"Ecrire" by Marguerite Duras, an unofficial translation.

Marguerite Duras published this brief sketch, “Ecrire,” in French in the spring of 1990, the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’m leaving it here in my unofficial translation for those who might be interested.

*

There is the scandal . . . that of literature. I think literature is scandalous, because it is scarce and it drives people crazy.

In other times, I believed— I repeated this for decades—that anyone could write. I hymned this across every tonality.

I don’t believe it anymore.

I don’t know what it means to write, at all, but I know that everyone cannot do it.

I can have a written page, there. We can read it. The page is tangible. But I don’t know at all what will be on the next page before tackling it.

It’s very aleatory. Sometimes, we fear dying before the page is full, because we know, regardless. . . we know the benchmarks, we know the event we are aiming towards, but we must bring the text to that. One must make it happen, venture the entire voyage.

Writing, I think, is essentially an activity that requires one to think about death every day.

They have said I write about writing.

But I think everyone who writes, writes about writing . . .

Which is to say that this species of the word’s infinite indefiniteness, of the image, of the theme, of the memory, of love, these things must obstruct those people, those people who do not write.

There is a choice that operates, an organic choice that operates

When we don’t write, I don’t know what we do, I can’t even imagine, but we must continue in a forest that never closes, on you; because there, when we write, it is the forest that closes; you are trapped inside it.

I believe that by dint of writing, by living there, in the writing, I have arrived in a sort of monoculture, a mono-life, a life near monotone, the accidents being nothing but the books.

Notes on Antoine Volodine's "Minor Angels": Part 2

Homage, homage (homage, homage)
Is coming back around (is coming back around)
Coming back through you (coming back through you)
Is something I can't understand (something I can't understand)


”HOMAGE”

To pick up from where I dropped the ball, namely, somewhere between the angels and the archaoelogy, and proceed into Volodine’s novel, Minor Angels (translated by Jordan Stump) with carpool at my throat—

Names change; they designate nothing more than a moment in time. Volodine continues vexing identity by having the angels play double roles, living under different names, acting out different parts of themselves.

Identity is ‘fragmented’, and the names toggle between persons and cover stories. So we meet "Sofia" in the nursing home, where she sorts and delivers mail to the crones, and the role of letters is salvific, as letters carry the words of other worlds into the prisons of this one. But the experiments conducted on the crones to study their immortality are finished: scientific interest has moved on. What remains are the scent memories of apparatuses, rubber sheets, and dental prostheses. The smell of the future is rich in plastic apparatus!

Every angel does the grunt-work speaking for ghosts. There is no single voice that remains singular.

"Unknown martyrs and anonymous mostly red peoples spoke through the voice of the old women, and now they speak through the voice of Will Scheideman."

Here, Volodine applies what he has called "the practice of homage," allowing the voices of the missing to be taken up by others who refuse their disappearance, who reject the feel of ending, itself.

“I’ve never done something where the sound alone is already an entire film…
where there’s so much to hear simultaneously, because so much is being told.”

- Wim Wenders on Wings of Desire, with its overhearing angels

CRONES, EPIC CORRECTIVES, AND FAILED REVOLUTIONISTS

The post-cataclysmic landscape of Minor Angels includes the "battered facades" of big avenues, the "gaping wounds" where buildings once stood, the ruins of consumerist temples and shopping malls; this field of debris continues expanding, swallowing, enveloping the world. The "barbarism" of the present is laid, loosely, against the lustrousness of remembered revolutionary ideals. The background noise is the "roar of the marketplace," but the real sound, the anchor, is the "clapping of little waves, the clapping made by loving bodies in an embrace." There are prisoners and those who demand their own execution for betraying the cause – for allowing the mafias and capitalists to take over.

The 12th narract belongs to Varvalia Lodanka, one of the formative revolutionists, a “crone” who invokes the choral repetitions of Greek tragedy, retracing the litany "before us, we see," layering memories, names, and places from motion which resembles the percussive effects of  a jazz brush circling a top-hat drum. Lodanka names the offenders: "the multi-national mafia", the "duplicitous language" that erases the poor, the present, the folk wisdom. 

Will Scheidenmann slumps on the bed in Varvalia Lodanka's yurt, a place he never felt at home, imagining the sixteen years since he had left, and the time before his birth: "the time of the dormitory, where his grandmother's manipulated his embryonic form and growled over his body to fill him with their vision of the world." 

Annoyed by the disruptive voices of memory, Will, who "hates being interrupted when ... reciting a strange narract," realizes the crones know him so well that they recognize him in any costume, any voice, any uniform. 

After a crone calls him out on the narract, Will admits:

"I gave him that name so I wouldn't seem to be forever speaking of myself and never of anyone else. But it was me." 

It is always me or us in the post-exotic oneirism; the one includes the countless. The we invokes the silenced. Does this conflict with the speakers’ refusals to be indicted for the past, as one sees in the monologue on “what matters” written "in the language of today and no other”?

The past is not something he can be responsible for, the speaker assures the reader.

"To build new ruins without shame, or, at least, to live without shame in the endless ruins before them:" this is what Volodine's characters were free to do after "the corrective epic of our Varvalia Lodenko, her appeals for a massacre of the powerful, her nostalgia for a total abolition of every sort of privilege" had taken place. The question isn't whether Varvalia's daydream was "right-minded". To interrogate it in this way would be to re-enact its massacres in reaction, to answer by affirming the importance of the end. Varvalia's goal was "to rip out the human roots of unhappiness"; another angel admits to assisting her with assassinations on an as-needed basis. The matter-of-fact narrative tone isn’t quite confessional, nor is it penitent.

“Mao Zedong said that the revolution “is not a dinner party,” Volodine has said:

Post-exoticism stages stories and projects images that have nothing to do with elegant descriptions of “dinner parties.” The stories often take place in the ruins of war, after the disasters of ethnic cleansings, after failed revolutions, atrocious counterrevolutions, in societies where violence, social injustice, and capricious masters hold sway.

Books and stories preserve the past but they also defy it completely, and forge new fantasies that may become actionable as a future. “What we had called post-exoticism,” Volodine writes in J. T. Mahany’s translation of Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven:

“ . . . was a construction connected to revolutionary shamanism and literature, literature that was either written by hand or learned by heart and recited, as the administration through the years would sometimes forbid us any paper material; it was an interior construction, a withdrawal, a secret welcoming land, but also something offensive that participated in the plot of certain unarmed individuals against the capitalist world and its countless ignominies.”

Volodine has said a “backfiction” lies behind post-exotic narratives. Again, one senses an unarticulated loyalty on the author’s part—-something he wishes to say without being responsible for having said it. In that sense, he is a time-bound as the rest of us.


ASIDE WHEREIN MY TIME DIFFERS FROM THAT OF THE ANGELS

If I were a better person, I’d excerpt the long quotes on advantages and hypocrisy found on page 32. But no one has the proper time to fulfill the duties of imagining to be the person they determined as better. My time differs from that of the angels, in the fullness of its etc.


THE PORT OF THE “WE” WE MUST BE UNTO OTHERS

In narract 34, Malecka Bayarlag describes life on a ship in a port plagued by power outages, physical fights among sailors in hard-bitten poses. As a self-described “subhuman” with some knowledge of shamanism, Malika locates a town in Peru from the dreams of a woman he slept with, and the dreams pass through the bodies of lovers like settings. This is the setting Volodine and gives us, namely, the place as trumped by others who passed through prior. The perspective tangoes through multiple minds remembering lovers, beds, ports. These "interior worlds" impinge continuously on conversations between characters, as when a ship captain remembers "his most absurd convictions," namely the love a man has for a son back when sons existed, when fatherhood was a locus of identity.

