1674 collection of devotional epigrams written by Angelus Silesius — and then attributed to the posthumous authorship of Johann Scheffler in the persona of a “cherubinic wanderer” — Lehnert fondles with the form’s atemporal perspective. A posthumous author has the advantage of looking back-and-forth upon a life once lived, and relived without the pressure of time at his back.

“Locodescriptive calendar poems,” Sieburth calls them . . .

Each distich is composed from two 12-syllable lines: the first line describes the subject in verbs, while the second line abandons the world of verbs for nouns, tucking a nomination into the first 6 syllables (i.e. “thus the name of” or “thus X is called”) qualified with a colon, followed by 6 syllables of metaphoric or metynomyic predicates referring to the thing being christened. In this way, each distich names the subject, turning it into a proper noun, a thing worthy of remembrance.

February thirteenth 2016, Breitenau

Something buzzing in the tree, syllables for sure.
Thus the name for embers: matter feeding words.

Early September 2016, in the lamplight, Breitenau

Whoosh— a call? A bang or whimper in fact?
Thus the name of the bat: the afterthought of that.

October 2016, Gottleuba Valley, Eastern Ore Mountains

Lost, like the leaves, those names by which we went.
Thus red beech is called: shadow of a summer spent.

Second advent 2016, Breitenau

The words hold still, there’s nowhere they want in.
Thus the name of fatigue: in silence it begins.

Several distichs from Cherub Dust lack the date and proper noun of place-name in the titling, as, for example, “Mother Tongue”:

Mother tongue

The room in which you write gets torn away at night
and burned up in the fire, out of words, out of sight.

A constellation

A different name and date, namely, the 2oth of March 1966, when Paul Celan wrote to Gisèle from Paris, thanking her for a book she had brought to the hospital for him.

My Darling

Thanks for Ulysses — I hope that all is well, that all will go well. […] I wrote another poem— here it is.

Rather than include the poem, I’m narrowing in on the end-notes concerning Celan’s copy of Ulysses, “the authorized translation (in two volumes) by Georg Goyert, 5th edition (Zurich: Rhein, 1952),” as noted by Bertand Badiou who also notes that “the two volumes have numerous reading marks and underlinings, and, at the end of the second part (volume 2, p. 196), the date ‘12 April 1966’” is visible in Paul’s handwriting.

Among the plenty of marked passages in Celan’s copy of Joyce’s Ulysses:

A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth. It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over Delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars. His eyes watched it, low-lying on the horizon, eastward of the Bear, as he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight, returning from Shottery and from her arms.

Speaking with Gisèle led Badiou to wrap this passage into a relational ontology wherein Gisèle helped Paul “deepen his knowledge of ‘things of the sky,’ to identity certain constellations, and in particular Cassiopeia,” while Paul helped Gisèle “learn about ‘things of the earth,’ to observe plants and stones, and to call them by their names.”

The personal note

A stranger awoke, saying the same sorry things
as me, in the hope I’d lend him my wings.

Christian Lehnert t. by Sieburth

“Navi” and a ‘Nick’ in a Name

In the middle of the Cassiopeia constellation sits its brightest being, a bling of a thing, a blue star named Gamma Cassiopeiae (a.k.a. Navi). Its nickname comes from the American astronaut Virgil Ivan Grissom, and does one of my favorite things to a name, which is simply to make a Semordnilap by spelling it backwards. So Ivan becomes Navi, and Navi is the star used as a navigational reference point by astronauts, including the star’s namesake.

At a distance of 610 light-years from our planet, Navi’s nature is fascinating and unpredictable. Its luminosity is 40,000 times greater than that of our Sun. Known for exhibiting irregular variations in brightness, Navi is what astronomers call an “eruptive variable star.” It can emit 10 times higher the amounts of X-ray radiation than that of other B class stars. In China, this star is known as Tsih, or “the whip.”

