Mingus when real.

“MYSELF WHEN I AM REAL”

If any piece has drizzled through my mind this year, it has been Charles Mingus’ piano improvisation, Myself When I Am Real, the first piece on the 1964 album titled Mingus Plays Piano: Spontaneous Compositions and Improvisations, offering Mingus at his most stripped and bare, improvising across the piano keyboard, moving through musings, working two fingers on the same note in order to get that trilling effect that he will carry forward to into various compositions.

Follow the arrow and sit with it a minute.


“IN OTHER WORDS, I AM THREE”

Although Mingus usually performed on double bass, piano was central to his compositional practice and the way he related to music. Ultimately, however, there was little he did not do, and he defended this polysemic self in his defiant autobiography, Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus. In his own words:

In other words I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two. The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. Then there’s an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being and he’ll take insults and be trusting and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes what’s been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid. But he can’t —- he goes back inside himself.

Which one is real?

They’re all real.


“ADAGIO MA NON TROPPO”

In 1972, Mingus’ album, Let My Children Hear Music, was released by Columbia Records. The second track, Adagio Ma Non Troppo, obviously works the motifs introduced in Myself When I Am Real, while simultaneously playing on the classical musical notation for “slowly, but not too much”, indicating the fusion between jazz and classical that Mingus was exploring.

Mingus plays bass in the recording—-

0:53 when the guitar plucking changes the timbre . 5:27 the unexpected entry of the E flat alto saxophone which then vanishes once the flutes step in . 7:03 strings tremolo.

Trombonist and conductor Alan Raph worked as an arranger for Charles Mingus, resulting in 9 movements of music for Mingus Dances by Alvin Ailey and the Robert Joffrey Ballet Company. The third movement of music for the Mingus Dances, “Adagio ma non troppo,” was later re-orchestrated and recorded for the album Let My Children Hear Music, with Raph conducting the ensemble.

Alan Ralph’s orchestration scores for what was still titled “Myself When I Am Real”

LINER NOTES TO ‘LET MY CHILDREN HEAR MUSIC’ (COLUMBIA RECORDS, 1971)

The following liner notes written by Charles Mingus were nominated for the 1971 Grammy award—- only the liner notes, not the music they accompanied. Mingus in fact never won a Grammy award, though he was nominated four times, once for his liner notes, twice for his jazz compositions, and once for his jazz performance. What follows is Mingus.

What is a jazz composer?

Each jazz musician when he takes a horn in his hand—trumpet, bass, saxophone, drums—whatever instrument he plays—each soloist, that is, when he begins to ad lib on a given composition with a title and improvise a new creative melody, this man is taking the place of a composer. He is saying, "listen, I am going to give you a new complete idea with a new set of chord changes. I am going to give you a new melodic conception on a tune you are familiar with. I am a composer." That's what he is saying.

I have noticed that there are many kinds of composers in this so-called jazz. For instance, there are musicians who simply take rhythmic patterns and very spare notes-very limited invention melodically-and play in a soulful swinging way. Some people in the audience, when asked what they think about jazz, say, "I just go by the feeling, I go by the feeling the guy gives me." Now, whether there is feeling or not depends upon what your environment or your association is or whatever you may have in common with the player. If you feel empathy for his personal outlook, you naturally feel him musically more than some other environ-mental and musical opposite who is, in a way. beyond you.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around. But there is no need to compare composers. If you like Beethoven, Bach or Brahms, that's okay. They were all pencil composers. I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer. I thought I was, although no one's mentioned that. I mean critics or musicians. Now, what I'm getting at is that I know I'm a composer. I marvel at composition, at people who are able to take diatonic scales, chromatics, 12-tone scales, or even quarter-tone scales. I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived. For instance, a man says he played with feeling. Now he can play with feeling and have no melodic concept at all. That's often what happens in jazz: I have found very little value left after the average guy takes his first eight bars-not to mention two or three choruses, because then it just becomes repetition, riffs and patterns, instead of spontaneous creativity, I could never get Bird to play over two choruses. Now, kids play fifty thousand if you let them. Who is that good?

Today, things are at the other extreme. Everything is supposed to be invented, the guys never repeat anything at all and probably couldn't. They don't even write down their own tunes, they just make them up as they sit on the bandstand. It's all right, I don't question it. I know and hear what they are doing. But the validity remains to be seen -what comes, what is left, after you hear the melody and after you hear the solo. Unless you just want to hear the feeling, as they say.

When I was a kid and Coleman Hawkins played a solo or Illinois Jacquet created "Flyin' Home," they (and all the musicians) memorized their solos and played them back for the audience, because the audience had heard them on records. Today I question whether most musicians can even repeat their solos alter they've played them once on record. In classical music, for example people go to hear Janos Starker play Kodaly. They don't go to hear him improvise a Kodaly, they go to hear how he played it on record and how it was written. Jazz was at one time the same way. You played your ad lib solo, you created it, and if it was worthwhile, then you played it in front of the public again.

Now, on this record there is a tune which is an improvised solo and which I am very proud of. I am proud because to me it has the expression of what I feel, and it shows changes in tempo and changes in mode, yet the variations on the theme still fit into one composition. (It is not like some music I hear where the musician plays eight bars and then the next eight bars sound like he is playing another tune). I would say the composition is on the whole as structured as a written piece of music. For the six or seven minutes it was played (originally on piano), the solo was within the category of one feeling, or rather, several feelings expressed as one. I'm not sure whether every musician who improvises can do this. I think I do it better on bass, although most people in the past did not understand the range I used to play (nowadays most all bass players use this range when they solo-the full scope of the bass), because they didn't really listen, they thought I was just playing high to play high, rather than realizing that my composition began some place and developed to another. I have never struggled to be accepted as a great bassist-I imagine I could have been if I had seen my available musical goal there. If people really knew the qualification of a good bass player, they would flip-because I know thirty or forty bass players who have the technique that I have.* Whether or not they are as inventive is something else because when you study the instrument, it calls for a technique that jazz has not even begun to express yet, with the bow or with pizzicato. The full-developed bass player masters harmonics with a sense-I don't mean just scraping the bow across and making squeak sounds, I mean he can play compositions in harmonics. There are a million bowings that could and probably do duplicate a horn better. For instance, my dream has been to put basses, or maybe two basses in a reed section, in place of the baritone saxophone. I never had the chance so I could never say how it really sounds, it is only in my mind that I can say I hear it and it would work better than most baritone saxes. I had a classical student who was in the symphony in Minneapolis. He used to study through the mail and, for his lessons, I would write things for him and he would re-tape them and send them back. That was when I realized how much more could done, musically, by using the boss with the bow, by utilizing all the possibilities of this instrument.

Back to the record: the music on this record is involved with my trying to say what the hell I am here for. And similar ideas. Another one is: let my children hear music -for God's sake-they have had enough noise. But mainly I am saying: Do you really know Mingus, you critics? Here is a piece I wrote in 1939 and I wrote it like this because thought in 1939 I would probably get it recorded some day. But when you have to wait thirty years to get one piece played-what do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music? That was when I was energetic and wrote all the time. Music was my life. Had I been born in a different country or had I been born white, I am sure I would have expressed my ideas long ago. Maybe they wouldn't have been as good because when people are born free-I can't imagine it, but I've got a feeling that if it's so easy for you, the struggle and the initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say.

Part of the reason I am a composer is that I studied composition with Lloyd Reese. Lloyd Reese taught Eric Dolphy; Harry Carney also studied with him and so did Ben Webster and Buddy Collette, to name a few. Art Tatum highly recommended him. When Art found out I was studying with Lloyd, he asked me to come and play for him. Lloyd Reese was a master musician, he knew jazz and all the fundamentals of music from the beginning. (He used to be the first alto player in Les Height's band.) And he could play anything. I remember he turned a record on to me one time. (In my era the record stores weren't crowded with The Beatles' records or rock & roll or hillbilly. They had a few hillbilly and a few records they called rhythm & blues. But it wasn't a big market then. The record stores were mainly for white people. They had classical music, I remember Richard Strauss, Debussy, Ravel, Bach, Beethoven. I remember my favorites: Debussy, Stravinsky and I liked Richard Strauss very much-the one who wrote "Death and Transfiguration.") In any case I remember one day when I came to Lloyd's house, he said: "What is this?" and he played a record, I didn't know the title at the time, but he said: "What do you think is going on in this particular movement right there?" And I said: "I don't know, man, but there's a whole lotta shit going on. There's too much to figure out." The timpani was playing and the basses were playing and the piano was playing a percussional sound with the bass- you could hardly hear the piano-and the flutes were playing syncopated chop rhythms, the trumpets were playing cock valves, and this cat said: "Well, here it is," and he took a C-Seventh chord-I remember it started on the Third, and he played E, G, B flat, and D natural, and he said: "This is what the clarinets are doing . . ." and he began to decipher down what was going on. He said: "Here's the French horn part" and it came in on G, B flat, D, F an octave down and ended A natural, which clashed against the B flat the clarinets were playing in the E, G, B flat, D natural line, and it made a beautiful sound. I said: "Whaaa? What is that?"

So I'm saying briefly that people don't know what a black man (it's nice to say black man)-people don't know what it took to make a jazz musician. In my young days, we were raised more on classical music than on any other kind. It was the only music we were exposed to, other than the church choir. I wasn't raised in a night club. I wasn't raised in a whore house (there wasn't any music in them, anyway- in the bars). Today, I don't know how they train kids musically. But my point about Reese is that if you told the average person Lloyd Reese took the music of Stravinsky off a record, he would say you were crazy. There are millions of musicians, however, who have the capability of hearing and reproducing what they hear. It wasn't called ear training; I don't know what he called it, He would just say: ''Now you take the trumpet part. Now, what's the French horn doing?" It was to show you structure, I imagine.

As I was saying, each jazz musician is supposed to be a composer. Whether he is or not, I don't know. I don't listen to that many people. If I did, I probably wouldn't play half as much to satisfy myself. As a youth I read a book by Debussy and he said that as soon as he finished a composi- tion he had to forget it because it got in the way of his doing anything else new and different. And I believed him. I used to work with Tatum, and Tatum knew every tune written, including the classics, and I think it got in the way of his composition, because he wasn't a Bud Powell. He wasn't as melodically inventive as Bud. He was technically flashy and he knew so much music and so much theory that he couldn't come up with anything wrong; it was just exercising his theory. But as far as making that original melodic concept, as Bird and Bud did, Art didn't do this for me in a linear sense. I would say he did it more in a chordal-structure sense. Bud and Bird to me should go down as composers, even though they worked within a structured context using other people's compositions. For instance, they did things like "All The Things You Are" and "What Is This Thing Called love." Their solos are new classical compositions within the structured form they used. It is too bad for us that they didn't compose the whole piece instead of using other people's tunes to work within. If they had, they would have been put in the same class as Bartok and Debussy-to anyone who knows. Bud wrote a few things and so did Bird. But they were still within the simple chord changes you were used to-either the blues (which shows how great they really were, to be able to create-with new and good melodic structures-on such simple chord progressions). In other words, if they had created anything complex, I am sure they could have upset the world.

For instance, Bird called me on the phone one day and said: "How does this sound?" and he was playing- ad-libbing-to the Berceuse, or lullaby, section of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite! I imagine he had been doing it all through the record, but he just happened to call me at that time and that was the section he was playing his ad lib solo on, and it sounded beautiful. It gave me an idea about what is wrong with present-day symphonies: they don't have anything going on that captures what the symphony is itself, after written. I'd like to write a symphony, myself, on this form-the old western form of classical music-I'd like to write a suite of three or four hours and have a solo in spots that is like Charlie Parker, with Bird in mind, playing ad lib.I think the music on this record is serious in every sense. I say, let my children have music. I said it earlier. For God's sake, rid this society of some of the noise so that those who have ears will be able to use them some place listening to good music. When I say good I don't mean that today's music is bad because it is loud. I mean the structures have paid no attention to the past history of music. Nothing is simple. It's as if people came to Manhattan and acted like it was still full of trees and grass and Indians instead of concrete and tall buildings. It's like a tailor cutting clothes without knowing the design, It's like living in a vacuum and not paying attention to anything that came before you. What's worse is that critics take a guy who only plays in the key of C and call him a genius, when they should say those guys are a bitch in C-natural. Pop music is still another story. Even tune structures are stolen. The music I've heard from the late pop groups (many of which are from England) seems to stem from a mixture of many different American composers and American music. " I Found A New Baby." "Nature Boy." "Ain't Necessarily So." I hear these tunes, certain tunes, all through The Beatles' music, for instance. I don't know if they just surround themselves with this kind of music and compose from it. But it doesn't come out ringing true to me as English composition. For instance, Schillinger used to say that you could take a sheet of music, turn it upside down-alter you wrote a cer- tain movement-eight or ten bars-copy it upside down, then copy it backwards, from the end of the page back, turn the page over and copy it backwards and upside down. This would give you eighty bars or more of the same mood without working for it. It's the same as taking a tape recorder melody and splicing it up several thousand different ways. To me that's not spiritual music. It leaves the feeling and emotion out. It seems to me that it should come from the heart, even though it's composed.

I think it is evident when a person is stealing or copying a form of music which is not his own. Other musicians recognize it, but I don't think it is important enough to them to say anything about it. Why, at least, doesn't the public, or don't the critics point it out? I heard a lot of Bird's solos in the music of this past and present rock music era. The names are not important. But what they do, more or less, is just take a melody created by a jazz soloist and put words to it. They add words to a solo with a few of the notes left out. That is what it sounds like to me and others I've discussed it with.

As I say, let my children have music. Jazz-the way it has been handled in the past-stifles them so that they believe only in the trumpet, trombone, saxophone, maybe a flute now and then or a clarinet (not too many of our "bad"- that is great-people go for the clarinet. Probably because there is not much work available for clarinetists, except for those who play in the studios). But it is not enough. I think it is time our children were raised to think they can play bassoon, oboe, English horn, French horn, lull percussion, violin, cello. The results would be-well the Philharmonic would not be the only answer for us then. If we so-called jazz musicians who are the composers, the spontaneous composers, started including these instruments in our music, it would open everything up, it would get rid of prejudice because the musicianship would be so high in caliber that the symphony couldn't refuse us.

In fact, who wants to be in the symphony anyway, nowadays? If you stop and take note of what jazz has done, and the kind of musicianship which has developed from each instrument (take the trumpet: Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Maynard Ferguson, Cat Anderson, or the pyrotechniques of Dizzy Gillespie; you never hear that kind of high- note playing in symphonic works), it becomes obvious that it has made each player a virtuoso. That is probably why most European musicians now choose to be jazz musicians rather than classical players because they are always proving that the instrument can do more than is possible. I mean, the range has doubled in octaves. For instance, Stravinsky wrote a piece for a high trumpet. He used a special trumpet-a piccolo trumpet-to play high, but Cat Anderson played off the piano with an ordinary trumpet-played higher than the piano goes, higher than piccolos. So do Maynard Ferguson, Snooky Young, Ernie Royal, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Freddie Webster, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Novarro, Clifford Brown. Hobart Dotson, Kenny Durham.

There are many other instruments besides the trumpet which jazz musicians have made do the impossible. And they can play, for hours on end, technical, involved, difficult, educated lines that have melodic sense. They are all virtuosi. The same goes for string bass. The same goes for saxophone, although it is not used much in symphony. But anything Milhaud has done in classical music, McPherson and Bird, alone, do with ease as well as human warmth and beauty. Tommy Dorsey, for example, raised the range of the trombone two octaves. Britt Woodman raised it three. And take Jimmy Knepper. One of his solos was taken off a record of mine and written out for classical trombone in my ballet. The trombone player could barely play it. He said it was one of the most technical exercises he had ever attempted to play. And he was just playing the notes-not the embellishments or the sound that Jimmy was getting.

That about covers it.

Let my children have music! Let them hear live music. Not noise. My children! You do what you want with your own!

–Charles Mingus

*[Which, incidentally, brings to mind another thought; along with the jazz hump music and nigger contests, there has never been a contest to decide who is the King of the Trumpet in the Symphony. Or who is the Best Violin Soloist-Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern, Salvatore Accardo? Or which is the Best String Quartet of the Year-Budapest or Juilliard?]

One million reasons to look at the Mingus website + aeons of gratitude to them for providing these materials and nurturing Mingus’ legacy.

Delusions are grandeur.

“Why don’t you develop a narrative arc in this essay?”

I am still thinking about this question, and my relation to linearity, MFAs, schools of thought, aesthetics, the gamut.

When first posed to me, the question felt aesthetic—- and one might say the answer begins there, in that hunger for beauty that relieves us of disorder, messiness, and discomfort. Nothing assuages like the elegance of clean lines; the affect is classical, sculptural, secure in its relation to time. Even darkness is groomed, streamlined, and poured into little black dresses that provide a form, a template, for how we adjudicate the value of complexity.

My initial response to the question riffed on constellations, or clusters of details that can be combined to find a figure. Unlike the endpoint or finale, the figure cannot lay a claim to being the only thing in the constellation. The figure is simply the seen thing, the discernible, limited by the gaze of time, place, subjectivity, culture, etc.

But a generalization glosses the failure to answer.

