" --- from a power base?"


THRESHOLDS, COLLARS, AND LONESOME SOCIALITY

“There are architectonic emblems of commerce: steps lead to the apothecary, whereas the cigar shop has taken possession of the corner. The business world knows to make use of the threshold. In front of the arcade, the skating rink, the swimming pool, the railroad platform, stands the tutelary of the threshold: a hen that automatically lays tin eggs containing bonbons. Next to the hen, an automated fortune teller—an apparatus for stamping our names automatically on a tin band, which fixes our fate to our collar.”

— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [C2,4]

That “which fixes our fate to our collar” has been on my mind lately, as Yervin’s “Dark Enlightenment” finally begins to percolate through mainstream media which has largely avoided giving substantive, analytic attention to Elon Musk’s “Dark MAGA” until now.

Precisely because the MAGA game makes use of postmodernist distances between sincerity and speech, I find myself drawn back to Dada, Situationism, and literature that confronts performativity with humor. Enter the brilliant untelling of Madeline McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom, which subtitles itself “a novel” — and gives us the author’s name upside down.

“I had come to the Lonesome Ballroom for this—this singular ideal discourse, this friendliness that didn’t require friendship, this conversation that was perfect precisely because it did not require me to speak,” the narrator tells us in the section excerpted in Cleveland Review of Books.

So what if my fern fell over? It is windy. The speaker’s shadow is lavender. Lavender as the dress Madeline wore when reading at the AWP Midwestern Prose off-site.

NOTABLY, GLENN GOULD COULDN’T CARE LESS WHAT WE THOUGHT ABOUT HIM

A tragic tone often colors the stories we tell of Glenn Gould’s withdrawal from the concert world. But what is tragic to the fern or the fern’s owner may not be tragic to the composer, himself. He had a long love affair with an artist; he made radio documentaries; he wrote criticism and composed music; he wore a scarf that grew into a myth about his extreme hermeticism due to hypochondria. He probably laughed often when encountering the character he’d become in newsprint and text.

Composers often struggle with the demands and travel of performance, exacerbated by pianism. At one point, Gould elected to opt out of the relentlessness. He wanted to play with sound. He wanted to write about music. He wanted to find his true north as metaphor and state of being. He wanted to express his opinions without licking his patrons’ spaghetti straps and mink stoles.

Cait Miller recalls how Gould’s opinions on music caused tension in his performance career, citing his “April 1962 performance of Brahms’ first piano concerto, with the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein conducting” where “Mr. Bernstein disagreed with Gould’s interpretation so vehemently that he felt it necessary to warn the audience beforehand.” Bernstein’s comments were preserved in the radio broadcast of that performance.

— which reminds me that one of my favorite literary forms is Gouldian, namely, the self-interview that shapes itself from the shadow of a musical form.


“THE TUXEDOED FALLACY”

Ambivalence and passion meet as text, in the (often unpopular) position Gould assumes before recapitulating it and playing it out. G.G., the performer/composer, argues with g.g., the interviewer.

At stake: the conventional hierarchies in the music world and criticism. The “tuxedoed fallacy”comes up in an interview where the speaker/s jauntily confronts the “noble tutorial and curatorial responsibilities of the artist in relation to his audience”:

I love how Gould plays his ‘persona’ in order to rattle his audience, knowing, of course, that his audiences are multiple, and taking pains to articulate his “tuxedoed fallacy,” pinning it to the act of “display”. The tuxedo provides the illusion that one person stands above the others, not naked at all, but “from a power-base”: the proscenium.



ASIDE ON DIORAMAS AS “DEVICES FOR CHANGING SPACE AND TIME”

“Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, known for his 1839 patent on the daguerreotype photographic technique, began his career as an assistant to the celebrated panorama painter Pierre Prevost. In 1822, Daguerre debuted the diorama, his first device for changing space and time. The diorama differed significantly from the panorama: Daguerre's visitors looked through a proscenium at a scene composed of objects arranged in front of a backdrop; after a few minutes, the auditorium platform rotated, exposing another dioramic opening. The entire diorama building became a machine for changing the spectator's view. Like the diaphanorama— in which translucent watercolors were illuminated from behind— the diorama included semi transparent paintings that could be modified by moving the lights.”

– Anne Friedberg, “Les Flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition”



"AND I WISH YOU’D STOP USING WORDS LIKE THAT”

Warning: if Gould doesn’t interest you, then the remainder of this post —- devoted to Gould’s self-interview on Beethoven — will be mortifying. “Glenn Gould Interviews Himself about Beethoven” was published In the fall 1972 issue of Piano Quarterly.

In it, Gould teases out the distinction between the “composer”, the “artist”, and the “performer” as constructed by musicology and other discourse:

glenn gould: Mr. Gould, when did you first become aware of your growing doubts about Beethoven?

GLENN GOULD: I don't believe I have any doubts about Beethoven—a few minor reservations, perhaps. Beethoven has played a very important part in my life, and I feel that while the warm glow of his bicentennial celebration remains, "doubts" is a singularly inappropriate word.

g.g.: You must allow me to be the judge of that, if you will, sir. But perhaps you'd care to define some of those "reservations" for us.

G.G.: Certainly. Well, there are moments in Beethoven when I'm a bit perplexed, I confess. For instance, I've never been able really to "draw a bead," so to speak, on the finale of the Ninth.

g.g.: That's a fairly common reservation.

G.G.: Exactly, and it certainly doesn't qualify as a "doubt," in my opinion.

g.g.: I see. In your view, then, it's simply an aversion to isolated moments in his music, is it?

G.G.: Well, of course, I don't mind admitting that I have a built-in bias in regard to Wellington's Victory, or even the King Stephen Overture, for that matter, more or less from first note to last.

g.g.: But among what we may safely call the "mainstream" works, you have no such objection, is that it?

G.G.: No, not exactly. I can't claim to be equally enamored of all the most familiar compositions, certainly.

g.g.: Well, then, which of these works fail to meet with your approval?

G.G.: It has nothing whatever to do with my approval, and I wish you'd stop using words like that. But I suppose, perhaps, I'm less fond of the Fifth Symphony, the "Appassionata" Sonata, or the Violin Concerto.

g.g.: I see. All those works are from what we might think of as Beethoven's “middle” years, aren't they?

G.G.: Yes, that's true.

g.g.: And very significant, too. I suppose, however, like most professional musicians, you have a pronounced penchant for the late quartets and piano sonatas.

G.G.: I listen to them a lot, yes.

g.g.: That's not really what I was asking you, Mr. Gould.

G.G.: Well, those are very problematic works, you see, and I—-

g.g.: Please, Mr. Gould, with all due respect, we don't need you to tell us that. If I'm not mistaken, even one of Huxley's characters—what was his name?—

G.G.: Spandrell or something, wasn't it?

g.g.: Yes, thank you—even he committed suicide more or less to the accompaniment of Op. 132, didn't he?

G.G.: That's right. Well, I apologize for the clichés, but those works really are very elusive, you know-very enigmatic, very—

g.g.: How about “ambivalent”?

G.G.: Don't be hostile.

g.g.: Well, then, don't you be evasive. What I'm asking, obviously, is not whether you share the worldwide bafflement in regard to the form of the C-sharp-minor Quartet—I'm asking whether you genuinely enjoy listening to the piece.

G.G.: No.

Acknowledging the role of taste or preference makes the professionals uncomfortable. It’s difficult for a critic to admit their “tuxedo style” is just the window-dressing for a personal opinion, or the stroll of a particular interpretive in the rendition.

Little G tells big G that he needn’t “be embarrassed” for admitting that he doesn’t enjoy listening to the C-sharp-minor Quartet, and then he asks which works attract him. Italics are mine.

G.G: I'm fond of the Op. 18 Quartets, certainly, and the Second Symphony is one of my two favorite works in that genre, as a matter of fact.

g.g.: Very typical. This, of course, is the well-known odd-number-symphony syndrome.

G.G.: No, I assure you, it isn't. I can't bear the Fourth, and I'm not particularly fond of the Pastorale, though I will admit the Eighth Symphony is my favorite among all his works in that form.

g.g.: Hmm.

G.G.: You see, I know you'd like to confirm a cut-and-dried diagnosis, but I really don't think it's quite that simple. You're also trying to establish a chronological bias, obviously, and I don't think that's fair, either.

g.g.: Well, Mr. Gould, I admit that our tests are far from conclusive at this stage, but since you've already confessed your admiration for the Second and Eighth Symphonies, perhaps you'd care to enumerate some other Beethoven compositions for which you have special affection.

G.G.: Certainly. There is the Piano Sonata No. 8, the String Quartet Op. 95. Then there are each of the Op. 31 Piano Sonatas and, believe it or not, the "Moonlight," for that matter. So you see, I just can't be typecast as readily as you might wish.

g.g.: On the contrary, my dear sir, I think, in relation to the Beethovenian canon at least, you've managed to typecast yourself, and with remarkable consistency. Do you realize that every work you've singled out has belonged to what we might call a transition phase—or, rather, one of two transition phases, to be exact—within Beethoven's development?

G.G.: Forgive me, but that's just hogwash. First of all, I can't buy this notion of the Beethovenian plateau. You'd probably like to convince me that every work he wrote is either "early," "middle," or "late" in spirit, and I think that sort of categorizing is every bit as unprofitable as it is unoriginal, if you don't mind my saying so.

g.g.: I don't mind your saying so, and I've noted your defensive reaction to the suggestion. But since you yourself alluded to this yardstick—-this subdivision of Beethoven's creative life into periods—-I simply suggest to you that there is perhaps something significant in the fact that all the works you've mentioned, by that very yardstick to which you've alluded, found him at the time of their composition in a state of, for want of a better word, flux.

G.G.: Every artist is in a state of flux or he wouldn't be an artist.

g.g.: Please, Mr. Gould, don't be tedious—-in a state of flux, as I say, if not between the early and middle years, then between the middle and late ones.

In this kerfuffle over “periods,” Gould toys with the structures of critique. And then, he turns around and interrogates the difference between performing and listening as an aesthetic experience. “Of course, you played a great deal of Beethoven in your concerts, didn't you?” g. g. asks.

Notice how this interview moves? Notice how it leans into the fugue as a form? It’s hard for me not to hear it, especially since the fugal form weighed so heavily in Gould’s sense of theory and sound. Speaking of “playing” v. “listening to”:

g.g.: Does this suggest, then, that you found his music, by and large, more fun to play than to listen to?

G.G.: Certainly not. I've already told you that I listen with great pleasure to—

g.g.: — to the Eighth Symphony and the Op. 95 String Quartet, I know. But in your concert-giving days you did play, let's say, the "Emperor" Concerto fairly frequently, after all, yet I haven't noticed it on your list of all-time favorites. So does this suggest, perhaps, that such performances simply provided you with tactile rather than intellectual stimulation?

G.G.: I think that's really uncalled for, you know. I tried very, very hard to develop a convincing rationale for the “Emperor” Concerto.

g.g.: Yes, I've heard some of your attempts at rationalizing it, as a matter of fact, but it's interesting that you say “tried.” I assume this means that you found it difficult to realize a spontaneous musical experience in relation to such performances.

