"It ain't no big thing"

 

HE: So you’re going to Los Angeles next Tuesday?

ME: I am.

HE: Is this one of those writer things where you freak out and do karaoke?

ME: O! It might be!

HE: Ha. The only karaoke song you did really well was “Kiss Me Deadly” at that bar in Maryland…

ME: I thought that was Tennessee?

HE: Maryland. Annapolis. I’m sure of it.

ME: Just admit it’s the best first three lines of a song ever.

HE: If by best you mean cliche as hell and cringe—

ME: I went to a party last Saturday night. Beat. I didn't get laid. Beat. I got in a fight. Beat. Uh-HUH. No beat needed. It ain't no big thing.

HE: You really like that “uh-huh”, eh?

ME: It’s so emblematic of the late 80’s. Billy Idol. Pat Benatar. The strut that led straight into riot grrrl aesthetic.

HE: Are you nervous about AWP?

ME: Very.

“There is an old nursery rhyme that tells of Muhme Rehlen. Because the word Muhme meant nothing to me, this creature became for me a spirit: the Mummerehlen. The misunderstanding disarranged the world for me. But in a good way: it lit up paths to the world’s interior.”

— Walter Benjamin, “The Mummerehlen”

“In Benjamin’s characterization, melancholia is described as an emotional numbness that can increase ‘the distance between the self and the surrounding world to the point of alienation from the body.’”

“Arcades share a genealogy with planetariums, star-gazing architectures, and also with greenhouses.”

“Benjamin was far more attuned to the barbaric side that Engels had glimpsed in his walks around Manchester.”

“First, contemporary ‘poverty of experience’, Benjamin tells us, designates less a yearning for new experiences (Erfahrung) than a liberation from (our constantly having to make) them.”

“Benjamin gives another example of such a misunderstanding: the day after the child had overheard a conversation about a copper engraving (‘Kupferstich’), a concept unknown to him, he stuck his head out from underneath a chair, to enact what he had understood as a ‘head-stickout’ (‘Kopf-verstich’): ‘If, in this way, I distorted both myself and the world, I did only what I had to do to gain a foothold in life.’”

“I wander from ruins to village with my crystal monocle and an unsettling theory of painting. Turn by turn I have been a lionized author, a famous drawer of pornography, and a scandalous Cubist painter. Now I am going to stay at home and let others explain and debate my character in the light of the above particulars.” [Jacques Vaché]

"Engels told me that it was in Paris in 1848, at the Café de la Régence (one of the earliest centers of the Revolution of 1789), that Marx first laid out for him the economic determinism of his materialist theory of history." Paul Lafargue, "Persönliche Erinnerungen an Friedrich Engels," Die neue Zeit, 23, no. [Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project]

“The intensity is proportionate to the contrast.”

— Joel Sandelson

As one who frequently laughs when reading, alone, I have often wondered if this is something that others do as well. Apparently, laughter is primarily a social behavior, and this is due to frequency, or the fact that humans are much more likely to laugh in the presence of others rather than alone. Laughing alone and whistling in the dark both came to mind when reading a wonderful essay by conductor Joel Sandelson on contrastive valence. “According to psychology, musical emotion is most intense when our evaluation of something switches from negative to positive,” writes Sandelson. “Indeed, the intensity is proportionate to the contrast. Psychologists call this principle ‘contrastive valence’. Judging from the hundreds of millions of views it has since received on YouTube, contrastive valence on a global scale was elicited by the singer Susan Boyle’s first appearance on the TV show Britain’s Got Talent in 2009. The video is a test-case of social stereotyping, and has become a subject of learned academic studies.”

Sandelson then mentions “skin orgasm” as a possible term for music’s physical effect on us— a term that is new to me, and which I imagine landing somewhere between frisson and goosebumps and the Derrida-style shudder— before quickly dismissing it as “a euphemism for something even more fundamental than sexual arousal.” (If I wasn’t shuddering prior, the following three lines are where that begins.) “What is that?” you might ask. And Sandelson replies: “Pattern and anticipation are possible only because humans have a grasp of regular time intervals. Our ability to predict what comes next is linked to the evolution of walking on two feet, to bipedalism. Walking might have taught our brain its sense of time, and time is perhaps the brain’s internal simulation of the periodic motion of footsteps (averaging about one step every several 100 milliseconds). In other words, the first step towards human music happened 4 million years ago when Australopithecines got up on their hind legs and took their first step.”

Time, pattern, anticipation, disappointment—the energy of the fugue. “Although the pleasure provoked by music is intense, the cognitive and affective dimension build meaning into the experience of music in a way that shatters even sex,” Sandelson concludes.

“I only name what I love. I only name what’s worth naming.” 

— Roland Barthes, 30 March 1977

There is no reason to believe that it was March 30th when Lichtenberg scribbled the following in his Waste Books: “The ‘second sight’ possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don't wear trousers. That is also why in all countries women are more prone to utter prophecies.”

REPRISE (n.): “In music, a reprise is the repetition or reiteration of the opening material later in a composition as occurs in the recapitulation of sonata form, though—originally in the 18th century—was simply any repeated section, such as is indicated by beginning and ending repeat signs.”

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line —
Then it is safe to go on reading.

—Kenneth Koch

REPRISAL (n.): an act of retaliation. Historically, a reprisal referred to “the forcible seizure of a foreign subject or their goods as an act of retaliation.”

“Over to the side, near the curtained doorway, my mother stands motionless in her tight bodice. As though attending to a tailor’s dummy, she scrutinizes my velvet suit, which for its part is laden with braid and other trimming and looks like something out of a fashion magazine. I, however, am distorted by similarity by all that surrounds me here. Thus, like a mollusk in its shell, I had my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies hollow before me like an empty shell. I hold it to my ear.”

— Walter Benjamin, “The Mummerehlen”

"A une passante"

1

Found myself wandering through The Arcades Project today, looking for Napoleon’s Madeleine (or its ruinscape) only to wander off into a passageway that led me back to Baudelaire’s sonnet, "A une passante"— which Walter Benjamin discusses in “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”, among other flaneuries . . .

Lightning . . .then darkness! Lovely fugitive
whose glance has brought me back to life! But where
is life—not this side of eternity?

2

Alberto Moravia made use of the epistolary form in a short story titled “The Thing" whose protagonist is a lesbian writing a letter to her longtime lover. Both are equestrians. The letter centers on a rejection, and a particular reading of Baudelaire’s poem “Femmes damnées”.

To the question of what damnation would involve for women, the speaker replies: “That of slavery to the male member.”

Oddly, the male member here is that of a stallion, a horse.

No worries! Moravia returns to this member-centric fold in a different story, “The Unknown God,” where he extols the apostatic penis.

3

The final verse of Baudelaire’s “Damned Women” sticks to the skull:

Vous que dans votre enfer mon âme a poursuivies,
Pauvres soeurs, je vous aime autant que je vous plains,
Pour vos mornes douleurs, vos soifs inassouvies,
Et les urnes d'amour dont vos grands coeurs sont pleins.

And since all of the translations included at the Fleurs du mal website felt a bit stuffy, I decided to wrangle my own:

You whom my soul has pursued into your hell,
My poor sisters, I adore you as I mourn you,
For your anguished sighs, your quenchless thirsts,
In your grandiose hearts, love’s urns are filled to brim.