*

Gabor Peterdi, Angry Sky

Vienna, 1904. Dots coalesce as a series of silences that mark the creative work. Composer Arnold Schoenberg is annoyed by how classical music resolves itself predictably, and how form depends on that resolution. Such romanticism ignores the world as Schoenberg saw. He wanted to depict a world in which hope was continually dashed and destroyed by irresolution. Closure, for him, was an illusion. 

What became the 'Vienna School of Music' was credited with the swerve towards atonalism— and the destruction of respectable romanticism. But no one studying in Vienna planned this.

One student of Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, wound up changing musical structure by refining it in accordance with experimental ideas. Webern's first composition was titled Five Pieces. In 1913, Webern presented this piece, his Op. 1, to Alban Berg with the following dedication: "Non multa sed multum, how I wish that could apply to what I offer you here." The Latin phrase he quoted means "little in quantity, much in quality." 

Brevity, the use of silence, and the stretching out of intervals characterized Webern's  aesthetic. Notably, his longest composition, Cantate (Opus 31), lasts only eleven minutes. Decades later, the French theorist Roland Barthes read a connection between Webern's compositions and Cy Twombly's paintings. At the time, Barthes was reading John Cage's For the Birds: In Conversation with David Charles. In case this constellation isn't visible to you, I will add that Theodor Adorno's music teacher, Alban Berg, was also Schoenberg's student. Adorno went on to co-found the Frankfurt School of critical theory who studied the world based on the constellations between events. 

*

Washington, DC, 2000’s. Returning briefly to Schoenberg's view that closure was illusory, which is to say, a facet of expectations created by form, something akin to a little machine that works on formulas and provides the desired resolution, I think the illusory is often packaged and sold to us in the much more solid, hardened delusions of eschatology. Frank Fukuyama's The End of History, for example, absolved many thinkers of critical thought during the Clinton years. The difference between an illusion and a delusion surfaces in the relationship we establish between what is and what 'has come to pass'. At its best, Critical Theory interrogates the illusions that have been accepted en masse, and become widespread delusions. Fake news speeds up the process and, in so doing, scatters the potential for critical analysis.

Theory that soothsays from the premise of finitude is always implicated in the metaphysics of the infinite. But the implication is sustained by concretizing the illusory.

Infinity and nothingness are not the termination points defining a line. Infinity and nothingness are infinitely threaded through one another so that every infinitesimal bit of one always already contains the other. The possibilities for justice-to-come reside in every morsel of finitude.

—- Karen Barad

The little black dress is easy on the mind. Elegance asks nothing whatsoever of the beautiful, horrible darkness. One must get messy. Unequivocally, one must fuck around to find out. Stigmatizing disorder is not unrelated to the punishment of transient persons or nomadic lifestyles. The little black dress is nothing if not the queen of hard borders.

13 notes on silver.

1

I woke up with Marina’s silver bell in my mouth. The tin jangle of it, metal on tooth. I sealed my lips tight for safekeeping and carried it through coffee and work, before wandering back to my notebooks to see if it was a “real” bell, a roil of real peels as opposed to a merely imagined one. There —-in an excerpt of Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poems for Blok”, as translated Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine —- dated April 15, 1916 (all those strange timbres coalescing around my birth-date again), Marina speaking to Aleksandr Blok:

“Poets are not born in a country,” Ilya writes. “Poets are born in childhood.” And childhood is a separate country distinguished by its literature, the heaps of Proustian madeleines and Michel Leris’ “once upon a time” sidling up next to Benjamin’s storyteller.

2

According to a 3rd century treatise on rivers and mountains (possibly written by Plutarch), there is a stone in Lydia called argrophylax that frequently gets mistaken for silver. The stone is hard to distinguish because “it is intimately intermixed with the little spangles of gold . . . found in the sands of the river.” What makes argrophylax is “one very strange property” that causes wealthy Lydians to place it right under the threshold of the treasurehouses where they store their gold. The stone is said to protect the gold from theft by emitting a trumpet-like sound whenever robbers draw near, thus causing the thieves to believe that they are being chased. Not only do the thieves run away without robbing the rich, but they also flee and fall over precipices and thus come to a violent death.


3

Sharp click of a cocked gun. Tick-tick of nails scraping the hardwood.

A dance beginning in the light click of hooves at night, accumulating in that desire to run farther and faster over a meadow without pausing to catch my breath. I guise my urge to gallop fastidiously, bury it in my relationship to dance.

Have always buried it in particular gestures—- the cocked elbow of hand on hip, the curl of the fingers, the conviction that speed makes one invulnerable, unbreakable. “Moving too fast is a way of refusing to wait for the duende to rise,” my teacher told me.

4

People say the past is another land you can’t visit. They say this while holding a dragon whose name is Leaf Blower. One gets cul-de-sacked into conversations with people who think the world is the same but different. It stings to say no. Pain extends the distance between what must be done and the doing. Time being a way of making things feel far. Building dimension. Your tramp, my bolero. Theory is repertoire of ways to draw lines through the same land. A palm ties a face to hand.

On the sidewalk with ailing bikes, a dead end I can’t describe.

A chain-link fence worn by the house like a pair of fine cufflinks.

The past dangles from my neck like the highways to hell in marking the hips of nude silver mermaid with outrageous nipples purchased on Coney Island. The past is a mermaid who measures time in twitches. She begins her lascivious dance against my throat least expected. The past is a necklace offensive to nice liberal mothers.  But a necklace is not another land. Not for this hand. Holding papers. A hand that fries eggs for breakfast. What’s past is a plural. Moments dangle like aluminum cans from the bumper of narrative bodies. 

5

Titled “Scene with Two Pinecones and a Baba” — that silver platter.

Stuck made three versions of Salome, all finished in 1906.

Unlike Stuck, I wrote the one-act plays after staring at his Salomes.

The versions. The left platter is gilded; but the silver platter on the right is the one required by the scene. It is the visible Salome, or the Salome made available for the purpose of the one-act play, even though that Salome is useless to me, since the scene was composed in relation to the golden painting, the horribly jaune-tinged Salome. The way her golden hand waits atop the green, sequin-studded slope of her hip, —- speaks to the dance.

(And besides, I tell myself, argrophylax isn’t pure silver. Argrophylax is silver screwed through with the spangles of riversand gold.)

7

In the sixth minute of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”, the silver ring on my finger melts. No matter where I am when listening to it, this happens every time. In that sixth minute. The melting.

8

It’s not just my hands; though, if forced to describe them I’d confess that they are unladylike— have always been resolutely unladylike, or to quote a young student: “Your hands look like they belong to a small man.” For the world is filled with small men and my hands belong to them. Even a student can see this. A student with eyes like blue bagpipes, summoning something merry from me. How easy it remains to be made merry by music, by bows and strings and percussion dissolving into its deep blue notes. The rest can be ruined—- language, another obfuscatory veil that hardens into velour, gains a sturdiness and heft, when we start to believe it.


9

HE: I found this sheet of paper on the nightstand and wanted to check before tossing it.

ME: It’s a receipt.

HE: Yes, but you wrote something on it.

ME: What?

HE: It says “velvet hangover”—

ME: Don’t look at me like that. I was making a note about something I read. David Williams. “Trümmerliteratur Redux.” Rubble-lit.

HE: (holding paper and waiting)

ME: Toss it.

10

On the train back from New York, 24 hours with no claims upon my time. At first, I laid words next to each other and listened to see if they vibrated differently when the wheels bumped over old bridges. I wanted to make Silver sigh.

After gulping up a bit of night at a station in Virginia, the scent of cold autumn leaves clung to my jacket and accompanied me back to my cabin, where the notebooks waited to be touched with that non-teleological tenderness Leo Bersani described. The notebooks have always been patient. That’s why I kiss them before lifting the pen and glancing briefly at the hand— the sparkling greenish fingernails, the hue and crackle of Salome’s skirt. Alex (who is quite irresistible in her suasions) painted them and for a moment, I am surprised to see my hands, the fingernails colored, possibly even ladylike at a distance. Hands belonging to small men.

11

On March 9, 1915, one day after arriving in Petrograd, the poet Sergei Yesenin visited Alexsander Blok and regaled him with declamations from his own poems. On that night, he was introduced to other poets, including Sergey Gorodetsky, Nikolai Klyuev and Andrei Bely. Blok promoted Yesenin’s poetry and helped start his literary career as a “peasant poet.”

One month later, among the early blooms and late snows of April 1915, Tsvetaeva penned the “Poems for Blok”—- the source of this silver bell.

12

My October train from New York to Birmingham meets a train plunging through a different October, on a continent, in the year 1917. Marina Tsvetaeva is riding from Crimea to Moscow. The Bolshevik Revolution had just taken place; her husband Sergei Efron, joined the Whites as they regrouped for one final stand on Don. Overnight, the money she had saved and inherited vanished, making it impossible for Marina to survive with her two children alone in Moscow as disease, starvation, and war ravaged Russia. But for now, Marina is taking the train back to Moscow, and hoping that her husband will be spared death.

Like any poet on a train (or a bus or a park bench or a dentist’s office), Marina began writing an essay. In this case, the essay unfolded from an opening that directly addressed Sergei, whom she calls Seriozhenka (or S.). "Should God grant this miracle —leave you among the living, I shall follow you like a dog," she began — before veering into a swarm of impressions and words overheard from the Russians riding the train beside her. Notably, the voices are spliced and collaged together without any transition or naming of speakers. It is the babble, the disaggregated masses, a paean to modernism.

What follows is an excerpt from “October on the Train" (Moscow, October- November 1917). Presumably, Tsvetaeva’s own thoughts are indicated by the absence of quotation markets to bracket them:

“Stenka Razin, I'm no Persian princess, but I’ll give you a ring – silver – as a keepsake.” 

“Look: a two headed eagle, wings spread, that is: guitarist 10 Kopec piece in a silver frame. Will it fit your hand? It will. My hand isn't lady like. But you… Don’t understand hands: the form, the nails, the breed. You understand the palm (warmth) and the fingers (grasp). You’ll understand a handshake.”

“It’s always comrade, comrade, but people still have their own names, don’t they. Maybe you’ll tell me what your name is?”

"Yes, yes, at all the Kremlin receptions.… Because you know, people are people everywhere. Everyone wants to enjoy himself after work. All these executions and shootings…"

The entire Russian intelligence is in these baskets!  I need to think about something else. I have to understand that all of this is a dream. After all, in dreams everything is backwards, so… Yes, but dreams do have their surprises: the handle could fall off… Along with the hand.

(Everyday life is a sack: with holes. And you carry it anyway.)

Anxiety about my foot masks the meaning of the threats. My foot –  comes first… Now, when I find my foot… And, oh joy: it’s found! Something hurts — somewhere. I pay close attention. It’s there, it’s there my darling! Somewhere far away, deep… The pain sharpens, unbearable now, I make a desperate effort…

But the oak is uprooted: next to me, like a smokestack (neither stocking nor shoe is visible) is my vital, righteous, 2nd foot.

Yes.

—-“(Everyday life is a sack: with holes. And you carry it anyway.)” Bury me in this line; fold my hands inside its coffin brackets.

12

After the Whites were defeated, Sergei could not stay in Soviet Union. He was a wanted man. So he fled to Europe, leaving Marina to search out his fate in Russia. It was Ilya Ehrenberg who told her that Sergei was alive, and living in Berlin. Marina set out to reunite with him, and arrived in what was now the Weimar Republic, her first stop among many European cities where she would live for the following decade. Berlin, Prague, Paris…. the Efrons built a life in Europe. But Sergei was homesick for Russia.

Maybe it was idealism, maybe it was reckless folly: Efron set out to be repatriated and began spying for the NKVD, hoping to secure a return to his homeland. To shorten a long, complicated story, the NKVD ordered Efron to return to Moscow, where he was held in a dacha under house arrest until his formal arrest on 10 December 1937. It’s not clear how much Marina knew about her husband’s doings with the secret police. Nor is it clear that she knew he was spying for the Soviets and had been compromised.

So, the year reads 1939 when Tsvetaeva and her son board a train to Moscow, hoping to be reunited with Efron and perhaps Adriadna, her daughter.

While sitting on the train, Marina re-read some of the notebooks she had packed, and came across the essay titled “October on the Train" that she had written more than a decade earlier.

“I’ll give you a ring – silver – as a keepsake,” a passenger had said in a different world, the world preserved in her notebook.

Should God grant this miracle —leave you among the living, I shall follow you like a dog. She had written these words. She read them aloud as the wheels moved over the tracks and then, staring intently at this line, Marina lifted up her pen and inked the following note in the margins: “And here I am, following him – like a dog [21 years later].”

13

April 14, 1930. Moscow, an apartment in Lubyansky alley. The final night of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s life.

What would you write if this were to be the last poem your hand offered to a page? What would you say to the eternity that will be April?

Mayakovsky:

She loves me, loves me not. I pluck my hand
and throw my torn-off fingers away,
like the games with stray daisies
you tear up and discard each spring.

A shave and a haircut will show my gray hair;
I want the silver of years made very clear.
I hope and believe I will never attain
the shame of common sense.

It’s past one o’clock. You must be fast asleep.
The silver river Oka in the night
Is just the Milky Way.
I’m in no hurry; no need to send
Telegrams to wake and worry you.

I want the silver of years made very clear, the evidence of what living costs us.

Knock on wood I finish the Ariadna poems. Maybe I’ll clean up the essay that is a sack with holes, sculpt shape that can carry the holes hiding inside Tsvetaeva’s as both speakers are swallowed by the trains returning them to their lives. A bird in my hand— and hers. Your name thrown like a stone into the lake of the things I’ve written and hidden. One more silver river in the night disguised as the cosmos.

Agamben, and the self-portrait of notebooks.

This was the life assigned to me
I don’t know how

— Fanny Howe

You ask me how I write. This is how I write. I get rid of the lizard.

— Leonard Cohen

Yesterday, in the span of a few hours, I read Giorgio Agamben’s self-portrait (now in book form; excerpted on the wonderful blog of Paris Review). Parked less than 12 miles from the house the owns my time, my mind, my body. There is nothing unique about these demands. The only uniqueness came with the reprieve of the book—- and the longing that crawled over my shoulders as ambulances flew past and joggers sought their daily adrenaline from the city sidewalks.

A highlight to mark a hesitation:

Among things from the intersections of yesterday’s notebooks, scribbled in a parking lot in Birmingham, Alabama, between pages of Agamben’s self-portrait and the uncertainty of my own.

I have many times thought about writing a book that was only the proem or postlude of a missing book. Perhaps the books that I have published are something of this sort — not books but preludes or epilogues. (Agamben) I winced. Like blinking away the thought that hurts. As if to pick it up with a tiny pincer and drop it outside on the asphalt. The feeling of touching, not touching. Flamenco, and what the dance wants . . . is nothing like writing. The dance seeks to avoid the hand that could slow it or mold it; heat is the friction of what could happen. But you can smell the other dancer; they are not an abstraction. “Tangibilia”; from tangibilis, "what can be touched, is palpable." On the object reduced, tamed, made familiar by the encyclopedic enterprise. Margins where semiotics creep in.

A writer's secret lies entirely in the blank space that separates the notebooks from the book. Hypervigilance; hygiene of grammar when editing begins. Will do nothing with October’s Sacrifice to Priapus. So-called. As if naming itself provides evidence of its existence.

Notebooks as a form of study and study as essentially unfinished. Bowie, no end to “the heart’s filthy lesson.” Filth assumes any form it can find. Messy; consigned to the pile of disorder and decadence. “Essentially unfinished.” And then —- shadows on tiny feet, speaking immaculate French. Roland Barthes, eyeing the word, “deliberation”; making a heading of it. Offering that word in a section in The Rustle of Language: "I can rescue the Diary on the one condition that I labor it to death, to the end of an extreme exhaustion, like a virtually impossible Text: a labor at whose end it is indeed possible that a Diary thus kept no longer resembles a diary at all." Barthes mounting a stallion to ‘rescue’ the Diary that is his love; the text that is Love entire. Dante and his friends grinning inside Vita Nuova, whispering, “all he needs is a 9 and he’s nailed it.”

The 'form of the research' and the 'form of the exposition', notes and draft are not opposed to one another: in a certain sense the finished work is also itself a fragment and research project. Formal variants on the use of the heading to behead the rest. What deliberation does to the body (Barthes’ corpus). This rustling, wrestling, wondering what will be left of the magic once the grammar is tied for consumption. Setting the table with forks, knives, and good manners. Saving the Diary requires one to decapitate it. Headless, as in ‘no trace of the “I” that Walter Benjamin avoided, for fear of not seeming scholarly.’ Head at one’s feet, as in rolling around. As if droll up the rigor that feigns invisibility to slip into the aesthetic of authority. A podium voice needs a plural pronoun that establishes itself in neutrality. Or a tweed jacket and effacement. Yi-yun Li’s line, something to the effect of "sometimes a man sees better once he learns how not to be seen." I’m paraphrasing. Picking up pieces that inch across the windshield. A man carrying an umbrella on a sunny day; his other arm in a cast.

As in music, every ricercar ends in a fugue, but the fugue is literally endless.