“Upon Cassiopeia’s death, Poseidon placed her in the stars, where she was chained to her throne and must spend half of the year upside-down as further punishment.”

*

Cassiopeia as depicted by Johannes Hevelius in his Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia (1687)
Cassiopeia in Astrobackyard
Christian Lehnert, Wickerwork, translated by Richard Sieburth (Archipelago Books)
Devendra Banhart, “Fistful of Love” (Antony and The Johnsons cover)
Devendra Barnhart, “Won’t You Come Home”
Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat”
Lizzie Harper, illustration of Petasites hybridus
Paul Celan, Letters to Gisèle (NYRB Imprints)
Petasites hybridus (Plants for a Future database)
Petasites hybridus (Alternative Medicine Review)

Walla Walla and a book about writing.

Flyin' like a fast train, I don't feel a thing
'Til when I pull into my station
I just crash and burn

— Kurt Vile

Back in the land of magnolias after a breathtaking weekend in Walla Walla, Washington, where I had the opportunity to yammer on and on about apostrophes and poetry and My Heresies for the Visiting Writers Reading Series at Whitman College, as curated by the marvelous Katrina Roberts for 25 years now. A decade ago, Katrina culled an anthology of anecdotes, craft notes, confessions, and conversations in dialogue with the many writers who have participated in the Whitman Reading Series — and it rustles through my brain like maple leaves and autumn fires.

Mark Strand responded to Katrina’s questions with a poem, and I love that she published it in its original, epistolary form, as an apostrophe to the poet’s diary. . . a few additional notes— and some music — and of course photos from the descent of color and cloudscapes.

ANTHONY DOERR on writing what you “know”

On many levels, ‘write what you know’ is limiting, inhibiting, stunting advice. Does that imply that as a forty-year-old bald male Idahoan, I should only write about forty-year-old bald male Idahoans? What do most forty-year-old bald male Idahoans really know about themselves anyway? I believe we should be urged to write toward what we don't know; we should fumble toward the mysteries, the things we can't articulate but believe are there, intuit are there. Maybe we start with what we know, if what we know is how it feels to rob a convenience store, or how to brew beer, or how to cross a frozen lake behind ten sled dogs, but then we start working in the opposite direction, away from things that are comfortable, familiar, known. We should use our sentences as engines to drive us towards the infinite universe of things we don't know. Otherwise we're not learning, and if we're not learning, why bother? […] Ultimately what I think we have to do is investigate. We have to try to skate away from the familiar and known, and push toward those shadows which are by their very nature unknowable: death, love, cruelty, the other. We should move away from familiar structures of language, of paragraph, of narrative, even as we stand upon them; we should write what we hope to know, and write it using structures we did not fully know when we began. In that way, I think, writing is an education, a kind of ‘knowing’ that never ends. At least I think it is. I don't really know.

JOANN BEARD on nonfiction, memory, and the boundaries between truth and fiction:

Because so much of my writing is based on memory— even the stuff about other people—- I have trained myself to remember. It isn't that hard, but it's time consuming and takes dedication; one memory fragment will lead to another and to another. For your previous question I spent a lot of time remembering what it was like to play dolls with my cousins, even though none of it made it into my answer. Those particular childhood memories feel very true and I trust them, but I'm no fool. (Or, no fool about this, anyway.) Memory will lie as often as it will tell the truth. I once included in a short story an anecdote that was based on a harrowing experience I had in my early 20s. When my friend, who was there for the harrowing experience, read my account of it, she said: Yeah, that's exactly what happened, all except you weren't there. I wasn't? I thought it was me, simply because her storytelling skills were such that I saw it and felt it so vividly that it became part of my own database of scary things you don't know can happen until they are happening.