G.G.: Well, if by “spontaneous” you mean an occasion when every note fell into place as though programmed by an automaton, obviously not.

g.g.: No, don't misunderstand me. I'm not speaking of technical felicities or anything as mundane as that. I simply suggest that if you were to play a work by—-who's your favorite composer?

G.G.: Orlando Gibbons.

g.g.: Thank you—by Orlando Gibbons, that every note would seem to belong organically without any necessity for you as its interpreter to differentiate between tactile and intellectual considerations at all.

G.G.: I don't think I've been guilty of any such differentiation.



g.g.: Ah, but you have, however inadvertently. You see, this armchair analysis of yours compels you to keep trying to like Op. 132, or whatever, but you don't feel obliged to undertake any similar probe in behalf of Mr. Gibbons's Salisbury Pavan, do you? And similarly, the elaborate rationale you concoct in behalf of the Fifth Piano Concerto—whether if you do it very slowly or very quickly it might suddenly and miraculously hang together successfully—isn't matched by any similar apologia when you play Gibbons, is it? Now, I'm sure you'll agree that it's not because Gibbons is less intellectually demanding—

G.G.: Indeed, he's not.

g.g.: —and indeed, given the passage of time from his day to ours, he might even be said to pose the greater re-creative challenge.

G.G.: That's true.

g.g.: But despite that fact, you see, I'm fairly certain that if you sit down to your piano, late at night, let's say —for your own amusement, in any case—it's Orlando Gibbons, or some other composer in regard to whom you evidence no such schizophrenic tendencies, that you'll play, and not Beethoven. Am I right?

G.G.: I don't really see what that proves, and I think—

g.g.: Am I right?

G.G.: But surely I'm entitled to —

g.g.: Am I right?

G.G.: Yes. Can you help me?

g.g.: Do you want to be helped?

G.G..: Not if it involves giving up Orlando Gibbons.

g.g.: That shouldn't be necessary. You see, Mr. Gould, your problem—and it's a much more common one than you realize, I assure you—relates to a fundamental misunderstanding of the means by which post-Renaissance art achieved its communicative power. Beethoven, as I'm sure you'll agree, was central to that achievement, if only chronologically, in that his creative life virtually bisects the three and a half centuries since the demise of your Mr. Gibbons—

G.G.: True.

g.g.: —and it's precisely during that period of three and a half centuries, and specifically at the Beethovenian heart of it, that the creative idea and the communicative ideal began to grant each other mutual concessions.

G.G.: You've lost me.

g.g.: Well, look at it this way. All the works that you've enumerated on your private hate list—

G.G.: It's not that at all.

g.g.: Don't interrupt, please. All those works have in common the idea that their ideology, so to speak, can be wrapped up in one or more memorable moments.

G.G.: You mean motives.

g.g.: I mean tunes. I mean, quite simply, that you, as a professional musician, have clearly developed a resentment pattern in relation to those tunes— forgive me—which represent and which characterize the spirit of their respective compositions.

G.G.: Well, there's nothing very special about the tunes, if you want to call them that, in the "Emperor" Concerto, since you're challenging me on that ground in particular.

g.g.: There's nothing special at all. There is, however, something readily identifiable about them which, by definition, threatens to undermine your interpretative prerogative, don't you see? You resent the fact that, in a work like the "Emperor" Concerto, the elaborate extenuations relevant to those motives have indeed been left in your hands, literally and figuratively, but the raison d'être of those extenuations inevitably devolved upon the kind of motivic fragment that automatically came equipped with certain built-in interpretive biases by virtue of which they can be sung, whistled, or toe-tapped by anyone—any layman.

G.G.: That's nonsense. Mendelssohn's tunes are every it as good as, and far more continuous than, Beethoven's, and I have no objection to Mendelssohn whatever.

g.g.: Ah, precisely substance n's are far more continuous because they relate to a motivic substance which is at once more extended, more complex, and-don't get me wrong, now-more professional.

G.G.: You think so too, then?

g.g: Everyone does, my dear fellow. It's precisely that impossible mixture of naiveté and sophistication that makes Beethoven the imponderable he is, and it's precisely that dimension of his music-that mixture of the professional's developmental skills and the amateur's motivic bluntness—that is at the heart of your problem.

G.G.: Do you think so?

g.g: There's no doubt of it. And it's not at all a bad thing, really—a bit anarchistic, perhaps, but, in a way, it's even rather creative—because when you reject Beethoven—

G.G.: But I'm not rejecting him!

g.g: Please! When you reject Beethoven, as I say, you're rejecting the logical conclusion of the Western musical tradition.

G.G.: But he isn't the conclusion of it.

g.g: Well, of course, chronologically he isn't. As I've said, he's really the center of it in that sense, and it's precisely those works which are in the center of his own chronology that disturb you most. It's precisely those works in which an elaborate exposé with which only a professional can cope is related to material with which anyone can identify.

G.G.: Hmm...

g.g.: And that disturbs you, Mr. Gould, because it represents, first of all, a comment upon the role playing, the stratified professionalism, of the Western musical tradition that you, and not without reason, question. No, it's no accident that you prefer those works in which Beethoven was less emphatically his logical-extremist self—the works written on the way to, or in retreat from, that position—the works in which the predictability quotient is lower, the works in which the composer is less concerned with making the mystery of his art explicit.

G.G.: But on the way to, or in retreat from, that position, as you put it, you encounter a much more professional kind of art— Wagner's professionalism, or Bach's, depending on which way you go—and you have to move a long way back, or forward, as the case may be, to encounter a purely amateur tradition.

The self-exposing “gotcha” is central to the fugal motion of Gould’s self-interviews. In fact, one might even be inclined to note that Gould places form first in his writing on music, and he does so in a Platonic manner that plays both with and against Samuel Beckett’s own dialogic modes. Ignore me. Here’s the notorious Emperor penguin!

G.G..: Hmm. Well, do you mean, then, that if I do reject Beethoven, I'm on my way to being an environmentalist or something like that? I mean, I think John Cage has said that if he's right, Beethoven must be wrong, or something of the sort. Do you think I'm harboring a sort of suicide wish on behalf of the profession of music?

g.g.: My dear fellow, I don't think you should be concerned about it, really. Besides, you're quite a moderate, you know— you didn't choose Op. 132, after all . . . You're vacillating. You're not quite sure whether in making that mystery explicit, in exploiting the dichotomy between layman and professional, we do our fellow man a service or a disservice. You're not quite sure whether in opting for an environmental course, which, after all, puts an end to professionalism as we know it, we're getting at some truth about ourselves more immediate than any professional can achieve, or whether, in doing that, we're simply reining in our own development as human beings. And you shouldn't be embarrassed, because Beethoven himself wasn't sure. After all, he didn't write many "Emperor" Concertos, did he? He vacillated, to a degree at least, and I don't see why you can't. It's just that in celebrating Beethoven, you're acknowledging one terminal point which makes your vacillation practi-cable, and now you have to find another one.

G.G.: Well, I feel consoled by that, actually. But there's one thing I don't understand: How did you know I had these doubts?

g.g.: Mr. Gould, it was perfectly obvious— you wouldn't have requested this interview otherwise. You'd have authored the piece as you were asked to do.

G.G.: I see. Well, thank you very much—is there anything else?

g.g: No, I don't think so. Oh, yes—if you don't mind, on your way out, turn down the PA, will you? If I hear another bar of the Eroica, I'll scream.


EN FIN.

A few of my favorite Beethoven performances by Gould, for no reason at all.

Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor "The Tempest": III Allegretto.
Sonata For Piano And Cello in A major: I Allegro ma non tanto.
15 Variations And Fugue in E-flat major: Variations I-XV.

“Ecstasy”. This is the word Gould used to describe his relation to music— to the worlds it opened and created. Rapture can be painstakingly disciplined, a function of heights within constraints, and so I leave you with Gould playing Gibbons. For the ecstasy so palpable that one feels it is almost private, something erotic occurring between two bodies in a world we cannot imagine, except by shadow.

What's in a name?

[Notes from a lecture given in Auburn last year, where I read a few of the poems that would eventually find their way murmuring into My Heresies. Like all thoughts and texts, this one can only speak for its speaker— and it would be horrifying to imagine that any human would decide to make a rule of what one uncertain and self-doubting speaker says. I speak for the “I” that imagines itself. And, with that, add a note of gratitude (so much gratitude) to Rose McLarney, whose new book, Colorfast, deserves your hands, your eyes, your mind, your attention— and to my sister of Eastern pasts and presents, Maria Kuznetsova, who is one the most hilarious, beautiful, brilliant humans I’ve had the chance to gab away with in recent years. Two hours with Maria is peak-living. Read Oksana, Behave! and fall in love.]

"Music causes plethoras in the head." 

— Soranus, 2nd century CE

I’d like to begin this reading with a note on pronunciation, and an appeal to unrelenting awkwardness of this Beckett-style moment in which You— the persons who live in this town whom I am visiting, persons who are possibly affiliated with the university from which I matriculated — have an expectation that I would be something pronounceable. 

Expectations are based on sounds, which is to say language, words gathering together into small parcels of meaning. We gather to hear them. They gather to enable us to encounter each other. Words and humans gather in this uncertain, expansive relationship rooted in a persistent hope that something meaningful can be made of a moment, a view, a life. And so I am surprised tonight to discover something utterly human in me, namely, a melancholy. How sad that anyone would worry about whether they had pronounced my name correctly. How unfortunate that we should gather and be gathered with the fear of mispronunciation among us. 

My father says Americans can't pronounce “Ceausescu” correctly because they don't do diphthongs. Their mouths aren't wired to holding so many vowels in one hut at once without cracking. So I have centered vowels in my poems—crammed and jammed them, making space for unassimilated voices. I am loyal to sounds, and a traitor to any part of the “self” we try to see whole.

This particular melancholy reminds me of an ongoing discussion with my youngest  child— a problem that I find easier to express in a poem, with Tomaz Salamun's little horse in the future anterior. 

[Poem: “I Have An Imaginary Pony”]

My daughter's pony is invisible, but my relationship to her pony is imaginary. I can only imagine what she has imagined to the point of invisibility. And invisibility, here, is the only way she can relate to the pony she cannot own. 

We cannot know each other the way we crave to be known. 

Ah-LEE-nah. Is it wonderful to hear my name pronounced correctly, wherein "correctly" is defined as the way it is pronounced in my native (and very minor) language? Does the thrill of hearing myself pronounced in my first language relate to the power to be one simple thing, one Alina Stefanescu, one constant and stable self? And is there—beneath that thrilling presumption, perhaps— a refusal to be known as one of you, as among you, in your presence, in your language —known as spoken and held in your mouth?

As a reader, it is not your job to acknowledge me, to affirm me, or even to perceive me correctly. I believe that such expectations set us up to fail in beholding one another. It is too much to ask of any human. I keep thinking of Beckett's Godot and the firmament, and the constant question that the two old friends, waiting, ask one another. The endless repetition: Who am I to you? Who will we be to one another? 

To be read is one way of knowing. To be pronounced is another. To be remembered, well, to be remembered as both a blessing, and a curse in any language.

I cannot know myself in the phrasings or interactions that present me— and give me to you, in flashes and stanzas, tonight. To ask of the human the infinitude we hope from the poem is too much. 