4

A short history of tourism, gleaned from one of Anne Friedberg’s end-notes:

Thomas Cook, the British entrepreneur, began organizing tours in 1841. A collaborator with the temperance movement, he posed the tour as a substitute for alcohol. The tourist industry successfully commoditized a combination of voyeurism (sight-seeing) and narrative. The tourist, like the cinema spectator, is simultaneously present and absent, positioned both here and elsewhere. Work on travel has suggested productive analogies among shopping, tourism, and film viewing. Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes the connections between the railway journey and other forms of "panoramic travel"—- walking through city streets and shopping in department stores. (The moving walkway, the trottoir roulant, was introduced at the Paris exhibition of 1900.)

The idea of tourism as a teetotaling therapy amused me, although it explains a bit of what feels so labored about touring, and tourists. There is a certain kind of attention required, as well as an itinerary—-like going through an art museum with a guide rather than wandering. The nature of the “encounter” seems different?

5

SURREALIST INQUIRY: WOULD YOU OPEN THE DOOR?

Editor's note: This playful inquiry ("Ouvrez-vous?" in French) was featured on the first page of the first issue of Medium: Communication surrealiste (1953). Translated by Franklin Rosemont in Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealist Women.

EB = Elisa Breton
AS = Anne Seghers
T = Toyen

Would you open the door for

Baudelaire? EB: Yes, overwhelmed. AS: Yes, completely amazed. T: Yes, with affection.

Bettina? EB: No, too cunning for me. AS: Yes, she's a curiosity.

Cezanne? EB: No, he's too involved with his calculations. AS: No, because I love apples. T: No, enough still-lifes.

Chateaubriand? EB: Yes, with admiration. AS: No, with many excuses. T: No, devoid of interest.

Juliette Drouet? EB: Yes, with sympathy. AS: Yes, because of the sweetness of her face.

Fourier? EB: Yes, joyfully. AS: Yes, as one welcomes spring. T: Yes, with the greatest interest.

Freud? EB: Yes (a great miner). AS: Yes, but not very sure of myself. T: Yes, to make him psychoanalyze me.

Gauguin? EB: Yes, in his aura of light and refusal. AS: No, out of fear of being disappointed. T: Yes, in friendship.

Goya? EB: Yes (the magic eye). AS: Yes, saluting him with reverence. T: Yes, with joy.

Caroline von Gunderode? EB: Yes, deeply moved. AS: Yes, she's a good friend (AS).

Hegel? EB: Yes (the atmosphere of high peaks). AS: Yes, but with some confusion. T: Yes, with respect.

Huysmans? EB: Yes, trying to win him over. AS: Yes, hoping he would stay a long time. T: Yes, out of curiosity.

Lenin? EB: Yes (a human breach). AS: Yes, respectfully. T: Yes, I would be very pleased to see him.

Mallarme? EB: Yes, but distantly. AS: No, too glacial. T: No, I'm not ready to go to sleep.

Marx? EB: Yes, but silently. AS: No, we would be bored together. T: Yes, in the friendliest way.

Nerval? EB: Yes, but slowly. AS: Yes, after some hesitation. T: Yes, I hope to be able to stroll through Paris with him.

Novalis? EB: Yes, as in a dream. AS: Yes (night's great Emperor Moth). T: Yes, to enter into his strange light.

DeQuincey? EB: Yes, from elective affinities. AS: Yes, with my heart beating. T: Yes, to dream with him.

Henri Rousseau? EB: Yes, with love. AS: Yes, an intimate friend. T: Yes, with admiration.

Seurat? EB: Yes (rigor and charm). AS: Yes, as with a bird tapping at the window.

Van Gogh? EB: Yes, bounding toward the fire. AS: Yes (the sun). T: Yes, but with a fear of fatigue.

Verlaine? EB: No (too Jesuitical. AS: No, too weepy. T: No, he's had too much to drink.

"Distances from nebula to nebula"

WELL THEN!

From Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 15: Moi (edited by Jackson Mathews)

OOOF!

I found myself hopping through the cosmos today . . . by which I mean to imply that this “nebula to nebula” happened to coincide with another cosmos: an encounter with two cosmonauts dressed as characters in a projected novel. Paul Valery’s spirit hovers near the threshold of what is to follow, namely, a strange intersection between writers I love, an intersection based on a guess or an excessively-close reading on my part.

Yes. Earlier this year, I wrote a bit about Witold Gombrowicz while admiring Matthew Zapruder’s “Poem for Witold Gombrowicz”— and then spiraling into my Bruno Schulz obsession. Tonight, at 10:41 PM, I find myself mentioning Witold again. He seems to enjoy this sort of thing: bursting onto the page and being a source of consternation to his audience.

While reading Paul Zweig's Three Journeys: An Automythology, I think the aforementioned figure did it again. Like any mammal whose middle school teachers labeled “a little too sensitive,” I paused and re-read the section before finally picking up a pen to mark the spot in the second journey where I recognized Gombrowicz. Even though Zweig doesn't name him, it sounds like Gombrowicz: I recognize his silhouette in the pessimism that permits absurdity, though Zweig actually credits him with something more interesting.

In the interest of literature and not-sleeping, I will share my possible misreading here by excerpting some chunks (see the end for a lengthier PDF of this section should thee like a copy), and also noting that all italics belong to yours truly:

SIX YEARS LATER, sunk in a deep chair in the salon of the Abbaye of Royaumont near Paris, he would listen to the asthmatic breathing of an older man whose face he could hardly see. For minutes they had faced each other without talking. It was not his place to speak first, for the man, with cruel irony, had let him know that, as a mere boy, he possessed an attribute which the man loathed but was drawn to nonetheless, as to a vice and a humiliation: it was youth, which the older man, a great Polish novelist, had described provocatively as a sort of original sin which time and pain alone absolved, time and pain being one and the same.

The novelist seemed to be thinking the breath into and out of his lungs, trying to catch the discordant inner music which would mark the final cure of what the other day he had called, with something like self-hatred in his voice, the only antidote for youth.

From the first, he had been fascinated by a leathery, boyish quality in the novelist's face. They had taken long walks together in the park of the Abbaye. They had talked about narcissism and philosophy, above all they had talked about youth. The paradox of the novelist's cynicism was that, in a way, youth had been his only homeland for almost thirty years, during which time he had lived obscurely in South America, his only human connection being to groups of adolescent boys which he seemed to attract, becoming their elder guide and counselor, as he would say, their pied piper to nowhere. His pleasure, he said, had nor been to debauch the boys—bleak lines in the man's face made this believable— but to inject an element of vice into their simplest thoughts and feelings, so that even the most ordinary acts would come to seem, and would become, transgressions.

"I will tell you what I think of you," he said, breaking the silence, "and then, when I am finished, you will tell me what you think of me."

Immobilized by the novelist's passionate cynicism, and by a quality which he sensed, although he was far as yet from understanding Immobilized by the novelist's passionate cynicism, and by a quality which he sensed, although he was far as yet from understanding it, his vulnerability, he listened, as the man began to speak: "My impression, first of all, is that you speak French too well. Even the muscles in your face seem French, and the way you use certain words, 'alienation,' for example, when you mean unhappiness. Yet unhappiness is an ancient, lovely word. It has a patina which comes from many mouths forming themselves around it. God and the devil are enclosed in the word unhappiness. But as a French intellectual you say, 'alienation,' and you feel the march of history at your side. You imagine Karl Marx approving of your ingenuity in finding this new use for a word which was so much more limited in his time.

"I will tell you what I think: this Frenchness of yours is an impersonation caused by fear. You are afraid of being ridiculous. Have you noticed how childish foreigners always seem? When you hear them fumbling for words as I am doing now, or peering from under their eyelids to see how one peels an orange in this country, you can't help wondering if they're not a little stupid. By impersonating a French existence, you conceal your clumsiness from everyone as well as the fact that you feel a little blue most of the time, as if you were looking at people through a glass pane. When a smile or a caress is directed toward you, it stops short by the thickness of a skin, because you're a foreigner. Is it possible that you left America because you were a foreigner even there, and weren't ready to find it out yet?