Safe harbor vs. the Untermenge one must be to others. But safe harbor is simply the act of narrating —- or “narracting”— the story. Hannah Arendt’s ghost tips her cigarette holder over narract 41, in which Constanzo Cossu describes the mass displacements of the End-Times, and the significance of the refugee's legal status. The refugee tries to buy his way to safety with gold, but the ship will not accept him. He begs the watchman to let him on as a company baggage, or to be in the untermenge category, or even to be added as a "a cadaver . . . As miscellaneous merchandise" or a "found object."  Finally, he begs the watchman to accept him as "an extraterrestrial covered with ants,"  but the watchman does not reply. It's business as usual for borders.

“THIS CONFUSION OF ONE WORD FOR ANOTHER”

In a month without rain or magnetic storms, a narract shifts from Witold Yanschog to the second person address. The epistolary nature of the narract glimmers after claims of "shamanically-assisted copulation," which the speaker asserts as "this confusion of one word for another." 

"I wouldn't like to be penetrated by an admirer of the capitalist system,” one lover says to another in quotation.

A character quotes his love interest back to her across memory, and then overnarrates Witold Yanschog, who might "dream of her and her naked body as he lay on top of you."  The next line goes on to explain or qualify: “I say you, I used the second person singular to avoid continually saying Bella Mardirassian, and so it won't seem that I only talk about myself and my own experiences.”

This is how the son speaks to the crones who want to know what happened to their friends that were imprisoned. The fate of the disappeared is the hearth and hedge of this novel. At one point, Scheidemann does locate himself in time, saying he has been in the yurts for sixteen years since being pardoned. In the apocalypse, as in the beginning, "the distances were not on a the human scale.


NEVER TRUST A NARRATOR OR A NARRACT

Hierarchy doesn’t vanish in Volodine’s post-apocalypse. Status-seeking behavior characterizes life in the camps. Loyalty to the nouveau-riche is frowned upon – better to identify as a "rubble-clearer." The questions posed by class-related identification are not elided.

And how effective, really, identity becomes when it buffs itself into a proper elite. Sex aside (for there is not enough of it), our species’ polymorphous perversity peaks at rationalizing massacres, genocide, and holy wars. Give us a gun and we’ll find something to shoot. Better still, send a cloud-carrying revelation across the green or the screen, a revelation that makes some of us part of a chosen, secret elect anointed to usher in the Future. *

Whether one calls it the Vanguard, the 144,000, the Saved, the Miraculous, the Remnant, the Q-Cave, Strauss’ Exoteric Readers, Bohemian Grovers, or the Billionaire League, the self-anointed Elect have everything to gain from disdaining the average and ordinary humans who deliver their groceries and struggle to budget healthcare deductibles. * Volodine's angels don't belong to a creed or nation; postexoticism, according to Volodine, remains a "foreign literature written in French."

Although there are many mothers, children are mostly absent from Volodine's scenes.

The world is old or middle-aged: it has lost its youth like a teen in an early fiction by Mircea Eliade.

Is this sort of lost youth consistent with the sort of Neo-Buddhism Voldodine has described? Is the absence of gender accomplished?

“The writer is a male-identifying human,” I said to my partner while reading Minor Angels on the small portion of sofa left to me by our dog.

“How can you tell?” he asked.

“I can just smell it,” I replied. “He thinks blood is tremendous and unusual. He fears like a man.”

To be clear, women play ‘leading’ roles in the novel— they drive the vehicles, they turn off the lights over their designer license plates at night. Yashreene Kagen, Linda Siew, each name too crowded by cultural resonances to provide a stable cultural referent. I think there are many ways to read this, and one of them is obvious: Volodine refuses to be read through conventional gender or genre commitments. The question of whether he earns this right is, I think, a different one. This confusion of one word for another makes interpretation shaky.

Never trust a narrator—- including yours truly.


OTHER “INFRASTRUCTURES OF THE APOCALYPSE”

Back on my bullshit, namely the last horse of the apocalypse, staring at the burning skyline and wondering if the end of teleology can lead us backwards-forward into a hopeful post-catastrophism.

Apocalypse trends in hard times, Dan Sinykin noted in “The End of the World As We Know It,” an essay surveying  literary apocalypso, or what he calls "a form concerned with the possibility of redemption through destruction." The Book of Revelation abandoned the prophetic tradition of warning against apocalypse, focusing instead on how the world would look when God brought it to an end. Prophecy assumes that humans can change their ways, or that one's actions have a relationship to outcome. Not so with the apocalypse's dead end: the warnings don't matter when it's over. Sinykin interrogates the doom-note created by the abundance of "Christian apocalyptic narratives that find a self-fulfilling prophecy in the devastation around us." 

By looking for signs of end-times, we commit to a sort of fatalism, an irrevocable despair that, to me, cannot be separated from the popularity of teleological takes. For it is teleology that abandons ontology for a reading of runes and signs, for a predicative direction that characterizes our ideas of Progress, apocalypse, salvation, exceptionalism. Sinkykin is right to notice salvationist dreamwork is tied to messianism—or, "the arrival of some transcendent rapture" that causes us to lean into fatalism (though I suspect this depends on one's position as a consumer or creator of time, as a spectator or maker of revolution). The idea of an ending foregrounds the marketplace of afterlives; it draws significance to belief; we choose which god, deity or lifestyle is preferable to rule the end-times. 

Enter Sinykin's discussion of Jessica Harley's Infrastructures of the Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex, which looks at writers working inside "colonial tradition" to imagine "forms of escape without salvation." Harley rejects what others take as Walter Benjamin's "redeemed time," aiming instead for a "non-utopian reorientation", a "narrative embrace of futurelessness," or what she calls "transfiguration."

If my lasso seems rodeos away from Volodine's minor angels, it may be due to our difficulty in imagining other ways of being, living, surviving, and thriving. Capitalist realism, which Mark Fisher defined as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it," is as critical to Volodine's angels as it is to Harley's transfiguration. 

The most compelling hitch in Volodine's hierophany is it’s refusal to divest from hope. Instead, his characters invest in the look of longing, in memory, in places treasured by intimacy. The traces of angels sacralize the gaze. Volodine's postexoticism privileges the unseen and invisible: it is the immaterial that signifies. 

In a prior conversation, Volodine suggested that postexoticism de-fangs the apocryphal, normalizing the apocalypse as a condition rather than a party fetish, an aberrance, or a religious revenge-fantasy. This sounds like a way of welcoming Fisher’s encouragement to imagine the impossible, and to question the possibilities inherent in the construction of the definition. We leftists are terrible at this part—- the imagining, I mean; the labor of visioning a scene without staging the shoot-out and congratulating ourselves on how we have used the master’s tools to temporarily take over the master’s house. I am paraphrasing Audre Lorde because her voice is significant, and her theory remains critical.

There is money to be made from the problem-solving, self-helping passion of the neoliberal subject. Thinking outside the given formulations requires facing the terror of the unpredictable and losing old labels, nations, names, all the ways we know ourselves, all the ways we are known by others, all the assumptions that keep us from knowing how to live in the present. Or what the present involves.

What comes after the death of prescriptions for personal and collective self-actualization? Perhaps something collaborative, non-redemptive, anterior to eschatology. If apocalypse is insignificant, then Progress, itself, is challenged by the Volodine's commitment to narrative polyphony and non-linearity. 


Volodine as photographed in 2014 by Samuel Kirszenbaum.

AU FIN, NON-FIN!

I like Volodine’s eyebrows. And his Minor Angels.

The book jacket refers to Volodine as a "Slavic writer," which begs the old question of how much a group can “describe” us. Or what we hope to achieve by affiliating ourselves with such a description. And whether an affiliative description is an inscription, a thing that makes us, an identifier that flirts with the possibility of self-definition while absconding the labor of meaning anything.