CHRISTIAN WIMAN on prose, heresy, and (heart throbbing) one of my favorite thinkers

Once after a reading a woman stood up amid a very large crowd, read a passage out of some prose I had written, and said, “How do you feel about being a heretic?” What I should have said is that there are no heretics, or that there are only heretics; that humans-mere and mirrored creatures that we are— move toward god in language, and to speak language is to profane him. I should have said that I grew up in a land god held in the very palm of his hand, lifting us all up lovingly to the light, breathing over us his tender winds, and then, almost as an afterthought, periodically crushing it all to dust. I should have said how does one praise a god in whom one does not believe, and how does one believe in a god whose only evidence of existence is one's insatiable and perhaps insane desire to praise. I should have said that “no human being possesses sureness of self: this can only mean being bounded and unbounded, selved and unselved, sure' only of this untiring exercise. Then, this sureness of self, which is ready to be unsure, makes the laughter at the mismatch between aim and achievement comic, not cynical; holy, not demonic. This is not love of suffering, but the work, the power of love, which may curse, but abides. It is power to be able to attend, powerful or powerless; it is love to laugh bitterly, purgatively, purgatorially, and then to be quiet.” The quote is from the English philosopher Gillian Rose. The book is Love's Work.

ROBERT OLEN BUTLER answering the question: “What is a short short story and how is it different from a prose poem?”

To be brief, it is a short short story and not a prose poem because it has at its center a character who yearns.

Fiction is a temporal art form. Poetry can choose to ignore the passage of time, for there is a clear sense of a poem being an object, composed densely of words, existing in space. This is true even when the length of the line is not an objectifying part of the form, as in a prose poem. And a poem need not overtly concern itself with a human subject. But when you have a human being centrally present in a literary work and you let the line length run on and you turn the page, you are, as they say in a long storytelling tradition, "upon a time'" And as any Buddhist will tell you, a human being (of a "character") cannot exist for even a few seconds of time on planet Earth without desiring something. Yearning for something, a word I prefer because it suggests the deepest level of desire, where literature strives to go. Fiction is the art form of human yearning, no matter how long of short that work of fiction is.

James Joyce spoke of a crucial characteristic of the literary art form, something he called the epipbany, a term he appropriated from the Catholic Church meaning, literally, "a shining forth." The Church uses it to describe the shining forth of the divinity of the baby Jesus. The word made flesh. In literary art, the flesh is made word. And Joyce suggests that a work of fiction moves to a moment at the end where' something about the human condition shines forth in its essence.

I agree. But I also believe that all good fiction has two epiphanies. There is the one Joyce describes, and there is an earlier epiphany, very near the beginning of a story (or a novel), when the yearning of the character shines forth. This does not happen in explanatory terms but rather is a result of the presence of that yearning in all the tiny, sense-driven, organically resonant moments in the fiction, the accumulation of which reaches a critical mass which then produces that shining forth.

And because of the extreme brevity of the short short story, these two epiphanies often even typically— occur at the same moment. The final epiphany of a literary short short is also the shining forth of the character's yearning. It has been traditional to think that a story has to have a "plot" while a poem does not. Plot, in fact, is yearning challenged and thwarted. A short short story, in its brevity, may not have a fully developed plot, but it must have the essence of a plot, yearning.

MAT JOHNSON answering the question “What do you dislike about writing?”

One thing: the time. The time it takes to create something worth anyone but yourself reading it. Every book you see lined up on the shelf is an artifact of a beautiful day that was not enjoyed, a conversation that was never conducted, a moment in the world not experienced. And it's not just the time I sit at my computer puttering away; it probably takes me less than a year of workdays to actually write a novel. The typing time is just the more final, literal part of a process which consumes my life. When I wake up and lie in bed, as I shower, as I dress, eat breakfast, and go through almost every task of the day until I lay down again, I'm thinking about my novel. My wife has learned to recognize the signs on my face when a random thought sets me off into literary land, and I become distant from the world while one of the tiny pieces clicks into place. Because that's what the novel is, in my head: a puzzle. A giant multidimensional swirl of puzzle pieces that I have to slowly decipher . . .