Earlier this week, I found myself returning to Michel Foucault, whom I first studied here on this campus decades ago. The Auburn Philosophy Department taught me to think, which is to say, Dr. J covered my papers in red ink – "What does this mean? No more flowers! What are you arguing?" I took every course I could with him, for the thrill of being challenged, for the gift of being taken seriously, worthy of criticism. 

The funny thing about Foucault is that his most famous work in Madness & Civilization relies on an archival history depicting the Ship of the Fools, a boat that carried mad men around. But his peers dragged him through a journal for failing to source the ship of fools. 

It seems that Foucault never actually replied with a credible archival source. The Ship of Fools existed, but did Foucault's ship of fools exist outside his book? This existential question is one of both philosophy and poetry. I found myself on his ship of fools earlier this month, and I wanted to share the first draft of it with you. To be unfinished somehow, and to risk reading the thing-in-creation.

[Poem: “So Foucault Failed to Source the Ship of Fools”]

Who were the mothers in that hospital room of bills that sink us all? Why do we punish the sick and suffering and vulnerable by making it impossibly costly to survive? I return again to Beckett's Godot, which I saw performed in a black box a few weeks ago, and how the first half of the play seems to tell us that only the burdens we carry give us reason to continue. 

I don't know about that. Sometimes I look at other mothers and feel so close to them, even though they are strangers. What could be stranger than this overwhelming love we feel for our children? What could be weirder than the feeling of being subsumed and totally sunk by it?

[Poem: “The Mother Test No One Talks About”]

There's a lovely part among the countless leavetakings in Godot, in the parting scene where the friends shout out "Adieu" again and again, making a refrain of a word in the language that Beckett adopted as his own, namely French. Adieu means goodbye in French but it also could mean to God. Derrida’s notion of leave-taking returns to this ‘a dieu’ that honors the life which can no longer defend itself.

I’m afraid we have very little respect for the dead in the US, and this is legible in the mainstream disregard for poetry and literary forms that bind us to eternity.

I'm not sure what any god means or wants. Certainly, they have demanded a lot of blood from our species over the centuries. The gods do not strike me as good poets, even if many of the humans who love them are.

Speaking of love, I met the man who became my husband in Virginia. I also left the man who became my husband at least 7 times before agreeing to marry him, and then actually following through with it. Adieu, I said to him. Adieu adieu adieu! Sixteen years later, with three kids and a terrible, wonderful schnauzer named Radu between us, I remain amused by how utterly different we are— his Kierkegaard to my strange mix of French continentals and Wittgenstein. 

Here is a poem for him, who is doing the caregiving this week. About how we coexist as strangers to another. How strangeness keeps us interested. 

[Poem: “Separate Bumper Stickers”]

Speaking of strangers, we feel as if we know them— we have seen them before—but we don’t re-cognize them. We know the stranger even though we can’t recognize the stranger. 

The awkward silences are gifts. Silence is terrain studded by landmines: blank, ambiguous terrain which intends to avoid stepping into harm. Yet this approach anchored in avoidance changes the terrain by rendering it dangerous in an unspeakable way. I remember listening to a museum guide describe the avalanche that destroyed a small town in Colorado as a mystery. "It is a mystery," she insisted, when pushed for information. 

All mysteries lean into their silences, the patched secrets which active mining communities keep in order to survive. The words that surround silence are like the signs labeled NO TRESPASSING; they signify the requirements of keeping distance while also challenging us to find a reason. 

Perhaps my obsession with sign-reading is tied to my childhood, or to being the child of Eastern Bloc refugees raised in the American South which is to say: I recognize a barbed silence when I hear it. Recognition commits me less to knowledge than to asking, studying, wondering, chasing. The writer who rejects a borders' imposition of "peace and quiet," the poet familiar with ontological complicity — cannot leave a silence unchallenged. The words with false bottoms demand my attention. What is this expression trying to hide?  And what is this silence denying?

The silences in my recent poetry collection are related to Ceausescu's dictatorship, and the things my parents could not say. The cost that their “defecting” posed to their family in Romania. 

[Read from Dor]

Dor, this book, is about a word I wanted to bring over borders— a Romanian word that means so many different things to different people. “Dor” is often compared to saudade as a form of nostalgia. We lost interest in that ancient word until it became a medical diagnosis made by Swiss Dr Johannes Hofer in 1688. Hofer applied this diagnosis to students, noting that nostalgia created false representations which caused the nostalgic to lose contact with the present, to stop caring. In a sense. But “in a sense” is still only one sense of the matter. (Just as “innocence” is a lie in any discourse including humans with American passports.) There are more senses than the sense implied by the argument. 

Obsessed by a longing for their native land, Hofer's nostalgics experienced something  like homesickness. Hofer's sense still dominates the discourses of nostalgia, the shame of looking backward, the punishment of turning to salt. How interesting that this sense of nostalgia implies a home. 

Reading John of the Cross, I wonder what "home" means to a monk. I wonder if one who has cut so many bonds with the physical, sensual world can experience a "rooted" longing. It must just be god. The ashes of my book's first draft sit in a box on the shelf to the left of my mother's ashes. The poem permits my mother to read the book which appeared after her death. 

[Read two from Dor, including lustration]

In sum, I do not want to be known in the way that pronouncing my name in Romanian would have me be known. I want to be known as I am, right here, in this encounter with You—where you are a poem, too. And what your mouth does with me. I want that. 

I want the ‘me’ that emerges from this, from us, from now. My “I” cannot speak for an other. It cannot and does not. I speak for no country, no community, no flag, no god, no guru, no nation. But there is a world in which we can articulate our impossible hopes aloud, and that world happens to exist above the borders of nation-states, somewhere in the republic of letters as dreamt by poets and writers. There—-and here— and now— I want to be known in the way you imagine my name sounding, in the ambiguous and complicated uncertainty of humans beholding one another— acknowledging our inherent strangeness in this moment of relating, committing to the radiance of that— and—-accepting, perhaps, that the stranger is also one who wishes to be recognized rather than known. Surely, we cannot ever entirely know the difference.

Two poems from my heresies in BOMB.

I tried once before, years ago, to write about Malte, to someone who had been frightened by the book, that I myself sometimes thought of it as a hollow form, a negative mold, all the grooves and indentations of which are agony, disconsolations and most painful insights, but the casting from which, were it possible to make one (as with a bronze the positive figure one would get out of it), would perhaps be happiness, assent,—most perfect and certain bliss.

— Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Lotte Hepner on November 8th, 1915

La vie est là
Qui vous prend par le bras
Oh la la la
C’est magnifique

I am so grateful to everyone who pre-orders My Heresies in the month leading up to its existence. In all honesty, the darkness this year has been very loud for me, and, the way my black dog works often involves extraordinary self-doubt and self-loathing, culminating in self-sabotage. I did not ask for blurbs. Even when friends offered, I felt too ashamed to take them up on those offers.

You might wonder why a writer would feel shame—- especially since we know how shame lies— and the best answer I can come up with is that the last person I wanted to hear from during this US-sponsored genocide of Palestinians was myself. A human can spend the better half of their lives fighting against the ghosts of extremist nationalism only to find these ghosts return in different forms. Language, itself, can hardly hold this. Language can barely make space for the decimation across this planet. And so, one goes silent. One writes in the notebooks and submits nothing. One tries to imagine how best to use ‘your voice’, while despising the sound of your voice.

I am lucky that Ilya Kaminsky said such generous things about the book. I am surrounded by writers, editors, and publishers who encourage me. I am speechless and humbled by that. Ultimately, I am a human who lives more in books than in what my parents called “reality,” which is the space where you learn about publishing and how to line up readings and ‘market’ your own labor. I am still clueless about the business side of writing.

And now, since this book is about the present in its own way, I quote myself in order to speak to my own silences:

Oh la la la, thank you to BOMB magazine for their generosity and the love in that community. Thank you to Eric and Erin and Kristen and Kira for their extraordinary labor in what has been a challenging year for Sarabande. Thank you to all the journals in which these poems were first published. Thank you in advance to all who invite me to talk about poetry and read it and share it, including my peers at New Orleans Poetry Festival, where I shall make a fool of myself next week. It is a joy and pleasure to be a fool for poetry. It is the only foolishness I know by heart.

You can learn more about the poetry collection here, and you can support the incredible work that BOMB has done for decades by purchasing a subscription. You can imagine a world that refuses to accept the given, a world in which empire and the weapons of the most powerful are not celebrated and defended. A world AGAINST GREATNESS. (Fuck Trump and the Neo-Fascist International completely.) You can join Writers Against the War on Gaza. You can support Workshops 4 Gaza and work with Haroon to create a workshop. You can donate to Heal Palestine and commit to the work of love. Either way, no matter what, you make my day by reading this, even if the other things are not possible due to finances. Thank you, humans. Thank you thank you thank you.

"Unsavory thoughts" and vistas.

SOME KIND OF COMPULSION AT PLAY

“What the metaphysics of the industrial revolutions demands is that anything that can be exploited, must be. Some kind of compulsion is at play. An insatiability.”

— Hunter Bolin, “Unworldliness: A Pathology of Humankind (On Günther Anders’s Negative Anthropology)”

*

The libido of late capitalism numbs the imagination. Contemporary novels reflect this paucity of ecstasy, the continuous desolation of being ravished by nothingness, consumed by the undertone of our planned obsolescence. In the era of Televangelical Materialism, the soul is sold to a screen and heaven (or eternity) is an impulse purchase. We don’t even get to argue about what “nous” might mean before handing it along to the wealthy prophets of prosperity and abundance.

“Been to America, been to Europe, it's the same shit.” Clearly, as that wise Canadian known as Destroyer noted, “the idea of the world is no good”:

The terrain is no good / The sea's blasted poem / A twinkle in the guitar player's eye
Cue synthesizer / Cue guitar / Cue synthesizer Wherever you are

At which point I defer/refer to one of my favorite parking lot choreographies in the annals of music video:

“Like everything that's come before, you are gone.”

Several times at AWP, these lyrics met me in the chaos of seeing beloved humans—and missing countless others— at that room known as the Book Fair, averring: “I look around the room, we are a room of pit ponies / Drowning forever in a sea of love ”

There are many ways to drown, and one reckons with this each time drowning occurs differently. I am hungry for writing that reflects the ordinary strangeness of revolutionary conditions, like the shock of remembrance that becomes a presence. At a rest area in Mississippi yesterday, the invitation of clover growing too fast for the mowers, and then reading something that prompted a memory of a similar day in adolescence, when the Mary Kay sales rep parked her pink Cadillac in our driveway and my mom invited her into the kitchen. Her name was Michelle Pearson, she was a “missionary”: a person who lived off the love of others and God’s will, as she put it, in her white fur coat and Tammy Faye eyelashes. Michelle asked money to fund a mission trip to "save the children of Africa" who were "starving without Bibles." I cannot forget that scene, and how it speaks to the nihilism of the present.

INTERLUDE WHEREIN LIBRARY CARDS ARE THE ONLY PASSPORT THAT SHOULD MATTER

THE CHASMS I NEED

“His writing dares to convey so little that it confronts us with the true chasm of ellipsis…”

— Andres Neuman (translated by Robin Myers) on Kafka in an essay on hunger artists for Franz

*

On the road yesterday, passed a dead armadillo which resembled my soul and thought how quickly it all becomes rearview. No one talked about tracking a thing in the rear view before autos. We look back longer at this speed I think.