Volodine drills holes in time and refuses to resolve the disorienting effects of such temporal fracking. I like that about him. Perforations in time won't kill us. Volodine's minor angels, like those demoted from the church canon, give us incisions in time which aren't incisive, cuts which aren't decisive in the way we have come to expect a progress of time, of the history that is part of a process requiring expert explanation. 

Conventionally, historians produce meaning by explaining the event (why a war begins, what ends it), and perhaps the momentum of directionality overdetermines the present in relation to the past or future. In the ambiguous terrain between imagination and reality, Volodine proffers no Hegelian climax, no proper end of history—there is a "journey towards nothingness" which layers narracts of tender, witnessed connection. But there is also a longing that feels radical in context. Where Guido Morselli's final fiction builds post-catastrophe from the loneliness of last-man syndrome, Volodine evokes a more sentimental post-disaster phase, where humans seek to preserve connections among themselves and their stories. 

I’m not arguing for pastoralia. There is no golden age worth huffing. A sentimental affection for stories doesn’t imply a longing for Edenic innocence. * Does innocence exist in story unmortified by sin and expiation? My daughter has stopped asking me to tell her a story at night.

Look, one comes to the post-catastrophic novel imperfectly, lugging the culture’s apocalyptic assumptions. Teleological ordering points towards finality, that dot of an end point in which time is fulfilled. I’m not sure it’s fair to say Volodine entertains teleology as much as he attempts to reveal a space beyond it. The dreams of the reader are the text. Dreams are precise because they aren't infected by capitalist realism—-they are as real as the inaudible pain of unwatered porch plants, and “listening” to the lamentations of plants widene our perception of the possible. 

There is an illicit metaphysicalism, a supranatural voyeurism, involved in perusing the dream-states of others.* Overhearing a dream is like reading a stranger's intimate letter.

As a communicative form, the dream is private, expressible, fragmented. In recalling our own dreams aloud, we become voyeurs of the self, voyeurs of the sleeping self whom we can never meet in real life, since to wake is to become a different self. There are so many selves in time, Volodine suggests. 

If the dialectical oomph of the American consumerist fetish for self-actualization mirrors our former commitment to historical progress, Volodine offers fiction against the self's final product. There is no ideal human, no final perfection. By expanding time to make space for the expunged angels, Volodine avoids overdetermined good vs. evil binaries. We read him to overhear the future, or enter the realm of anti-capitalist realism. "It's memories that I'm stealing," whispers Tom Waits. We're innocent when we dream.

Alternative Ways of Reading; i.e. the asterisks

“…once they’ve received the revelation that makes them part of a chosen, secret elect anointed to usher in the future.”: For the elitism of the vanguard, the hierarchy of status based on access to Party politics, see Henri Lefevbre's life-long effort to create a Marxist sociology that would dethrone the idea of labor as a solution to alienation.

“… and struggle to budget healthcare deductibles.”: Monks are interesting in that they withdraw from the world in order to save the world, and their vows to community are metaphysical commitments that balance between collective embodiment, devotion, and solitude, usually on the basis of their own vision or revelatory event. Unlike the monk who belongs to an order, the mystic heads for the desert and drafts maps from found signs. The mystics relationship to revelation is thicker, which is to say, their commitment to God is sustained by revelation more than ritual.

“A sentimental affection for stories doesn’t imply a longing for Edenic innocence.”: Does innocence exist in story unmortified by sin and expiation? My daughter has stopped asking me to tell her a story at night. “Things don’t happen in life the way they do in your stories,” she tells me when I offer an unsolicited one. The value of stories depends on the expectations we bring to our ontologies at any given moment in time.

“There is a sense of metaphysical illicitness, a supranatural voyeurism, in perusing the dream-states of others.”: For variations of the relationship between dreams and voyeurism, see Hugh Fulham-McQuillan's fabulous essay in a recent issue of Firmament (Sublunary Editions).

13 ways of looking at an allegro.

1

The son and I spent the better part of a phone conversation arguing about the meaning of allegro. The argument itself proceeded at a pace one might score as “allegro” in that it was lovely, angular, and filled with sharp edges that neither of us wished to soften. It is a pleasure to argue about language with my son, as it is a pleasure to argue about meaning with anyone who is genuinely interested in thinking— who finds thinking to be incredibly pleasureable, and that pleasurable to be incommensurable.

Despite our disagreements, the son and I concluded something unrelated to either of our contentions, namely, that allegro is a word used to describe a relationship between an object and its surroundings— it exists in relation to others. An atom alone in the universe cannot be allegro; there is no way to measure the movement of an atom without the presence of others atoms.



2

In music, allegro is a tempo marking used to indicate that the performer should play faster, more quickly, brightly. In ballet, it indicates brisk and lively movement. The definition is the denotation—the cold, hard bone of the word laid out before us on the table. Connotation is what clings to it, what hides inside the word; the sticky opportunities to add dimension and volume to a word—to make it shine differently after being modified by the addition of new objects.

Simply, connotation is a commonly understood cultural or emotional association that any given word or phrase carries, in addition to its explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation. Playing the denoted meaning against the connoted meaning creates tension in poems. Poets can rely on connotations in order to inflect the way a poem touches or ruffles us, or defamiliarizing the world as we know it. When leveraged and played in relation to other words, a powerful connotation can infect a poem without explicitly declaring itself.



3

The simple stricture of "Vivaldi" by Stuart Dybek can tempt the reader into overlooking its elegance. The simple part is the motion: it begins by making a promise, then adding a qualification, then shifting into interrogative meditation before finishing with a rephrasing.


Dybek opens with the promise that he is going to tell us about meeting Vivaldi. He begins by describing a scene from a 19th century novel before breaking into a new stanza with a "no" —  an uncapitalized qualification, an amendment that returns to the promise. (But it returns to the promise without starting a new sentence, and this insistence on expanding duration is notable; there is something he decided here, something that meant to distinguish between a "No" and a "no").

In the second stanza, immediately after the “no,” Dybek tells us about a winter night around a city subway, or maybe a train.. More specifically, he lists the sounds of that winter night—the violin, the drunks wassailing, the implied echo of strings meeting metal on tracks. And there is a milk truck, which is a time-piece: it tells what time this is happening, maybe in Dybek's childhood, or the childhood of his parents, maybe in a book he has read in a scene he imagines.

And then Dybek drops an ellipsis to indicate a thought trailing off, a thought wandering alone down the tracks as the speaker turns to the reader and begins asking questions. "Has it never been so…?" The fourth stanza is made entirely from questions. Question after question. Addressed directly to you or me or the one simulataneously overhearing and listening and reading. It is the longest stanza in the poem (5 lines to the 3 and 4 of other stanzas). It wants to know where sound begins.  

I think I mentioned Dybek finishes musically, which is to say, he finishes with a rephrasing and a defamiliarized image.

[SON: The musical term for this isn’t “rephrasing” mom. You’re referring to the basic structure of harmony, and the way pieces reach toward closure by returning to themes.]

Fine. Let's look at the first line of the first stanza and compare it to the first line of the final stanza:

When I met Vivaldi it was dark,

When I closed my eyes,

Both are written in past tense to describe a moment that was present to the speaker. Both occupy the space that is the promise of meeting Vivaldi.

What do we know about baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi? Although he composed for multiple instruments, the only two instruments we know he was officially trained to play included the violin and the harpsichord. Again, first stanza:

When I met Vivaldi it was dark,
a ragman lashed at his horse's bells

And second stanza:

When I closed my eyes,
less than a ghost,
Vivaldi cupped a mouth harp
like a match against the wind.