Dice. No dice. Enter the music of silence as scored by John Cage. Enter Baudelaire’s flaneur, a stranger to his own cityscape. Enter Georges Simmel turning the study of alienated Parisians into sociology. Put Rilke, Walter Benjamin, Derrida, in the margins. “A page of the album is moved, deleted or added according to chance–this chance that it is precisely the function of true literature to abolish,” Jacques Scherer wrote in The Book of Mallarmé. Because those dice must be on the table.

So arduous is the task of the poet—being skinned alive in order to sing.

Bonnard's yellows.

 I have all my subjects to hand, I go back and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream.

—-Pierre Bonnard 

“One cannot have too much yellow,” said Pierre Bonnard. Yellow, for him, was the color of light—- and he used to warm and enliven landscapes, to complicate interiors, and to saturate spaces and figures with emotional resonance. If Bonnard had a thumbprint, it would be yellow. His layering of brushstrokes to emphasize color paved the way for the great colorists of abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko.

What follows is a few of Bonnard’s yellows organized chronologically, as well as commentary by art critics. The commentary isn’t matched to the painting, but I wanted to leave that tension in between the piece and the possibility so as not to provide a definitive “first reading” for any of these.

Pierre Bonnard, The Port of Cannes (1926-7)

“There is a sense of the picture plane, beginning on the bridge of our nose, much in the way reading glasses change the way we see, resting on the nose, looking over, looking through and looking at our own nose itself. Could it be that Bonnard’s pince-nez triggered this vision? In the in-focus, out-of-focus drawings and paintings of Bonnard, the deep space is flattened, near forms are volumetric, and the negative spaces operate as both flat and spatial simultaneously. All this is made more apparent through the possible subtle use of his eye-glasses shifting positions. It is with a single adjustment of his spectacle frames that he could see, say, a bunch of grapes, flattened and unified, and then, conversely, volumetric and spatial, with the individual grapes revealed, and the apex of the nearest grape to the painter’s eye defined.” (Graham Nickson)

Pierre Bonnard, Self-Portrait (The Boxer), (1931)

“There is always color, it has yet to become light.” (Bonnard)


Pierre Bonnard, The Workshop with Mimosa (1935)

It’s interesting to contrast this intense warmth with a more pastel-hued glimpse of this painting.

Pierre Bonnard, Dining Room on the Garden (1935)

“The time in the paintings is also deepened by furtive movements and rustlings, mostly thanks to Bonnard’s figures. They often seem to shift about, partly because we can look right at them for a while before we actually see them. Our shock that they have been there all along, or have just arrived, somehow prolongs the painting into an event.” (Roberta Smith)

“It is in the later drawings that we see him using an innovative lexicon of marks, which are made up of loops, squiggles, spirals, dots, dashes, ticks, circles, crosses, zeds and horizontals, diagonals, and vertical variants. These variable marks constitute a language for him to “speak” to the image and color. In the rarest of circumstances, black and white can suggest or imply color.  One thinks of certain Van Gogh drawings for example, where the intensity of the black against the white has a color potential. If we look at a lot of Bonnard’s later drawings, the landscapes in particular, we feel the potential of these marks as metaphoric of certain color. Most importantly, the marks held information for Bonnard. The drawings carry form and space, a sense of scale, and of course, image. Bonnard would use an eraser to add to the confection of space opening up forms. Often, the drawings have a density of application and a highly charged intensity of feeling. Nearly always the late drawings have context — that is, a subject of enquiry and its context relative to its environs.” (Graham Nickson)

Pierre Bonnard, Nude in an Interior (1935)

 

Pierre Bonnard, The Garden Steps (1940)

“Working simultaneously on several unstretched canvases tacked directly to the wall, he painted largely from memory with the help of quick sketches and watercolors, burnishing his motifs until they approached incandescence. He said that painting from reality distracted him from the task of making the painting a freestanding entity.” (Roberta Smith)




Pierre Bonnard, Self-Portrait

“In Self-Portrait (1938-40) the left spectacle lens has a small, very powerful negative shape of light isolated by the frame of the glasses. Bonnard’s eye literally views light in a ying-yang, color-chiaroscuro confrontation. Next to this is a barely perceptible, yet significant, sharp mark of depiction of the spectacle frame’s edge – it is a pencil mark embodied in the paint.” (Graham Nickson)

Pierre Bonnard, The Last Self-Portrait (1944-1945)

“In many works we have a strong feeling that we are ‘in’ the space of the represented image. That nearness is a very strong element in a lot of the work. We are taking tea with Marthe, we are passing the cream to her, we are taking the bread roll from the basket, an apple from the compotier. Even in the self-portrait we are rinsing the safety razor.” (Graham Nickson)

Pierre Bonnard, Picking Cherries (1946)

“I have all my subjects to hand, I go back and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream. “

—-Pierre Bonnard 

Addenda and other butterflies to chase . . . The yellows in Bonnard’s late interiors. The relationship between Les Nabis, whom Bonnard helped to cofound, and the yellows. Bonnard on painting and light as glimpsed by an artist wandering through an exhibit.

Yellows.

What is erotic is the human ruin, and the contamination of pity by a delight in destruction.

—- Michael Wood

After I had left for good, all I really needed to do was to describe the place exactly as it had been. That I could not do, for that was impossible. And that is where poetry might begin.

— Larry Levis, "Eden and My Generation”

MONSTROSITY surrounds itself in idioms, as the photo caption above reveals. One is left to wonder what qualified as the monster for this well-dressed fellow who establishes his competence in the usual Western gear. Of course gear can become idiomatic to the world of the story. 

I.

YELLOW refers to the primary color between green and orange in the spectrum. It is a subtractive color complementary to blue. A few variations include: lemon, “ROTHKO YELLOW”, YOLK, SAFFRON as in the dress of Fragonard’s “A Young Girl Reading” (1776), many others.

2.

Light-absorbing CAROTENOIDS provide the characteristic yellow color common to autumn leaves, corn, canaries, daffodils, and lemons, as well as egg yolks, buttercups, and bananas. Carotenoids eat light.

3.

When the Sun nears the horizon, sunlight has a slightly yellowish hue due to the ATMOSPHERIC SCATTERING of shorter wavelengths like green, blue, and violet.

4.

YELLOW OCHRE was one of the first pigments used by humans to make art. The YELLOW HORSE in France’s Lascaux cave is 17,000 years old.

5.

A SYLPH is a playful spirit of the air that is also one of the posthumous forms assumed by a deceased coquette. The word comes from the Greek silpho meaning BEETLE LARVAE.

6.

“A rose by any name other would smell as sweet” — a line of poetry that has become a cliche. Like “roses are red, violets are blue,” the repetition of romantic symbols rely on cliche. “THE ROSE” by Ben Lerner plays into this idiomatic language while invoking his grandmother’s name.

7.

In an interview, Marguerite Duras spoke about her "FILM OF VOICES" that sought to give weight to women speaking. The voices shape space in relation to sound, but they also hint at a sort of disassociation. The voices of women "are linked by desire" for each other, Duras said, even though we "do not know we exist", and do not realize that others hear us. 

8.

"This GLOSSOLALIA disseminated in vocal fragments includes words that become sounds again," wrote Michel de Certeau, bringing resonances to include "the reminiscences of bodies lodged in ordinary language and marking its path, like white pebbles dropped through the forest of signs." In the POETRY OF THESE “QUOTED FRAGMENTS” sustained by the energy of their own dissatisfaction, their unfinishednesss and incompleteness, what persists is the sense of possibility inherent in language and human relations. Fragments gesture towards continuance so that the text, itself, evinces what de Certeau calls the "resonances" of a touched body— "ENUNCIATIVE GAPS in a syntagmatic organization of statements." Certeau likens these gaps to "the LINGUISTIC ANALOGUES OF AN ERECTION, or a nameless pain, or of tears," which is to say, "the expressions of remembering," and the body awakening to "indebted speech."

9.

Elsewhere in Duras, SILENCE intones the instant when he touches her. It marks the UNSPEAKABILITY of the thing that has happened. "Cries and tears: an aphasic enunciation of what appears without one's knowing where it came from (from what obscure debt or writing of the body), without one's knowing how it could be except through the other's voice," writes Certeau. These "contextless voice-gaps," the seams in "citations of bodies," imply the existence of another dialogue. And this implication, or the act of suggesting, ratifies and insists on the existence of the secret thing.  

10.

I suspect we are all imagined by our readers. I suspect we co-create each other from RESONANCES and ECHOES. The key to both is the play on recognition.

11.

Ancient Egyptians used yellow ochre or the brilliant ORPIMENT (a.k.a. arsenic trisulfide) in their tomb paintings. Like poets, they free-associated a relationship between yellow and the imperishable, eternal, indestructible mineral, GOLD. Gods had skin and bones composed of gold. A small paintbox with orpiment pigment was found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun. In Egyptian art, men were always shown with brown faces, women with yellow ochre or gold faces.

11.

The early Christian church associated yellow with BETRAYAL and JUDAS ISCARIOT, so it was used to mark heretics.

12.

Like the romantic composers who borrowed colors to evoke tone, J. M. W. Turner used yellow to create moods and emotions. Turner’s painting Rain, Steam, and Speed – the Great Central Railway is dominated by glowing icterine clouds.

13.

CHRONOSYNCHRONICITY is the presentation of all stages of a person's life in a single piece of art. Everything at once; synchronized time. Samuel Beckett often plays into this temporality. John Berger wanders in and out of time in his essay, “THE COMPANY OF DRAWINGS”.

14.

NOTHING is a motif in the writing of Donald Barthelme who borrowed it from Samuel Beckett who borrowed it from its plethora, namely, EVERYTHING. Bartheleme’s “NOTHING: A PRELIMINARY ACCOUNT” opens with YELLOW CURTAINS, or their negation.

15.

Tony Wood described “KONSTANTIN MELNIKOV’S SONATA OF SLEEP” in an issue of Cabinet. There is “A GOLDEN BEDTIME STORY” about the painting Melnikov’s son created to recollect the golden bedroom of his childhood.

16.

Psychopaths are great charmers, said Charles Baxter in “ON DEFAMILIARIZATION”. But understanding what made John Ashbery’s poetry great requires a sort of respect for cliche and capacious deployment of defamiliarizing techniques, as Baxter explains.

17.

In response to Donald Barthelme’s most avowedly ‘political’ piece of writing, William Gass wrote his own short version of “THE BARRICADE” that serves as an informing idiom in Barthelme’s.

18.

Greg Gerke plays misunderstanding and overdetermined expectation in “ISSUES” & “CAREFUL”.

19.

The image above is the beginning of “THE CONNECTION” by Daniil Kharms, which continues as a list story.

“PHILOSOPHER!” is a fantastic interpellation, and interpellations call the reader out of the familiar with an ABRUPT direct address. Unsurprisingly, the word abrupt shares energy with RUPTURE, which is exactly why abrupt things feel threatening and why they should be used as often as possible to make the reader uncomfortable.

20.

Genre differences remain at the forefront of many literary spats. For those who are deeply invested in the micro-spat, William Knelles has written “MICROFICTION: WHAT MAKES A VERY SHORT STORY VERY SHORT”.

Cezanne's clock.

October 14, 1907. Paris, France.

While his wife and child remain at the art colony, Rainer Maria Rilke spends several months in Paris. On this particular date, he is studying an early still-life by Paul Cezanne titled The Black Marble Clock (1869). The painting belonged to Cezanne's friend, Emile Zola.

Later, the painting would move to other private hands before winding up back in Paris, where it currently resides with a rich person. This is what paintings do. But don’t let it distract you from The Black Marble Clock.

The world of the painting: The Black Marble Clock (1869).

What does Cezanne include in this still-life?

An inventory of objects might mention the half-dressed table; a folded white cloth on the surface; a tea cup and plate; one lemon; a large seashell or maybe a dish; one crystal vase or candle stick that seems to hold a reflected object; large black clock looming the background, two vases visible on top of it . . . and whatever else I've missed or misread.

The painting seems to get richer the longer one looks at it.

The story it tells depends on the palette Cezanne selected; the painting would not be the same if the colors had developed differently. This leads me to the obvious question, namely, what colors feel essential to this palette? What role does light play in diminishing or expanding these colors?

It seems as if the whites of the fabric tablecloth get plucked up to resonate in the multiple objects. The darker accents also reappear inside these same objects and across the dark background, in that space where contrast emerges between those burnished portions that resemble a coppery gold. 

Let's go through what we know of the poet who is studying this painting. Let us mention, too, how we know this, and the context in which this knowledge is gathered.

I often resort to this practice when beginning an essay or a review: a simple dialogue between the writer and the page about the nature of knowledge expressed in the text.

How do we know what we know?

And what do we mean when we say that we know it?

We know what Rilke thought of this painting because he described it in a letter to his wife, Clara. During this year in Paris, when he lived separately from wife and daughter, Rilke wrote a daily letter about the art he had seen to her. As an artist, Clara found herself committed to childcare, but she must have valued these letters because she saved them.

We don't know what Clara thought about the distance a child had placed between her and her own creative practice.  

Am I changing the “subject”?

October 14, 1907. Paris.

The date and place have not changed. The aforementioned letter from Rilke to Clara continues.

Rilke seems interested in the sounds of Cezanne's colors in The Black Marble Clock:

Although one of his idiosyncrasies is to use pure chrome yellow and burning lacquer red in his lemons and apples, he knows how to contain their loudness within the picture: cast into a listening blue, as if into an ear, it receives a silent response from within, so that no one outside needs to think himself addressed or accosted. His still lifes are so wonderfully occupied with themselves…

Pure chrome yellow and burning lacquer red are "loud" to Rilke. And Cezanne "contains" this loudness by adding a "listening blue."

Cezanne painted his first still-life, Still-Life with White Bread (1865), the year prior to this. I am definitely changing the subject.

The world of the painting: Donald Barthelme on Joyce.

In an essay titled “After Joyce” (1964, I think), Donald Barthelme tried to defend non-representational art from its critics, particularly those who felt ‘alienated’ by the absence of lyrical proximity. I will excerpt a few parts (and italicize the phrases that glimmer to me):

Satisfied with neither the existing world nor the existing literature, Joyce and Stein modify the world by adding to its store of objects the literary object— which is then encountered in the same way as other objects in the world. The question becomes: What is the nature of the new object? Here one can see an immediate result of the shift. Interrogating older works, the question is: what do they say about the world and being in the world? But the literary object is itself "world" and the theoretical advantage is that in asking it questions you are asking questions of the world directly. This sounds like a species of ventriloquism— the writer throwing his voice. But it is, rather, a stunning strategic gain for the writer. He has in fact removed himself from the work, just as Joyce instructed him to do. The reader is not listening to an authoritative account of the world delivered by an expert (Faulkner on Mississippi, Hemingway on the corrida) but bumping into something that is there, like a rock or refrigerator. 

Barthelme turns abruptly to modern painting here:

The question so often asked of modern painting, "What is it?" contains more than the dull skepticism of the man who is not going to have the wool pulled over his eyes. It speaks of a fundamental placement in relation to the work, that of a voyager in the world coming upon a strange object. The reader reconstitutes the work by his active participation, by approaching the object, tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaring within.

It is characteristic of the object that it does not declare itself all at once, in a rush of pleasant naiveté. Joyce enforces the way in which Finnegans Wake is to be read. He conceived the reading to be a lifetime project, the book remaining always there, like the landscape surrounding the reader's home or the buildings bounding the reader's apartment. The book remains problematic, unexhausted. 

As I turn abruptly to twitter and Brian Davey:


Joyce gives us “a linguistically exciting surface, dense, glittering, here opaque, here transparent,” Barthelme says. And there are worlds of possibility in these perversions, I think.

“Joyce he proceeds like a man weaving a blanket of what might be found in a hardware store,” adds Barthelme. “The strangeness of his project is an essential part of it, almost its point. The fabric falls apart, certainly, but where it hangs together we are privileged to encounter a world made new.” As for Gertrude Stein, her words and syntax also reveal “a willingness to follow language wherever it leads (and if it leads nowhere, to make capital of that).”

Joyce "defended his language... as a largely emotional medium built up by sifting and agglutination... " (Ellman)

"I very recently met a man who said, how do you do. A splendid story." (Stein)

“These perversities answer perfectly Valéry's specifications.” (Barthelme)

“Using this as an opportunity to once again post the syllabus Barthelme assigned his students. Ishmael Reed! Paley! Bernhard!” (Davey)

Finally, after much digression, I return to the essay that isn’t the clock or the letter in Paris. “It has been argued that the ontological status of the literary work has always been just this, that Pilgrim's Progress is an "object" in this sense just as Finnegans Wake is,” continues Barthelme, “but such arguments ignore the changed situation that ensues when the writer is aware of and exploits the possibilities of this special placement.”

And now comes the lovely finale:

Joyce and Stein reap the benefits of a new strategy. Their creations modify the beholder. I do not think it fanciful, for instance, to say that Governor Rockefeller, standing among his Mirós and de Koonings, is worked upon by them, and if they do not make a Democrat or a Socialist of him they at least alter the character of his Republicanism. Considered in this light, Soviet hostility to "formalist" art becomes more intelligible, as does the antipathy of senators, mayors and chairmen of building committees. In the same way, Joyce's book works its radicalizing will upon all men in all countries, even upon those who have not read it and will never read it.