RIP soul. I shall return with a roadside cross for you. Shall shawl that cross with plethoras of those eternal plastic flowers which promise to last “forever” and are therefore all we can really know of heaven besides radium and cockroaches.

Two books that have been stellar company today:

  1. Disintegration Made Plain and Easy, a poetry collection by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi from Piżama Press

  2. Unsavory Thoughts, a prosodic creature by Thomas Walton from Sagging Meniscus

Tant pis, I cannot share any of Kiik’s poems yet because the collection will be released in May, but I can encourage you to pre-order it—which I am actively doing.

As for Thomas’ book, it is new and waiting and utterly bingeworthy. Even the epigraphs are tantalizing:

“The Buzzcocks combined punk with a sort of sentimentalism,” I thought to myself while driving yesterday.

“Thomas Walton had my complete attention from the get-go, with the fantastic use he makes of the “preface” as a site of temporal frottage,” I say to you now— enclovered, still admiring the injunction of the titular.

Here you are then: a little pharmakos from Thomas. “A little medicine to make us sick, a little poison to make us well,” which made me think of a part in Swann’s Way, in James Grieve’s translation of Proust, where the speaker says:

Only the day before, had I not wanted to avoid upsetting Gilberte, I would have settled for infrequent meetings with her; but now these could no longer have satisfied me, and my conditions would have been different. For in love, unlike war, the more one is defeated, the more one imposes very  harsh conditions; and one constantly tries to make them harsher—if one is actually in a position to impose any, that is.

Acknowledging that he is “not in this position” with Gilberte, Proust’s speaker says he is determined not to go back to the Swann house. Alas, the pharmakos doesn't serve its function where reverie and love are concerned; for there is “a new pain”:

I also went on telling myself that Gilberte did not love me, that I had known this for ages, that I could see her whenever I liked, and that, if I preferred not to see her, I would eventually forget her. But these thoughts, like a medication that has no effect on certain disorders, were quite ineffectual against what came intermittently to my mind: those two close silhouettes of Gilberte and that young man, stepping slowly along the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. This was a new pain, but one that would eventually fade and disappear in its turn; it was an image which one day would come back to my mind with all its noxious power neutralized, like those deadly poisons that can be handled without danger, or the small piece of dynamite one can use to light a cigarette without fear of being blown up. For the time being, though, there was another force in me, fighting for all it was worth against the pernicious impulse that kept showing me, without the slightest alteration, Gilberte walking through the twilight: working against memory, trying to withstand its repeated onslaughts, there was the quiet and helpful endeavor of imagination. The force of memory went on showing the pair walking down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, along with other irksome images from the past….

And it is spring, the season before the summering which commits me to my annual Proust re-reading. So many summers of my life are saturated by Proust’s presence, his metaphors and reversals. Friends come and go but Proustian summers manage to remain and continue like the metaphysical baller, himself.

Cue my brain at the rest stop again:

Cue violin sonata for the award-winning rest area in upper Louisiana where I learned that many people are praying for me and other sinners at the RV place! Was also told to “expect excellence from the Lord”! Fantastic slogan-riffing occurring out here. Bavardage with eschaton!

Cue Tristan Tzara’s lament, “The Death of Guillaume Apollinaire”, as translated by Mary Ann Caws and marked up with my sublimated ardors and envy of avian creatures that transgress borders continually:

In sum, dim sum, bright green—- and everything that begins in “This quiet”, as with this with poem by Gunter Grass translated by Michael Hamburger and Middleton, shared by Tom Snarsky. All of it so wrong, and so beautiful.

Cue synthesizer.

And you, wherever U R —

Notes on what the programs called "AWP 2025".

Crush my calm you cassavetes
I was sitting tight so quiet quiet
In the dark till the lights came up my heart
— Fugazi, “Cassavetes”


GOPHER INCIDENT

J and M made me laugh like the monocle de mon oncle n the Gopher alcove. We chatted in earnest about the unwritable book and the literary urge to fuck around and find out being no less urgent as the world burns. This is how friendship works between writers: we converse through various texts while wrangling quotations and interpretations as if the world depended on it. As if we, too, depend on it. The as-if is our solace and our shared joy. We refuse the world we are given. We argue over the other ways it could be. We blow up the given to realize the otherwise. We entreat our readers to imagine more— and urgently. We fear dying before the book that escapes us, the book that will free us, the text that will loosen the compulsion or obsession to write. We covet the pure products of pears and apricots. We ode them for blowing our minds. When we leave each other, we return to the world where literature, art, philosophy, humanities, and words don’t 'really matter’ — or matter instrumentally. But these moments are called upon in nights of despair, and we remember that we are not alone. Not entirely alone. Not utterly so.

Took walks and listened to music and scribbled things. Did not see any unicorns but thought about what a gem the Minutemen offered for teaching writing craft during neo-fascism for discussions about how the verb ‘acts upon; the noun, etc… The state, the church, the plans, the waste, the dead, what's the verb behind it all? The do, the how, the why, the where, the when, the what, can these words find the truth?


Make me think (take my head)
Sit me down
Fix a drink
— Archive “Take My Head”


PIGEON BREAK

A different M sits on the sun-slathered stairwell for introverts outside the convivial outdoor cafe area. I don’t recognize him while climbing to the top, in search of yesterday’s pigeons whom I hope to meet again. After I sit down, M comes up the stairs and introduces himself, apologizing —-as we all apologize, afraid to disturb each other— and the pleasure of putting a face to a name becomes mine. As he introduces himself, the warm goo of Los Angeles’ smoggy sun conspires with M to bring me the pleasure associated with meeting writers one admires at a literary conference. They are your interlocutors, your peers, and he has a fiction collection coming out from Dzanc in February. You are elated for him, and for yourself, as a reader. This is all you want: more literary forms that stray from the conventional. His ‘win’ is yours. The pie is never zero sum if you love reading as much as you love writing. You can’t wait for his book. The conversation drifts to the heartbreaking news of John Domini’s sudden death while traveling through Morocco with his wife. Both of us speak of his kindness and generosity as a critic, writer, memoirist, and human being —- before going silent, for it is unthinkable. Always unthinkable, even to those of us who imagine everything. It is never possible to fully accept that a human being who was still dreaming the future can be gone.




Sheer opportunity determines love, coincidence, local patriotism, and murder.
— Günther Ander

MY PSEUDO PET

The part where a free crocodile named Gorky from Deep Vellum wound up on my forehead. Literature is thriving! Literature is dying! Long live literature! I highly encourage all text-based mammals to join the Deep Vellum Book Club because you will love it and you don’t have to manifest a croc on thine forehead at all. That sort of bad behavior was bequeathed us by the New Critics and the neo-New Critics, who can afford to act badly because the author’s life has no bearing on the text (which is decidedly Anglo-Saxon since New Crit can’t develop a neutral and yet definitive reading when diacritics and brooches appear.



WITH MY LITTLE EYE

I saw some things. Here’s the part where I list them with no intervening apparatus. AZ was wearing a Minor Lit brooch! Okay, it was actually a pin on his lapel “but we cannot do decadence without getting hardcore about brooches,” I thought to myself while imagining AZ’s pin into a brooch without his knowledge or consent. I saw a blur of a tall, cool guy wearing all black whose name was surely Romeo right before we both screamed and I ran over and he picked me up like we were in a really bad Poets Reunite scene from a movie no director would ever screen. It made me so happy. The Malarkey table was wonderful and I gabbed with two writers whom I have been dying to meet and yet—- I did not die! We just chatted even though I had been dying to meet them and no one died at all which is always a miracle. JK made me laugh and we talked about simultaneous orgasms at the top of our vocal range in the cafeteria that served cold waffle fries. Not once did we descend to our ‘inside voices’ and it was a gift to hug OL who has the best bob in poetry and translation. RA HAS NOT CHANGED A BIT AND EVERY TIME WE GAB AT 100 MPS IN BROKEN ROMANIAN THE WORLD GLISTENS AND LOVES ITSELF MOMENTARILY. There was no good food to be had on site so many of us went off-site and hit up the taco trucks or got drinks with maraschino cherries in them. I spoke to exactly 23 of the 189 people I hoped so much to hug which is nothing to boast about at all. I hugged Jill and signed books and we chatted about listening to Tin Tin on audio to improve French language skills. Jad and Dina warmed my whole heart; it was as if they put leg warmers on my aorta and I was elated to chat with them, however briefly. Same for Len and Robert: tiny explosions inside my ribcage. An excess of laughter and foolishness. I am leaving so many humans and encounters out of my little eye list . . .


FIRST SIGNING

Just before I started signing the first copes of My Heresies; LA and Kristen took photos and once could not ask for a more beautiful signing experience. Thank you to the many humans who showed up and purchased books and introduced themselves and brought so much joy into my day. Absolutely gobsmacked to meet fellow Romanian writers.

On the bus, okay, don't say "hi" then
Your tongue, your transfer
— The Replacements, “On the Bus”

THE SMOKE ALARM

On the second night, likely as a result of laughing too much earlier, I am roused from a strange dream by a fire alarm blaring through the hotel loudspeaker. The clock reads 5:18 am (or 5:33, my memories argue amongst themselves like in-laws) and the uncanny part is that the interrupted dream is about fire, which is to say, I dreamt one of the usual Joan of Arc variations that has visited me since childhood. Some parts are the same: the feeling of my hands being tied to a hard thing behind my back, and something atop my head that I can’t read—-something that all the people watching can read and know about me which I cannot learn, lacking hands. Again, that feeling of staring through very hot streams of orange and blue, trying to discern a friend in the masses of people standing and watching. This time, however, it is especially difficult to see through the flames and smoke. My eyes sting. I keep blinking. If I try to speak, smoke fills my lungs and I choke, cough, gasp. There is a familiar figure in the front. I focus on him and squinting in an effort to see his eyes. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m sorry for this spectacle.” Everything stings now—-my calves, my arms— and I accept that there is no way he can hear me. After cursing briefly, likely for the last time in my life, I apologize to the book I will never finish, a creature that is as real to me as the books I have finished. Particularly the books I burned. No one is as alive to me as the books I burned to cinder. But now, I am burning (again) and the fire alarm beeps. It goes off again but there is no smoke. K seems to sleeping and I debate whether to wake her. I lay there and stare at the ceiling, surveying my options. We are on the 14th floor, an even number, a number divisible by two and therefore very unlucky, if my past has any bearing on the present. A man’s voice announces that the fire alarm was a “mistake” without specifying the nature of this mistake so I stare at the ceiling a bit longer and try to imagine the mistake, itself.

My favorite skyscraper in downtown L.A. Imagine the skill and effort it took to tag these walls so perfectly. Cheers to the creators of this anti-Chambers of Commerce collaborative mural! Cheers to the birds who live in the eaves! Cheers to the pigeons who congress there!

READINGS & STACKS

I can’t even detail the Asterism Reading and Midwestern Prose Reading here. I simply cannot. They were fabulous and I will do so later— in a post where I also share the books that required me to leave behind a few shirts and socks. It comes to my attention that I have shared almost nothing of what happened of the past five days. A whirlwind. Still reeling from the kindness and love and generosity of my peers. . . and moving towards the things that keep me up at night.