KATIE FORD answering the question “How do you know when to break a line?”

Recently, a Russian friend of mine, also a poet, said to me, “I think you have a different sense of the line than I do.” Line breaks are, to some degree, determined by the language and culture and the conventions of both. If you were to study eastern European poets, for example, you'd find that the line break of Czeslaw Milosz is far different from the line break of the American poet Allen Ginsberg (although that's an extreme example), the line break of a Korean writer utterly more spare than that of the wonderful emerging poet, Natalie Diaz, whose long, full lines nearly overwhelm a reader with their painful realities of living as one of America's native people, on and off of an impoverished, but vibrant, Mohave reservation. So, there are boundless choices. My line breaks are largely intuitive now. Sometimes a line can only bear so much. Then you must break. Sometimes pressure put on a last word will double or triple the meaning. Then you must break. Sometimes the break creates a hovering, spooky enjambment. Then you must break. Sometimes the breath can go no further. Then you can break, unless you want to break the voice, which is often necessary. Sometimes the line, when broken in a particular place, makes a meaning otherwise absent from the poem. Then you can break, unless the meaning is absolutely ridiculous.

Second verse same as the reverse . . . standing on top of the world when it started to burn

- Kurt Vile

*

Katrina Roberts, ed. Because You Asked (Lost Horse Press, 2015)
Kurt Vile, “flyin (like a fast train)”
Kurt Vile, “Like Exploding Stones”
Kurt Vile, “Palace of OKV in Reverse”
Kurt Vile, “Say the Word”

Rumor has it.

“I didnʼt think it would turn out this way” is the secret epitaph of intimacy. To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity. But intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way. 

— Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy”

Rumor has it.

Rumor has it that Donald Barthelme was obsessed with the letter that Soren Kierkegaard wrote to his ex-fiance’s husband whose family name was Schlegel. As evidence would have it, the private letter that has never been made public inspired a short story by Barthelme titled “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel.” It’s difficult to overstate how central this story remains to understanding what Barthelme was doing in literature.

Gossip and hearsay: these are the details that condemn humans in the court of public opinion. Every public has its own rumor mill, just as every intimate relationship has its hearsay.

But rumor has it that the writer Tyrtamus of Eressos only had sex intercourse once in his entire life, at the age of 47, with Aristotle's son. Trytamus (also known as the philosopher named Theophrastus) was Aristotle's favorite pupil, and the one-off lover of his son. But this character from Eressos remained unimaginable to me until Plutarch dropped the sort of lubricious detail that brings a dead man to life: “The offensive man is the kind who exposes himself when he passes married women on the street. At the theater he goes on clapping long after everyone else has stopped.”

What else — apart from rumor — does the work of fleshing-out small details in fiction and prose?

Those small things not speaking. 

Plutarch believed that “small things” – an offhand remark, an aside, a quick dialogue, a joke, a ritual gesture – illuminated the subject of an essay more effectively than explanation and description. His essay “On the Failure of Oracles” rants and raves like a tell-all, offering a view behind the curtain into the secret practices of his job at the Delphi Oracle. Plutarch tells us how he unscrambled puzzles from the underground chamber where answers were received. He gives vent to his suspicion that the chamber was filled with hallucinogenic gas. The reader is given an intimate foretaste of how the genre of the “tell-all” creates buzz around a subject. Even the deconstruction of its secret parts seems to add to the mystery and marvel.

Could mention weather.

In his notebooks and writings, Roland Barthes was drawn to mundane everyday details about weather, schedules, clothing, lodging and biography – minutiae that fleshed out the sensorium of incarnation, artefacts of the ordinary. The immediate was relevant. Barthes felt there was more to learn from tactile consciousness than from what he called “insipid moral musings.”

Could mention the hair on his pillow.