What else do we know about Antonio Vivaldi? On September 18, 1693, Vivaldi was tonsured as a monk, and on March 23, 1703, he was consecrated. For his hair color Vivaldi was nicknamed the "red monk". Vivaldi never played a mouth harp. In fact, mouth harp is a word associated with the blues harmonica. Dybek ends on this very specific blues harmonica in the mouth of Vivaldi.


4

SON: Your allegro is not my allegro.

ME: There is no single allegro.

SON: Right. We can speak about a general allegro-like aura but the composer imagines (and scores) an allegro to mean one thing—- a thing that exists in his mind—-- and the pianist then interprets that allegro in relation to other notes and tempo markings. So, for example, I think Shostakovich’s allegro is different from Vivaldi’s, and that difference is only learned by studying the body of their work.

ME: This is true for poetry as well. The implicit associations that poets hold in relation to a certain word—- take “home” for example, or “tenderness” —- often emerge by studying their use of that word across poems, and determining how tightly they hold the word, which is to say, how rigid and fixed it is in their mind.

SON: So we agree that everyone's allegro is different, and this difference is what makes a performance unique. A conductor like Sergiu Celibidache has a very particular way of interpreting the way an allegro relates to what surrounds it in a symphony. My allegro, or the one I use as a composer —-my private allegro, if you will—- starts to change a little when I learn a new piece, and I get close to another allegro, a Beethoven allegro, for example. Even if I don’t realize it, I can’t go back to the private allegro I held before learning to play Beethoven’s.

ME: The anxiety of allegro influence!

SON: No, mom. Not anxiety—it’s just the way music works. Everything you hear and play changes what you can imagine hearing and playing and composing.

ME: Poetry is the same. That’s why reading poetry is how we learn to write poetry, or how the possibilities of our poetics expand. I’m thinking about the subterreanean intertextuality of these influences, these things we have heard or read and thus carry forward. I’m thinking about how it holds the capacity for humor and subversion. Just as defamiliarization (or "making the familiar strange") relies on subverting expectations, parody relies on tradition, on the words and scores of others, in order to refashion meaning. Intertextual references reach into a shared past and attempt to re-vision it in the present; a reference is a nod to influence.


5

“The Allegro” is a flash fiction of a piano piece composed by Erik Satie when he was 18. Dated September 9, 1884, it's his earliest known composition. "The Allegro" is also the first place in which Satie signed his name as "Erik" instead of "Éric". Satie was serving time in what he called the  "penitentiary" of the Paris Conservatoire in 1884, and finding his creative energy sapped. It was on a summer holiday visit to his hometown of Honfleur, on the coast of Normandy, that Satie wrote his first "known" piece, and the only music he'd ever compose in his hometown. The upbeat and earnest optimism of the Allegro won't characterize Satie's later compositions, which are more whimsical, melancholic, and biting. But even from the start, Satie's appetite for quotation shaped his music. Allegro quotes the popular song, Ma Normandie (1836) by Frédéric Bérat. There is even a bit of the refrain—- whose lyrics are "J'irai revoir ma Normandie" ("I long to see my Normandy") — tucked into the middle of the piece.

In a sense, Satie’s Allegro is also the first piece in which he displays his penchant for quotation as part of the composition. The son and I have talked about quotations in music and poetry at length. I leave my quotations of those conversations for another day.

6

SON: Don’t forget that we’re talking about tempo markings here: we’re talking about duration and the space between silence and sound. That’s Cage, right? The tempo-marking tells the performer how to play it. Play it quickly, briskly, brightly.


7

I’ve taught the “Allegro” by Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer many times—-because readers always find something new in it.

Basically, my thinking about this poem focuses lightly on structure, but takes more interest in Tranströmer’s use of language. We can notice the simple couplets, the sparsity of adjectives, the way in which these formal choices create a sort of dark, quiet room for the poem.

The speaker begins by telling us that he is playing Haydn–"I play Haydn after a dark day"–and then he does this wild thing that poets do, namely, he creates an unforgettable word in order to defy the given world. To push that little world to its limits.

"I push the hands deep into my haydnpockets," Tranströmer writes, and thus does he turn away from the emperor's demands. It is an act of private, intimate protest rather than a public gesture. You can't play a song on a piano with your hands in your pockets. By pushing these two words together, the poet gives us an attitude, a way of being, a way of describing how playing Hadyn is an intimate ecstasy. 

Tranströmer titled this poem after a tempo-marking in Haydn. By giving us this marking, we may find ourselves wondering which piano sonata he is playing, which particular allegro.

The allegro has its own history as the first section or part of a sonata. To have an allegro was a must for classical composers. But to have hadynpockets is to be someone who knows Transtomer's personal allegro: it is to know the neologism he created to resist the lure of kings.




8

SON: Composer Erik Satie didn’t use conventional tempo markings in his pieces. In fact, that short “Allegro” may have been his only allegro, and it was as a title.

ME: Why?

SON: He wanted to defy everything that the Conservatory stood upon for its authority. Unlike many of you adults who like to think you’re avant-garde, Satie was the real deal. He delegitimized himself and constantly refused respectability. He was performing his radicalism— he lived it. He lived with his rats and didn’t give a damn. I respect him for that.

ME: You say he didn’t give a damn, but I think he was quite pissed.

SON: I mean he didn’t care enough to try and fit in. He would never have accepted the sorts of things you all do for money. Playing in a Cabaret bar, to him, was part of being free.

ME: I, too, was nineteen once.

9

francine j. harris’ “Sonata in F Major, K.183: Allegro” is a stunning engagement of Scarlatti’s composition as played by Daria van den Bercken. The relationship between the music, the rain, the presence of Scarlatti in the sounds:

the women, who step in the street and yell
to anyone they loved once and it sounds like prelude if
Scarlatti hadn’t moved to Madrid

It’s hard not to get tongue-tied at the beauty of the enjambment here, and harris’ use of the field to drop into the relationship between Scarlatti’s composition and the streets experienced in Madrid. How “it sounds like prelude if”—and the line breaks on the conditional—-where the use of prelude is uncanny, it torques time in the poem, it reverses the motion of the women in the street somehow. The conditional continues:

would he have moved the notes diatonically as the rain falls up

a rood. ascends the scaffolding. It’s impossible to read The Street

The magic of a harris poem is this feeling that the space and the moment is becoming a book or a text, and here the speaker is reading “The Street” and the movement of the notes bears kinship with the strange reversal of the women’s calls of love. Such an arfully crafted composition, this poem.


10

My editor told me straight away I’d shown I had a nose for news. He was getting a bit irritated because all the documentary life-stories were so alike. However hard life might have been for the person in question on the other side, however respectable the reasons for his flight, there had gradually developed a stereotype story—-looked at journalistically—-that did violence to my editor’s professional instincts. And now we had a rather special case: this young man who, without any fuss, simply wanted to get something out of life, who hadn’t found what he wanted on the other side, and had got out. At last we had, not a tragedy, but an intriguing allegro, a fine specimen of the picaresque. We’d simply never come across anything so flatly hedonistic before. What more natural than to invite this young man to join the paper?

- Martin Walser, “A German Mosaic”

This is only time I have seen “allegro” used to designate a mode of the picaresque—-a literary genre rather than a way of playing it.


11

W. H. Auden’s “Words and Music" deserves a read in its entirety. I pass it quietly to you, for the insight on meter and composition.

From the same page in my notebook: Igor Stravinsky said an allegro usually involved several movements "of which one confers upon the whole work its symphonic quality namely, the symphonic allegro, generally placed at the opening of the work and intended to justify its name by fulfilling the requirements of a certain musical dialectic." On this view, the most critical part of the dialectic is in the development, which occurs at the center—and this is what Stravinsky took as "the symphonic allegro" (a.k.a. "the sonata-allegro").