En-vois.

“Doubtless, we are several, and I am not as alone as I sometimes say . . .”

— Jacques Derrida, Envois 


I

I will begin by identifying an interlocutor named “Jeremy Stewart”, whose book, I, Daniel: An Illegitimate Reading of Jacques Derrida's 'Envois', cites Derrida — “Doubtless, we are several, and I am not as alone as I sometimes say . . .”— page 107. I will begin with a name, a text, and a quotation while acknowledging that my “I” includes others. One of these others took a photo of the above passage a few years ago when poring through Derrida’s Envois, and perhaps it was she who recognized Jeremy’s quotation.

On the same day, a framed photograph fell off the wall and the glass shattered all over the hardwood. I took a photo of this as well, and worked it into a poem that will be published in a book at the end of next month. When coming across Jeremy’s quotation, “recognition” occurred as an immediate perceptual awareness of absence. I felt something was missing, and the feeling chased me into a lingering and somewhat corrosive curiosity. I took my dog for a walk and remembered the photo. Having admitted these coincidences (the photo of the quotation and the broken photo frame), I won’t “begin” again. There is no reason to convince you that beginnings must be rich and verbose. Nothing immaculate exists. No immaculate is actual. “I know what this costs.”


II

In writing about books I have read, or books I have written, or projected works in draft, it is easy to confuse what I have said publicly—- whether spoken or published— with what I have written and left unfinished. There are traces of such things, and it hurts (stings, smarts, burns) to discover that the words remain hidden in my notebooks, severaled in silence.

Uncertainty is where relationship possibilitizes itself, as such, every relationship of value alters its subjects irrevocably, giving them a knowledge that could not have been gained elsewhere. A knowledge about themselves. The touch deforms us, and thus makes us more real, laying the weight of the world in proximity to our bodies and our experience of embodiment. To be touched by another simultaneously wounds us and recreates us.

Derrida said something similar of poetry in a late essay: “No poem without accident, no poem that does not open itself like a wound, but no poem that is not also just as wounding. You will call the poem a silent incantation, the aphonic wound that, of you, from you, I want to learn by heart… The poem falls to me, benediction, coming of (of from) the other.”

Traces allude to the wound without speaking for the wound, or evidencing it. The trace is not a presence so much as “simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself.” A simulacrum is a representation or imitation of a person or thing.


III

Speaking of inheritance, Derrida: “In my anticipation of death, in my relation to a death to come, a death that I know will completely annihilate me and leave nothing of me behind, there is just below the surface a testamentary desire, a desire that something survive, get left behind or passed on—an  inheritance or something that I myself can lay no claim to, that will not return to me, but that will, perhaps, remain.”


IV

Dear reader, forget the photos. Pretend I didn’t mention them. But don’t forget that I lied to you when I scoffed at beginnings and repetition. And don’t forget how I defined recognition in relation to the secret I may have kept.

V

With dinner guests due to arrive in a few hours, I sat in my car in a parking lot where no one could find me and read Peggy Kamuf's essay, "A plus d'un titre," alongside Jeremy’s fabulous monograph, both of which led me to the uncanny moment on September 22, 2001, when Derrida was awarded the Theodore W. Adorno prize in Frankfurt, on this pseudo-date (since the prize was traditionally awarded on September 11 to coincide with Adorno's birthday, which, in this case, coincided with al Qaeda's attack on the World Trade Center in New York). 

It was cold in the car, cold enough to warrant gloves and earmuffs, an accessory situation that deranged my note-taking efforts, forcing me to consign some thoughts to memory, most of which did not make it through dinner and the evening. Awarded every three years, the Adorno Prize recognizes work ‘in the spirit of the Frankfurt school’ that spans philosophy, social sciences and the arts. None transgressed these boundaries as consistently and kookily as Jacques Derrida, who, in Tympan, insisted that "it is about this multiplicity, perhaps, that philosophy, being itself situated, inscribed and included there, has never been able to reason."

The multiplicity and polyvocality appears in countless texts, including the post-scriptum of On the Name, where Derrida amends his statement about speech, writing, "More than one, forgive me, one must always be more than one in order to speak, there must be several voices…"

On September 20, 2001, looking out at the audience in Frankfurt, Derrida began his speech, “The language of the foreigner” (as translated by Lucie Elvenin), by recounting a dream spoken by a different voice, a spectre that haunted his own work as well as that of the Frankfurt school. He does this for many reasons, but one of them involves language, particularly the connection between Derrida's French and Walter Benjamin's German. Both men, in this scenario, use languages that are not their 'first languages' in order to communicate an insight. Both men indirectly pose questions about fidelity to language in doing so. 

“To open this modest statement of my gratitude, I will read a phrase, which one day, one night, Walter Benjamin dreamt in French,” Derrida tells his audience, adding that Benjamin “entrusted it in French” to Gretel Adorno, who had become the wife of Theodor Adorno by the time this letter was addressed to her on 12 October 1939. Walter and Gretel carried on a lively correspondence prior to her marriage, and those letters to Gretel Karplus present us with a richer, more flirtatious slant of both persons. But when Benjamin wrote the quoted letter to Gretel, he was interned in what the French authorities called “a camp de travailleurs voluntaires (voluntary workers’ camp),” as Derrida says, and the banality of that arrangement might have lent the dream a more “euphoric” tone. 

In this dream, as described by Derrida, Benjamin said the following to himself in French: “Il s’agissait de changer en fichu une poésie” which Elvenin translates as “It was a case of turning poetry into a kerchief”. But Benjamin “translated this as: Es handelte sich darum, aus einem Gedicht ein Halstuch zu machen,” Derrida says, sharing this German translation with his audience, subtly shifting the terms of his address, while adding that “later we will touch on this ‘fichu’, this kerchief or scarf.” And then — notice how he continues with this plural pronoun— “We will discern in it the letter of the alphabet that Benjamin thought he recognised in his dream. And ‘fichu’, as we will come to, is not any old French word to denote a muffler, shawl or women’s scarf.” 

Briefly, Derrida discourses on the 'fichu', a word which “means different things according to whether it is being used as a noun or adjective”:

The fichu – and this is the most obvious meaning in Benjamin’s sentence – designates a shawl, the piece of material that a woman may put on in a hurry, around her head or neck. But the adjective fichu denotes evil: that which is bad, lost, condemned. One day in September 1970, seeing his death approaching, my sick father said to me, ‘I'm fichu.’

After drawing the correspondence between his father's use of the handkerchief to say, ‘I'm fed up with it,’ Derrida addresses his audience: “Do we always dream in bed, at night? Are we responsible for our dreams? Can we answer for them? Suppose I am dreaming now. My dream is a happy one, like Benjamin’s.” Using the plural pronoun gathers the audience into the questions, or makes them, so to speak, answerable for the response. The coincidences here are the name and the date, to quote Paul Celan, namely, that the Adorno Prize itself was to occur on Adorno's birthday, September 11th, which in that year coincided with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

“I feel I am dreaming—” Derrida tells the audience. To 'feel' that one is dreaming plies the difference between dream and recognition: who am I when I see myself dreaming and what relationship can be said to exist between my dreaming and my personhood? In gently touching this sense of disbelief, Derrida insinuates that the affect isn't limited to the dream as such but related to the confusion between dream and reality, as he seems to suggest in the next line, “Even if the highwayman or the smuggler doesn’t deserve what is happening to him — like the poor student in a Kafka story who believes himself to be called, like Abraham, to the seat reserved for the first in the class — his dream seems happy. Like mine.”

After drawing himself into the Kafka story, and creating parallels between dreams in Prague and dreams along Mount Moriah, Derrida addresses the audience in a series of questions that alight from each other like reflections of pebbling skipping across a lake’s surface. “What is the difference between dreaming and believing that we are dreaming?” Derrida asks the audience:

And, anyway, who has the right to ask that question? The dreamer, plunged deep in his experience of the night, or the dreamer who has woken up? Would a dreamer be able to speak about his dream without waking? Would he know how to name the dream at all? Would he know how to analyse it fairly and even to use the word ‘dream’ knowingly without interrupting and betraying – yes, betraying – sleep?"

[* These happy-seeming dreams remind me of a conversation between Ernest Bloch and Theodor Adorno about utopia. I'm making a note to come back to it later, if the right corridor appears.]


V

Derrida in Archive Fever.

“A phantom can be thus sensitive to idiom,” Derrida said of the ghosted.

In a note to his Adorno Prize speech, Derrida mentions “an odd coincidence”, namely, the co-incidence of Adorno’s birthday with the September 11 attack by al-Quaeda, which meant that a ceremony honoring the anniversary of a birthday had been postponed due to the prize-winner (Derrida) being in Shanghai. The images of fear and mass murder would be permanently linked to this particular date, a date that connected Adorno to Derrida. “A coincidence of anniversary dates is nothing very odd at all, as Derrida points out in ‘Shibboleth’,” Kamuf writes. What stands out is “the coincidence of coincidences, the more than one coincidence that deserves remark and casts an uncanny shadow in ‘Fichus’.”

Derrida’s notes are notable for how they haunt his writings. One could write a book on less; paratext and punctuation (the asterisk, the footnote, the parenthetical, etc.) are the hauntological grammar of the text. They say what gets ghosted by post-Cartesian philosophy. The plurality of selfhood runs in tandem with the plurality of textual devices that memorialize what is missing, or what academic convention prefers to consign to the dustbin of history due to its overly-speculative nature.

Speculation, the speculative, is specular. It plays with light and mirrors. Physics tells us that specular reflection— the name for any ordinary reflection— is “the mirror-like reflection of waves, such as light, from a surface.”




VI

“By leaving this title in the plural and without article I was making a supplementary and still more equivocal use of the ‘s’ that could cover or include the three uses of the word and highlight the possible plurality of these uses, citing them in advance, as it were.” 

— Derrida, Memoirs for Paul de Man

The supplementary in Derrida’s explanation of his plural (or ‘severaled’) titling for Mémoires for Paul de Man calls to mind a passage in Javier Marias' novel, The Man of Feeling, where the protagonist reproaches his live-in girlfriend for abandoning him as he sleeps, allowing him to sleep unmolested, unattended, open to dreams, at risk of dreaming and becoming subject to dreams— which, of course, is the conceit of the novel itself that opens as a dream in a train. The difference between the artist and the philosopher is their response to this question, for where the philosopher refuses the dream, the poet wavers, pauses, allowing the dream to speak, and risking its dangerous influence. 

Poets and artists “would acquiesce to the event, and to its exceptional singularity: yes, maybe we can believe and admit that we are dreaming without waking; yes, it is not impossible, sometimes, to say, while sleeping, with our eyes closed or wide open, something like a truth that issues from dreaming, a dream’s meaning and reason, which deserves not to sink into the night of nothingness,” Derrida tells us. Night verges on the abyssal— a space that philosophy often consigns to metaphysics, or to the flaky side of life. And here is where Derrida elects to name Adorno himself, drawing "that lucidity, that light, this Aufklärung of a dreamy discourse on dreams" towards the man whose birth is noted on this date: 


“A passage from Minima Moralia reminds us of this,” Derrida continues, adding that he has chosen the passage for two reasons, the first being that “in it Adorno says that the most beautiful dreams are spoilt, harmed, mutilated, ‘damaged’ (besachädigt), hurt by the waking consciousness that tells us that they are pure-seeming (Schein) in the eyes of reality (Wirklichkeit).” And what stands out to Derrida is the coincidence of the hurt Adorno mentions, this beschädigt that also appears in the book's subtitle, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben.