"You're not so young that this innocence should be permitted you any more, therefore you ought to remember what I'm saying. a Polish Catholic as you know. I am also an anti-Semite. You smile, because you don't believe that an intelligent person can be an anti-Semite. Nonetheless, it's true, so you may consider that I'm telling you this through malice; that I'm simply trying to put some scratches on the pane in front of your face. Well, that may be true too. It is hard to see you, because the room is so dark. But even in daylight one doesn't see you very well. If I ignore the impersonation which, by the way, is more artistic than you know, and actually quite unusual, if I disregard it, I see a graceful boy slipping away, but glancing over his shoulder, coquettishly, as if he wanted to be found out.

"In my opinion, you're a wandering Jew, someone who is forbidden to have a home. No power forces him to move on, but the law is applied from within. His existence therefore is bitter. But don't forget, God is a wanderer too. That is why He appears mainly to wanderers, because wanderers exist principally among abstractions. They have given up so much that they have become light and unstable, like winged seedlings never touching the earth.

By the time the novelist stopped, the afterglow of the stained-glass windows had dulled into opaque strips of night. Again the two sat without speaking. During this pause, must we imagine the boy pensive and mute? At the novelist's prompting, if only for a moment, has he glimpsed the vitreous pour of his inner existence? Has he felt the stir of massive roots fishing for moisture in the parched underground, and the vertical pressure of sunlight crushing all movement but that of the wind which gnaws, sucks, and grinds without end? We must not. As yet only nameless hints had reached him of that portion of his destiny which would be compressed into the arc between Saint Anthony and the Beni Hillal, between the Thebiade and the voluminous quiet of the Tanezrouft. To tell the truth, he wasn't thinking at all. He was waiting, and he was intimidated. It embarrassed him that this famous person should consider him, vacant and speechless, not entirely at any given moment a presence, a sufficient subject of interest. It made him doubt ever so slightly the incisiveness of the man's genius. He was, one might say, disappointed.

Happily, the tinkle of the dinner bell enabled him to escape his half of the bargain, for he had no idea how to go about telling the Polish novelist what he thought of him.

With the detachment which characterized so much of his personal thinking, he was aware of how literary their conversation had been. As extraordinary as it may seem, the old man had fashioned the scene in the salon after a scene in one of his own novels. In the novel, however, the words had been more savage. The accents of cynicism and disdain had been sharper. The boy in the novel had been a malleable material, his self-awareness had been cushioned by his smooth and supple body. In the novel, too, he had been bored by the old man's abstractions, but he had also felt sorry for him, as if he had guessed that the novelist's disdain for youth was a form of love, was, in fact, an elegy.

As he walked down the broad wooden staircase and headed for the rectangle of light which marked the open door into the dining room, he was filled with a feeling of exaltation. He began, inexplicably, to giggle, and then to laugh out loud, despite all his efforts to hold back.

He turned and walked outside into the park under the bulky shadow of the linden trees. There too he giggled uncontrollably. He felt a mysterious elation, as if a wish he could no longer remember having made had been fulfilled against all expectation, and almost inconveniently. Long after the giggles subsided, a feeling of inner certainty approaching self-confidence remained, combined with an undercurrent of surprise. What surprises most of all in a person who had once made a proclamation of complete inner limpidity was his failure to remember the "wish," so to speak, or to grasp (it kept eluding him) the nature of the fulfillment.

And yet it was simple. It was, one might say, childishly simple. He was simply flattered to the point of giggles at the thought that a novelist might fashion a scene out of his life; that a common sure existed, however fleetingly, between a "character" in a book, and the peculiar bundle of existences which he was. In the dark of his psyche echoed the long-forgotten plaint: 'How can I be a writer when I don't have any biography?'

And here, in the old man's novel, even if only at second hand, was a biography. Here was the idea—it was really too much to encompass—that he too, from a certain point of view, might be a "character."

At this point, Gombrowicz’s novel sauntered into my head… and now I leave it to you to guess which novel I suspect Zweig was referencing.

Nevertheless, guess or no guess, several pages later, Zweig returns to this mythical moment while comparing the Polish novelist to a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, and to the queer heavens that seem to taunt us:

Maybe such heavens are not meant to be had at all, but precisely to be longed for. In longing, their mineral clarity is softened by something human, something which comes from us: a blending of fulfillment and elegy, of having (like water after a long thirst) and remoteness (like the liquid flow of the mirage), of self-abandonment and awareness of loss. Maybe this blend is the state of mind we associate with art. When we read a book or contemplate a painting; when, taking a walk, we become estheti-cally aware of nature's profusion, or of the patina on old buildings or, even more acutely, of objects which a moment before seemed ugly: a subway platform, newspapers blowing against a house; at such moments we are turning our eyes toward heaven and, simultaneously, sharpening our awareness of loss.

What the Polish novelist had offered him that evening at Royaumont (a "biography") was the possibility that one day he might become a poet. From his laughter under the linden trees would come a perception of bright shapes softened by distance, darkened by longing. These would be the images of poems; rather, they would be the medium the images were plunged in, through which they swam and reached their destination, their meaning. His "style" as a writer and as a man would be rooted in a soil composed of his laughter and the pitch black dome of the linden trees.

If anyone has knowledge about whether this is based on Gombrowicz — I say ‘knowledge’ to maintain a qualitative distinction between facts and my late-night speculation— please let me know!

O! And that final mention of the dome of the linden trees reminded of Paul Celan and Jean Daive strolling beneath the domes of Paris in the elsewhere of a different book, although perhaps in a similar tender timbre.

ZUT ALORS!

Reading has eaten my life, and colonized my nebulae and nebul-eye! But, as promised, voici le PDF of the longer excerpt from Zweig’s “Polish novelist” scene.

Buried with his fermata.

THE COMPOSER

The truth—like air and sun— costs nothing. It lends itself to an infinite number of compositions of equal likelihood. And this is how what was is indistinguishable from what might have been.

—- Paul Valery, "Remarks About Myself"

This is the gravestone of Soviet-German composer Alfred Schnittke (1934 - 1998), located in the famous repository of Russian artists, namely, Novodevichy Cemetery.

Sculptor Alexander Rukavishnikov created the gravestone itself (as well as the monument to Schnittke in Moscow), but the design for the gravestone came from one of the composer’s close friends, fellow composer and collaborator Sofia Gubaidulina. Irony, humor, passion, personality: these were the qualities Gubaidulina hoped to reflect in her tribute. She reached into musical notation itself, and selected markings indicate both silence and sound, life and death, eternity and temporality. 

As she described the design:

“On top of the stone, there is musical staff with a semibreve (the center bar) indicating a rest or pause in the music. The fermata (the half circle + dot at the top) indicates to hold the note (in this case the rest) as long as desired. The note should then be performed fortississimo (the three f's at the bottom), meaning it should be performed extremely loudly/strongly. So it's essentially an extremely loud/strong silence (rest) to be held as long as desired.”

THE MUSIC

I set down a beautiful chord on paper, and suddenly it rusts.

— Alfred Schnittke

Although influenced by the compositions of Shostakovich (who has been on my mind quite a bit since hearing his 10th performed recently), Schnittke’s music is sharper, a bit bleak, tighter at the throat somehow, like a vase with a very thin throat. One feels the inhibitions and limitations of space when listening to him. This intensified concentration of sound in Schnittke shows up in this arrangement of a piece from The Fairytale of Wanderings, which has been in my head often during the past week (and which I shared below).