12

In her Charles Haskins Lecture for 2001, titled “A Life of Learning”, Helen Vendler uses John Milton’s “L’Allegro” to make a point about judgement in literature:

From the time I was very young I continually asked myself, as I read through the works of poets, why some texts seemed so much more accomplished and moving than others. Why was Milton's "L'Allegro" more satisfactory than his "On the Death of a fair Infant dying of a Cough?" I believed, and still do, that anyone literate in poetry could see that the one was superior to the other. (Those who suppose there are no criteria for such judgments merely expose their own incapacity.) Still, to clarify to oneself and then to others, in a reasonable and explicit way, the imaginative novelty of a poem and to give evidence of its technical skill isn't an easy task. I've been brought to mute frustration by it when I know intuitively that something is present in the poem that I haven't yet been able to isolate or name or describe or solve. In chapter 12 of Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad remarks on "that mysterious, almost miraculous, power of producing striking effects by means impos- sible ofdetection which is the lastword ofthe highest art." I wanted, hardly knowing how, to detect the means of that power.



13

Finally, there is this qualified allegro used by Susan Sontag in her catalogue description of a similarly titled exhibition “In Memory of Their Feelings”— about the world created by Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and the endless physical dialogue which took shape between them. Allegro vivace.

"Sentimental" v. "sensitive".

It was Vladimir Nabokov who deposited me near this particular trough tonight, at the rim of this slop-bucket where the degradations of sentimentalism meet the elisions of the sensitivity. Specifically, it was Nabokov’s lecture on Dostoevsky, published in his Lectures on Russian Literature (which I read recently and which one can find partially excerpted in 1981 by the New York Times) that led me to this uncomfortable mess that continues to ravage poetics and prosody and discussions about craft.

After rigorously dragging Dostoevsky across the literary landscape and then proceeding to smear his own rancorous excrement on what remains of Dostoevsky’s disembodied soul, Nabokov scowls himself into theorizing that we must distinguish between the sentimental and the sensitive. This is quite sensible. Thus do I quote:

Nabokov begins by making a claim which he then substantiates with series of examples. Unfortunately, the only thing we learn about the sensitive is that “a sensitive person is never a cruel person”— which is as bald lie as any, since countless sensitive people are also viciously cruel, depending on their socialization, worldview, and personal ethics. Many bullies are just hypersensitive kids who prefer to feel powerful rather than vulnerable. Many sensitive people lack a capacity to feel for others. As everyone who has dated a born-in-the-US human knows, narcissists can be incredibly sensitive.

Since Nabokov doesn’t define the sensitive, or posit any correlation between sensitivity and empathy, I’m not sure why Lenin’s opera tears are sentimental rather than evidence of Lenin’s sensitivity. Nor do I understand why the politician’s evocation of Mother’s Day is taken for sentimentalism rather than political strategy. Nabokov’s fictional characters rarely weep. Is this because they are sensitive but not sentimental?

“Bullies are afraid of looking weak or sensitive,” my youngest informs me.

Trump won a political election by campaigning as a Bully; the American Christian Right went so far as to suggest that their God created him to be a bully, as part of His Plan to increase profits for gun makers. Trump, like Stalin, performed the politics of loving babies.

As for Dostoevsky, he is in big, big trouble with Nabokov, whose defines a “sentimentalist” as a writer who is guilty of “the non-artistic exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional compassion in the reader.”

Sentimentalism (noun): the excessive expression of feelings of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia in behavior, writing, or speech.

“Automatic traditional compassion”! A tragedy that Vera permitted her beloved to past a first reading with this turgid phrasing. Personal sentiments aside, the word “sentiment” comes from the Latin for feeling, which is to say, sensing or experiencing. And sentiment, in every sense, has decreased in usage, where it is associated with maudlin sentimentalism, Romanticism, and amatory manipulation.

I feel close to you: this is how an expression of sentiment may sound in the 21st century, where the “I” speaks for itself, accepting responsibility for its “feelings,” and declaring those feelings in a relational context that implies individualistic agency and self-determination.

After determining that D. is vaguely and absolutely one of those sentimental saps, Nabokov detours into the lamentable influence of the “European mystery novel” on Dostoevsky’s novels:

Certainly, Dostoevsky’s obsession with staying Slav—-and cultivating the dark suffering of the Russian soul—was dreadfully essentialist, but one could argue that this particular relationship to suffering also became the lever applied by Stalinism. Dostoevsky didn’t invent it: he fictionalized it. One could argue that Solzhenitsyn also represents this school of Russian imperialist tenderness alongside the theme of Russian imperial carceral systems.

One could argue that a certain imperial tenderness inflects the descriptions of how conventions are altered in carceral spaces, as seen in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Notes from A Dead House, the fictionalized narration of Dostoevsky’s time in a prison camp:

It is now quite understandable why, as I already said earlier, my first question on entering prison was how to behave, on what footing to put myself wit these people. I sensed beforehand that I would often have such clashes with them as now, at work. But, despite any such clashes, I decided not to change my plan of action, which I had already partly thought out at the time; I knew it was right. Namely; I decided that I must behave as simply and independently as possible, by no means to betray any any effort to get closer with them; but not to reject them if they themselves wished to get closer. By no means to fear their threats and hatred and, as far as possible, to pretend I did not notice it. By no means to side with them on certain points, and not to cater to some of their habits and customs—in short, not to invite myself into their full friendship. I realized at first glance that they would be the first to despise me for it. However, by their way of thinking (and I later learned this for certain), I still had to maintain and even show respect for my noble origin before them, that is, to pamper myself, put on airs, disdain them, turn up my nose at everything, and keep my hands clean. That was precisely how they understood a nobleman to be. Naturally, they would abuse me for it, but deep down they would still respect me. Such a role was not for me; I had never been a nobleman according to their notions but instead I promised myself never to belittle my education or my way of thinking before them by any concession. If, to please them, I were to start fawning on them, agreeing with them, being familiar with them, entering into their various “qualities” in order to gain their sympathy—they would at once assume I was doing it out of fear and cowardice, and would treat me with contempt.

One could even imagine a theoretical relationship between the contempt experienced by the incarcerated Russian and the affect of man-shame that characterizes Putin’s recent imperialist ventures. One could, of course, argue, imagine, and saddle many irresponsible yet interesting things, given time and a stable income. Since I cannot argue them all, I will comfort myself by gesturing towards continuation of metaphysical discussion on the stairwell after midnight.

Nabokov made no secret of his contempt for Dostoevsky. In his 1964 interview in Playboy (as reprinted in Strong Opinions), Nabokov insisted:

Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway.

A few years later, “this reader” told James Mossman:

I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigmarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search.

At this point, I am prepared to suggest the following: Nabokov reserves his most viperous critique for the writers whose influence is most detectable in his own work. N0 one would suggest Anton Chekhov influenced Nabokov’s writing style; this is why Nabokov considers Chekhov to be the greatest Russian writer who ever lived.

My favorite butterfly-king takes Dostoevsky for a simpleton who pens mystery novels because he cannot imagine the human condition. Additionally, he misuses the word “farce” and refuses to define it; he leaves that “farce” there like a tapeworm in the middle of the paragraph, where what Dostoevsky positions against “drama” is the “absurdity” that will define the coming century.

Is Nabokov envious of Dostoevsky’s insight? Only Vera knows.

Only a frog would populate his books with characters that suffer from epilepsy or mental illness, Nabokov tells us. The “raving lunatic” characters, on this view, have little relation to the world, and offer nothing sublime, nothing as viscerally fantastic as, for example, a man in an elegant coat at the opera who is trying to diddle a child.

“Art is a divine game,” and Nabokov wants the game to feel as if a god set it up rather than a fool who got himself imprisoned in Siberia for several years and dined with various riff-raff and criminals.