Prying at this difference in use, this distance in signification, Derrida deconstructs the title to indicate “not ‘reflections on’ a life that has been hurt, harmed, damaged or mutilated, but ‘reflections from’ such a life, aus dem beschädigten Leben: reflections marked by pain, signed with a wound.” 

“Signed with a wound.” — this phrase lies at the center of everything Derrida does, as well as the parts of his language that get folded into lyrical works attempting to gloss his pain without addressing it directly. Like Jean Genet and Artaud, the wound is the site that language returns to as well as the fuel for creation. We are of course talking about circumcision, and his complicated relationship with sacrificial rituals that mark one as a ‘member’ of a group. To my knowledge, Derrida is the only cigar-smoking Parisian flaneur of the solitary attic to theorize his refusal to have his own son circumcised? Given the proper future anterior, Kierkegaard would have good reason to envy what Derrida dared.



VII

“I recognize that I love — you — by this: . . . “

A statement Derrida makes in The Postcard, presumably directed towards Christine, his lover, the mother of his son, his mistress, his fin, or en-fin, perhaps. French is lovely that way: it allows the mind to burrow into the abstract noun, to feel it closer to the flesh, and even to visualize it.

En-voi.

En-fin.

This recognition of the irreplaceable wound is how Derrida conceptualized relationships. You can see this in his later texts on friendship as well as the posthumous collection of his elegies that his own peers and friends published after his death. I recognize that you are gone and no one can replace you. No one can be you to me. Never again.

The practice of dedication speaks to this act of naming, drawing a line within text that takes up direction, or moves towards a particular name. Adorno dedicated Minima Moralia to Felix Horkheimer, who would become his partner in theory when they returned to Germany to establish the ‘Frankfurt School’, as well as the co-author of their unfinished Negative Dialectic. In his Adorno Prize lecture, Derrida raises the book’s dedication alongside the title, adding the dedication “explains that its form was influenced by private life and the painful condition of the ‘emigré intellectual’." The second reason he chose this passage — a passage he has still not spoken or revealed— is to "pay homage today to those who instituted the Adorno Prize and respect a certain spirit" that Derrida names as Adorno's "most beautiful legacy," namely, "this theatrical fragment makes philosophy appear in one single act, on one same stage before all other forms."

This series of thirteen en-vois will be continued, as soon as I get a chance to type my notes…

APPARATUS

Jacques Derrida.
‘Fichus: Frankfurt Address’, trans. Rachel Bowlby, in Paper Machine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Mémoires for Paul de Man, rev. ed., trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
‘Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum)’, trans. John P. Leavery, Jr., in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
‘Shibboleth: For Paul Celan’, trans. Joshua Wilner, rev. Thoamns Dutoit, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Dutoit and Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).
‘Tympan’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans., with additional notes, by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

"Recommence"

Begin again.

Alternately: start it up, where “up” indicates a wheel-like structure that moves across terrain when fueled by gasoline and shut it down means stopping the cycle.

Additionally: surrealism’s “eroticism” dictionary of hand signals which ends by resuming, and using the sign to indicate both an action and a procedural motion.

The 27 expressions iconized above remind me of Erik Satie’s furniture music, but also of Fugazi’s furniture demo, and of the word, mobile, in French . . .

. . . or the possibilities that connect to immobilization, “mobila” (in Romanian, furniture), telephone mobile (mobile phone), and mobile phones in general… Because phones can walk now and what a shame that I only happened upon Satie’s prefiguration of this today.

Nefariously, it has come to my attention that I am very very behind on emails, a fact that I can only excuse by noting that it takes me a long time to figure out how to respond to the level of fluxus on display below:

What I admire about this poem is the use of mixed dictions and colloquialisms. What I rue is the “Wedding” that wants to be a gnosis. Thoughts and prayers to the nada! To thine own catalyzer, be true— even if it is number 15 on the surrealist chart.

Variations on Tzara's circus.

Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!" What does one do with all this crap?

— Jack Spicer, Second Letter to Lorca

Reading Tristan Tzara’s “Circus,” as translated by Mary Ann Caws, and noticing how frequently he moves from sound to sound, riffing off the homophones and shared energies.

All the colors above are mine, a facet of my plays with language, a subset of looking for pulses that stretch through translations.

Some words cling to each other, and this attachment isn’t a relationship of correspondence so much as a friction that holds possibility to destabilize the separate meanings. One can hear the syllables inching towards each other, at which point the compositional question for the poet becomes one of proximity. Should you, for example, spread out the alliterative nouns across the stanza in order to let them call each other across the field? Or you should you put them in the same line and let them wreak a slight havoc on the senses?

Dada aimed to dissolve binaries.

Tzara’s existence in multiple languages often played into the misunderstanding of idioms and expressions. He kept lists of words and often started a poem from a word-list, looking for the sonic interaction between words, not quite “mining the gaps” (as Rosmarie Waldrop does) but exploding them.

To play with finding a triptych. To pretend that such things are “found”, and “founded.” To go for three as the foundational element.

Only my soul again, a studio of paper. Forgive me: uncontrolled drum beats, guilty hand. My heart lengthens with the subtlest inflection. Look for it. Here.

I have not forgotten my mother. It is you, in all the somewhere surging forth from the criticism. The velvet is that ringing.

Poster the tick-tock and the glory.

The surrealist "truth game".

A few excerpts from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project on games:

On gambling; the less a man is imprisoned in the bonds of fate, the less he is determined by what lies nearest at hand. [014,3]

The ideal of the shock-engendered experience <Erlebnis> is the catastrophe. This becomes very clear in gambling; by constantly raising the stakes, in hopes of getting back what is lost, the gambler steers toward absolute ruin. [014,4]

Benjamin relied heavily on surrealist games for his concept of the “dialectical image,” and I shall post something coherent about that soon (maybe tomorrow), though not without sharing this humorous excerpt from Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Yves Tanguy, Benjamin Peret, Louis Aragon, etc playing the The Truth Game:

Technically, the surrealists never published any version of the Truth Game in their magazines or books. As Phillipe Audouin noted, the game wasn’t strictly ‘surrealist’, even though the surrealists played it constantly. The game “caused too many disagreements that were already too severe for anyone to consider worsening them by making them public,” Audouin said, adding that there was “a quasi-ritualistic stripping of those present, an ordeal to the symbolic death, and apparently, Levi-Strauss—several times called upon to participate in this awesome game — regarded it (according to Andre Breton) as equivalent to an initiation rite.” This sounds quite similar to the rituals that Georges Bataille would soon develop in the headless leadership and the events that occurred in the forest where the tree that had been struck by lightning waited for its secret society. Nevertheless, I include this next round of the truth game because it reads like a large cafe-scene of truth 0r dare, where the only dare is to answer honestly. . . even if the dare included be completely naked in an apartment elsewhere, a scene I leave to your imaginations.

Speaking of style as a means of expressing from within the given body, the brilliant Jeff Dolven noted that “a side effect of versatility, and sometimes of appetite, is caricatures, holding the other constant in order to be sure of escaping from yourself.” Consistency may be the “great lie of style,” the “constitutive . . . lie style always tells against the contradictions of desire.”

The contradictions of desire are always present in art; style has to be part of how that contradiction is expressed. I thought of a friend’s current project while reading Frank O’Hara’s “My Recess Self,” a poem that reveals the tension between asserting self-likeness and holding on to self-identity, which is lost. Identity is the slipperiest fish, perhaps because its performance is difficult to separate from the social games in which humans participate.

“A good game is one you can win,” Jeff Dolven quipped — but I beg to differ. A good game might be one for which the desire to win is replaced by love for the game as a reason for playing. (And one could argue about different modes of pleasure, comparing, for example, the pleasure of winning —which is a pleasure closely bound to identity, or how we see ourselves as seen by others— to the pleasure of getting lost in the playing of the game— a state bordering on the ecstasy of dancing in a crowd, where what we love and enjoy is that feeling of embodiment without the commitment and boundedness of identity.

Disco makes us feel free-ish, to paraphrase Richard Dyer’s “In Defense of Disco” (and to thank Nate Holdren and Jeff Melnick for leading me to it, and giving me a way to think about love of dancing). Embodiment is precisely what late capitalism refuses to grant us. In our perpetual alienation from the body, as socialized by market cultures that cultivate excessive self-consciousness and hyper-awareness of comparison, there are few opportunities for ecstasy in groups. College football, soccer, baseball, Olympics— the public events that provide opportunities for unbounded pleasure or ‘getting lost’ are not erotic. They are simply competitive and we celebrate the thrill of being on the winning side. But what do we feel, physically, in our bodies, when the desired team wins?

Dancing in a crowd isn’t competitive: there is no winner, no win, no game apart from the playing. Maybe there is a way to speak about style that narrows in on the particular shape that our love for the game (or our en-gamement) takes when we play it?

How to explain the affinity one feels when reading O’Hara’s “My Recess Self”? Part of it— the part that has little to do with the particulars of the “I” making such a claim— would be O’Hara’s style, or the way in which playfulness drives his turns and ripples through his syntax. He flirts, which is to say, he makes us feel that something relational is at stake in the unfolding of the poem. He calls us into that charged space where secrets get overheard or accidentally spoken, and that energy develops tension from his use of grandiose rhetorical gestures alongside the sheepish grin of his self-effacements. And yet, there are no “dialectical images” that looms through O’Hara’s poems, partly because the self-mockery (or that particular game of impersonation that he plays in both life and on paper) is, itself, dialectical.

I’m not sure how to phrase what I’m thinking. . . so I am leaving this note to myself and to the void in case words alight on the seat of my brain’s bicycle seat the way bees buttered the seat in Meret Oppenheim’s found object.

The Truth Game is excerpted from A Book of Surrealist Games published by Shambhala Press.

Mesmerized by Elias Khoury.

“Thinking about imperial violence in terms of a camera shutter means grasping its particular brevity and the spectrum of its rapidity. It means understanding how this brief operation can transform an individual rooted in her life-world into a refugee, a looted object into a work of art, a whole shared world into a thing of the past, and the past itself into a separate time zone, a tense that lies apart from both present and future.”

— Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (as quoted by Guy Mannes-Abbott)

“In the light of Spivak’s invocation of the ‘epistemic violence’ operating in colonialist subject production, the works of Akhter and Ferdous could arguably be read as not only refusing the voicelessness of the subaltern, but also as participating in a decolonial project of epistemic counterviolence.”

— Tom Holert, “Epistemic Violence and the Careful Photograph”

1

In cinematography, DIRECTING THE EYE refers to using frame composition, camera movement, or lighting to make clear what is most important in the frame.