Among the pieces by Alfred Schnittke that haunt me, or prefigure particular resonances:

“Declaration of Love” from The Fairytale of Wanderings

“Psalm 8” from Psalms of Repentance
performed by Tõnu Kaljuste and Swedish Radio Choir

“IV. Senza Tempo” from 5 Aphorisms for Piano
performed by Anna Gourari

Concerto Grosso no. 2
performed by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra, Oleg Kagan, Natalia Gutman

A Paganini
performed by Gidon Kremer

Agony Suite from Elem Klimov’s film, "Agony"

“III. The Faces, The Flights, Pyramids” from The Glass Harmonica Suite
arranged by F. Strobel

The final piece on this list is from “The Glass Harmonica Suite,” which Schnittke composed for The Glass Harmonica (1968), a short, animated film directed by Andrey Khrzhanovskiy. It sticks in my mind for the harrowing pitch that the strings interpose against the piano and percussion: you can almost hear the strings corkscew and swirl into a mad series of spirals. By the eighth minute, a chilling sensation of suspense and dread appears when the brass announces itself; one recognizes the dread had been building, simmering, waiting for release.

Alfred Schnittke considered his Ninth Symphony to be a work apart and completely dissimilar to his preceding symphonies. As Irina Schnittke expressed it, he wrote this symphony as it were ‘for his departure’.

— Alexander Raskatov, as quoted by William C. White

Alfred Schnittke, Autograph manuscript graphic score signed for Cantus perpetuus for keyboard, solo percussion and four percussionists, 1973/75—- with colored pencils on 18-stave paper

I found the graphic score for Cantus perpetuus at an auction site which claims that “this is the only written form for the work, and is intentionally open to differing interpretations by the performers.” Schnittke’s Cantus perpetuus was first performed in Moscow on 14 December 1975, “a performance which Schnittke himself regarded as definitive.” Additional notes translate the Russian color key to note “central rhombic figure with internal crossing lines also in five colors; a key in Russian at upper left noting that the red, green, blue and yellow lines represent 'polyphony', 'melody', 'rhythm' and 'harmony'.”

More rabbit-holes for those who are interested . . . the secret art of dedications in Schnittke’s compositions . . . more of the (rather brilliant) music Schnittke composed for films in order to support himself in the Soviet Union . . . excerpts from interviews and media (he mentions aleatory methods at the end) . . . a different view of Schnittke’s gravestone that is made of the same black stone as the fermata but has a large crucifix in the center?

A collage formed from lines of readings this week.

 

Eighty-two-year-old Pauline tortures herself over the selection of classical music in “Radio Station WISS.”

We only fight for our ideal, which ought to be everyone's ideal: free people on free land.

Where is love in Oarystis?

Urbanism is the ideological gridding and control of individuals and society by an economic system that exploits man and Earth and transforms life into a commodity.

We demand everything.

When your brain breaks, so does your future and your past.

A telephone is convenient, but sometimes it must be destroyed.

“I will repeat it in every way” wrote Georges Bataille, “the world is livable only under the condition that nothing be respected within it.”

My own radicality absolves me from any label.

I have always been fascinated by the long journey Hölderlin undertook following his break-up with Diotima.

Communard women who were rumored (probably falsely) to have burned down many Parisian buildings during the final days of the Commune by throwing bottles of petroleum.

And I remember that my wife was once a stranger.

If this question refers to the function of employees in the reigning spectacle, it is obvious that the number of jobs to be had there expands as the spectacle does.

If one is to believe power's fairy-tales, Jupiter and Jesus experienced fleshless couplings upon Olympus and Golgotha, and the pure abstraction of their celestial sexual satisfactions consoles us for having, here below in the valley, mere tears at pleasure cut short by production anxiety.

What is your favorite flower?

The idea that a party could constitute the “spearhead of the proletariat” reproduced in the proletariat the hierarchy that the denaturalising function of labour had established into the thinking brain – the “boss” – and the rest of the body.

DH Lawrence and Nietzsche both read Revelations as a fantastic revenge fantasy that bids people to sit and wait and bide their time as others laugh for they will be smited when the big ending comes.

Furthermore the poet Scutenaire said “There are things that one does not joke about. Not enough.”

Dante and Milton, hypothetically describing the infernal wastelands, proved that they were hyena of the first species. This proof is excellent. The result was bad. Their books didn't sell.

Rodin's Dante.

Through me the way into the suffering city,
Through me the way to the eternal pain,
Through me the way that runs among the lost.
Justice urged on my high artificer;
My Maker was Divine authority,
The highest Wisdom, and the primal Love.
Before me nothing but eternal things
Were made, and I endure eternally.
Abandon every hope, who enter here.

— DANTE, Inferno, 3.1–9

These are the lines Auguste Rodin supposedly chose to represent in his Dantean masterpiece, The Gates of Hell.

“For a whole year I lived with Dante, with him alone, drawing the eight circles of his inferno,” Rodin told Le Matin. “At the end of this year, I realized that while my drawing rendered my vision of Dante, they had become too remote from reality. So I started all over again, working from nature, with my models.”

The artist’s dream is officially realized with the stamp of a State commission in 1879, when the Under-Secretary for Fine Arts offered Auguste Rodin the opportunity to create a work for the public. Obsessed with his readings of Dante, Rodin asked for permission to create a doorway for the planned Museum of Decorative Arts, a threshold between interior and exterior based on the first section of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, from the Inferno.

For the next two decades, The Gate of Hell would consume Rodin’s thoughts and work. He missed the 1885 deadline for the commission. Even at his death, Rodin’s gate remained unfinished, its fragments scattered, quoted, reshaped into various sculptures and pieces that rest across the museums of the world.

The 186 figures and characters of The Gate of Hell never stop moving through fear, despair, erotic hunger, the lyric of horror and life.

Excruciating tenderness distinguishes my favorite detail from The Gate (pictured below).

— and the extraordinary hands, the way agony is carried in the curl in the fingers.

I remember sitting on the cold stone stairs outside a cathedral in Paris, smoking a cigarette and scribbling nonsense about Dante in my notebook. Who knows what became of those notes?

(Rodin published his cathedral-inspired sketches in Les Cathédrales de France in 1910.)

Rodin’s famous statue, The Thinker, was sourced from The Gate of Hell, where Rodin located him above the door panels, calling him “The Poet”, a god-like figure stationed at a central point, perched atop a rock looking down on the endless anguish of creation.

The Kiss also began as part of Rodin’s conception for the commission, intended to symbolize the pleasure prior to final damnation, but Rodin removed it, sensing something in that kiss that was alien to the suffering around it.

Other notable sculptures that first appeared in The Gates of Hell include: Ugolino and His Children (according to the story, Ugolino ate the corpses of his children after they died by starvation); The Three Shades, an over-life size group that originally pointed to the phrase “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”; Fleeting Love, inspired by the story of Francesca da Rimini’s love affair with Paolo Malatesta, a medieval tale of adultery and murder; and Meditation, which appears on the rightmost part of the tympanum, later used for the celebrated Monument to Victor Hugo.

“Because of the complexity of art, or rather of the human souls who take art for a language, all classification runs the risk of being futile,” Rodin told Paul Gsell. Thus, “Rembrandt is often a sublime poet and Raphael often a vigorous realist.” But our efforts to “understand the masters” runs the risk of fetishizing the classification through we purport to know them. “Let us love them,” Rodin continues, “let us go to them for inspiration; but let us refrain from labelling them like drugs in a chemist’s shop.”