The art changes us and we change it in turn. If I had a wife and a child, I’d be tempted to write a letter and tell them all about it.

Walking, writing, and writing from walking.

I got sucked into this mesmerizing video essay by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, a montage of the walkers that move through Philippe Garrel’s films. The essay traces the arc of the Garrelian story—the elements of that loosely autobiographical “novel” which he endlessly takes up in different configurations, from different angles—through the juxaposition of his walkers.

As captioned by MUBI:

People alone, brooding or dazed; encounters with a passer-by on the street, seemingly casual but forever life-changing; the romantic couple, walking forward with the camera, or off into the distance and the future, like in a Charlie Chaplin movie; and the “holy family” of man, woman, and child all together, no matter by what strange, fortuitous, or circuitous path that trio may have come to be formed.

Watch “Garrel’s Walkers” with sound.

Then watch it without sound.

Put on some music (preferably without lyrics) and get your notebook. Watch the video as one might watch people passing on a street and write what you see.

Tell the stories that appear.

Note the pauses where walking ceases: place a “(rest)” in those areas of your notes.

Then go back and make a list of what each rest indicates—- or what is at stake in each rest. Is the trajectory of that rest inscribed in the next instant, or does the trajectory reach far into the future? What color does a rest evoke? What background noise situates the different rest in relation to what the walkers might later remember of it, if they look back?

On lyrics: "And when I touch you, you don't *feel* a thing..."

"Heightened sexual situations provide catharsis . . . letting us say the things we might feel deeply but are anxious to discuss, a smashing together of Eros and Thanatos."

– Cody Delistraty

I.

Co-incidences abound.

I say this because Cody Delistraty's essay, "Sex and Death,” was published a few days before my review of Alison Strayer's translation of The Uses of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie appeared in LARB—- and maybe the poetics of coincidence has been on my mind lately.

Leaving my mind to the side for a moment, Delistraty begins by meditating on the abjected subjects that populate Egon Schiele's art, and then moves into the subtext of perversion and perversity. The moral hygiene surrounding sex and death creates a generalized discursive prudery (one could say it emerges from 'prudence') that stymies discussion of what makes us human. We are the animals who know we will die. If grief is characterized by "catastrophizing," as Delistrary notes, then sex is the catastrophic writ large. The dissolution of the boundary between self and other, or life and death, complicates the expectations of presence – of 'being there for,' so to speak. In Delistraty's description of grief-related sex, one secures release rather than closure. Closure is bad infinity. Conceptually, closure serves various nameless others by making loss invisible, rendering its expression dirty. Dignity is what is at stake in Schiele's art as well as the way we respond to death.

II.

Another co-inciding (or perhaps co-inciting) thing is Delistray’s reference to J. G. Ballard's novel, Crash, which many humans have seen in its movie form, as a 1996 film directed by David Cronenberg.

Speaking to Tom Vanderbilt about the relationship between the novel and the movie, Cronenberg said:

“Flaubert once said that the more bourgeois you can be in your life, the more radical you can be in your art—something along those lines—and certainly that was Ballard,” said Cronenberg. Of Crash, Delistraty ties the crash’s confrontation of death to a sort of “transcendence by way of fetishisation”.

“He never wavered,” Cronenberg said.

III.

And there is a different coincidence at play here—-one that won’t be recognizable to most people. The context for U2’s “Stay (Faraway, So Close)” is a different film, namely, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. But that is the objective context; subjective contexts differ.

There is a relationship between what the girl in this song wants and what the players of the Crash game want . . .

Dressed up like a car crash
Your wheels are turning but you're upside down
You say when he hits you, you don't mind
Because when he hurts you, you feel alive
Is that what it is

To quote Rainer Maria Rilke’s letter to Inga Junghanns (dated January 5, 1921): “because the whole is too infinite, and we recover by calling it for a while by the name of one love, much as it is just this impassioned restriction that puts us in the wrong, makes us guilty, kills us …”

What it is cannot be severed from what it was.

Donald Barthelme on "Not Knowing"

1. ‘THORNY MATTERS’

Returning to Donald Barthelme’s “Not Knowing,” an essay on writing that deserves a few excerpts. Admittedly, I have completely ignoring DB’s paragraph breaks and replaced them with my own, for my own purposes, which remain unknown to me:

These are by no means the only thorny matters with which writer has to deal, nor (allowing for the very great differences am the practitioners under discussion) does every writer called “modern” respond to them in the same way and to the same degree nor is it the case that other writers of quite different tendencies innocent of these concerns. If I call these matters "thorny," because any adequate attempt to deal with them automatically creates barriers to the ready assimilation of the work.


2. ‘DIFFICULT ART’

OF “difficult art”— Barthelme doesn’t distinguish between the actually difficult and the merely moody, or the obfuscation of difficulty beneath one of those paintings that is purchased to match the living room:

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.

However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.


3. ‘PROBLEMS’

Art exists because problems exist, and artists are humans who relate to problems in a particular fashion:

Problems in part define the kind of work the writer chooses to do, and are not to be avoided but embraced.

A writer, says Karl Kraus, is a man who can make a riddle out of an answer.


4. REPETITION (‘MASTURBATORY’ ISSUES)

“Let me begin again,” Barthelme asserts, with a finger raised to Beckett’s wind:

Jacqueline and Jemima are instructing Zeno, who has returned the purloined GRE documents and is thus restored to dull respectability, in Postmodernism. Postmodernism, they tell him, has turned its back on the world, is not about the world but about its own processes, is masturbatory, certainly chilly, excludes readers by design, speaks only to the already tenured, or does not speak at all […]

The fictional scenario of the critic who serves as a guard at the art museum returns.

Barthelme includes it because he wants us to understand that the work of literature is philosophy, or an effort to think-through the world. So here is the scene (with my paragraph breaks rather than Barthelme’s):

Gaston, the critic who is a guard at the Whitney Museum, is in love with an IRS agent named Madelaine, the very IRS agent, in fact, who is auditing my return for the year 1982.

"Madelaine," I say kindly to her over lunch, "semiotics is in a position to claim that no phenomenon has any ontological status outside its place in the particular information system from which it draws its meaning, and therefore, all language is finally groundless, including that of those funny little notices you've been sending me."

"Yes," says Madelaine kindly, pulling from her pocket a large gold pocket watch that Alphonse has sold Gaston for twenty dollars, her lovely violet eyes atwitter, "but some information systems are more enforceable than others."

Alas, she’s right.


5. ‘TYRANNY OF GREAT EXPECTATIONS’

Then Barthelme ventures into the paradox of mystery, which is something the critic wants to ‘solve’ rather than appreciate as central to the work.

Each piece has its own mystery. Some pieces numb themselves with the aesthetics of mystery in order to guise their commitment to vagueness. How do we read against the desire to box categorically, and then find meaning based on the relation to the box?

I would argue that in the competing methodologies of contemporary criticism, many of them quite rich in implications, a sort of tyranny of great expectations obtains, a rage for final explanations, a refusal to allow a work that mystery which is essential to it. I hope I am not myself engaging in mystification if I say, not that the attempt should not be made, but that the mystery exists. I see no immediate way out of the paradox—-tear a mystery to tatters and you have tatters, not mystery—I merely note it and pass on.

This “rage for final explanations” is one that Samuel Beckett spent a lifetime parodying and emptying.


6. ‘THE GOAT GIRDLED WITH A TIRE’

Now Bartheleme approaches a particular work of art by Robert Rauschenberg, namely, Monogram (1955-6), a piece that boasts a goat and a tire:

We can, however, wonder for a moment why the goat girdled with its tire is somehow a magical object, rather than, say, only a dumb idea. Harold Rosenberg speaks of the contemporary artwork as "anxious," as wondering: Am I a masterpiece or simply a pile of junk? (If I take many of my examples here from the art world rather than the world of literature it is because the issues are more quickly seen in terms of the first: "goat" and "tire" are standing in for pages of prose, pounds of poetry.

It’s not secret that Robert Rauschenberg influenced Barthelme’s artistic process as well as his aesthetic interest in messiness. We are given messiness as a condition of thought. Messiness is one Eden wherein art thinks itself and stories the problems it wishes to approach:

Let us discuss the condition of my desk. It is messy, mildly messy.

The messiness is both physical (coffee cups, cigarette ash) and spiritual (unpaid bills, unwritten novels).

The scene is set; the author will move into the problem, which is a word for the interior of any human sitting before a desk:

The emotional life of the man who sits at the desk is also messy—I am in love with a set of twins, Hilda and Heidi, and in a fit of enthusiasm I have joined the Bolivian army. The apartment in which the desk is located seems to have been sublet from Moonbeam McSwine. In the streets outside the apartment melting snow has revealed a choice assortment of decaying et cetera. Furthermore, the social organization of the country is untidy, the world situation in disarray. How do I render all this messiness, and if I succeed, what have I done?

In a commonsense way we agree that I attempt to find verbal equivalents for whatever it is I wish to render. The unpaid bills are easy enough. I need merely quote one: FINAL DISCONNECT NOTICE.

Hilda and Heidi are somewhat more difficult. I can say that they are beautiful—why not? — and you will more or less agree, although the bald statement has hardly stirred your senses. I can describe them— Hilda has the map of Bolivia tattooed on her right cheek and Heidi habitually wears, on her left hand, a set of brass knuckles wrought of solid silver-and they move a step closer. Best of all, perhaps, I can permit them to speak, for they speak much as we do.

"On Valentine's Day," says Hilda, "he sent me oysters, a dozen and a half."

"He sent me oysters too," said Heidi, "two dozen."

"Mine were long-stemmed oysters," says Hilda, "on a bed of the most wonderful spinach."

Etc. etc.


7. ‘HALOS, PATINAS, OVERHANGS, ECHOES’

The dialogue between characters reveals part of the social organization, or the concerns that adjudicate status among humans. There’s that. So Barthelme returns to an explanation of the “messiness”—- this explanation just so happens to double as an exquisite lesson on what words can do to each other if we sit them side by side in a train, like two strangers, before entering a destination and committing ourselves to watching them for the duration of the ride.

Let’s start with chocolate, in B’s words:

The words with which I attempt to render "messy," like any other words, are not inert, rather they are furiously busy. We do not mistake the words the taste of chocolate for the taste of chocolate itself, but neither do we miss the tease in taste, the shock in chocolate.

Words have halos, patinas, overhangs, echoes.

The word halo, for instance, may invoke St. Hilarius, of whom we've seen too little lately. The word patina brings back the fine petery shine on the saint's hale. The word overhang reminds us that we have, hanging over us, a dinner date with St. Hilarius, that crashing bore. The word echo restores us to Echo herself, poised like the White Rock girl on the overhang of a patina of a halo in firm ground, we don't want the poor spirit to pitch into the pond where Narcissus blooms eternally, they will bump foreheads, or maybe other parts closer to the feet, a scandal.

There's chocolate smeared all over Hilarius' halo, messy, messy.

Messiness is holy, hallowed, delicious. Barthelme makes sure this is clear:

The combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they're allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven't yet encountered.


8. ‘CRITIC-COMPUTERS’

Obviously, the work changes. Many of Barthelme’s short fictions began as novels; he wrote them and then gutted their corpses for a material to reframe in shorter form. The book you begin is rarely the one you publish.

At one point, Barthelme talks about A.I.—which was quite far away on the horizon in those pre-internet days. But it is interesting anyway:

It could be argued that computers can do this sort of thing for us, with critic-computers monitoring their output. When computers learn how to make exes, artists will be in serious trouble. But artists will respond in such a way as to make art impossible for the computer. They will define art to take into account (that is, to exclude) technology— photography's impact upon painting and painting's brilliant response being a clear and comparatively recent example.

Art will be fine. Barthelme believes this. The novel isn’t dead. Anytime a critic claims the novel is dead, what they need is a good vacation and a very demanding pet to distract them from the feeling that everything resembles itself. It’s easy to lose our capacity for discernment. It’s easy to burn out like a candle inside a rotting jack o lantern. We should anticipate that and make adjustments for it.

9. ‘THE ADVANTAGES OF OUR DISADVANTAGES’

“The prior history of words is one of the aspects of language the world uses to smuggle itself into the work,” Barthelme writes. “If words can be contaminated by the world, they can also carry with them into the trace elements of world which can be used in a positive sense.”

And so: “We must allow ourselves the advantages of our disadvantages.”

Life, like fiction, is filled with the messes of living:

A late bulletin: Hilda and Heidi have had a baby, with which hey're thoroughly displeased, it's got no credit cards and can't peak French, they'll send it back... Messy.

10. ‘TO IMAGINE AGAIN’

He ends with a few notes on style, and on the responsibility of imagining ‘again’. I leave him to do it:

Style is not much a matter of choice. One does not sit down to write and think: Is this poem going to be a Queen Anne poem, a Biedermeier poem, a Vienna Secession poem, or a Chinese Chippendale.

Art cannot remain in one place. A certain amount of movement, up, down, across, even a gallop toward the past, is a necessary precondition.

Style enables us to speak, to imagine again.

Beckett speaks of "the long sonata of the dead" —where on earth did the word sonata come from, imposing as it does an orderly, even exalted design upon the most disorderly, distressing phenomenon known to us? The tact is not challenged, but understood, momentarily, in a new way.

It's our good fortune to be able to imagine alternative realities, other possibilities. We can quarrel with the world, constructively (no one alive has quarreled with the world more extensively or splendidly than Beckett).

"Belief in progress," says Baudelaire, "is a doctrine of idlers and Belgians."

Perhaps.

But if I have anything unorthodox to offer here, it's that I think art's project is fundamentally ameliorative. The aim of meditating about the world is finally to change the world. It is this meliorative aspect of literature that provides its ethical dimension. We are all Upton Sinclairs, even that Hamlet, Stéphane Mallarmé.

Robert Rauschenberg with “Interview” (1955), “Untitled” (ca. 1954), the second state of “Monogram” (1955–59; second state 1956–58), “Bed” (1955), and “Odalisk” (1955/1958) in his Front Street studio, New York, NY, United States, 1958. Photo: Kay Harris

The list of "certain questions of a theological nature" from Molloy.

Matt Seidel said Molloy was Samuel Beckett’s “great road novel,” and I think it is, since every road novel runs the route of the mind traveling back to childhood, encountering himself in the daydreaming child who wanders around the village looking for a bicycle. Even if the father is Penelope and the son is Odysseus.

There is much to be said of the home-going scenes, particularly when the son makes a conscious effort to ignore the sirens of the field, namely the "friends in human shape and the phantoms of the dead that tried to prevent" him from returning. On this long walk, the young son cogitates and comes up with a list of questions. Here is the passage:

But I shall not dwell upon this journey home, its furies and treacheries. And I shall pass over in silence the fiends in human shape and the phantoms of the dead that tried to prevent me from getting home, in obedience to Youdi's command.

But one or two words nevertheless, for my own edification and to prepare my soul to make an end. To begin with my rare thoughts.

Certain questions of a theological nature preoccupied me strangely.

As for example,

  1. What value is to be attached to the theory that Eve sprang, not from Adam's rib, but from a tumor in the fat of his leg (arse?)?

  2. Did the serpent crawl or, as Comestor affirms, walk upright?

  3. Did Mary conceive through the ear, as Augustine and Adobard assert?

  4. What is one to think of the Irish oath sworn by the natives with the right hand on the relics of the saints and the left on the virile member?

  5. Does nature observe the sabbath?

  6. Is it true that the devils do not feel the pains of hell?

  7. The algebraic theology of Craig. What is one to think of this?

  8. Is it true that the infant Saint-Roch refused suck on Wednesdays and Fridays?

  9. What is one to think of the excommunication of vermin in the sixteenth century?

  10. Is one to approve of the Italian cobbler Lovat who, having cut off his testicles, crucified himself?

  11. What was God doing with himself before the creation?

  12. Might not the beatific vision become a source of boredom, in the long run?

  13. Is it true that Judas' torments are suspended on Saturdays?

  14. What if the mass for the dead were read over the living?

And I recited the pretty quietist Pater, Our Father who art no more in heaven than on earth or in hell, I neither want nor desire that thy name be hallowed, thou knowest best what suits thee. Etc. The middle and the end are very pretty.

It was in this frivolous and charming world that I took refuge, when my cup ran over.

But I asked myself other questions concerning me perhaps more closely. As for example,

  1. Why had I not borrowed a few shillings from Gaber?

  2. Why had I obeyed the order to go home?

  3. What had become of Molloy?

  4. Same question for me.

  5. What would become of me?

  6. Same question for my son.

  7. Was his mother in heaven?

  8. Same question for my mother.

  9. Would I go to heaven?

  10. Would we all meet again in heaven one day, I, my mother, my son, his mother, Youdi, Gaber, Molloy, his mother, Yerk, Murphy, Watt, Camier and the rest?

  11. What had become of my hens, my bees? Was my grey hen still living?

  12. Zulu, the Elsner sisters, were they still living?

  13. Was Youdi's business address still 8, Acacia Square? What if I wrote to him? What if I went to see him? I would explain to him. What would I explain to him? I would crave his forgiveness. Forgiveness for what?

  14. Was not the winter exceptionally severe?

  15. How long had I gone now without either confession or communion?

  16. What was the name of the martyr who, being in prison, loaded with chains, covered with wounds and vermin, unable to stir, celebrated the consecration on his stomach and gave himself absolution?