“A shudder with a strong element of delight in it” could describe a sadist’s response to the suicides of Othello, Kirilov or Svidrigailov? I’m not sure a strong element of delight is the necessary intellectual or aesthetic response to tragedy. It’s not a wrong response, but it is a personal one, namely, the response of Vladimir Nabokov.

And there are ways in which Nabokov’s own novels fail by the standard he sets for Dostoevsky?

“A genius of spiritual morbidity”: Nabokov grants Dostoevsky this much—which is a bit more than he grants “Pasternak’s vilely-written Zhivago.”

Alas, Dostoevsky fails the Nabokovian test of “harmony and economy which the most irrational masterpiece is bound to comply with”:

Dostoevsky’s “rational” “crude methods” make “his characters mere ideas in the likeness of people”; his “mechanical methods” are soiled by their “earthbound” attention to “conventional novels” published in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; his European style betrays Russia; his Slavophilism is anti-European; his “verbal overflow” is epileptic; his “unreal” fictional world fails to transfix the reader.

Truly, Nabokov’s personal embodiment of dialectical energy is exemplary. Only Joseph Brodsky could match so much badminton with his shadow. Alas, despite the tenuousness of some of their critical writings, both Nabs and Joe were incredible writers whose words continue to ravish my brain. So, to be fair, I leave you with a particularly lovely Nabokovian passage from his attack on Dostoevsky’s dead corpus:

Speaking of blood donations, soul-stomachs, and inspiration, here is Paul Auster’s Ferguson (in the novel, 4 3 2 1) describing Dostoevsky’s impact on him:

If the sentimentalism of Auster’s troth bothers the rigorously-sensitive, I would argue they need to make space for the blasting winds of the universe and all related flailings.

Alternately, one can take the route Thomas Bernhard took in Extinctions— and nail the Bovarisms to a chair of national self-implication.

“According to the exhibition description, Dostoevsky’s notes to himself “represent that key moment when the accumulated proto-novel crystallized into a text. Like many of us, Dostoevsky doodled hardest when the words came slowest.” Some of Dostoevsky’s character descriptions, argues scholar Konstantin Barsht, “are actually the descriptions of doodled portraits he kept reworking until they were right.” [Source: Open Culture]

"Romanian Notes" by Gary Indiana.

[As part of Gary Indiana’s travelogue series with Vice, “Romanian Notes” was published on August 19, 2013. I am excerpting it in full below, just in case the Vice archives vanish.]


“Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks for a nation of finks.”

—William S. Burroughs, A Thanksgiving Prayer


In Bucharest, the psychological damage inflicted on a society subjected to surveillance terror is apparent everywhere when you scratch the surface, even 24 years after the fall of Ceauşescu—in the suspicion older Romanians show toward one another; in the furtiveness and compulsive cheating rampant among shopkeepers and service providers; in the resigned abjection of young people who can imagine no future options besides A.) colorless, lifelong conformity in a degrading job or B.) membership in a neo-Nazi gang; in the atmosphere of demoralized powerlessness that suffuses daily life in Bucharest as perceptibly as melancholia pervades Istanbul. No problem too small to be insoluble, no conflict unthreatening enough to resolve without trauma. And in the countryside, people say, it's worse.

*

In line at an airport immigration check, the couple ahead of me debated which of their passports to use. They each shuffled at least five, like cards in a poker hand, all issued by different countries. The two sounded postcoitally blowsy, absorbed in their own sleepy dithering. They asked if I'd been around Taksim Square the night before. They had been sprayed, it turned out, with the same wave of tear gas I had walked into three blocks down the street. Like me, they'd spent all night rinsing their eyeballs, and now could easily fall alseep on their feet.

"We just got married," the woman said, making a little snort, as if they shared a few doubts about whether this had been a great idea. She was 40-ish, dubiously blond, pale, strong-chinned, gray-eyed, very pretty, of unguessable nationality, wearing a frazzled old Chanel suit and no makeup. Her partner was a hefty man, possibly Lebanese, with a stippled whitish fringe along the trim line of his thick black hair. Youthfully loose-limbed, but paunchy and quite a bit older. One pale-aubergine shirttail fluttered at his zipper; the other was stuffed into his pants. He was trying to be amusing and, unlike most people in airports, succeeding. "Guess where we're going," the woman quizzed with mock haplessness. "Cairo, jewel of the Nile," her new spouse chimed in, rolling jaded eyes at the predictable ironies of travel. I had a half-conscious flash that these people weren't touring or jetsetting at all, but testing out a much-revised script for incipient flaws, a fiction close enough to reality to go unchallenged in public. The immigration person waved them forward. "And then, what the hell," the woman laughed as she walked away, "Beirut. How's that for a dream honeymoon?"

*

It's possible that people intending to do bad things use the telephone and the internet to plan them, if they are also morons. However, morons are not noted for their planning skills. I suppose it would be nice if some bad things could be prevented before they happen without turning the world into a police state. The "eye in the sky" in casinos nips a lot of card counting and skimming and other scams in the bud. But if you place every human being or even everybody in a single country under invasive surveillance, a police state is what you get, even if the collected data is scattered around unsorted in a mainframe until a particular person becomes "a person of interest."

*

The overriding imperative of any bureaucracy funded by the state is its own self-perpetuation. If its purported reason to exist threatens to disappear, a bureaucracy will create whatever conditions it was supposed to eliminate. A drug-enforcement agency will deal drugs. An antiterrorism agency will breed its own terrorists, attracting weak-minded, potentially volatile people into bogus conspiracy cells. A central intelligence agency or so-called department of homeland security will manufacture threats to security, for example the recent "increased chatter alarm" that closed all the embassies in North Africa for a week.

If these glue traps for federal revenue are allowed to collect unlimited information about everybody, they can also make anybody into a terrorist, a drug mule, or whatever other menace a potential agency or department budget reduction calls for, cutting and pasting together a flimsy but widely believable, totally distorted version of any individual for public consumption, using bits of his or her data that have been parked in a massive hard drive in North Dakota or Utah or one of the other storage states. Last words of Lee Harvey Oswald: "I'm just a patsy."

*

In Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite, a book about the rise and fall of Ceauşescu, Edward Behr quotes a former Securitate official: "Imagine a huge apparatus spreading rumors, fear, and terror, an atmosphere in which common people feel that if they try and do the most insignificant thing identified as an act of opposition… they will disappear. It was psychological terror that paralyzed the Romanian population, and the most outstanding piece of disinformation was the rumor, deliberately spread by Securitate itself, that one out of every four Romanians was a Securitate informer."