“[The artist] is, as Dante said of Virgil, ‘their guide, their master, and their friend,” Rodin told Paul Gsell.

"Imbiciles!"

“All hierarchy depends on the police.”

— Ratgeb

In June 1968, Raoul Vaneigem received a circular from the "Writers' Union" that inviting him to join them. In addition, they wanted to know if he wanted to "participate in the work of the professional commission (PC), the ideological commission (IC), or both," and if he would like to send thirty francs to his peer, Jean-Pierre Faye, a member of Tel Quel and founder of Change.

Vaneigem responded with the letter below, which was published under the title "Writers' Union" in the September 1969 issue of Internationale Situationniste #12:

I blame the absorbing intellectual histories of lettrism and situationism authored by Marcus Greil and McKenzie Wark for my recent explorations of Vaneigem—- whose books are difficult to procure, a reality that is slightly ameliorated by the availability of his work online— particularly, Contributions to The Revolutionary Struggle, Intended To Be Discussed, Corrected, And Principally, Put Into Practice Without Delay, which is also titled:

Behold the society we will build. Behold the reason that we seek your destruction.
Contributions to The Revolutionary Struggle,Intended To Be Discussed, Corrected, And Principally, Put Into Practice Without Delay
— Ratgeb (Raoul Vaneigem)

Whether authored by Ratgeb or Raoul, there is a line that sticks in my head at the present political moment, namely, “The best guarantee against any other (and, of necessity) oppressive power (i.e. parties, unions, hierarchical organizations, groups of intellectuals or of activists... all of them embryonic states) is the prompt construction of radically new living conditions.”

And so it begins...

The writer lights a candle lays a remaining fragment from Niobe by Aeschylus near its wick:

Alone of gods, Death has no use for gifts 
Libations don't help you, nor does sacrifice
He has no altar, and hears no hymns;
He is not amenable to persuasion.

The writer stares at the clock and checks herself for ticks.

The writer thinks about vampires and roadmaps and something Dimitris Lyacos once said in an interview: “The totality of our texts are mutually meta-fictional. They always reflect themselves and each other, they are parts, or aggregates, of other textual fields, and you have to cross those fields in order to get where you want to go.”

The writer presses PLAY.

All of this is just to say: Slicing up eyeballs I want you to know | | | I will be in Los Angeles for the anti-reading later this month, and likely doing a few book signings as well— which may appear on the trusty web calendar if I remember to update it. | | | I will be at the NOLA Poetry Festival in April and celebrate another year around the sun while I am there, which may or may not involve reading in a water fountain or a tree or ruinscape. | | | I will also be in NYC for almost a week at the end of April, where I get to read with some of my favorite humans and also possibly fork about and maybe read elsewhere as well. I don’t know enough about fountains and trees in NYC but there are some divine, rinky-dinky swan-shaped boats in Prospect Park that caught my eye as a wonderful locus for Swann-songs last time I visited and perhaps something will come of this. | | | On May 8th, in Birmingham, Alabama, I will be involved in officially launching My Heresies from a safe and well-loved indie bookstore aptly named Thank You Books, and located less than five miles away from home, which may or may not end with an after-party elsewhere. | | | If you would like for me to be somewhere, whether in the air, on a screen, or in a city, just send me an email at myheresies at gmail. It’s an honor to be emailed, read, considered, and imagined into existence by the reader. More on the book, itself, soon. Sarabande is currently hiring for a few positions, so thank you to everyone for their patience and here is a tiny skeleton, and my abundant gratitude to all who preorder this creature. For best or worse, til death or the book do us part.

"White bare white body fixed ping elsewhere."

Reader: So you want me to feel as if I were reading a letter addressed to someone else?

Poet: I want you to feel as if I had read a letter addressed to you by someone else and am shamelessly quoting from it.

— Vera Pavlova in her notebooks

Thus does Samuel Beckett begin his 1966 short story, “Ping”.

“Hands hanging palms front white feet heels together right angle”: Beckett’s eyes studying a painting or a postcard of a statue, bringing together the labor of eyes and light.

For some reason, this made me think about Picasso, and one thing that has long bothered me about his art, namely, the ways his hands fail. The human hand rarely comes alive or speaks in Picasso; one has only to contrast his pieces with those of Egon Schiele to feel the numbness.

Pablo Picasso created this piece at Juan-Les-Pins. The horse is so very white. A pale horse. The scene of a rape. Themes that are not rare in Picasso’s imaginary.

Hands characterize: they relate through motion, or the arc of an implied motion. In a photo or an image, we see the instant of the hand, the frozen eternity between before and after; we anticipate what the hand will do next. And we read the subject in relation to this expectation, even if we don’t acknowledge this to ourselves. There is always the thing we imagine to complete the gesture and give it meaning.

“A painting is a thing which requires as much trickery, malice and vice as the perpetration of a crime; make counterfeits and add a touch from nature,” Edgar Degas said (as quoted in Robert L. Herbert's book on impressionism and Paris). The counterfeit that forbids hands an expressive agency, a particular sort of skin in the game of representation. A sin in the game of not-saying.

. . . The diminishing of hands contra the emphasis given to hands by Derek Overfield and Henry Ossawa Tanner in these two pieces:

In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.

Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, “Autonomy,” evokes the holothurian, a creature who amputates part of its own body in self-defense, in order to flee and survive.

. . . The extraordinary role given to hands by Gustav Vigeland, in his Kneeling Man Embracing a Standing Woman, where her hands are simultaneously pushing him away and resting upon him, as if we can see her thinking, and feel her thought in the tension exhibited by her curled fingers.

It is not an image of happiness, per se. And now I quote from a novel I gobbled last week, a small book worthy of your eyes and time, namely, Markus Werner’s The Frog in the Throat, as translated by Michael Hofmann):

Often, an image exists to show up the absence of what it stands for. As here. Happiness is remote. That's how it's meant to be. Bliss is scorned. We want values, in other words: supervision. We seek fathers, rules and regulations. Give us the model that will crush us, the measuring rod that will how us what chipolatas we are.

A chipolata is not a sausage. But it is perhaps a clue at the author’s Swiss origin. Light. Heat. White planes. Rodin’s plastercast fingers and arms and hands. Eric Frischl’s subject attempting to contain herself, only to be outdone by her own shadow.

To read is to mince the limbs we can afford to lose in order to imagine the story that comes alive for us. There is a revolving door, or a way of seeing in this, as Marina Tsvetaeva noted in her diaries:

To love is to see a person the way God intended him and his parents failed to make him.

To not love is to see a person as his parents made him.

To fall out of love: is to see, instead of him, a table, a chair.

Notebooks

Inventory of small joys:

Adela Sinclair’s poetry book, The Butcher’s Granddaughter, is available for pre-order; Paul Cunningham’s Sociocide at the 24/7 is available for immediate consumption; Magic City Poetry Festival t-shirts are awaiting your purchase as the schedule for the 2025 season is finalized; David Frayne’s The Theory & Practice of Resistance to Work is available for free download below; the sun is lingering a few minutes longer each day before vanishing into the horizon.


On the altar:

In mad love with Judith Kiros’ O., a retelling of Shakepeare’s Othello, translated by Kira Josefsson. In Kiros’ words: “In this play, a white man manipulates a black man, O, into murdering his wife. Later, O learns the extent of the white man’s treachery and responds by taking his own life. There is no other way out––he has become that which the white audience always suspected him to be. He has fulfilled his role. Curtain.”

Aside:

“Ah! ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me? If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death.”

— Oscar Wilde, Salomé

Image:

The ‘great devouring cloud’ that John Ashbery offers in Your Name Here.