  17. What would I do until my death? Was there no means of hastening this, without falling into a state of sin?

Samuel Beckett. "Molloy." The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett: Volume II: 160-162.

A poem and 2 things: Louise Bogan's "Words for Departure"

Only music can create an indestructible complicity between two persons. A passion is perishable, it decays like everything that part takes of life, whereas music is of an essence superior to life and, of course, to death.  

—- Emil Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations

Emil Cioran calls it sublimity. Across decades of words and texts, music shuts him up and pours the ineffable all over his head.

There’s a part in Anathemas and Admirations where Cioran sits inside the stone womb (or the tomb-birthing chapel) of Saint-Severin and listens to an organist playing through Bach's fugues, calling this moment "the refutation of all my anathemas." 

Like music, poetry is composed from sound and silence, two materials which invoke each other and are figured in different ways. Because the resonant sound of a text is subjective, depending on the reader's relationship to sound, the text exists in relationship to the reader's sonic experience. 

"Mute" suggests an inability to speak, or a state of speechlessness which may be imposed from the outside or chosen as a response. But to be muted is to be rendered inaudible, to have one's volume turned down. To say that 'I muted myself' is jarring, since the conventional use of a muted female involves being rendered silent, and then being determined to be complicit in that silence, insinuating that  muteness, as a condition, inscribes the power of the world over the sound one can make. Watching someone go rapt over music is like watching their face during sex, or realizing they love it.

Thelonious Monk and Charlie Rouse playing Epistropy on my wedding dress.


WORDS FOR DEPARTURE


 Louise Bogan



Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten.
When we awoke, wagons were passing on the warm summer pavements,
The window-sills were wet from rain in the night,
Birds scattered and settled over chimneypots
As among grotesque trees.

Nothing was accepted, nothing looked beyond.
Slight-voiced bells separated hour from hour,
The afternoon sifted coolness
And people drew together in streets becoming deserted.
There was a moon, and light in a shop-front,
And dusk falling like precipitous water.

Hand clasped hand
Forehead still bowed to forehead—
Nothing was lost, nothing possessed
There was no gift nor denial.



2.

I have remembered you.
You were not the town visited once,
Nor the road falling behind running feet.

You were as awkward as flesh
And lighter than frost or ashes.

You were the rind,
And the white-juiced apple,
The song, and the words waiting for music.

 

3.

You have learned the beginning;
Go from mine to the other.

Be together; eat, dance, despair,
Sleep, be threatened, endure.
You will know the way of that.

But at the end, be insolent;
Be absurd—strike the thing short off;
Be mad—only do not let talk
Wear the bloom from silence.

And go away without fire or lantern
Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.

 

Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard.




Sexexistence, a pseudo-archaelogy.

Paris, 2000. “Pompéi—villa du mystère en trop.”

While visiting Jean-Luc Nancy in the year 2000, François Martin noticed a patch of water damage on his wall. The two men must have chatted briefly about the shape of the damage before Martin picked up some graphite and sketched this figure over the damaged surface. At some point before the wall was re-plastered, Jean-Luc took a photo of François’ drawing and titled it, Pompéi—villa du mystère en trop. This title could refer perhaps to original drawing or its preservation in the photo.


Hamburg, May 2015.

Jean-Luc Nancy gives a lecture that will be titled “Sexistenz”. This title plays on the existenz of existentialism.

“What is made, then, when we make love?” he asks rhetorically. “We make nothing in the sense of production (if a child results, whether or not he or she is considered a production, that child is not love as such, which can very well be completely absent).” What we make is murky.

“We make in the sense of performing an act, but the designated act is not an act; it is a sentiment, a disposition, the arousal of relation that reaches beyond itself toward something that seems destined either to renew it indefinitely or to surpass it in an embrace where it concludes without us knowing how to interpret that sense of concluding,” Jean-Luc continues. The work of performance seems to be accomplished by the statement itself.

Then:

Expression indicates an effectiveness of love that no declaration, no demonstration, no testimony can claim to convey. This is why, in a sense, it is not impossible to make love outside the limited sense of a sexual relation: the exchange of looks, of such and such contact, of words too that can venture into the terrain of this “making.”

For at least one thing is sure: love cannot merely be said; even its saying must be a doing.

He classifies “I love you” as a “performative” that “does what it says.” Under this condition, the statement does all the work. A physical embrace “only adds an excess saying, performing its own limit.” The limit of the limitation is the invisible constraint.


“E. M.” French.

“(Related question: in how many languages does one say, more or less literally, make love?)”

—- Jean-Luc Nancy, “Sexistenz”

Unlike French, Romanian is a minor language. This was unbearable to Emil Cioran. Unbearable to exist in a language that could not contest its own disappearance. Unbearable to be born into this tongue that marked itself insignificant. In a letter to a friend, Emil decided he would only use the Romanian language for cursing.

In Paris, E. M. (formerly Emil) vowed to marry a French woman who lacked any ties to Romania. By adopting a foreign tongue, Cioran planned to distance himself from the homeland-craziness associated with Romanian. "The acceptance of this linguistic discipline has moderated my delirium," he wrote. The voluptuary of exile would be his new belonging, but his point of origin would haunt him and inflect his writings. Fortunately, Simone Boue allowed the notorious pessimist to exert his charms on her, and became his official French wife. It is lovely when love works out that way.


Paris. March 5, 1944.

Georges Bataille reads "The Laughter of Nietzsche" aloud to a group of intellectuals. In this paper, he argues that Zarathustra made laughter sacred. Bataille quotes Nietszche: "to see the shipwreck of tragic figures, and to be able to laugh, in spite of the profound understanding, emotion, and sympathy. One feels, that is divine."


Hamburg, May 2015.

“If it can only be made, performed—which, of course, has nothing to do with what is called “sexual performance” (nothing except perhaps precisely the fact that this representation of performance, of perfection in making [love], and of the capacity to enjoy and to give enjoyment, must be related to this preeminence of making [love])—if, therefore, it can only be made and if perhaps even love with all its values can only be an act and a “work” in the sense that Christianity has given to this term, it is perhaps now necessary for us to try to think and say something about the actuality of this act,” Jean-Luc tells his audience.

This “actuality” — the sex— has been stifled and silenced by modesty in most cultures, an inhibition that Jean-Luc specifies as a “restraint in terms of what could never be shown or what could only be shown between the lovers doing it.” He then shifts to a quote from Emmanuel Levinas’ Eros, littérature et philosophie: Essais romanesques et politiques, notes philosophiques sur le thème d’éros, published two years prior, in 2013.

What is interesting about this book is the fact that its editors include a man and a woman, namely, Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, himself. The nature of this quotation gives it the aura of an inscription:

As Emmanuel Levinas writes in an isolated note: “Obscene: love that others make.”

Jean-Luc qualifies the note: “This also means that what we make is not obscene. However, in making it, we do not speak about it—or else what we say participates in the obscene, is an exclamation of the obscene.”

Thus, speech (or expression) is what renders the love we make obscene. A notion like this also parses the legal conceptions of pornography. Behind it lies the conception of sex as sacred. But that isn’t quite where Jean-Luc takes this. In fact, he will develop the sacred side in the book titled Sexistence, a title that shifts from the existential implications of that “z” into a longer meditation on embodiment and ecstasy.


1933 - 1947. German.

In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein worked through his earlier view that philosophy should be composed in the manner of a poem. He locates his thinking across time in relation to his own perspective, situating it with respect to past, future, or present thoughts. 

What changed between 1947 and his earlier writings? Alternately, what follows from this line written by Wittgenstein in 1933?

"For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what I would like to be able to do."

His statement is my question.


Hamburg, May 2015.

“Sex opens up the existent to an abyss and a violence that certainly do not deplete the deviating and exposed traits of existence,” Jean-Luc told his audience. What this abyss and violence do is “bring us to the border of a ‘making’ that essentially touches at the same time the dual beyond of the animal and the divine, two names that articulate nothing but existence as its own dehiscence, a sexistence.”

Dehiscence is “a partial or total separation of previously approximated wound edges, due to a failure of proper wound healing” that usually occurs 5 to 8 days following surgery when healing is still in the early stages. It is a failure to heal: a failure to adhere the edges. As one who lived with transplanted organs, Jean-Luc knew the failure to heal intimately. He knew it as someone knows the “gape” that Roland Barthes used to inscribe the erotic. The hole that needs sutures and seams.

I was thinking about seams today because one of the teens asked why I didn’t get my “scars fixed”. The question interests me in its aesthetic presumptions. "For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what I would like to be able to do."

Repetitio rerum: a removal and repetition of original founding acts which create the field for their continuation.


Italy. January 5, 1921.

Rainer Maria Rilke sends a letter to Inga Junghanns that speaks to the role names play in our memorial imaginaries:

... Yes, how curiously things do happen in life; were there not a bit of arrogance somewhere in it, one would indeed like very much to stand outside, confronting everything, that is, everything that occurs, so as surely not to lose anything—; one would then still remain fixed, perhaps for the first time really so, in the actual center of life, where everything comes together and has no name;— but then again, the names have bewitched us—the titles, the pretenses of life— because the whole is too infinite, and we recover by calling it for a while by the name of one love, much as it is just this impassioned restriction that puts us in the wrong, makes us guilty, kills us …

I don’t know when Herbert James Draper executed this study for The Lament for Icarus, but I am interested in what kills us. Or the ways time abolishes its possibility, whether through prophecy, apocalypse, or atrocity. There is something about flying that haunts the shape of a body in the air before the moment of impact. The memory of it feels absent, yet the traces are recognizable in my urges. This, too, is a history of the self that is forced to imagine what defines it.

Lived remembrance is never archival: it is discovery. The authentic historian is also a poet of precise imagining.

—- George Steiner


Charles Ives in 33 notes.

1. Cosmology

On October 20th, 1874, Charles Edward Ives entered the world via Danbury, Connecticut. He remained in this world for 79 years, during which he joined Wallace Stevens by turning the insurance salesman an alternate career for the American artist.


2. First memory

Among his first memories, Charles recollected his father, George Ives, standing in the rain outside their house, listening to church bells peal ring through the heavy air, his brow furrowed in concentration as he rushed back inside the house to duplicate the overtone structure on his piano. Again and again, his father went out to listen and came in to try to play what he had heard.

As a military band leader and lover of muses, George snatched melodies from the air and carried them home for experimentation and elucidation. These memories inspired Ives’ compositional practice. Drawing on the soundscapes of his Danbury childhood, Ives frequently snuck popular forms like ragtime, religious hymns, circus parades, folk songs, military marches, and patriotic anthems into his pieces.


3. Two variations on a river scene

In June 1908, the newly-married Charles Ives and Harmony Twichell, went for a hike while vacationing in the Berkshire Hills of New England. Two days later, still meditating on the ethereal landscape, Ives began sketching what would become the final movement of his orchestral tryptic, Three Places in New England (1914). He titled this third movement The Housatonic at Stockbridge, and it stretches from a luminous silence towards voices that shift in and out without announcing themselves, as if riding an eternal current.

Fragments of hymns like Isaac Woodbury’s "Dorrance" waft through the piece, giving it the feel of a sonic collage presaging John Cage’s The Idea of North.

Ives credited that “Sunday morning walk that Mrs. Ives and I took near Stockbridge, [Mass.,] the summer after we were married. We walked in the meadows along the river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember.” After describing the scene, Ives added that “Robert Underwood Johnson, in his poem, ‘The Housatonic at Stockbridge,’ paints this scene beautifully.” In actuality, Johnson’s poem was titled “Ode to the Housatonic at Stockbridge,” and Ives returned to it in 1921, when he arranged this movement as a song for voice and piano with Johnson's text. Ives had an excerpt of the poem printed in the score of the original orchestral version. Here’s Housatonic at Stockbridge (1921) with Gilbert Kalish, piano and Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano.


4. “The wrong way”

“Ives blasts in my head, and I can hear Ed’s voice chastising me about my lack of understanding of this great American music,” wrote the great Charles Bowden in what ended up being one of his final published essays, a piece that meets the desert and borders in Edward Abbey’s love for Ives’ compositions.

In a review of Jeremy Denk’s new Ives for NPR, Tom Huizenga says Ives “inherited” his zaniest ideas from his father, that “musical jack-of-all-trades … who instructed his son to sing songs in one key and play the accompaniment in another.” George Ives used to tell his son, “If you know how to write a fugue the right way, then I’m willing to have you try the wrong way.”


5. Motherwell’s monster

Motherwell dedicated the painting to Ives because he felt the composer understood the difficulty of making modern art that moves its audience without explaining why.

— Smithsonian

In 1959, Robert Motherwell painted Monster (for Charles Ives) while listening to Ives’ music. Drawn to the unexpected chords and musical phrasings, Motherwell opened himself to images and impressions inspired by the drifts towards atonality. According to the Smithsonian (where this work is currently held but not exhibited), the monstrous, threatening masses that punctuate Motherwell’s paintings “express his anxieties as an artist and as a witness to a violent century.” A few years earlier, Motherwell said that poets, composers, and artists were "ill at ease in the universe" and their creations intended to parse the ravine between loneliness and the living world.

Robert Motherwell, Monster (for Charles Ives), 1959,


6. String Quartet No. 2

The string quartet right from the beginning was always a... subtle medium for the expression of social relationships... The old image of... four civilized people talking to each other in terms that would not have been unfamiliar to philosophers of the Enlightenment. And whilst that of course is somewhat absurd from the present-day standpoint, and indeed was turned on its head by Charles Ives who had four very irascible characters climbing a mountain and shrieking at each other... It does seem to me there is something about the quartet which is inherently imbricated with what we understand human relationships to be on a highly evolved level.

— Brian Ferneyhough in documentation accompanying a recording of rehearsal of his own Sixth Quartet

It used to come over me — especially after coming from some of those nice Kneisel Quartet concerts—-that music had been, and still was, too much an emasculated art. Too much of what was easy and usual to play and to hear what was called beautiful, etc. — the same old even-vibration, Sybaritic apron-strings, keeping music too much tied to the old ladies. The string quartet music got more and more trite, weak, and effeminate. After one of those Kneisel Quartet concerts in the old Mendelssohn Hall, I started a string quartet score, half mad, half in fun, and half to try out, practice, and have some fun making those men fiddlers get up and do something like men.

—- Charles Ives of String Quartet No. 2 (in Memos)

"S[tring] Q[uartet] for 4 men—-who converse, discuss, argue (in re: 'Politick', fight, shake hands, shut up--then walk up the mountain side to view the firmament!"

—-Charles Ives, beneath the score's title

Supposedly, Ives started composing this string quartet as a 21-year-old student. The first movement, "Discussions," introduces the two violins, viola, and violoncello in a discursive motion.  The second movement, "Arguments," emerged from a 1907 sketch inspired by lively conversations and debates at "Poverty Flat," the apartment Ives shared with friends. The score includes quotations of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" theme. In these quotations of Romantics, Ives pushed back against the musical establishment who rejected him.  

Ives scores the second violin as a character named "Rollo." With [Andante emasculata / Slowly in an emasculated way],  the second violin, Rollo, steps in with these maudlin tonal candenzas that attempt to establish order among the arguing voices of the quartet by evoking traditional sentimentality. Then, after a few measures, we get [Allegro con fisto / Cheerfully with fist ] where other  instruments respond with a dissonant fff passage recalling the opening of the movement. This is followed by another slow, emasculated cadenza.

Notation: "Too hard to play, so it just can't be good music - Rollo."

The second movement shifts into the third movement with a brief, open-string pause designated by [Andante con scratchy (as tuning up) / Slowly like scratchy]  

Allegro con fistiswatto / fff "good place to stop - not end!"

The dissonant chords that open the third movement, "The Call of the Mountains,” don’t move at first. Although the music unfolds slowly, it soon gains momentum as a the furious tremolos intervene. Gradually, the instruments strain to the upper limits of their registers as the four ascend the mountain.

I love how this quartet ends without giving the audience anything except a queer presentiment of metaphysical mystery. It is unsettling and inexplicable, and keyed to Ives’ own disgust for the perfect composure of music society led him to rant against the string quartet’s formal colloquy of bourgeois patronage—- "a whole evening of mellifluous sounds, perfect cadences, perfect ladies, perfect programs, and not a dissonant cuss word to stop the anemia and beauty."

Through the character of Rollo, Ives lambasted the mainstream critics and musical media. In this, his Rollo reminds me a bit of a persona invented by composer Claude Debussy when he found himself in dire need of money and began writing musical critique under the pen name “Monsieur Croche” (i.e. Mr. Quarter-note). After his death, Debussy’s criticism was collected and published as Monsieur Croche, Antidilettante.

I’ve written a whole series of poems based on Ives’ string quartet, but two have been published, thus must I mortify the reader by sharing them.

First published in Air/light, a journal I adore. 

First published in Air/light, a journal I adore, edited by David Ulin whom I deeply admire.



7. Inventory in which each statement begins with Ives:

  1. “Was a spikey and outspoken man” who “hated what he called 'pretty music'.”

  2. Was obsessed with Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, sneaking it into his compositions again and again, much as Mahler did with those ghostly parade-trumpet calls.