*

Local "unrest" distracted me from Egyptian news in Sofia, where comparatively festive marches "turned violent," as the wire services put it, only once, on the 41st consecutive night of demos, when protesters trapped journalists and politicians in the Parliament building, then stoned a police bus sent to extract them. It felt much easier to identify with angry Bulgarians, angry Turks in Taksim Square, than with the factional mix of Islamists in Cairo. The Istanbul demos targeted once-popular Prime Minister Recep Erdoǧan after he proposed razing Gezi Park and replacing it with an Ottoman Disney Mall. (Erdoǧan's biography features the most piquant dependent clause I've come across recently, citing the fecund marriage of the former sesame-bun seller and anti-Semitic playwright to Ermine Güilbaran "despite his homosexual background," about which, there isn't another word.) The Bulgarians, unusually effective street agitators (aside from bringing down the whole government last February, demos recently produced a total ban on shale-oil extraction), were enraged by the government's ongoing collusion with crime syndicates turned corporations that control much of the country's industry and resources. These things made sense. I understood where they came from. It takes no imagination at all to perceive the US since 9/11, notably New York under mayors Guiliani and Bloomberg, as a more elusively layered, distractingly overdecorated version of Bulgaria Today or Istanbul Now, if you throw in an electronic upgrade of the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, the Soviet KGB, and the Albanian SHIK. Egypt, however…

*

To pilfer the title of Ivana Lowell's brilliant memoir, why not say what happened? According to Alan Taylor's The Civil War of 1812, even before the American Revolution scores of colonists in every trade and profession fled the soon-to-be-United States for remote parts of Canada, disgusted by the corruption and unbridled avarice that already permeated life in American towns and cities. By 1871, reporting on the fantastic chicaneries of the Gilded Age robber barons and the rotten judiciary they manipulated to thwart one another, Charles F. Adams, Jr. was able to write of an atypical judge, with no fear of intelligent contradiction: "At this particular juncture Mr. Justice Sutherland, a magistrate of such pure character and unsullied reputation that it is inexplicable how he ever came to be elevated to the bench on which he sits…" How different the US might be, today when the piratical ruthlessness of the Gilded Age amounts to a pimple on Lloyd Blankfein's ass, if every school child were taught the actual history of the country, instead of being stuffed with platitudes glorifying the supreme greatness and goodness of the place where he or she happened to be born.

*

I registered Egypt as a creepy smudge when it appeared on Bulgarian TV, which I only turned on for news of Edward Snowden, marooned at the time in the Moscow airport. Now, in Bucharest, I catch myself doing the same: Egypt seems even more distant, a catastrophe with no solution and no exit. I don't know how to reconcile the contradictions embedded in it. I can't look at it. Among other things, it would force me to consider: Do I honestly 'believe' in democracy?

I'm old enough to know America itself doesn't, since until very recently, any democratically elected head of state or popular leader anywhere whom the US couldn't control swiftly experienced a CIA-sponsored insurgency or coup d'etat—Arbenz, Mossadegh, Allende, Aristide, Sukarno, Lumumba, Trujillo, Diem, Goulart in Brazil, Nkrumah in Ghana, to name just a few, and then there are all the failed coups, against Castro, Chavez—the list covers every continent except Australia, where I think the US mainly just rigs elections. Everybody in this world, except in America, understands exactly what the single mission statement of US policy is: "You do it our way or we'll push your face in."

*

No answer, no exit: asking people to choose between the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood is the same as asking if they'd rather be sent to Auschwitz or Treblinka.

*

Beside the veranda of his carpet emporium, Ahmet's ringlets brushed John-from-Melbourne's ear while they sipped mint tea, slouched on fat embroidered pillows. In the midafternoon heat, they lolled like pashas on a vast Soumak carpet laid out on the ground. Ahmet's piccolo, a cherubic but very pushy 15-year-old, had "teasingly" escorted me the length of the bazaar, from a fabric shop also owned by Ahmet, where I had been on the verge of getting laid by one of his employees. Ahmet had been there earlier, striking Mae West poses and exhausting his supply of sexual innuendoes. Ahmet was what used to be called a camp. Not my thing. Now I had to deal with him again, taking in a tableau of pudgy, effeminate carpet shill nuzzling lanky, louche-looking retiree from Down Under, which strongly suggested that Ahmet and John were carnally familiar old friends. I took John for an expat living in Istanbul since at least the Battle of Gallipoli, if not the Crimean War.

After a lot of misfounded conversation, I gleaned that he was nothing of the kind. Depressingly, he was two years younger than I was. He had arrived two days before on a loosely organized package tour, and had met Ahmet for the first time that morning. He wasn't gay, or not much, just comfortable with body contact. This was the six-hour anniversary of Ahmet's campaign to sell him a carpet, subtracting an hour for lunch and another for Ahmet's mosque duty. Merchants in the Old Bazaar not only drip charm and oblige you to drink tea with them for hours, but will happily fuck you in the ass to make a sale. The playfulness involved often looks and feels more personal than it is, though.

*

Democracy, Schmemocracy. It's irrelevant to the people who manage the country, a joke to the people who own it. A local example, of course, is New York's City Council, led by Christine Quinn, abolishing mayoral term limits after they were set by a voter referendum—the most unambiguous expression of the citizens' wishes in a democracy (unless the ballot question is constructed by Californian Jesuits). What I'm not certain about is whether I support, believe in, advocate, adhere to, "democracy," if the outcome is or might be something very evil.

*

Silence was the enemy of Ahmet's trade. He had a Wagnerian opera's worth of rug chat stored in an otherwise fallow brain. At times, weirdly, losing himself in the throes of a marketing aria, he appeared to mutate, like a human CGI effect, into a more urbane, philosophically detached, European personality, even a hereditary duke or viscount, from a country far west of Turkey. Or an actor, perhaps, researching the role of a faggy Levantine rug peddler, who sets off for lunch at the Four Seasons before remembering he's still in greasepaint and a cheap rehearsal costume. These improvised personality touches—ruminative, skeptical, fitfully dismissive, florid, conflicted, judicious, brazenly unctuous by turns—began to suggest that somebody else was trying to sell him the carpet. He made two paltry sales all day, both dismayingly irrelevant to his current business plan. His current business plan was to somehow unload a centuries-old Isfahan consignment item, valued at two hundred thousand euros. Everyone entering the shop wanted a look at it, since Ahmet invoked it as if it were the Holy Grail. Absurdly, I thought, he went as far as to tell people he expected the thing to triple in value on its next appraisal, and prayed some devilish shrewd customer wouldn't wrest it from his inventory before that. However, Ahmet could divine with amazing accuracy the net worth and disposable income of any living human being, and saw that none of the day's marks had remotely enough assets to buy it. He was just fucking with himself. It seemed mildly endearing.

*

The Obama administration scrambles to glue a happy face on its out-of-control spy agencies, while the director of the NSA lies to Congress, not only about the fact of rampant domestic spying, but about the number of terrorist plots the NSA has thwarted by means of any of its surveillance programs. At first it's 50, then it's ten, then it's down to five, finally it's "I don't have the exact figures in front of me." Exactly none, apparently. Even Joe McCarthy was less obviously full of shit. By the time James M. Clapper, if that really is his name, finished testilying under oath, news of the illegal liaison between NSA and the DEA had already leaked from the cache of yet-unpublished Snowden documents. It's brilliant to release the sordid truth one item at a time, right after the Clapper or some other federal sinkhole has been forced to admit the last one and indignantly denied that the logically inevitable next one could even be possible.

*

When Ahmet disappeared to cook tea, John mentioned that Cairo was the next stop on his itinerary. The question of whether to cancel hovered in the muzzy air. "Of course you should go," I said, yawning. "They're not rioting in Luxor or Alexandria, are they?" I had no idea if "they" were or not, but it was just rioting, as far as anyone knew. Maybe it would stop, the way the bazaar stopped when the prayer call, crackling with dense static, bleated like a scary foghorn from the Fatih Cadde mosque across the road. "Not yet," John said. "Unless all hell breaks loose before Tuesday, I'm going. I only get away from Melbourne once a year; anyway, it's already paid for."

I meant not to sound too encouraging, but life really is cheatingly brief. And people who never travel tend to imagine, when trouble erupts in a distant country, that its entire landmass has seized into convulsions. I reminded John that he knew better, though I had scrubbed Egypt from my own vague plans that morning. John wasn't American, I rationalized, he would be less unwelcome than I in a combat zone, or else less attractive as a hostage, if it came to that. "Either things will calm down before you get there," I said, "or you'll have a great story to tell your grandchildren."

"Anyway," John said, "I check the embassy travel advisory every day."

"Sometimes," I said,"even when there's a war, if the Hilton stays open, it means you can travel around and still avoid the whole thing if you're careful."