“Then a great devouring cloud
came and loitered on the horizon, drinking
it up, for what seemed like months or years.”

Absence:

Among Raymond Roussel’s posthumously discovered works, there is a 632-page play and a 1575-page ‘verse chronicle,’ both in alexandrines.

Simile:

“You are like countries in which my love / took place”, where Jack Gilbert’s enjambment adding a reverb to the action indicated by the verb took and undoing the expression took place, sheer gorgeousness at the level of the line and the line break.

Process:

A concept I find difficult to ‘talk about’, partly because it feels incomplete when I try to address it. Process is something between Joana Gama’s performance of John Cage’s “Suite for Toy Piano” (1948) and jumping into a random lake impulsively, for the sake of the feeling. How does a poem get written? Generally, something bothers, irks, itches, distracts, or interests me — in a landscape, a musical performance, a scene, an image— and a secret sensory tendril sets off on its own, venturing forth, biding its time, waiting for me to pull away from life and give it attention. I never know what I will find there. Never quite anticipate what is simmering. At most, I know it will surprise me, this strange thing that accrues in the mind while one does other things.

Example. One of the teens took a photo of me leaning against a wall at an outdoor mall, bitching about how much I hate shopping, begging the teens to let me go sit in a cafe, whining that I had not even brought the right pen, being insufferable. I was actively thinking about a poem I wanted to write when she took this photo; lines were bulldozing through my brain and Crusoe was there. Those bones became two of the poems that got published in Iterant.

Sul ponticello.

1

Someone asked me where the poem “came from”— and this is an attempt to answer that question. It is also an acknowledgement that answering such a question cannot be definitive, for the nature of poems, of the material of a poem, eludes its creator in conversation.

After all, the color of fire has never been properly established. What does fire say? How do we hear a thing whose breath is smoke?

2

The poem in question was published in a 2019 issue of Prairie Schooner. I reproduce it below, as it first appeared— though later versions are slightly different.

3

Someone told me that the will-o'-the-wisp — that flame-like phosphorescence which flits over marshy ground due to the spontaneous combustion of gasses from decaying vegetable matter — is a wandering fire. And each wandering fire is actually the spirit of a stillborn child who wanders between heaven and the inferno.


4

There was music and literature in it. Also: money, or the art of 'making money' alongside modernity's questions of self-fashioning. The gun of those absent kreutzers in Leo Tolstoy's 1891 novella, The Kreutzer Sonata. The question of art as it intersects with life, marriage, virtue, and family. 

In 1923, on the edge of October and into November, Leos Janácek composed a string quartet based on the Kreutzer Sonata. This quartet wasn't his first tribute to Tolstoy's scandalous novella: Janácek had written a Kreutzer-inspired Piano Trio in three movements in 1908-9, honoring Tolstoy's eightieth birthday that year, and this piano trio had been performed in Brno the following April, at a chamber concert. The Kreutzer piano trio appeared in local piano repertoires until 1922, when Janácek disemboweled it by pulling the material into his first string quartet, and destroying the piano version. 

Some musicologists refer to Janácek’s 1908 Piano Trio as “now lost.” But this underestimates the composer a bit. I think some things must be destroyed. And they are. This, too, is part of art.

5

Janácek's First Quartet situates itself firmly within the scandal of chamber music, as carried by the quartet form into bourgeois homes of the late nineteenth century. Each of the four movements touches itself somehow, or exists in that intimate self-consciousness birthed by proximity.

00:00 - I. Adagio - Con moto

The opening adagio in E minor moves as if carried along a river, silvered with the short violin motif that resembles what Janácek called "the sigh of the Volga" in another piece. The cello enters and expands the melody, picking up the viola's ostinato triplets and smashing against the broken chords of the Vivo only to finish, bewildered, quivering, with an echo of that opening sigh motif.

04:47 - II. Con moto

The second movement is a scherzo in A flat minor, a form laden with associations of elegant dances in salons, overseen by the presidium of coquettes and gentleman bachelors. The aroma of inherited wealth rustles through the heavy curtain fabric as the viola picks up the polka-like melody. Dances like the polka cue us to a particular kind of social performance that celebrates constraint and inhibition, the kissing cousin of aestheticized elegance. A mouthful in that moistness—

Suddenly, the viola introduces a new motif marked sul ponticello (indicating to be "played near the bridge”). This anguished, slightly horrified motif works against the convention of the polka. There are the markings as understood by the performer of this viola motif. And there are the markings as understood by the reader of bridges, and the resonances of the Bridge of Sighs that appear elsewhere, in a different piece, tuned to a different time. 

[Viola, what have you done?]

6

Her name was Kamila Stösslová. She was happily married to a well-to-do doctor, secure in her life and finances, surrounded by household staff and care, a mother with time on her hands to live and read and exist, in addition to the labor of parenting. Both Leos and Kamila were married. It began and then ended.

It began and ended and went on forever.


7

08:58 - III. Con moto - Vivo - Andante

The third movement is marked “lightly, timidly”. Here, the duet between violin and cello evokes the theme in Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, which Tolstoy introduces into his novella when it is performed at a concert given by Pozdnishev's wife and her admirer. The sul ponticello expands to cover new figurations as Janácek builds from his signature staggered parts, combining ostinatos and rhythmic diminutions of themes, landing in this multi-layered texture of sound. A musician pointed out to me that double and triple time alternate in this third movement, as do the passage markings which switch between sul ponticello and naturale. Finally, the Vivo sinks into the suspended calm of the Andante, where the mood seems closer to whispering and worry.

12:51 - IV. Con moto - (Adagio) - Più mosso

As if keyed to chorus, the first movement returns in the final movement; the chorale is woven through with a sad, aching melody marked 'jako v sizách' (as if in tears). The lamenting viola returns; the second violin drags us over shattered chords; various themes and their variations wind again into a multi-layered texture of widening intervals with a chromatic melodic line. Flickers and flashes: allusions to the opening theme vanish in the descending octave leaps, which Janacek marked 'zoufale' (in desperation), repeatedly. In desperation. Both themes reappear; the motifs and figurations intermingle until the opening theme of the quartet returns, played fortissimo and 'feroce' (ferociously). The final bars abandon the lament for a marking that reads 'slavnostne, jako varhany' (in a festive manner, like the organ), forcing the tempestuous flow into a climax that evokes the river at the piece’s opening.


8

After watching his sonata rehearsed by the Bohemian Quartet, Janacek wrote to Kamila, raving.  If you had only imagined the piece and then heard it come together. If you saw her black hair moving through the bars of a rhyme. If you fell in love with what she inspired and felt your innermost being embodied in it. 

"I was imagining a poor woman, tormented and run down, just like the one the Russian writer Tolstoy describes in his Kreutzer Sonata", Janácek wrote to Kamila. But where Tolstoy abandoned his heroine to vice and moralistic punishment, Janácek’s Quartet lamented her powerlessness, and revealed the limited options granted to women. 

Surely Janácek's own wife, Zdenka, read Tolstoy's novella. Surely she recognized herself as the woman Tolstoy would have preferred, the angel on the pedestal. Surely it stung to discover that her husband was re-composing a happily-married woman straight into his own arms and fantasies? 

According to archives and scholars, Zdenka did in fact express her rue to Zina Veselá, the wife of the reporter Adolf Veselý. And, many years later, Zina told an interviewer that she looked at the composer and his wife and "thought: poor devils, both of them." At a performance of Káta Kabanová, Janácek told Zina that he'd wanted a persecuted woman to be the subject for Káta. As Zina told the interviewer: 

'He did not have to look far, I thought .  . . I have been pondering why that marriage of his was so unhappy. I think that it was simply out of boredom. Zdenka was a virtuous wife, always the same voice, the same walk; she was insipid, always the same. His heart was aflame with his belated success, and he also longed for success in his personal life.'