  3. Composed his most well-known works from 1896 to 1921 and had pieces performed as early as 1925.

  4. Composed Study No. 21: Some Southpaw Pitching (1918–19) for piano in an effort to put baseball to music.

  5. Was not “widely known” until 1939, despite his prodigous output.

  6. Wrote four symphonies, the third of which—Symphony No. 3—won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize.

  7. Left us with unconventional notation, often omitting key, time signatures, and bar lines.

Charles Ives in his tweed. 

8. Of free dissonance

In 1919 or 1920, Charles first heard Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird, and found it lacking. "The idea of a phrase, usually a small one, was good enough, and interesting in itself, but he kept it going over and over and it got tiresome," Ives said of Stravinsky. "It reminded me of something I had heard of Ravel, whose music is of a kind I cannot stand: weak, morbid and monotonous; pleasing enough, if you want to be pleased."

“He experimented with atonality way before Schoenberg—-and with free dissonance way before Stravinsky—- and with quarter-tones way before Alois Haba—- and with multiple rhythms, even today so complicated they can hardly be performed accurately,” conductor Leonard Bernstein said of Ives. Despite being an insurance salesman, Ives stood apart from other pioneering composers in that his “whole real life was composing music.”

9. Of foot-notes

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ives scorned footnotes. The 1920 publication of his Essays Before A Sonata includes a total of five in a work built on quotations. However, the book begins with the first and only “Introductory Footnote” I have ever read, authored by Ives himself, informing us, his readers, that:

These prefatory essays were written by the composer for those who can't stand his music—and the music for those who can't stand his essays; to those who can't stand either, the whole is respectfully dedicated.

10. Of property and various local characters buried in Ives’ work

Sam Staples was a Concord "character" who rose from hustler and barkeeper to constable, and later Representative in the General Court. He was Thoreau's jailer in 1846 when Thoreau refused to pay his poll-tax in protest against the war with Mexico, and later, his friend and rodsman on surveying expeditions.

While meditating on the "perversion" occasioned by property, Ives thought of Sam Staples in an essay on Thoreau:

It is conceivable that Thoreau, to the consternation of the richest members of the Bolshevik and Bourgeois, would propose a policy of liberation, a policy of a limited personal property right" on the ground that congestion of personal property tends to limit the progress of the soul (as well as the progress of the stomach) — letting the economic noise thereupon take care of itself — for dissonances are becoming beautiful — and do not the same waters that roar in a storm take care of the eventual calm? This limit of property would be determined not by the voice of the majority but by the brain of the majority under a government limited to no national boundaries. "The government of the world I live in is not framed in after-dinner conversation" around a table in a capital city, for there is no capital— a government of principles not parties; of a few fundamental truths and not of many political expediencies — a government conducted by virtuous leaders, for it will be led by all, for all are virtuous, as then their "innate virtue" will no more be perverted by unnatural institutions. This will not be a millennium but a practical and possible application of uncommon common sense. For is it not sense, common or otherwise, for Nature (to want) to hand back the earth to those to whom it belongs— that is, to those who have to live on it?

You can also get a sense of Ives’ non-existent citation strategy here, as he moves between quoting Thoreau to invoking others while ultimately landing on his lifetime credo, namely, “dissonances are becoming beautiful.”

11. Piano Sonata No.2, Concord, Mass., 1840–60

How far is anyone justified, be he an authority or a layman, in expressing or trying to express in terms of music (in sounds, if you like) the value of anything, material, moral, intellectual, or spiritual, which is usually expressed in terms other than music?

— Charles Ives’ opening salvo in Essays Before a Sonata

The Piano Sonata No.2, Concord, Mass., 1840–60 (commonly known as the Concord Sonata) is one of Ives’ best-known pieces. Although some parts of it were sketched in 1904, Ives didn’t really start working on it until 1911, finally completing the work in 1915. The Concord Sonata was first published in 1919 with a second, revised, edition appearing in 1947 (the one that gets used today).

Just before the original Concord Sonata was published, Ives published a book titled Essays Before a Sonata detailing the scope and reverie of his work. The Sonata was an "impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Massachusetts of over a half century ago,” wrote Ives, and the conveyance of this transcendentalist spirit “is undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne."

In 2012, a reprint of the original, uncorrected 1920 edition was published, including Essays before a Sonata and with an added introductory essay by the New England Conservatory's Stephen Drury. It is a gold mine for lovers of Ives. More than anything, one can hear Ives’ fascination with the Concord Transcendentalists intimately inscribed in the score. Each of the four movements represents a particular figure from local history.

0:00 - I. "Emerson" (after Ralph Waldo Emerson)

16:23 - II. "Hawthorne" (after Nathaniel Hawthorne)

29:21 - III. "The Alcotts" (after Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott)

35:29 - IV. "Thoreau" (after Henry David Thoreau)

Ives’ experimental tendencies are on full display, as much Concard Sonata is written without bar lines, despite the advanced harmonic structure.



12. First movement: “Emerson”

“. . it [wisdom] enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, for in days of cheerful labor."

—- Ralph Waldo Emerson, final sentence of "Nature"

To Ives, both Emerson to Beethoven are “invaders of the unknown.” He claims this in Essays just before explaining that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony rouses us with a transcendent call to action “above the relentlessness of fate knocking at the door, above the greater human-message of destiny, and strives to bring it towards the spiritual message of Emerson’s revelations, the Soul of humanity knocking at the door of the Divine mysteries.” This is why the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth are quoted in each of the Concord Sonata’s four movements, serving as quotational anchors that shape harmonies and assert sonic and gestural pivots within the melodic narrative.

Where Ives reads Emerson well is in his commitment to thinking towards truth rather than crowning himself as its inventor. Getting messy on the back roads of the mind requires imagination, and Ives agrees with Emerson’s view that imagination is critical to understanding. “To think hard and deeply and to say what is thought, regardless of consequences, may produce a first impression, either of great translucence, or of great muddiness, but in the latter there may be hidden possibilities,” Ives wrote, continuing:

Some accuse Brahms' orchestration of being muddy. This may be a good name for a first impression of it. But if it should seem less so, he might not be saying what he thought. The mud may be a form of sincerity which demands that the heart be translated, rather than handed around through the pit. A clearer scoring might have lowered the thought.

This line—-a clearer scoring might have lowered the thought— applies to Ives’ compositions— while the reference to mud as a form of sincerity calls to mind how little we know of each other. Both convention and the medium of language often overdetermine our reading of a speaker’s intent. Emerson lingers on this thought as well, lamenting what conversation presumes of sincerity. "How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the same words!” Emerson exclaims. “My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation until all is said which words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption." All the talk in the world won’t bring us closer to understanding one another if our goal is to merely listen rather than engage the labor of fathoming. For Emerson, no friendship could deliver a supernal knowing of the other: humans remained strangers in the land of the friend’s mind.

As an “impressionistic picture” of Emerson, the first movement has patches that feel as if the composer didn’t bother to make them cohere. This, too, seems intentional, since Ives writes in the Essays:

Carlyle told Emerson that some of his paragraphs didn't cohere. Emerson wrote by sentences or phrases, rather than by logical sequence. His underlying plan of work seems based on the large unity of a series of particular aspects of a subject, rather than on the continuity of its expression. As thoughts surge to his mind, he fills the heavens with them, crowds them in, if necessary, but seldom arranges them, along the ground first.

Striking an note that aligns with Emersonian perfectionism, Ives says of composers and writers who try the impossible and fail: “not being perfect, they are perfect examples pointing to that perfection which nothing yet has attained.”

Near the end of the “Emerson” movement, Ives included an optional part for viola—an unusual addition to a piano work. That choice opens the door to expanding the piece’s terrain; it locates a stake in sheer possibility.

13. Aside on Ives’ seeping sonata

Why did Ives leave his Concord Sonata for solo piano unfinished? And “what to do with those ad-lib cameo parts for, during the first movement, solo viola and, at the very end of the piece, solo flute?” wonders Philip Clark. “Should pianists wrap the suggestion of ‘alien’ instrumental voices back into the work’s fantasy? Or take Ives at his word and include them?”

The answer depends on the pianist. But the open-endedness of Ives’ interpretive space feels necessary, given his innovations in form. Like 19th-century novels, the sonata form usually assumes the creation of a musical world contained by the piece. Listening to a sonata allows one to enter and experience that world for the duration. The sonata’s aesthetic success may be judged on the basis of how effectively it transports the listener to the sonic world of its evocation. Alas, Charles Ives’ music specialized in seepage: it leapt over borders with a tin trumpet and introduced ordinary sounds defamiliarized by their insertion into the sonata. Ives was the maestro of wild allusion and quotation.

14. Second movement: “Hawthorne”

The substance of Hawthorne is so dripping wet with the supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical—so surcharged with adventures, from the deeper picturesque to the illusive fantastic, one unconsciously finds oneself thinking of him as a poet of greater imaginative impulse than Emerson or Thoreau. He was not a greater poet possibly than they—but a greater artist.

— Charles Ives, Essays Before A Sonata

 The pianist performing this “scherzo” is Alexei Lubimov. (Notice what happens at 9:08) For “there is often a pervading melancholy about Hawthorne, as Faguet says of de Musset "without posture, without noise but penetrating,’” Ives writes:

There is at times the mysticism and serenity of the ocean, which Jules Michelet sees in "its horizon rather than in its waters." There is a sensitiveness to supernatural sound waves. Hawthorne feels the mysteries and tries to paint them rather than explain them—and here, some may say that he is wiser in a more practical way and so more artistic than Emerson.

But none of this mystique, according to Ives, enters the 2nd movement. Instead, Ives claims that his “Hawthorne” is just an "extended fragment” aiming to impress the listener with some of Hawthorne’s “wilder, fantastical adventures into the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal realms.” It is the fantastic Hawthorne that Ives fashions into music:

It may have something to do with the children's excitement on that "frosty Berkshire morning, and the frost imagery on the enchanted hall window" or something to do with "Feathertop," the "Scarecrow," and his "Looking Glass" and the little demons dancing around his pipe bowl; or something to do with the old hymn tune that haunts the church and sings only to those in the churchyard, to protect them from secular noises, as when the circus parade comes down Main Street; or something to do with the concert at the Stamford camp meeting; or something to do with the Concord he-nymph, or the "Seven Vagabonds," or "Circe's Palace," or something else in the wonderbook—not something that happens, but the way something happens; or something to do with the "Celestial Railroad," or "Phoebe's Garden," or something personal, which tries to be "national" suddenly at twilight, and universal suddenly at midnight; or something about the ghost of a man who never lived, or about something that never will happen, or something else that is not.

Notably, Ives added to “Hawthorne” a cluster chord created by depressing the piano's keys with a 14 3⁄4-inch (37 cm) piece of wood. 



15. Third movement: “The Alcotts”

All around you, under the Concord sky, there still floats the influence of that human faith melody, transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the cynic respectively, reflecting an innate hope—a common interest in common things and common men—a tune the Concord bards are ever playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethovenlike sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and perseverance—for that part of greatness is not so difficult to emulate.

— Charles Ives, Essays Before A Sonata

In Essays, Ives details the proximity of his characters in Concord, pausing at a space by occupied by the Alcotts to describe the partly-fictional “Orchard House,” which he calls “the home of the ‘Marches’", spaces “pervaded with the trials and happiness of the family and telling, in a simple way, the story of ‘the richness of not having.’” Ives continues:

Within the house, on every side, lie remembrances of what imagination can do for the better amusement of fortunate children who have to do for themselves-much-needed lessons in these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty. And there sits the little old spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony.

The “musical sketch” won’t focus on the moral grandeur of the Alcotts. Instead, Ives renders “the memory of that home under the elms—the Scotch songs and the family hymns that were sung at the end of each day—though there may be an attempt to catch something of that common sentiment” demonstrated by the Alcotts, namely, “a strength of hope that never gives way to despair—a conviction in the power of the common soul which, when all is said and done, may be as typical as any theme of Concord and its transcendentalists.” No surprise that this movement begins with an instruction to be performed “moderately”.



16. Fourth movement: “Thoreau”

The personal trait that one who has affection for Thoreau may find worst is a combative streak, in which he too often takes refuge. "An obstinate elusiveness," almost a "contrary cussedness," as if he would say, which he didn't: "If a truth about something is not as I think it ought to be, I'll make it what I think, and it WILL be the truth—but if you agree with me, then I begin to think it may not be the truth."

— Charles Ives, Essays Before A Sonata

Briefly, during this fourth and final movement that Ives called an “impressionistic picture” of Thoreau, a flute appears as if to figurate the poet himself, drafting him into the tribute. To Ives, Thoreau was “a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the Symphony.’” Instead, Thoreau heard music in the forest.

“The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer,” Ives wrote of Thoreau. One can hear this rhythm in “Sounds,” which takes off from a perfectly-shaped short statement that could be the first line of an ode: “I love a broad margin to my life.” Here is the delicious excerpt in its entirety:

I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness.... I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. . . . For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished.

In addition to nature, Ives discovered time (and tempo) in Walden. "Throughout Walden, a text that he is always pounding out is Time,” Ives wrote, interspersing his own words with quotes from Thoreau’s:

“Time for inside work out-of-doors; preferably out-of-doors, though "you may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor house." Wherever the place-time there must be. Time to show the unnecessariness of necessities which clog up time. Time to contemplate the value of man to the universe-and of the universe to man-man's excuse for being. Time from the demands of social conventions. Time from too much labor (for some) which means too much to eat, too much to wear, too much material, too much materialism (for others). Time from the "hurry and waste of life." Time in “St. Vitus Dance”.

And Time, of course, is prone to running out. "Who has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever?" Thoreau wonders in the conclusion of Walden.

17. Essays Before A Sonata and Other Writings (Norton)

A deceased author cannot be queried, and one must either print his text exactly as he left it in the last approved version, or risk burdening the reader with the explanations and apparatuses of textual scholarship. The latter treatment would probably have annoyed Ives as it did Emerson, who speaks scornfully of the "Third state" (with the world and the soul) consisting of "the restorers of readings, the emmendators, [and] the bibliomaniacs of all degrees" scripts and the printed book.

An obviously necessary revision of the punctuation in the book could not be undertaken without looking up all the passages in quotation marks, of which there were hundreds. Even if it were decided that bolstering Ives' quotations with reference was unnecessary pedantry, there was no other way to distinguish between real quotations, paraphrases, allusions, or passages placed in quotes to express strong feeling.

—- Howard Boatwright, opening Ives’ Essays with a husky explanation of his edits to the archival manuscript

Howard Boatwright edited and compiled this version of Ives’ Essays Before A Sonata. As he notes in the introduction, the original manuscript was previously thought to have been lost and its discovery “opened the possibility for a new edition of the Essays, which in its privately printed edition of 1920 had not been deemed suitable for literal reprinting by those who had considered it. The manuscript offered the opportunity to consult with the author, as it were, in correcting various lapses which had occurred in the 1920 book.”

While sorting through Ives manuscripts, a lengthy, unpublished essay titled "The Majority" was discovered, alongside numerous versions of “Ives' other political and economic fantasies.” Boatwright mentions that the following were also found: rough drafts of well-known prefaces and program notes for Ives pieces, including the "Postface" to 114 Songs; materials relating to Ives’ one article in the sphere of speculative music theory: "Some Quarter-tone Impressions.”

Ives writing wasn’t directly concerned with music. Instead, it sketched the field of interest that inspired his music. When concerned with music, Ives wrote music. And when he used words, he did so “to provide the general philosophical support for his compositions,” writes Boatwright, since “words were the principal weapon when his idealism led him (around 1918) away from attempting to reform the musical conventions of his youth towards attacking the weaknesses of our national and international life, as he saw them.”

As he saw them, of course, acknowledges that Ives’ views tended to eschew the popular sentiment. He was cantankerous and driven by the dissonances that emerged from complex juxtapositions. What his editor calls “the language of conversation transferred to a book” also marks Ives’ musical compositions. This line comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of Montaigne: "It is the language of conversation transferred to a book."

Ives often wove the names of authors, musicians, and public figures into his prose, and Boatwright made an effort to track down the actual quotations as well as the lesser known allusions, finally settling for "a revision of the punctuation, done after collation of the book and manuscript, and the tracing of the quotations." In a sense, Ives punctuated the way he scored music.

“While most writers use commas for grammatical clarity, to Ives they are "phrasing," in actual time, functioning like the phrasing slurs of musical notation,” Boatwright observes. “If more time is required to articulate the sibilants at the end of one word and the beginning of another, he puts a comma to indicate the necessary slight pause.”

To reduce the stressfulness of Ives’ syntax, Boatwright made the editorial decision to reduce “the use of commas in this edition … to normalcy, for the most part,” thus freely interchanging Ives’ original pause-markings (i.e.commas, semicolons, colons, and dashes) in order to “make the important clauses stand out as clearly as possible in Ives’ often very long sentences.”

No change has been made without keeping in mind one striking instance of a complete alteration in the meaning caused by the absence in the 1920 book of two commas which were present in the MS. The passages were: (Book) "And unity is too generally conceived of"; (MS) "And unity is, too, generally conceived of."