The self is often identified with its loyalties and affiliations. The details that evoke such loyalties also tend to be the source of tension in human relations. Lush tidbits in the Sei Sonagon’s “pillow book.”

They say she dreamt the whole thing ten years before it happened.

Dreams are the form that can do absolutely anything. Never forget that. No part of a dream can be disproven. The data of dreams is non-falsifiable as a lived or received experience.

My mom used to remove the marrow from soup bones and put on it bread as a school sandwich.

The margins aren’t really tangents. Margins are the things we would say if we stop skewering language with the pretexts.

In his introduction to Urban Gothic, Bruce Benderson aligns his work with the French genre known as “textes” that offers a more capacious narrativity and blurs ontological boundaries. At several points in different stories, Benderson mentions “tenderness” in surprising contexts: when feeling overcome by an “irresistible reverence” for beauty that isn’t sexual, and just after being strangled by a john in a “contrived situation” that resembled “the feeling of love.” 

Yes, said Anne Carson. “The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.”

*

Anne Carson, “Short Talk on Kafka on Holderlin”
Bruce Benderson, Urban Gothic (2022)
Donald Barthelme, “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel”
Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy”
Magnetic Fields, “It’s Only Time”
Plutarch, “On the Failure of Oracles”
Sei Sonagon, The Pillow Book of Sei Sonagon (translated by Ivan Morris)

Wanting a hit.

Yeah, you wanted the time.
But maybe I can't do time.
Shit, we both know that's an awful line,
but it doesn't make it wrong.

— LCD Soundsystem

DADASCOPE

A

Dadascope was leather. I mean nobody agreed it on its meaning.

HANS RICHTER

Whether or not they understood the content or the meaning of Dadascope, that's a different story. . . What the artist does and what the public takes from what he does is always a different story. Not just in the instant that the story is told, but also in the way the story is read fifty years later.

A

Fifty years. Is that the windspan, the wingspam, the spamwidth?

RICHTER

There is no story, there is no psychological implication except what the spectator puts in the images, but it is not purely accidental but rather a poetry of images built with and on associations (Nothing's ever tough enough. . . until we hit the road) the film takes the liberty of playing on the scale of possibilities of the cinema, freedom for which Dadaism always bet and to which it continues to give medium.

(the reader imagines touching his lovely scalp)

Dadascope is not conceived of at all as chaos, but as freewheeling poetry; and, as such it is in my opinion the best film-making I have done. But the poetry is so free that in several instances the sensations or analogies cannot be established at all. It is just as much chance which directs the flow of images as I do. But the fact remains that it is my chance, that it is my own borderline— the line where chance and conscious or creative direction cross or parallel each other. It's my chance because I realize it as chance. Another might not even realize it, or look at it, or feel or hear it.

LCD

No dirty bus and early flight. No seven days and forty nights.

ORTIZ MORALES

Dadascope is “a multilingual collection of Dada poetry, sound poems, and prose, along with Richter's choice of images and sounds typical of the Dada movement (objects and sculpture, especially by Man Ray; paintings, theater, performances and even chess games)” intended to “generate a new filmic style” that Richter called CINEMATIC POETRY and which he defined as “externalized internal events” for which the essential poetic element is “montage that creates metaphors.”

A

[Note to self, quote Morales on ‘the essential poetic element is montage that creates metaphors.’ See if constellates.]

MINOTAUR

RICHTER

In 1953/54, I wrote a scenario for Minotaur, a film I never made, but it is a major work as far as I am concerned. It is autobio-graphical. When I met Fellini for the first time, he told me, “Everything an artist does is autobiographical.” And that is right, to a greater or lesser degree. And Theseus in my Minotaur is to a greater degree.