9

Although Janácek's seventieth birthday was celebrated with a production of his Taras Bulba in Brno, what he wanted most in 1924 was to lay his eyes upon Kamila. His wish was granted at the end of June, when he first visited the Stössels' home in Pisck, and spent three, shadowless days there, surrounded by laughter and merry-making. Kamila winding through his letters—her 'raven black hair undone', her bare feet moving across the floors of the house, her spontaneous affections and charm, that sense of continuous vitality.


10

— To whom is the poem faithful?

— To itself.

— Who does it serve?

— That flush of emotion that birthed it.

— Who does it betray?

— The world.


11

"Loving, believing in someone or something does not mean accepting dogmas and doctrines as true . . ."

Giorgio Agamben's words punctuate the images as I flip through an album of old photos. Loving, believing is, for Agamben, "rather, like remaining faithful to the emotion that one felt as a child looking up at the starry sky." The sky offers our loves as constellations, the melodies of relationships that shape us, the motifs that become figurations.

"I have tried not to forget them, tried to keep the word I tacitly gave," Agamben writes. But ultimately, it is not the sky that sustains him. His hopes and beliefs are placed elsewhere. If queried about this ‘elsewere,’ Agamben says, "I could only confess in a lowered voice: not in the sky above— but in the grass," in the soil that gives and sustains life:

In the grass— in all its forms, the tufts of slender blades, the soft clover, the lupin, the borage, the snowdrops, the dandelions, the lobelia and the calamint, but also the couch grass and nettles in all their subspecies, and the noble acanthus, which covers part of the garden where I walk every day. The grass, the grass is God. In the grass—in God—are all those whom I have loved. For the grass and in the grass and like the grass I have lived and will live.

A mountain in the mouth: this langue hidden within this language.

They See Dot Com.

A poem by Eugenio de Andrade, from White on White, as translated by A. Levitin.

XXX

It burns you, the memory of the night before
we spoke, burns you, the salt
of the mouth which bit
before it kissed.

You don’t have room to die
with the morning, you only have a hole
in which to hide your tears,
a dry branch for chasing off the flies.

The soul’s task is to unlearn.
Animals are the great marvel,
no memory of having been brother
to the morning star.

Perhaps already quenched or crumbling to dark.


A photo and the final scene from La Boum (1980), a French film directed by Claude Pinoteau.

A few variations on how ad-target algorithms read this photo from La Boum.

Platonov's cow, Bob Dylan's footsteps, and my rage.

Of two minds at once, am I—- of two energies and timbres. Fury and whimsy, Medusa and Orpheus, with barely a gap between.

Nevertheless:

In school that morning they started their first-term tests. The pupils had to write an essay on the subject: "How I will live and work in order to be of service to our Motherland."

Vasya wrote out his answer in his exercise book: "I do not know how I will live, I have not thought yet. We had a cow. While she lived, my mother, my father and I all ate milk from her. Then she had her son—a calf-and he ate milk from her too, there were three of us and he made four, and there was enough milk for us all. The cow also ploughed and carried loads. Then her son was sold for meat, he was killed and eaten. The cow was very unhappy, but she soon died from a train. And she was eaten too, because she was beef. Now there is nothing. The cow gave us everything, that is her milk, her son, her meat, her skin, her innards and her bones, she was kind. I remember our cow and I will not forget." It was twilight when Vasya returned home. His father was already there, he had just come in from the line; he was showing Vasya's mother a hundred rubles-two notes that the driver had thrown down from the engine in a tobacco pouch.

This is how Platonov ends his short story, “The Cow,” likely written in 1938 or possibly 1939, as translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Angela Livingstone.

In their endnotes, the Chandlers mention Soviet literary critic A. Gurvich’s critique of Platonov’s “pity” and his pitiful, unheroic characters. Although Platonov wrote on the appropriate subjects, he got the “tone” wrong. There is no grief in the heroic State: there is simply the death of the useless and underprivileged in the name of teleological fulfillment. The Chandlers read Platonov’s story, “The Cow,” as a “defiant rejoinder” to Gurvich’s pillory. This brief tale “is as saturated with pity as anything he ever wrote,” they note:

The characters do indeed feel pity not only for one another but also for "birds, grasses, winds and machines.' Most moving of all, however, is the compassion—a clear-minded compassion entirely distinct from self-pity —that Platonov directs in this story towards his own self. The subtext here is that Platon, Platonov's fifteen-year-old son, was arrested in 1938 and sent to the Gulag. This may well have been an indirect way of putting pressure on Platonov himself; Lev Gumilev, the son of Anna Akhmatova, was also arrested in 1938, for a second time. It seems likely thar Stalin hoped, through sending their sons to the camps, to be able to bring Platonov and Akhmatova to heel, to exploit them far his own purposes.

For some reason, Bob Dylan’s “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” has been looping through my head at this time when I am sure of how much life matters, and more sure of how horrible it is to identify with one’s government, as if any armed behemoth with bombs can speak of what it means to live and believe in life. . .

Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood
Let the smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood
Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves
Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace

Alternately:

I raise my arm against it all and I catch the bride’s bouquet. This is the darkness, this is the flood—-Your name pressed against my temple. It is what I thought and not what I thought: It’s past one o’clock. You must be fast asleep. It is a light that goes out in my mouth. And there is no man or woman that can’t be touched / in my eclipses, in my returns. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking. Light clarity avocado salad in the morning the world is not my world, the human body concealed my cipher beneath images of scandalous visibility. Philosopher! The body knows, at most, an octave—-Take it.

[Leonard Cohen; Marina Tsvetaeva; Vladimir Mayakovsky; Louise Gluck; Georg Trakl; Leonard Cohen; René Char; Félix González-Torres; Frank O’Hara; Louise Gluck; Jean Cocteau; Deborah Digges; Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky; Daniil Kharms]

Ailleurs

Five hours on the road yesterday.

Five hours to listen to music and think about the intersection of poetry, portraiture, and what language creates or dis-establishes.

Five hours to miss the feeling of my eyes running down a page rather than a roadway.

Five hours, of course, ruptured by my intransigence, when the urge to read made me pull over for 20 minutes somewhere in a town with no stoplight in Mississippi, where I returned to Platonov’s Soul and wandered through John Berger’s beautiful afterwords, written in October 2004—-and yet present, somehow.

Meditating on a passage from one of Platonov’s short stories, a passage about leavetaking, as P’s couples are perpetually taking leave of one another, and to love Platonov is to know this leavetaking intimately, to study how leavetaking becomes leavemaking in his syntax, Berger writes:

Here the future's unique gift is desire. The future induces the spurt of desire towards itself. The young are more flagrantly young than on the other side of the wall. The gift appears as a gift of nature in all its urgency and supreme assurance. Religious and community laws still apply. Indeed, amongst the chaos, which is more apparent than real, these laws become real. Yet the silent desire for procreation is incontestable and overwhelming. It is the same desire that will forage for food for the children and then seek, sooner or later, (best sooner), the consolation of fucking again. This is the future's gift.

And then, while taking notes, I flipped back through my notebook and kicked myself softly for one again failing to properly attribute what I copied, a bad habit that frequently makes it difficult to discern whether I thought a thing after reading a thing or whether the thing I read was copied verbatim, an experience much like the act of writing, itself, in dialogue with other writers, both ghostly and living, to which I add this particular fragment in case someone recognizes it:

GUIDO: Love is commentary: it creates its subject. Love puts a name to a face, and then sets about ‘knowing’ it. Knowing is conquering.