A special feature of Ives' style is his coinage of new hyphenated combinations. Unnecessary ones such as "late-spring," or "city-man" have been eliminated. But highly characteristic combinations such as "manner-over-insistence," and "image-necessity-stimulants" have been allowed to stand. A few hyphenated combinations present in the MS but not in the 1920 book have been noted.

Ives uses quotation marks for direct quotations, indirect quotations, mere echoes of another author's prose, allusion, and to indicate strong feeling, which is quite frequently sarcasm. (See the dedication of the book, in which his ironical quotation marks have been retained; those which were placed around the title of the book on the title page have been removed.)

With the feeling of most typographers strongly against excessive use of quotation marks because they make the page appear to have broken out in a rash, an attempt was made to remove some of the unnecessary ones in the Essays. 

Ives was brave enough, and absorbed deeply enough in his subject to quote frequently from memory. But, whatever the reason, the fact is that scarcely a quotation in the entire book is exactly like its source. When the differences between Ives' text and the source did not involve changes in meaning, and were only single words or punctuation, the corrections have been made silently in the text, and the source given. If there was an interesting change of meaning (e.g., Thoreau: "They shall live with the license of higher beings"; Ives: "They shall love with the license of higher beings"), or if the whole quotation was drastically altered, the form in the source has been given in a note.

Amused by Boatwright’s fastidiousness, I turn back to the music.



18. Central Park in the Dark

I started with it, and I can’t help returning to this marvel of presence in Ives’ programmatic work. First performed on May 11, 1946, by chamber orchestra students from Juilliard Graduate School as conducted by Theodore Bloomfield, Central Park in the Dark is a masterpiece of layering where orchestral textures meet in the fray of the sidewalks. A haunting playground of polytonality. Ives sets the clashing orchestral sections against each other, refusing to tame them with politeness, suggesting perhaps that extraordinary difference can coexist in public park spaces. Around 3:58, one can hear the ambient strings arguing with the syncopated ragtime pianos as ruptured by a passing brass street band. The rhythms swirl as the trumpets predominate, culminating in a fantastic kerfuffle at 4:51.

19. Co-creators

"One thing I am certain of is that, if I have done anything good in music, it was first, because of my father, and second because of my wife," Ives said.

20. Premiere of Concord Sonata

[Ives] has rewritten his works so many times, adding dissonances and polyrhythms, that it is impossible to tell just at what date the works assumed the surprising form we know now.

—- Elliott Carter wrote in 1939, when reviewing the premiere of Ives Concord Sonata

According to James B. Sinclair's catalogue of Ives' works, the sonata was publicly premiered by John Kirkpatrick on November 28, 1938 in Cos Cob, Connecticut. There had been earlier performances of isolated movements and excerpts. The second performance (given in many sources as the premiere), also given by Kirkpatrick, was given at the Town Hall in New York City on January 20, 1939. Among those present was Elliott Carter, who reviewed the piece in the March–April 1939 edition of the journal Modern Music.

21. Against anxiety of influence

Ives had no truck with Bloom’s anxiety of influence. If anything, his concern was to include as many voices and textures as humanly possibly across the variants of his pieces. Few phrasings were set in stone. And many of us adore him for that. Even Classical Nerd admits: “Ives is my favorite composer.”

22. Nature as companion and teacher

If he will take her as a companion and teacher, and not as a duty or a creed, she will give him greater thrills and teach him greater truths than man can give or teach-she will reveal mysteries that mankind has long concealed. It was the soul of Nature, not natural history, that Thoreau was after. A naturalists mind is one predominantly scientific, more interested in the relation of a flower to other flowers than its relation to any philosophy or anyone's philosophy. A transcendent love of Nature and writing […] doesn't necessarily make a naturalist.

It would seem that, although thorough in observation […] and with a keen perception of the specific, a naturalist—-inherently—-was exactly what Thoreau was not. He seems rather to let Nature put him under her microscope than to hold her under his. He was too fond of Nature to practice vivisection upon her. He would have found that painful, "for was he not a part with her?" But he had this trait of a naturalist, which is usually foreign to poets, even great ones: he observed acutely even things that did not particularly interest him— a useful natural gift rather than a virtue. The study of Nature may tend to make one dogmatic but the love of Nature surely does not.

—- Charles Ives on Thoreau’s Nature

23. Aside on Aeolian harps

For this poet, one of the most sanguine objects that traverses the span of transcendentalisms is the Aeolian harp.

 "He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph wire," Emerson said of his “beautiful enemy,” Henry David Thoreau. Ives quotes Emerson on "the polyphonies and harmonies that come to us through his [Thoreau’s] poetry." Of course, the lyre bears an an ancient association with poetry and Orphism, but Ives’ takes Thoreau's writing as poetry for more immediate reasons, namely, genre-porousness and fluidity characterized Emersonian transcendentalism as well as Ives’ own compositional strategies.

Transcendentalists never refused the existence of poems as such. In his Collected Essays, for example, Emerson framed each essay with a poem that he did not bother to explicate within the text. The poems perch above the doorway of his prose like levitating address markers. What seems blurred is the idea of the lineated poem as a holier form than the prose.

Let’s go back to how Ives’ gets seduced by Thoreau’s fascination with the Aeolian sounds of the telegraph wire in Walden. In Thoreau’s words:

"… like an Aeolian harp, which I immediately suspected to proceed from the cord of the telegraph vibrating in the just awakening morning wind, and applying my ear to one of the posts I was convinced that it was so. It was the telegraph harp singing its message through the country, its message sent not by men, but by Gods."

At one point in “Sounds,” Thoreau mourns the vanishment of background hum. “Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever,” he admits, while feeling his way towards a soundscape of place, and doing what many of us do when wandering through a city to map its soundscape for a poem. Sounds tell time; they are life’s beat, its rhythm-track. Wistfully, Thoreau even goes so far as to naturalize the city sounds from within the woods, writing: “Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness.” This natural melody of the bells is also likened to a harp when Thoreau adds, “at a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept.”

Perhaps the most resonant, vibe-heavy line is the one that follows: “All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.” (italics mine) Human eyes and ears fondle the things carried to us across a great distance. Thoreau’s sentiment calls to mind the musical marking, lontano (from Italian word meaning “at or from a great distance”) often used to describe something intended to be played extremely quietly or very distantly offstage. For example, György Ligeti's 1967 piece, lontano, crafts an ethereal, orchestral dreamscape from tone clusters, shifting colors, and dissolving images.

But faraway sounds are distracting me from Thoreau’s universal lyre, and the relationship it suggests between sound and place, a relationship secured by local acoustics and the conditions by which sound is shaped when moving into different areas. “The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it,” Thoreau wrote, stressing that the echo “is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.”


24. Variations on America

It is easy to understand the doubts of audiences, befuddled by under-rehearsed and under-enthused orchestral performances of Ives's work. It is harder to forgive this neglect in professional musicians. Not long ago, I was in a car with a distinguished British cellist who admitted he knew just one Ives piece: the cheeky satire "Variations on America." When I mentioned the anniversary, he said that Ives was "cute," but that was it. This condescending opinion, offered in near-perfect ignorance, made me want to dump every last ounce of British tea into the nearest harbor.

—- Jeremy Denk, “At 15o, Charles Ives Still Reflects Darkness and Hope” (New York Times)

Ives composed Variations on America in 1891, and it remained unpublished until at least 1949, when E. Power Biggs popularized it. What Denk calls the “near-perfect ignorance” of this British cellist, who knows nothing about Ives except an early organ piece, would certainly have excited Ives enough to let Rollo do the talking.

I’ve included the fabulous Virgil Fox’s performance because Ives, himself, sent this performance to E. Power Biggs when asked if he had a organ composition that he could play on his Sunday morning radio show featuring the organ. Mrs. Ives found the comp and mailed it to Biggs. The instrument is also unique: Fox’s Rodgers organ, “Black Beauty,” was made specifically for his traveling performances. Totally analog, Fox’s “Black Beauty” boasted seventeen speaker cabinets and a console stacked with hundreds of individual oscillators. When played vociferously, the organ’s sound could vibrate the building.


25. “Parallelepipedon”

A child knows a strain of joy from one of sorrow. Those a little older know the dignified from the frivolous— the "Spring Song" from the season in which the "melancholy days have come" (though is there not a glorious hope in autumn!). But where is the definite expression of late spring against early summer—of happiness against optimism? A painter paints a sunset—can he paint the setting sun?

In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones— when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now— perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be a transcendental language in the most extravagant sense. Possibly the power of literally distinguishing these "shades of abstraction" — these attributes paralleled by "artistic intuitions" (call them what you will) — is ever to be denied man for the same reason that the beginning and end of a circle are to be denied.

A composer may not shrink from having the public hear his "love letter in tones" while a poet may feel sensitive about having everyone read his "letter in words." When the object of the love is mankind, the sensitiveness is changed only in degree. But the message of Thoreau, though his fervency may be inconstant and his human appeal not always direct, is, both in thought and spirit, as universal as that of any man who ever wrote or sang—as universal as it is nontemporaneous—as universal as it is free from the measure of history, as "solitude is free from the measure of the miles of space that intervene between man and his fellows." In spite of the fact that Henry James (who knows almost everything) says that "Thoreau is more than provincial-that he is parochial,"* let us repeat that Henry Thoreau— in respect to thought, sentiment, imag-ination, and soul, in respect to every element except that of place, of physical being, a thing that means so much to some— is as universal as any personality in literature. 

But personally, we prefer to go around in a circle than around in a parallelepipedon, for it seems cleaner and perhaps freer from mathematics; or for the same reason we prefer Whittier to Baudelaire, a poet to a genius, or a healthy to a rotten apple-probably not so much because it is more nutritious, but because we like its taste better: We like the beautiful and don't like the ugly; therefore, what we like is beautiful, and what we don't like is ugly-and hence we are glad the beautiful is not ugly, for if it were we would like something we don't like. So having unsettled what beauty is, let us go on.

— Charles Ives, “Epilogue” to Essays Before A Sonata

26. The Unanswered Question

Leonard Bernstein titled his 1973 Norton Lectures after Ives’ piece, The Unanswered Question, which remains —-to me —- one of the most beautiful and haunting compositions created in New England. The score allows the players to choose between trumpet or oboe or clarinet.

At 2:44, something begins in the background and does not let go.

“All thought depends on the caprice of a key,” wrote Edmond Jabes in The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion.

27. 114 Songs

From “Majority,” the first piece in Charles Ives’ 114 Songs.

Ives printed 114 Songs at his own expense. Some have alleged it to be “the greatest collection of songs written since Brahms, and like Sacre and Pierrot and Wozzeck, one of the aesthetic pivots of the 20th century; a pivot only because of its influence on composers - certainly not on the public who has heard only a few of them.”

Legacy is complicated by the fact that Ives founded no school and left no system for the handful who consider themselves to be his disciples. Improvisation, innovation, polymorphously perverse interpenetration of subjects and quotations: Ives bequeaths them to listeners and students. Song no. 15 is the afore-mentioned “Housatonic at Stockbridge,” and I’ve included an interesting note that Ives added at the bottom of the first page:

Song 31 is titled “Walt Whitman,” and evokes Leaves of Grass starting with the 21st stanza. Ives scores the poet’s song “Fast and in a challenging way.” Song 33 is a “Cradle Song” drawn on the traditional lullaby form. Song 25, “August,” uses lyrics from Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets, and Ives marks the piece “Con grazia,” accordingly. “September” follows as song 26, drawn from the same Italian poems, marked “Presto.” Song 39, “Afterglow",” quotes James Fenimore Cooper “by permission,” and includes the interesting instruction to play the piano “as indistinctly as possible” with “both pedals used almost constantly.” Song 42, a unison chant, is titled “Serenity” and one can hear a universalism in this hymn as well as many of the religious songs Ives included. Songs 76-79 are from a series of French songs, and the lyrics remain in French.

Ives often experimented with orchestration and refiguration of his pieces. Song 44, “Watchman!”, comes from the 2nd Violin Sonata and includes lyrics by John Bowring. Song 45, “At the River”, is drawn from Ives 4th Violin Sonata and supplemented by lyrics from Robert Lowrey. Song 47, “The Camp-Meeting,” comes from a movement of Symphony no. 3 and features lyrics written by Charlotte Elliott.


28. Piano studies

Among his completed piano studies:

— Study No. 2: Andante moderato–Allegro molto (Varied Air and Variations)
— Study No. 5: Moderato con anima
— Study No. 6: Andante
— Study No. 7: Andante cantabile
— Study No. 8: Trio (Allegro moderato–Presto)
— Study No. 22: Andante maestoso–Allegro vivace
— Study No. 9: The Anti-Abolitionist Riots in the 1830s and 1840s
— Study No. 20: March (Slow allegro or Fast andante)
— Study No. 23: Allegro

29. Lost and incomplete manuscripts

In 1927, Ives suddenly found himself unable to write any new music. Even after he retired from his insurance job, he was unable to write, though he spent his time tweaking previous works and arranging performances.

Some of Ives’ choral works (still in manuscript) have been heard for the first time in the past decade. Other manuscripts were thrown out by the church in NYC where Ives served as an organist. These manuscripts have never been found, and Ives’ organ book is among them.

Of his 27 piano studies, 9 have been completely or partially lost, including:

— Study No. 3
— Study No. 10 (mostly lost)
— Study No. 12
— Study No. 13
— Study No. 14
— Study No. 17
— Study No. 24
— Study No. 25
— Study No. 26

His incomplete piano studies include:

— Study No. 1: Allegro
— Study No. 4: Allegro moderato
— Study No. 11: Andante
— Study No. 15: Allegro moderato
— Study No. 16: Andante cantabile
— Study No. 18: Sunrise Cadenza (Adagio)
— Study No. 19
— Study No. 27: Chromâtimelôdtune


30. Gem

A gem of a lecture from Kyle Gann: “How Ives composed.”


31. Violin Sonata No. 1

If I had to choose one piece to represent Ives's most important achievements, it is the slow movement of the First Violin Sonata, a reflection on the Civil War. We begin by musing over a cliché tune of American nostalgia, "The Old Oaken Bucket," filtered through Ives's imagination into a ravishing idyll. But soon a march begins in the piano, drowning out the violin, which is left in the past, quietly remembering while the boys go off to war. A terrifying disconnect, with one violent, overabundant (and somewhat Wagnerian) voice making another impossible to hear. Is there a more powerful image for our current debates about free speech?

Ives loves to rove through time, and to sample an array of voices, so we fast-forward to hear nostalgic veterans, boasting of former military glories. But this devolves into a long argument, with piano and violin talking past each other in unyielding bubbles. In the final pages, you hear flashes of the tender beginning. These fleeting visions of unity are so beautiful, but unsettling to play today.

—- Jeremy Denk, “At 15o, Charles Ives Still Reflects Darkness and Hope” (New York Times)

Ives’ willingness to take on the “sacred cows” of the cocktail parties and chattering classes is part of what Denk calls his “antidote to nationalism.” Every sacred object is forced into the public square, where it must be just another voice among others. That’s not quite what Denk says, but it is a slipshod way of expressing my own relationship to the continuous discord churned by Ives.

Denk also notes that the final movement of the Violin Sonata No. 1 “takes on the march - a handy emblem of national pride and swagger,” leaving listeners with “barely enough of the rhythm to tell us we are marching” before disrupting “it with offbeats and voice-leading collisions, creating a march at war with the idea of a march, an anti-swagger, disintegrating into dark silence.”

“This passage allows for an unusual range of interpretive possibilities: not differences of degree, but absolute opposition,” Denk rightly concludes.


32. On Ives’ desire to find a common language in music

Ives worked on these passages, you sense, not to achieve perfection, but glorious imperfection. Not music as a refined object, to be placed on the shelf, but as a process, something being made in front of us. Once the ragtime finally gets going, its energy is unstoppable. [. . . ] Ives understood that ragtime was not primarily a genre but an act. He approaches it with more respect - even awe — for the power and joy of syncopation unleashed against the square, white tunes of traditional Americana.

—- Jeremy Denk, “At 15o, Charles Ives Still Reflects Darkness and Hope” (New York Times)

When Denk compares Ives’ un-Instagrammable dissonance with the clean poise and ad-friendly texture of Aaron Copland’s compositions, one is reminded of how much hygiene is at stake in our notions of patriotism. As my teen quipped a few months ago, “We treat flags better than we do human beings in this country.”

For me, Ives’ anti-elitist approach is evidenced by his insistence that the edges of his pieces remain frayed, prone to seepage, opening the mind to a porousness that refuses to resolve the discord of layers. Transcendence replaces purity for him, in quotation, punctuation, and musical notation. Ives common language evolved to transcend the parlors, academic corridors, and concert halls in order to take a residence in the public square, where sonic collages came together from voices heard in passing, parades, childhood nostalgia . . . all of these public traces held in common by persons who live in an American town or city.

The Academy maintains its prestige through condescension, an affective register that holds stock in some ideal of aesthetic purity or beauty that those with Great Taste ™ can pride themselves on purchasing, defining, or owning. Ives offends us precisely because he rejects an optimism based in the purity of salons and intellectual elite. Instead, he embraces the cacophony of the streets. Contra the national populism of xenophobia, Ives’ populism is an effort to make salient and tender the local, communal, contingent space formed at the intersection of American childhood and the eventual disappointments of adult life.