The scenario started really from the same desire as the last episode of Dreams: the Labyrinth as an expression of the unforeseen ways in life you had to take, unforeseen obstacles you had to overcome. One goes through life worrying, but not so much that it inhibits action, one just goes forward. This going forward, trying out the right way, a life pattern, that is what I wanted to express in this film. It is the story of a man who is Everyman, but who becomes a hero when he does not suppress the voice of the innocents calling him for help. That's the essence. And in telling the story, I remember as a boy protecting the weak ones in school, and it is, in retrospect, also connected with the Hitler times, this incredible feeling of loneliness but still being forced to do something for one's co-human beings and not being able to do anything. This induced me to write the story.... You can't tell stories without telling stories you have lived through.

I should have made this film. That I couldn't do it is just one of those paradoxical, inhuman things that happen.

Final page of Hans Richter's film script for Minotaur, 1953

RICHTER:

Variations of ∞ the 8:
The infinite line returning to its origins (or returning into its origins?)
The labyrinth of my film script Minotaur
Where entrance and exit meet has kept me fascinated for the last twenty years in films and painting.

. . .

“The original source of this realization was a curious German DVD from the 90's with no information about the editor, publisher or the place of edition…”

OBJECT X

Object X is “a compilation of Dadaist poems and texts declaimed by their own authors and made by Hans Richter in 1957 and premiered in 1961. Participating Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Haussmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes,Walter Mehrig, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters (on a 1932 recording), Tristan Tzara, and Wladimir Vogel. Also included is a posthumous participation by Theo van Doesburg, recited by his widow Nelly.”

“since he held that sleep was simply a succession of fainting-fits brought on by semi-asphyxiation due to (a).”

*

Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan), Chapter VIII, Footnote 1, from The Third Policeman
Hans Richter, Dadascope (1961)
LCD Soundsystem, “You Wanted a Hit” (Live at Austin City Limits)
LCD Soundsystem, “You Wanted a Hit” (This Is Happening, 2010)
Ortiz Morales, “Music for Audiovisuals” (Superior Conservatory of Music of Malaga, 2006-2007)

Eternals return.

The world is all that is the case. […] There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus

In his journals, Georg Simmel stared at Nietzsche's eternal recurrence and then, quietly, refused the implied sameness: 

The world process strikes me as the turning of an enormous wheel, but understood as the premise of the eternal recurrence. But the result, the actual repetition at some point of the identical, is not the same— for the wheel has an infinitely large radius; only once an infinite amount of time has elapsed – that is, never – can it reach the same point again. And yet it is a wheel that turns, which, in its ideal, aims at the exhaustion of qualitative manifoldness without ever exhausting it in reality.

Elsewhere, Paul Valery’s Mon Faust: “Only the ineffable is of any importance!”

Even a Somewhere sounds solid in comparison.

Reviewing notebooks again. Trying to catch up on the things I haven’t finished. Finding old words staring at new ones. Lured by the queer sensibility of metaphors that draw on the mystical via negationis [way of negation], or what Hans Blumbenberg calls “those self-portrayals of the elementary perplexity that riddles every theology: having to speak of God incessantly without presuming to dare say anything about him.”

+

How Blumenberg squares Cusa in “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality”:

Nicholas of Cusa made this perplexity a speculative means of representing his coincidentia oppositorum [unity of opposites]. He invented the explosive metaphor of the circle whose radius approaches infinity and thus produces a circumference with an infinitely small curvature so that the circle's arc coincides with its tangent. Here, the intentionality of intuition is over-expanded in order that its futility be expressed in itself, so that the anticipation [Vorgriff] performs the retraction of the trespass [Übergriff].

+

How metaphors offer us access to ways of thinking that are limited by the nature of our relation to a source, or a source text.

+

How translation theory figurates the constellatory potential of language in relation to the absent original, where “original” designates a mythical unitary language demolished with the towel of Babel.

+

How the god of the gaps may occasionally partake in this longing for originary wholeness.

+

And (I want to argue) poetry works against such regressive nostalgia when it employs the conditional.

+

And George Lichtenberg, lamenting something like a deus absconditus in the trunk of the tree. . .