Four things, between mile markers, on the road.

1

“Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest.”

— Marcel Proust (tr. Lydia Davis)

2

An end-note from Platonov’s beloved translators, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, as found in the NYRB publication of Soul.

Locomotives and trains appear frequently in Platonov's work, and are often connected to the theme of revolution. In 1922, in a letter to his wife, Platonov described an experience from the time of the Civil War: "Even though I had not yet completed technical school, I was hurriedly put on a locomotive to help the driver. The remark about the revolution being the locomotive of history was transformed inside me into a feeling that was strange and good: remembering this sentence, I worked very diligently on the locomotive..."

The sentence the young Platonov remembers is from Karl Marx: "Revolutions are the locomotives of history." " By 1927, however, Platonov had grown disenchanted: towards the end of Chevengur, Sasha Dvanov remarks, "I used to think that the revolution was a locomotive, but now I can see that it isn't." Earlier in the novel, there is a head-on collision between two trains. And several of Platonov's heroes, including Sasha Dvanov in Chevengur and Nazar Chagataev in "Soul," descend from trains and choose instead to walk long distances, apparently renouncing their belief in any quick and easy journey to a new world. By the mid-1930s the struggles of the Revolution were in the past, and utopia—according to the official Soviet position–was in the present.

3

A. Gurvich’s political denunciation of Platonov was based on his being anti-narodny (against the people). In an article, G. argued that Platonov's worldview had not changed since the late 1920s and that he had learned nothing from his many mistakes. Tremendous scorn was reserved for Platonov's indulgence in the un-Bolshevik emotion of pity or sympathy for the downtrodden. What G. calls Platonov's "pity-intoxicated heart" served as a warning to writers who believed that ‘realism’ should include any sense or sensibility of the Other. There was no Other in Stalin’s Russia: there was only the Enemy.

To quote G’s (fairly accurate) denunciation of Platonov (as found in the Chandlers’ endnotes):

4

And finally: "Dream of Lust" by Louise Glück, as published in The Kenyon Review, New Series, Winter 2001, Vol. XXIII, No. 1:

After one of those nights, a day:
the mind dutiful, waking, putting on its slippers,
and the spirit restive, muttering
I’d rather, I’d rather—

Where did it come from,
so sudden, so fierce,
an unexpected animal? Who
was the mysterious figure? You are ridiculously young, I told him.

The day tranquil, beautiful, expecting attention.
The night distracting and barred—
and I cannot return
not even for information.

Roses in bloom, penstemon, the squirrels
preoccupied for the moment.
And suddenly I don’t live here, I live in a mystery.

He had an odd lumbering gaucheness
that became erotic grace.

It is what I thought and not what I thought:
the world is not my world, the human body
makes an impasse, an obstacle.

Clumsy, in jeans, then suddenly
doing the most amazing things
as though they were entirely his idea—

But the afterward at the end of the timeless:
coffee, dark bread, the sustaining rituals
going on now so far away—

the human body a compulsion, a magnet,
the dream itself obstinately
clinging, the spirit
helpless to let it go—

it is still not worth losing the world.

Self-fashioning in the for-your-eyes-only.


I.

The eye-miniature entered the lexicon of love in the late 1790’s, as a subset of painted portraits depicting the left eye or the right, alone. Intended to be set in lockets, brooches, rings, and other ornamental objects, eye-minis (a.k.a. “lovers’ eyes”) were painted with watercolor atop a thin sheet of ivory—-a proper medium for aspirational jewelry.

According to “The Lens of Desire: Eye Miniatures”: “Luminous, exquisite, and fragile (a drop of water might wash away the tiny brushstrokes), lovers’ eyes did not mean, as it might seem, ‘I have my eye on you’, but rather, ‘You have my heart, and here’s my eye to prove it’.”

An eye for an eye, in essence. Though the eye functions as a gift rather than a subliminal surveillance device, it is hard to escape the presence of the gaze. It’s difficult to not feel somehow bound or seen by it.

II.

Cold metal walks on my forehead.
Spiders search for my heart.
It is a light that goes out in my mouth.

At night, I found myself on a pasture,
Covered with rubbish and the dust of stars.
In a hazel thicket
Angels of crystal rang out once more.

— George Trakl, “De Profundis” (translated by James Wright and Robert Bly)

Sarah Goodridge, Beauty Revealed (Self-Portrait), 1828

 “…poetry loses itself to stay lost. There's something about what's unsayable, what can only be gotten at in these spaces between, in these things placed together and the juxtaposition that somehow sparks something for us.”

— Mary Hickman

III.

FOURTEEN SUBJECTS FOR A THEORY OF MINIATURES

  1. A red box painted as a secret gift. Red to invoke a scarlet letter. Red because the flag is striped with it. Red because bloodshed is continuous in the game of democracy, and he is its elected representative.

  2. “The ruins of thought itself . . . in terms of the possibilities that only the impossible may still offer.”

  3. A small ethics. A minima. A sketch. Nothing so grand as a Maxi-Min principle. Nothing so practical and American. A red box with an image of her breasts painted on a slip of white ivory.

  4. The family portrait a politician needs to present after winning an election to the House of Representatives. The role of representation: the people, the publics, the portrait, the self-fashioning, the perceptual drift. She will be its author. She will never marry.

  5. A representational self-portrait with no head. A voiceless image. Eyeless but for nipples. An upset of the eye-miniature tradition.

  6. “True are only those thoughts that do not understand themselves.”

  7. She titles it Beauty Revealed (Self-Portait). The artist knows the game she is playing and decides to play the hand she has not been given. The purpose of art begins to resemble the purpose of the culture industry: to fabricate a self that can be traded, offered, transacted on the basis of ‘value.’

  8. The addressable catastrophe must be undressed.

  9. White gauze surrounding the bare chest, as if the clouds had decapitated the subject. The veiling and unveiling of dialectic.

  10. Self-representation reveals “the point of encounter between an authority and an alien.”

  11. By the time Daniel receives Sarah’s letter and the little red box she painted for him, its author has been alienated from it. The reader does the work of interpretation alone, at his desk. His take overrides her intent.

  12. The Graeculi or “little Greeks” teach the Roman ruling classes in the 1st century. Does the little box teach the Congressman a little ethics inflected by irony?

  13. The 10 a.m. of it all, continuously.

  14. The morning’s machine in me, and the dream of Walter B.’s letter to Gretel where he expresses his refusal of psychology, holding it out on a limb like astrology. He wants to keep the stars, I think, so he rejects the system for the constellation, or the story we make of figurations. Any space of potential irrationality can ruin the machine.

[Quotations: Gerhard Richter; Adorno MM 192; Stephen Greenblatt]

Sarah Goodridge, Beauty Revealed (Self-Portrait), 1828

IV.

“For love is ever filled with fear,” Penelope wrote to Odysseus in Ovid’s Heroides.

A vacuole is the void that holds the hole in the thing’s thingness.

“The poet has an obligation to dissect his own corpse and reveal the symptoms of its illness to the world,” said Natsume Sosaki.

“Speaking of ephemera, I read that Wagner’s home in Bayreuth has the composer’s copy of Henrich von Kleist’s Broken Pitcher on its shelves, with Wagner’s metrical marking scribbled inside it. Perhaps I am also speaking of modernity’s anxiety of influence,” wrote Michael Maar in “Deadly Poison: Kliest and Wagner”.

Ah, but “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination,” said Samuel Taylor Coleridge after staring at a blackbird.