Like Denk, I relish the “Ivesian laughter —- his wild, often childlike sense of humor, his willingness to fail.” I find solace in how, to quote Denk again, Ives opens a piece “by trying to begin, limping through a series of false starts,” as at the opening of Violin Sonata No. 3’s ragtime when “the piano plunks down bass notes while the right hand tries out ideas. These riffs slide around, splutter out and seem to lose heart, until, at last, the momentum of inspiration takes over.” This insistence on failing and flailing publicly is perhaps aesthetically nauseating to those who privilege elegance or classical Platonic Beauty.



33. A final fire

Thus is Emerson always beating down through the crust towards the first fire of life, of death and of eternity.

— Charles Ives, Essays Before A Sonata

Although Ives’ doesn’t depict fire in the Concord Sonata, an auto-da-fe drifted through my mind while absorbed in James Marcus’ Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson this weekend. A treasure for those interested in Emerson’s philosophy of friendship, Marcus’ book also gave me this phrase, “beautiful enemy,” that I used when describing Thoreau.

On July 24, 1872, Ralph Waldo Emerson awoke to the sound of a strange almost crackling music coming from his walls. a fire started in the attic above. It was slow burning, so neighbors came to try and save books, clothing, household, objects, and various materials while Emerson and his wife stood outside, somewhat shocked. At one point, without explanation, Emerson began throwing souvenirs and mementos of his first wife, Ellen (whom he lost to tuberculosis two years into their love) and his son Little Waldo (whom he lost to a sudden, unexpected childhood illness) into the fire.

Marcus describes Emerson’s “assault on his own memories” as if removed from tragedy, as the old fellow stood in stocking shoes and a muddy coat, surveying the destruction of his home quietly. Later, Emerson would tell a friend that he “felt something snap in his brain “during the fire — (Marcus wonders if it might have been a stroke) —- but there were no words for what had snapped, or none that Emerson ever made an effort to articulate.

“House burned”: such is the entirety of Emerson’s journal comments about the fire.

Hundreds of years after this house fire, Marcus elects to make the pilgrimage to Emerson‘s house. He wanders through its musty rooms, seeking a sort of material presence, and discovers that Little Waldo’s leather pool toy had escaped his father‘s memory-pyre. The transcendentalist’s engravings remained on the walls.

In the study, Marcus sees Emerson’s Aeolian harp sitting on the windowsill. I gasped when reading this part. The eye tenders these memories as if they were part of an encounter with inaudible music that touches both the author and the reader who seeks him. Poetry and music, bound in their Aeolian hauntology.

J. A. Boiffard's photos and surrealisms.

MAKING NADJA

From 1924 to 1929, Jacques-André Boiffard worked as an assistant to Man Ray in Paris. Eventually, Boiffard wound up taking the photos of street scenes for Andre Breton’s Nadja. 

James Elkins’ fantastic website, Writing With Images, features a close look at the photos and images in Andre Breton’s Nadja. Elkins frames the enigma of Breton’s photos in the context of developing surrealisms: “Because Breton gives inconclusive signs and signals about how he wants images to interact with the narrative, some readers have preferred to read silent mystery in the abandoned streets, and personal narrative in the prose.”

The variations across publications of Nadja shift the role played by images to the periphery. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to call them ornamental, Breton maintains loose relationship to the images. Elkins expands on this:

Toward the end of Nadja, speaking of the book’s composition, [Breton] says he went back “to look at several of the places” he had mentioned in the narrative, in order “to provide a photographic image of them taken at the special angle from which I myself had looked at them.” This is the first a reader hears about the photographs; in the rest of the book the captions tell readers what passage they illustrate, and nothing in the book refers to the illustrations as photographs rather than as direct representations of places. It is also the only time Breton mentions anything to do with the framing of his photographs.

I don’t think it is possible in most cases to guess what the “special angle” might be, and so I doubt the veracity of his comment; it seems more likely that he told Jacques-André Boiffard (the photographer who took the street scenes for Breton) the locations he wanted photographed, but not the angles, or at least not with any precision.

Mixed feelings have been noted by others. According to Rick Poynor, Breton appeared “to have had mixed feelings about the photographs in Nadja, describing the images soon after publication as “dreary and disillusioning,” while nevertheless dedicating a copy to Boiffard with the encomium (perhaps it was faint praise) that his were ‘the most beautiful photographs in this book.’”

Certainly, Breton lacks the tenderness and close attention central to Roland Barthes’ reading of images. The misogyny of Nadja precludes this. Whatever can be said of Breton, it would be silly to call him cerebral; his relationship to thought resisted close study and oriented itself to proximity to social prowess. Unlike Barthes, Breton wanted to be the executive director of an artistic movement. He identified as avant-garde, and fought to secure his reputation against other emerging schools and movements.

In a way, Breton’s use of photos in this novels feels closer to the way Bataille and Leiris explored the arche of the city, providing an archeology of the present by alienating themselves from it. “The only kind of visual material Breton studies is iconographically dense, or full of writing,” Elkins adds, noting that the author “analyzes a few of Nadja’s symbolic drawings,” revels in symbolic density, “reads broadsheets and posters,” yet “barely looks” at the photographs he included.

Breton offers no close reading of photos here. He does, however, offer a stigmata of romantic fantasy that cannibalizes difference.



THE EYES HAVE IT

“I had never seen such eyes. Without a moment’s hesitation, I spoke to this unknown woman.”

Nadja was created in this chance encounter in October 1926, when Breton observed a bedraggled, delicate woman striding towards him on the avenue. She told him she called herself Nadja, “because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning.”

The two met repeatedly for several days, and their encounters were marked by uncanny coincidences and inexplicable events. True to form, Breton got bored with Nadja’s erratic behavior and pulled away, waiting until the end of the novel to reveal that he had been warned “Nadja was mad” months ago.

After causing a disturbance in the corridors of her hotel, she was taken to an infirmary.

Breton changed several photographs for the 1963 edition, adding at least three new photographs including the montage of Nadja’s eyes (pictured above). See also “her eyes of fern”; “products of a ‘voluntary banality’”; alleged anticipations of choragraphy.

According to Elkins, Breton’s “narrative isn’t indifferent to details such as particular turns of phrase, nuances of expression, and the verbal compositions of the vignettes involving Nadja; but the street photographs are.” Elkins continues:

This quality of “aesthetic indifference” doesn’t pertain to the photographs of documents or drawings (they are full of legible and meaningful details, and some have carefully chosen compositions or interesting assemblages of objects); and it doesn’t apply to the portraits (which are carefully done according to various portrait conventions of the time). The indifference applies mainly to the street photographs. Can we distinguish between Breton’s intentions and capacities as a photographer and our proclivity to read the photographs as aesthetically indifferent? I wonder this especially in light of his own reference to the photographs as capturing the “special angle” from which he experienced each place.

BOIFFARD V. BRETON

When Boiffard pissed off the kingpin, Breton expelled him the Surrealist group.

He went on to contribute to Un Cadavre, a pamphlet that in no uncertain terms castigated Breton and his leadership of the movement before allying himself with the renegade Surrealists grouped around Georges Bataille. Some of his most fantastic work appeared when Boiffard served as the in-house photographer for Bataille’s Documents. His photographs illustrating Bataille’s article “Big Toe” are freakish and disturbing, as intended.

One of my favorite Boiffard photos from Documents.

13 scenarios.

"I suppose you do love me, in your way," I said to him one night close to dawn when we lay on the narrow bed. "And how else should I love you—in your way?" he asked.

I am still thinking about that.

—Anne Carson, Plainwater


  1. Salvador Dalí carried around a little piece of Spanish driftwood to help him to ward off evil spirits.

  2. The rise in spatial pathology generates a post-agoraphobic prosperity. The culture industry hides its most powerful smokestacks behind the fast-growing pine forests planted by corporations. Your face looks so tender in the green wash.  The porn bot inquires you hot? want to see? I'm lonely. One bot pairs up with the spectre of Adorno for the Friday BOGO-a-gogo.

  3. In order to master “the art of becoming an original writer in three days,” Emmanuel Carrere said you must “take a few sheets of paper and for three days on end write down, without fabrication or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head. Write down what you think of yourself, of your wife, of the Turkish war, of Goethe, of a trial, of the Last Judgment, of your superiors—and when three days have passed you will be quite out of your senses with astonishment at the new and unheard-of thoughts you have had.”

  4. Nervous about poor reception for Ulysses, James Joyce chose his birthday, February 2, 1922, as the day to publish his novel. Two copies of the book arrived in Paris by train on this day, one for Joyce and one for his bookseller, Shakespeare and Company. Somewhere else, a man signed his father's name to his own suicide letter.

  5. This is how Ernst Jünger appears to Martin du Gard, who pays him a visit in Berlin in 1933: "A boy of thirty-five, with ascetic face, full of energy and reserve, sporting, dressed for golf, plus fours, a cigarette between his lips." Jünger's disconsolate exclamation follows: "We have lost everything, even honor! The movement of the masses has gone, he tells me, personal valor is imposed in Russia and in Italy. And it must be imposed in Germany. But the socialist ideal is not dead. Social democracy is no longer capable of being the agent of socialism. It is now the turn of the National Socialists." (Roberto Calasso)

  6. Charles Dickens bumbled about with a navigational compass on his person at all times and always faced north while he slept in order to optimize his creative spirit and affirm his writing practice.

  7. News of continuous suicides greeted Arthur Koestler as he waited in Lisbon in the autumn of 1940: "And more suicides: Otto Pohl, Socialist veteran, Austrian ex-Consul in Moscow, ex-Editor of the 'Moskauer Rundschau.' Walter Benjamin, author and critic, my neighbor in 10, rue Dombasle in Paris, fourth at our Saturday poker parties, and one of the most bizarre and witty persons I have known. Last time I had met him was in Marseilles, together with H., the day before my departure, and he had asked me: 'If anything goes wrong, have you got anything to take?' For in those days we all carried some 'stuff' in our pockets like conspirators in a penny dreadful; only reality was more dreadful. I had none, and he shared what he had with me, sixty-two tablets of a sedative, procured in Berlin during the week which followed the burning of the Reichstag. He did it reluctantly, for he did not know whether the thirty-one tablets left him would be enough. It was enough. A week after my departure he made his way over the Pyrenees to Spain, a man of fifty-five, with heart disease. At Port Bou, the Guardia Civil arrested him. He was told that next morning they would send him back to France. When they came to fetch him for the train, he was dead."

  8. Two men watch the ducks peck at each other near the lake created for the nice park. One of them wonders if the ars rhetorica has replaced the quest as the shape of the artistic journey, since language itself frequently sets the terms of the quest and defers to elected authorities for the epistemological solution. The other lets the fire ants bite him in the hopes of discovering a novel discourse.

  9. The problematic is articulated as a pre-game advertisement for capitalism's solutions.

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

  11. Isabel Allende began writing her first novel on January 8, 1981. What had started as a letter to her grandfather who was dying eventually transformed into her book The House of the Spirits. Allende now begins all of her books on January 8. Initially, it was out of allegiance with her first book, but now she says she does it because she can be in solitude, since everyone knows she is not to be disturbed on that date. (Matt Levin)

  12. "The Zone doesn't exist. It's Stalker himself who invented his Zone," Andrei Tarkovsky said once upon a time in the world—and then, again, in a book written by John Wall Barger.

I want to say "I would have waited"?

1. MY MILLIMETRIC MUTENESS

Humans die daily of brain injuries. Inflamed, the gray matter swells towards the skull. That final millimeter of inflammation loads the dice and alters the prognosis. Life, this ongoing condition of embodiment, exists at the behest of the tiniest distinctions. When it comes to the brain, millimeters mark the most importance distance between the body and the corpse.

I get swarmed by the game of it as the news media serves up the latest story about football and traumatic brain injury.

Football season in the US leaves me mute, speechless: there is no frame to collapse the gap that separates me from the majority of Southerners who identify as college football fans. They wear their team as a brand; they pause in the Piggly Wiggly to introduce themselves to strangers who brand themselves of the similar team.


2. “SENZA PAROLE”

I keep returning to an essay by Andrea Marcolongo, “Ancient Family Lexicon, or Words and Loneliness,” where she mentions senza parole, an Italian phrase that appears in various permutations across Latin languages.

To quote Andrea’s exquisite rendering:

Andrea’s speechlessness is declarative, which is to say: her tattoo designates an area of embodied experience that is mute. Or muted. One could read this senza parole as a response to loss, but each reading complicates the boundaries of what Andrea is saying / not-saying.

After her mother’s death, Andrea dyed her hair black. I drowned my black hair in bleach. Both Andrea and myself changed our hair color in order to negotiate the rupture of self that greeted us from the mirror. That reflected image no longer aligned with the inhabited self.

The easiest way to express this is by acknowledging two simultaneous, somewhat contradictory truths about the nature of recognition, namely, 1) both A’s, Andrea and Alina, could not bear to recognize their mothered selves 2) neither A could recognize herself.


3. RE-COGNITION

Speechlessness can be a responsive state, one that communicates without saying (or says what it knows it can no longer say). As with the A’s, a part of this speechless is responding to the experience of recognition.

To recognize, or re-cognize, is to know again. As such, recognition is a form of knowledge that presumes comparison to a prior knowledge: the thing seen and then recovered, the instance lost and returned when walking across a similar terrain, the face on a subway that reappears in the cafe.

When I read about the football player who loses his mind in his 40’s due to a TBI accrued in his 20’s, I am drafted into an uncanny re-recognition, a doubling of the original meaning (to re-cognize)that re-re’s the absolute randomness of life. The sirens intrude and echolocate my body; I close my eyes and imagine hovering above it, untouched, unmolested by physical sensation.

There is nothing a human can do to earn or deserve a brain injury. And there is nothing a human can do to earn or deserve surviving such an injury. Even as the mind loses the self, the brain injury, as a clinical fact in the medical chart, knows what it means to lose one's name – or to lose the connection between the name and the personhood.


4. LOADING THE DICE, GAMING THE OUTCOMES

My partner is amused by what he calls my “Baba superstitiousness.”

I, too, am amused by his amusement, though, to be fair, back in the medical nightmare that was 2023, I brought a bit more of that all-American rigor into my notation of portents. I counted the black cats that crossed my path and then canceled each event with the non-black cat that followed. In trying to stay ahead of the curse, or calling it even, the tally of forthcoming misfortunes refused to balance out to zero.

“Visually, the sum of bad luck is a zigzag,” I told the man.

As a numbers-fiend, the man felt it necessary to respond with a plethora of (unrelated and fairly recent) neuroscience-related statistics, as if to suggest that the numerical data was more protective than reading for signs.

“Statistics lied about the odds of being hit by a car while crossing beneath a red light,” I reminded him.

I didn't know to fear a car's failure to stop. That possibility wasn't on my mental horizon. 

"But what would you have done differently if you'd known to be afraid?" he asked. 

“I would not have crossed.”

I wanted to say: I would have waited until every car that wanted to destroy me passed by. I would have stood there, frozen in time, a statue of the self before the accident. 

Instead, I note that Salman Rushdie said the saddest city in the world is located in Alifbay. It is so sad that it has forgotten its own name and so the sadness floats about without attaching itself to a proper noun. The deepest sadness comes from being nameless.


5. FEAR! DANGER! PROFANATION!

“Fear isn't a story about reality,” my friend says. “Fear is a story about what we find salient in reality.”

She invites me to yoga. I decline: clearing my head sounds like being suctioned.

“Have it your way,” she replies. “You’re the only one that can determine your mental health.”

My friend really doesn’t even know how goofy this purely-psychological construction of mental health sounds to some of us. She has yet to lose a grandparent or parent to Alzheimer’s. She lives in the land of Free To Choose. I don't want to argue, don't want to disprove, don't want to disagree. . . 

Fear is an intensified way of reading. Sometimes it is based on things we’ve imagined; other times it is based on things we’ve experienced. I’m not sure the two are the same, despite the efforts of late capitalism and popular culture to fashion political coalitions defined by shared fears. Identifying ourselves by fear seems like a doomed political project at a time when we desperately need vision.

“So what is danger, then?” the middle teen asks me. It is bewildering to watch to her drive this wretched minivan; bewildering and marvelous to imagine the places she will choose to go on her own. The question of danger comes up as we talk about what to consider when running a yellow light. “You have to weigh various factors,” I admit.

As a concept, danger is obviously contingent, multivariant, and fluid. The feeling of danger can mark unmet aesthetic or social expectations, and these expectations emerge from our daily reading of the world, a reading that —- over time—- can develop into a commitment to read the world we are given in a particular fashion or worldview.

Danger appears when we read it again, in light of context and new information. Or maybe just shifts in syntax and juxtaposition. After all, juxtapositions are central to Walter Benjamin’s respect for surrealism’s profane illuminations. What am I saying?

We know the first number is zero. 

The slipperiest situation in the natural world is black ice, melting ice with a thin layer of ice on top. Black ice forms suddenly, a surprise formed in early evening when the dew point dips below freezing and moisture slickens into a deceptive, invisible ice. Black ice is the deadliest for drivers who don't believe the road needs reading. 

We know the last number is unknown. 


Adrian Piper, Everything Will Be Taken Away No. 2.8