It really didn't occur to me until 3 AM, when I was feeding cats in the streets near my hotel, to ask myself what is always somehow an untimely question: "Why the fuck did I say that?"

*

Obama—not to be outdone in devising the "least untruthful" excuse for a money-gobbling vortex of warrantless searches and supine FISA court judges who sign off on anything put in front of them—assures us that he had planned some purgative review of the NSA even before Edward Snowden was a drop of cum in his father's balls, so there! How sad that the still-inspiring symbolism of Obama's election has turned out to be the only unqualifiedly positive thing about his presidency—even Obamacare is so deeply compromised by concessions to the insurance industry that its main value is likewise located in the realm of the symbolic. I'm rarely moved by the rhetorical style of Ivy League valedictory addresses, so when people say "the president made a great speech," it's just an unnecessary reminder that actions speak louder than words. And in the matter of Edward Snowden's immeasurably laudable and invaluable public service, and regarding the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA et al., the next shoe to drop will doubtlessly be federal collection of all citizens' medical records—and, since all the acronyms are having a gang bang, why not let the IRS in on the fun, along with the family doctor?

Bruno Schulz and Józefina Szelińska.

 

The Henryk Sienkiewicza school in Drohobycz, where Jozefina was working from 1930-1934, when Bruno Schulz met her. The building is currently a private residence.

Spring came early in that year of 1933, when Bruno found himself fascinated by a 28 year old teacher at the local seminary. Her name was Józefina Szelińska—and she was equally fascinated. She agreed to pose for a portrait in pastel, a portrait that became the first in a series.

After spending the morning posing and drawing, the two would stroll through the meadows behind her parents' house, discussing literature, art, and poetry, and wandering into the birch forest to be alone. Józefina later described those meetings as "something miraculous . . .  inimitable experiences, which so rarely occur in life. It was the sheer essence of poetry."

Józefina grew up in Janow, the daughter of  Zygmunt and Helena Schranzel, a Jewish couple  who converted to Catholicism. In 1919, she officially changed her name from Schranzel to the more Polish-sounding Szelińska.

Bruno referred to her as Juno, a nod towards the Roman goddess of marriage and fertility. Every person has an animal resemblance, Bruno explained, and hers was with the antelope. As for himself, he resembled the dog.

"The artist absorbed the human being in him," Józefina said of Bruno, whom she likened  to a kobold, or "a mythological sprite neither boy nor man, alternately virtuous, and mischievous." This mixture of innocence and dangerous jouissance characterizes her thinking of him.

Schulz came to visit her almost every evening of that summer in 1933; they discovered a shared adoration of Rilke, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. She was the first ear to hear many of the stories Schulz read aloud to her.

When she lost her teaching job in 1934, Józefina moved to Warsaw, and the two began a relationship of correspondence, which she described as “passionate letters that saved Bruno from his depressions”, attenuated by short visits in winter and summer holidays.

Maria Kasprowiczowa, the widow of a poet named Jan, invited the couple to her villa near Zakopane. The correspondence between Bruno and Maria was only discovered in 1992, when a scholar was rummaging through Jan Kasprowiczowa’s archives. But this correspondence offers insight into Schulz’s thinking about his beloved during this time.

On 25 January 1934, Bruno wrote to Maria:

The word "human being" in itself is a brilliant fiction, concealing with a beautiful and reassuring lie those abysses and worlds, those undischarged universes, that individuals are. There is no human being there are only sovereign ways of being, infinitely distant from each other, that don't fit into any uniform formula, that cannot be reduced to a common denominator. From one human being to another is a leap greater than from a worm to the highest vertebrate. Moving from one face to another we must rethink and rebuild entirely, we must change all dimensions and postulates. None of the categories that applied when we were talking about one person remain when we stand before another.... When I meet a new person, all of my previous experiences, anticipations, and tactics prepared in advance become useless. Between me and each new person the world begins anew.

In January 1935, Schulz’s brother, Izydor Sculz, died young of a heart attack, leaving behind a daughter, sign, and a mother who relied on him for financial support. A few months later, Bruno and Josefina made their engagement public.

Józefina "enslaves me and obligates me," Shulz wrote to Maria of his betrothed:

My fiancée represents my participation in life; only by her mediation am I a human being and not just a lemur or a gnome. ... With her love, she has redeemed me, already nearly lost and marooned in a remote no-man's-land, a barren underworld of fantasy….Is it not a great thing to mean everything for someone?

When he was granted a six-month paid leave in January 1936, Schulz elected to spend most of it in Warsaw with his fiancée. The two attended a dinner there, in that month, where Józefina raved about living in Paris after the wedding. But Bruno stared at his plate, saying nothing. When asked where he'd like to live after their marriage, Bruno answered: "In Drohobycz." A crack had opened.

Another complication was the rising anti-Semitism in the borderlands. The nomenclature of bureaucracy required Schulz to encounter identity as construed by the state. As mentioned, although Józefina was born to two Jewish parents, she converted to Catholicism (the official Polish religion) along with them, and also Polonized her surname—-a fact which may have saved her life once the Nazis took over.

Neverthless, that February, Schulz published an announcement in local papers that formally acknowledged his “withdrawal from the Jewish community” (in Balint’s words). Rather than register himself as Catholic, the official Schulz declared himself a man “without denomination.”

In spring 1936, Josefina translated the first edition of Kafka’s The Trial into Polish. Although Bruno’s name was also listed on the cover as a translator, the majority of the translation work belonged to her. Bruno’s afterword located Kafka in a sort of universal mysticism whose ideas “are the common heritage of the mysticism of all times, and nations.” For Bruno, Kafka lifts the “realistic surface of existence” and sets it atop “his transcendental world” in a sort of “radically ironic, treacherous, profoundly ill-intentioned” grafting.

One could say that Bruno and Josefina wrote a book together, a book whose author was also Jewish, also an Austro-Hungarian who imagined life in relation to his entrepreneurial father. One can also wonder how Bruno’s reading of Kafka influenced the trajectory of his own relationship with Jozefina.


When Józefina begged him to live with her in Warsaw, Bruno refused, referencing his sister’s illness and the needs of his family. Later, Józefina said that he was haunted by an image of himself "as a beggar, wandering the city, reaching out his hands, and I would turn away from him contemptuously." Bruno often mentioned this image when discussions about money and cohabitation began. 

By January 1937, Józefina despaired of his commitment. His indecision made her "the weaker party in the relationship," she said. For where "he had his creative world, his high regions," Józefina felt that she "had nothing". She celebrated her 32nd birthday quietly. A few days later, she poured a handful of sleeping pills into her mouth and swallowed them. Wavering along the edge of unconsciousness, tasting the nearness of death, Józefina cried out for help and was taken to the hospital. 

After learning of his fiancee's averted suicide, Bruno rushed to Warsaw to be with her. While at the hospital, Bruno caught influenza and spent 10 days in bed, completely enfeebled. With Bruno being treated for influenza, Józefina went to recuperate at her parents' home, near the birch forest where she and Bruno had spent countless memorable afternoons. 

In February, Bruno appeared at her parent’s house, carrying figs, dates, and flowers. He surrounded  Józefina with tenderness and devotion. "He felt guilt," she wrote later, adding that the guilt was "completely unfounded, for he was nothing but goodness."

But a plant can be beautiful and transient; a gift horse can begin a war; a romance can mean everything and go nowhere. And if Bruno was goodness to his betrothed, but he was also indecisive, unreliable, wracked with self-doubt and insecurity.

In the spring of 1937,  Józefina ended their engagement and forced herself to stop answering his correspondence. 

Neither Bruno nor Józefina ever married. After Schulz's murder by a Nazi,  Józefina spent the next 49 years in fidelity to his memory. "To stay with him, for better or worse, forever," she wrote. That is the story she insisted upon.