I am thinking about Andrew Davies' translation of Elias Khoury's The Children of the Ghetto: II: Star of the Sea, a book which took my breath away. Sonorous language makes it easy to get lost in the lyric of the Lebanese-born Khoury's efforts to make literature a conduit for stories and lives deprived of archives, particularly those of Palestinian refugees in camps near his hometown, and I said as much— though not enough— in my thoughts on the Barrios Prize finalists. Alas, I did not have a chance to say there what I will say now, namely, that one of the particular gifts of the past year has involved reading almost a hundred books in translation that were possible contenders for the National Book Critics Circle’s Barrios Prize, as led by Mandana Chaffa.

The shutter blinks, stutters, tries to focus . . . multiple lacunae distract the pen. This is where the panorama comes in, as opportunity to step back from the thing evading definition. In Star of the Sea, Khoury leverages narrativity to reveal the voices disinherited from their history by the Nabka. Rather than 'tell' the story, he shows us how the story has 'been told', in fragments and broken shards, in shame and terror, in hope and desperation. Each story opens into other tales, voices, and places; every proper noun links to another noun that has gone missing.

Al-Tantura, occupied on May 23, 1948.

The novel’s fifteen-year-old protagonist, Adam Dannoun, is a child of "the ghetto", one of the strategic containment areas created by Israel's army to set Palestinians apart from Israeli citizens.  To be a child of the ghetto is to vanish before existing in the language of modernity and nation-state hegemony. 

What the poet Mahmoud Darwish called "the presence of absence" echoes through Adam's life, as well as Khoury's narration, where the speaker is both present and absent, there and not-there—- and yet one feels so deeply entangled in Adam's efforts to find an identity that enables him to live, to exist, to speak as an "I" with a history. The author takes the “present absentee” of apartheid into himself, and works this self-ghosting into the third person point-of-view.

To draw loosely on Paul Celan, the name and the date mark us. The name and the date situate the text and turn it into a memorial site, a ghost-citation. Star of the Sea takes place in the 1960's in Haifa, where the scent of the ocean reaches across the rocks and shapes the imaginary, the identities available to Palestinian youth were premised on non-existence, on subterfuge and lying. No part of life, whether food, travel, education, marriage, was safe from this. Adam must be whatever Israelis need in order to continue living, and it is literature, in the end, that sets him on a path of confrontation with the self he constructs, a self fashioned from self-identification with Israeli Jewish citizens. He knows this, consciously—just as the Israelis around him know him, subconsciously.


2

Pronouns in Arabic are extraordinarily supple, unmatched in any other language. The written letters that take a person’s place are called “consciences”, but since the conscience is also an invisible  moral compass, how can a novelist write using the conscience of one who is absent? And finally, what does its corollary—that the conscience must be absent in order for a person to tell their story really mean?

— Elias Khoury, My Name Is Adam (translated by Humphrey Davies)

Technically, one should begin with My Name Is Adam, the first book in Khoury’s “Children of the Ghetto” trilogy, which is precisely what my ever-insightful peer, Joseph Schreiber, does in a recent review. (I highly recommend reading it for a richer context.)

Once upon a time, there was a man. He opened his eyes and realized he lived in a garden. A god named him Adam. His author created a world that begins on the day of Adam’s birth in 1948. From the very beginning of My Name Is Adam, narration is problematized: the book consists of a scattered, unpolished manuscript written by Adam Dannoun, a Palestinian man in New York City who died before finishing his attempted novel. After Adam's death, Elias Khoury decides to publish the manuscript; he is, after all, implicated in its beginning. Adam never intended to write a book about his past in Palestine; he did everything to disconnect from what he had fled. He hides from history only to discover himself found by it. Adam changes his mind as a result of "two events—the screening of a film based on Khoury’s famous novel Gate of the Sun, and a conversation with a man he has not seen since he was seven years old," to quote Joseph.

A film and a conversation lead him Adam to commit to writing his life, a sort of self-narration that develops into a novel shaped by his relationship to the present. Archives and official history say little about the Palestinian experience in 1948, the year of Adam’s birth. Time, history, names, textbooks—- all conspire to erase the dispossessions that followed. The nature of narration is warped by what poet Mahmoud Darwish called “the presence of absence,” a way of seeing that inflects Adam's gaze when he looks back at his homeland. Memory mistrusts itself; the child cannot find words for the experience of the ongoing Nakba. 

The title of the trilogy foregrounds this disinheritance: Khoury's subject is the resident Arab children who experienced physical, linguistic, economic, and social containment in what Zionist soldiers named a “ghetto.” To be a child of the ghetto is to vanish before existing in the language of modernity and nation-state hegemony.

Who is the ‘author’ here? Is it Adam disinherited from telling his own history, or the well-established Arabic novelist who feels driven to get it published?

Joseph mentions that Khoury's custodial role in (and of) Adam's novel is "assumed to be understood, but not mentioned" in the trilogy's second volume, Star of the Sea. Since my experience with this trilogy began in a disorderly fashion, namely, by beginning with the second volume, I can honestly say that the book felt complete to me. Khoury's narrative strategy moved seamlessly through its self-ghosting, and nothing about the book necessitated a precursor, to my reading. There is no information that Star of the Sea lacks in order to succeed as literature. Having read the first volume late last year, part of me still wonders if the second volume isn't a better first volume for this trilogy whose third volume remains (as of yet, to my knowledge) untranslated?

3

An ASYNCHRONOUS situation occurs when audio tracks are out of unison with the visuals in the frame, whether intentional or accidental.

Palestinians leave Haifa after Zionist forces enter the city, April 21, 1948. Source.

Khoury named his maternal grandmother as "the most important person in his life"— for she was the one who storytold the family history and gave the young Khoury a sense of narrative lineage. He said this in an extraordinary “Art of Fiction” interview for The Paris Review, to which I owe much of this information, as well as the living description of Khoury as a conversationalist given to stories “told in a low rumble, textured by decades of smoking Marlboros—which frequently end with him slapping the table and laughing. His anecdotes, often about fellow Arab writers, show his love of the mildly scandalous or seriously blasphemous. Khoury also enjoys an argument. When posed with a question, his impulse is often to correct or disagree with its premises.”

After mentioning his grandmother, Khoury quotes from one of his own novels, namely, Gate of the Sun, the novel whose film version inspired ‘Adam’ to write the first book in this trilogy. “My grandmother used to tell me stories as though she were tearing them into shreds; instead of gathering them together, she’d rip them apart,” says the protagonist of Gate of the Sun. Perhaps this gestures towards an explanation for the haphazard shape of My Name Is Adam, a book relying on the memories of a child (whose own experience is frequently narrated to him by elders) to reconstitute a history. 

To add to the intertextual richness, Khoury titled Gate of the Sun after Ghassan Kanafani's Men of the Sun, a novel that consumed him in 1963, when it was first released. Later, while working in Beirut for the Palestine Research Center and its journal, Palestinian Affairs, Khoury met Kanafani, who was writing for the PFLP-associated paper, Al-Hadaf.  Kanafani wrote like one who knew he didn't have long for this world. "He smoked nonstop and drank coffee and whiskey and was always writing something—journalism, novels, essays, children’s books, plays," Khoury said. Ultimately, Mossad assassinated Kanafani in a 1982 car bomb attack which blew his body to bits, leaving his friends to "gather the limbs off the sidewalk," as Khoury said. 

Unlike Kanafani, whose novels condense and narrate, Khoury tended to work against brevity and clarity by expanding and drawing very close to the interior states of his characters. The most important part wasn’t the hero or narrative arc but rather the sidereal, Khoury said, in “the marginal detail or side story that we have to come to recognize as central.”

4

“The question keeping the writer of these stories awake at night is the following: how can the absentee write? Can they tell their own story using “I,” thereby writing as though remembering? Or should they employ the third person to write in their place?”

— Elias Khoury, My Name Is Adam (translated by Humphrey Davies)

Khoury’s novel, Little Mountain, was published in 1977, two years after the start of the Lebanese civil war. Although Khoury fought with the fedayeen during the first two years of the war, he insisted that the book was "not a memoir" but an act of imagination. The places may be real, but “the events are made up.” After he finished writing it, Khoury was mystified by genre and didn't know how to classify it. “I still have that feeling whenever I sit down to write that I don’t know how to do it, that I have to learn to write all over again,” he told an interviewer. What he knew—and continued to believe—was that Arabic literature needed to move away from its nineteenth century commitment to historical novels. “We needed to write things as they happened, to tell the story of the present.”

“I had no model,” Khoury said of Little Mountain, "I wrote like a blind man—”

5

There is a sensuousness that overtakes Khoury’s narratives—- the scent of the fruits, trees, salt on skin—- the particular enchantment of his phrasing. Khoury “writes about the scent of words, which take on such immaterial qualities that writing itself works like a sixth sense in his fiction,” Guy Mannes-Abbot said in his splendid review of As Though She Were Sleeping. I can’t think of a better way to describe Khoury’s structure of intersecting narrative circles than the one offered by Guy:

6

THE FOURTH WALL is the illusory, imaginary plane through which the audience is able to watch the film. The fourth wall is what gets broken when the audience is reminded that they are watching a film.

Elias Khoury’s experience with the fedayeen served as “a kind of training for life, and for death: which “required the utmost ethical commitment and the ability to see things critically, even at times ironically.” As he explained in the Paris Review interview, he did what felt necessary and what seemed clear based on the things he had witnessed. “For me the issue was straightforward— Palestinians have a right to their country and the refugees have a right to return to their land,” he said. The political specifics were tactical questions, but the conflict itself was “an ethical issue”: When you have a victim in front of you, you must identify yourself with the victim, not just show solidarity.”

What does identifying with the victim mean to Khoury? He considers himself an Arab, and thus refuses to identify 'as a 'Christian' minority in Lebanon, adding that “one’s religious heritage is essentially a literary heritage.” If he had been raised a Muslim, he would have written his books “in exactly the same way as I have,” Khoury told the interviewer.

What is the difference between identifying with and identifying as?

The question seems simple, but Khoury troubles the easy answer in Star of the Sea, which introduces us to a post-pubescent, fifteen-year-old Adam. It is now 1963, and Adam cannot bear watching his stepfather abuse his mother any longer. It is too much: he can hardly control his urge to defend her physically. He has to leave.

In a moving scene, Adam's mother seeks a goodbye from her son as he prepares to flee into the darkness. She gives him a parting deed: his father's will and testament. But which courts will acknowledge these documents? Who is in the position to judge or adjudicate the future of a disinherited teen?

As a runaway, or a human in exile from his family and community, Adam has no legible history. His future will involve creating a cover story that enables him to live safely, to become a person, to build his own home and future. But a cover story is not the same thing as a life.

Seeking work, Adam gets lucky when Gabriel, a Polish Jew who picks him up while hitchhiking, offers him a job as a mechanic in his garage. Gabriel is drawn to Adam because he resembles his fair-haired, light-skinned younger brother who is no longer living. He gives him a place to live, helps him get into a Jewish school, and Adam responds by changing himself to fit Gabriel's imaginary. Adam's survival depends on being what Gabriel needs him to be. Adam changes his name from Dannoun to Danon and learns Hebrew. In Khoury's words (which Joseph typed):

If the heroes of novels could break through the fourth wall (page) and speak without an intermediary, then Adam could very well have told his story not as the invisible man, but a man formed from his imagination. And indeed he had imagined an entire personality that both matched his true nature and was completely different. From the moment he left his mother’s house on the night of the rain, Adam realized that he could represent himself however he wanted by using certain true events to create a compelling background.

Open into room where Khoury is speaking with the interviewer again, parsing the distance between imagining the self as a writer and identifying as a writer. He names a book as transformative in his development.

Correction: he names the relationship he formed with this book as transformative. Khoury began thinking of himself as a writer after reading Albert Camus’s The Stranger and realizing that he had read it so closely and intensely, read it the way a lover reads the beloved's body, that he knew it "by heart." 

Like the poets I saw in a panel at NOLA, Khoury brought the poems he loved into his body, creating a repertoire of memorized poems: 

“I used to memorize huge amounts of modern poetry in Arabic—Adonis, al-Sayyab, Khalil Hawi. I didn’t study them, I memorized them. And after I memorized The Stranger, I felt like I was actually the author. The book became a part of me, it was inside me. This happened every time I read a book I really loved. My sense wasn’t that I wanted to write something similar to what I’d read—no, my sense was that the book had entered me and that I was its author. I became obsessed with literature. Even when I was training in Syria, I brought novels with me to read.”

When Emile Habibi asked why he chose to give his characters Christian or Muslim names, Khoury told him that was out of a fidelity to their society, where one can often recognize a person's religion by their name. Habibi gave his characters neutral names, and Khoury pointed out: "Your own name isn’t neutral, it’s Emile! Are you going to change that?"

7

Repetition is, I might say, a way of insisting that every story contains many stories inside it. The same story can be told in any number of different ways, of course. My novels try to suggest this richness, even though I can tell only a limited number of versions. In other words, I’m a student of Scheherazade—I don’t tell the story, I tell how the story has been told. There’s an important difference here. The whole tradition of Arabic literature teaches us how ­important it is. All classical texts tell us that there’s a prior authority or source for the story about to be told. There’s always a chain of transmitters, or translators, even though each version differs. And in Arabic, the word for “novel,” riwaya, also means “version.” In this sense, there’s no such thing as pure repetition. To write multiple versions of the same story is to suggest that every story is a form of potential, an opening onto other stories. 

Literature cannot be a compensation for history, but it can point to an ­absence. It’s a form of accusation, if you like. [ … ] The novel indicates what isn’t there.

— Elias Khoury, “The Art of Fiction Interview”

Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, West Bank.

A Palestinian girl carries her laptop as she walks past a mural of Ghassan Kanafani, the writer and leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, West Bank on May 12, 2018, as photographed by Anna Paq.

Red threads its way through this photograph, joining the Arabic inscription on the wall to the red laptop case carried by the girl and then climbing, quietly, towards the upper left corner of the frame where the evergreen magnolia bursts over the side of the wall, revealing two ruddy seed cones, poking upwards. I noticed it perhaps because the velour laptop case shares a velvety texture with that seed cone… and then catches the shirt of the boy riding the bike down the alley.

As part of his continuing effort to “write the present”, Khoury published an essay collection titled The Continuous Nakba in the year before his death . . .


8

While studying in Paris, Khoury attended some of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France; several auditoriums had to be opened to accommodate the crowds. Like Gen X teens camping outside the box office to get teens for a rock concert, Khoury says he and friends would arrive “three or four hours early with our ­sandwiches” in the hopes of scoring good seats. “Foucault was like a wizard, so erudite. No one dared to ask him a question after he finished lecturing.”

9

“It’s not true that the dying don’t know; if they didn’t, death would lose its meaning and become like a dream. When death loses its meaning, life loses its meaning, and we enter a labyrinth from which there is no exit.”

— Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun (translated by Humphrey Davies)

To return to The Star of the Sea— the man who gives Adam his job, the Polish Jew named Gabriel, has a daughter named Rivka. And perhaps there is an Eden in this, for she becomes Adam's first love. Both of them depend on the same man, the same god, as it were, the king of the garden. The rules were put in place before the birth of the lovers—and all that remains is for them to “sin,” or to upset the order of the garden where what is known is known solely by Gabriel.

Of course Khoury selects the name Gabriel to evoke to angel that appears that offers respite, and it is a testament to Khoury’s brilliance that he plays mythical characters and religious figures against each other continuously, complicating the scriptures themselves as part of the narrative strategy. In these religions of the book offered by monotheism, humans are given a world created by the authors. This is what good fiction does: it creates a believable world that sucks us into its topography and conventions. So Adam lives there, in Haifa, under an assumed Israeli identity, an existence that depends entirely on the goodwill and complete trust of Gabriel.

To Israel and the IDF, the Adam inherited from his father’s will and testament— the Adam on paper— is an Arab, a foreigner, a potential threat. In an effort to understand his oppressors, Adam becomes a student of Hebrew Literature and comes under the mentorship of a German-born professor, whose passion for literature inspires him. The class takes a trip to Warsaw, Poland, where the eighteen-year-old Adam finds himself so deeply embroiled in lies and disguise that every moment demands constant vigilance. Fear of exposure fuels his social interactions. The problem of recognition and identity returns in the tour of the Warsaw Ghetto— a tour that has become increasingly common for students in Israeli schools— where he hears the stories of the tour guide and other survivors narrated to the students, all of whom are listening, learning history, so to speak, a history that, for many Israeli students, is their history. His peers are proud to be Israeli; the future belongs to them. What sort of life is the “present absentee” allowed to imagine? What can he dream that isn’t a threat to the occupiers? What part of Adam’s breath isn’t a ‘danger’ to the mythos of the ethnonationalist state that punishes those who are born there for being born in the wrong religion?

10

“You and I and every human being on the face of the planet should have known and not stood by in silence, should have prevented that beast from destroying its victims in that barbaric unprecedented manner. Not because the victims were the Jews but because their death meant the death of humanity within us.”

— Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun (translated by Humphrey Davies)

Lacuna. A thing held in brackets. A gap in the manuscript. A silence between pages that constitute a life narrative. A date inscribed upon the memory of every Palestinian. A date all the more painful for its absence from any public acknowledgement in the US, where much of the diaspora finds itself. April 9th, 1948. No camera in the US dares to touch it— and yet, the postcard of the depopulated al-Tantura connects to it, the two divided by a month and a small distance.

”Meanwhile, in the Black Sea near Crimea, there is a garden of dismantled Soviet statues deep beneath the water, a stunningly blue cathedral of water where Stalin and Lenin sit near the poet Sergei Esenin, while Yuri Gagarin, the first human to enter outer space, lives out eternity at the other extreme. I’d love to rent scuba gear and meet these monuments under the sea – I think of that song in The Little Mermaid, ‘Under the Sea’ – to bring that song to it, to combine these different realities in water, the juxtaposition of their solidity and permanence against my weightlessness. Reality is complicated; nothing is as binary or simple as we want it to be. And I’m very comfortable with something that doesn’t erase the past but interacts with it in a way that challenges the past. Changing the tense of history. Darwish does that or can give us a route into doing that. He can say we are present with absence. And we are responsible for imagining the next part.”

History may be owned by the victors, but truth is not. Truth waits for the day when the lies of the victors cause the victory to fall apart. Every child raised in a dictatorship or personality cult secretly knows that the lies will dissolve eventually: the only question is how long will it take for the adults to wake up?

The White Ribbon.

“The White Ribbon had to be in German because of the subject matter, that was clear.”

— Michael Haneke

“For love is ever filled with fear.”

— Letter from Penelope to Odysseus in Ovid’s Heroides


In an interview with Alexander Kluge, Michael Haneke said “the real topic” of his film, The White Ribbon, was “how people under pressure become receptive for ideology, i.e. how they even create their own ideology, how they absolutize an idea— and then, with the help of this absolutized idea, punish those who preached this idea to them— but who lived differently from the way demanded by that idea.”

The white ribbon isn’t a static figure in the film: it recurs and adapts to disciplinary tools (the riding crops used to whip the children) as well as the tools of violence and rupture (the rope the farmer uses to strangle himself, the wire that makes the doctor fall, etc.) so that the ribbon itself becomes a being of velocity, a particular kind of symbol or iconography linked to this idea of designating as as well as the possibility of protecting.

To designate and to protect: these are active verbs.

The father ties his son to the bed at night with white ribbons to protect him from masturbating.

Haneke took the white ribbon from Johann Gottlieb Heusinger's early 19th century text where a pastor ties white ribbons in his children’s hair or around their arms to remind them of “Umfeld und Reinhot,” as Martin Blumenthal-Barry observed. This didacticism at the level of symbol invokes the role of talismans and religious ritual, as well as the chosenness of being marked by signs that are exclusively legible. You can see this in the wrenching seventh scene, where the symbols are being established and explained:

The “wrongdoers”— this word that holds so much silence inside it — situates itself near the confession, or creates a longing for confession and expiation. There is an aura of moral hygiene that hovers, cloud-like, over the scene, where the awareness of such hygiene is internalized as feeling dirty.

Blumenthal-Barby’s interest in “aprioric state of guilt" of the children and parents meets us on the screen, as spectators of Haneke's film, where we are encouraged to ask about the nature of responsibility under conditions where guilt is inexorable and close to a first cause. Even sincerity is implicated in it, as Blumenthal-Barby points out: the father’s idea of the son telling the truth assumes his son’s guilt. To lie is to say you are not guilty, where the registers converge to make communication void.

The psychological degradation and suggestivity of the white ribbon are the tools used by the pastor to control his children. These sorts of disciplinary regimes resemble the gaze of the Panopticon that reports to be nonviolent, a technology of continuous surveillance and control through internalization of the gaze. This is what we call a modern education, and to learn it involves internalizing the jargon of particular discourses, becoming a subject of these discursive practices which the film presents as an instructive violence behind closed doors, rendered unavailable to the spectator.

The closed doors haunt me. I am referring to the scene in The White Ribbon where Haneke reasserts the border between the public and private (a border he collapses in other films) to leave us outside the door, in that 83-second acoustic rehearsal of pain, cries, and humiliation by the boy. Anyone who has stood outside the door hearing a sibling or nephew or friend being spanked will recognize the horror, the absolute helplessness, established by the authoritative exclusion from visibility.

In the interview with Kluge, Haneke said he initially thought to name the film “The Right Hand of God," playing on how the kids come to believe, as socialized, that they are representatives of divine  authority to judge and to punish. Those absolute standards absorb the panopticon's ontology and provide meaning and stability, a continuity of family life, through this act of assuming something like responsibility for disciplining those who fall short of propriety.

Judgement doesn't liberate so much as it commits one to standards that require continuous enforcement, defense, justification, and explication.

All value, as socialized, depends on this ability to judge and to protect—  to act as a God would act in a metaphysics of presence. The long-take that fixes us to that bedroom door imprints this moment on our minds as a sort of unspeakable terror, activating our imaginations in relation to what is visible. Because all parts of the visual field are rendered equal in this sort of take, we are forced to decide how to signify the relations and dimensions that are present. There is a particular cruelty to this, a nausea in in the way Haneke leads us to imagine the beating. And this is more horrible in some ways than the films where he forces us to reckon with our complicity as consumers of the violence displayed—- here, in this scene before the door, we are active in creating it. Or imagining it. I am rarely sure there is a difference.

"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?