O camera.

---

“camera”

. . . comes from the Latin phrase camera obscura, which means “dark chamber.” Used to describe the original devices used for projecting an image, which were essentially dark rooms with a small hole that allowed light to enter and project an upside-down image on the opposite wall.

1 /

K. walks along the lake as he decides how to keep moving. The god who claimed to make his followers fishers of men has erred: the man on the boat catches no fish. Instead he pulls up a rosewood dresser filled with the words of a stranger. A stranger that feels strangely like him. This is the repetition: we recover ourselves across time, in various lakes and texts, in the book inside a book discussed by Hilarius Bookbinder who happens upon Stages on Life’s Way inside an old bureau. The bookbinder becomes a publisher when he decides to print a three-part text, written by three different authors, each of whom he forgot to return their bound texts. His sense of duty drives him to publish the books, and all three are bound together by nothing except the uncanny accident of their going unnoticed across time. Hilarius is thus cast into the role of pseudo-editor by accident and happenstance. It would take a poet or a god to divine meaning from this.

2 /

3 /

It has been called a sequel to Either/Or, which was published two years earlier.

It was the last of K.’s works to be published under the veil of pseudonymity.

It is “the richest of all I have written, but it is difficult to understand,” K. said of “‘Guilty?’/’Not Guilty?’” — the unhappy love reconfigured as a diary drawn from the depths.

4 /

“It is a valuable find, and I feel that I am under obligation to advertise it,” Kierkegaard writes in “Advertisement,” the prefatory note to the “Guilty/Not Guilty” section.

And “Guilty/Not Guilty” is truly the Eden of his either/or. K renders this “passion narrative” in the form of an epistolary diary: a series of letters by Quidham to himself concerning the subject of a broken engagement. Quidham’s Diary ravages the genre-boundary between the private diary and the public text, for the entries retrace the same days and bumble over the same streets in the same year where the speaker keeps running into himself whenever he sees “Her.” Or whenever she is recollected.

5 /

The motto of Quidham's Diary is inscribed on the following page: Periisem nisi periisem. Kierkegaard culled the phrase from his own diaries, which would later be published posthumously as Journals— a title that downplays the role he imagined for thinking-as-writing.

“cameră”

        (n.) “room” or “chamber” in Romanian

November 1794.

After completing his university studies in philosophy, Georg Phillip Friedrich Hardenberg fell in love with Sophie von Kuhn. She was twelve years old when the coup de foudre occurred. Unlike Dante, Novalis went after his Beatrice in the flesh. The two were betrothed when she was thirteen. A few months after their betrothal, Sophie became deathly ill. She died at the age of 15 years, and this event was the world — and its end – to Georg. 

The ideal of Sophie died along with the person, and became the basis of his lyrical turn. Hymns to the Night was published in 1800. Georg had become a poet. But he had also become “Novalis,” this character marked by the creation of a “new beginning” — a man who could no longer exist entirely as Georg Phillip Friedrich Hardenberg, the husband of Sophie.

Summer 1798.

In the year following Sophie’s death, Novalis imagined writing about Goethe as a natural scientist, drawing his literary work into the whole of his life. Novalis journaled about Goethe’s journals within his own, writing in the company of his ghosts. And so Novalis wrote . . .  “Journals are actually the first books to be written in common. Writing in company is an interesting symptom giving us an inkling of a great development in authorship. Perhaps one day people will write, think and act as a mass. Entire communities, even nations, will undertake One Work.”

The end of the singular “public” which has been displaced by the possibility of a conversation with the world. But what meaning can the private or personal have for this conception of the public? Reality would be displaced from the agora to the interior chambers of the heart and mind, as experienced subjectively. 

Novalis stares at her portrait and tries to reconcile the image he sees with the human he knew. Reality, he thinks, can only exist in the fragmented, partial knowledge of all participating authors. The need to write the book justifies its existence; no other justification is needed.

Midnight (the time of metaphor)

Novalis is alone with his grief. The desire to understand Sophie, the longing to share the mutual understanding that characterized the romantic ideal of his time, is gone. The only reality Novalis has is his own. Ironically, it is only through the Other – the beloved, the absent, the Sophie – that Novalis realizes his “infinite.” The concept of infinity becomes the space of true speech. And an impossibility arises, for Novalis depends on Sophie to reach the ideal but, due to the accidents of human life, he will never understand her completely.

At the risk of repeating one’s self . . . 

Sophie dies. Novalis stares at death — gives us death as a “specter haunting man’s entire history, his highest cultural achievements.” Jacques Derrida paces the room that will become a “camera” – an eternal chamber that holds the hauntology of here, the ghost is me. Sophie cannot “be” dead. Not literally.

Novalis forges a complicity between time and displeasure in life’s end. “Time originates with displeasure. Thus, all displeasures [are] so long and all joy so short… displeasures are finite like time. Everything finite originates out of displeasure.”

Death becomes the ultimate apocalypse, the culmination of our finiteness, the conclusion to any reality we know. Death makes a void of life’s meaning. Time fucks us up entirely.

. . . but I will not degrade my soul
by learning to know her . . .

Thus does the speaker of Quidham’s Diary vow to keep himself pure at heart.

Every answer begins with anxiety. As does the question it begs. 

November 2025

Constantin and Virgilius think that recollection, an idea central to Platonic epistemology, seems complementary to repetition. “Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, where a genuine repetition is recollected forward,” says Constantin. 

In a different camera, Johannes de Silentio, the author of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, draws on Aristotle’s idea of recognition, a moment in theatre when tragedy is realized, in order to offer his own view of recognition as presupposing and dispelling some “prior hiddenness.” But Johannes de Silentio, Constantin, and Vigilius never discuss recognition, recollection, and repetition in relation to one another . . . which is too bad. I mean, if recognition presupposes the condition of hiddenness, then it would precede recollection and repetition, since both recollection and repetition must presuppose some form of recognition in order to occur. The thing that stays hidden without ever being recognized can’t be meaningfully recollected nor can it be meaningfully repeated.

Say Novalis needs a lens to put Sophie’s death in perspective —

lens 1

— the incredible lightness of being that Novalis experienced while in Her presence negated the despair that time unfolds on an Us. The ‘solution’ to the existential crisis lies in the reflection. Reflecting allows us to escape our finiteness by encountering the “absolute joy” that remains “eternal – outside all time.” We turn “displeasure into joy, and with it time into eternity,” Novalis whispered to his Reflection.

lens 2

When Constantin Constantius returns to Berlin in order to replay or reexperience his time in the former lodges next to Gendarmenmarkt, he is mining for repetition. And this repetition – the replay of fond images —  is the technical marvel accomplished by the family movie, or even the cinema film watched with a first love. There is a loop into Krapp’s Last Tape…though what Beckett reveals is the subject’s failure to recognize the prior selves. To recognize is a way of claiming: it is recognition that precedes both recollection and repetition. (K avoids this, I think.)

lens 3

It is strange to lose the only thing I’ve never lost before— not since the age of 18, when I wore a bob. It is eerie to watch my hair fall out in clumps without explanation. The discomfort of humans in white coats allows me to abandon the confused woman and step forward to reassure the professionals: “Surely it will be fine.” “Just do what you know.” “How will this medication affect my insomnia?” “I understand that diagnosis is a betting game.” “I know you are doing your best.” “I know you regret how the prescription from four weeks prior only caused more hair to fall from my head.” “I’ll be damned if the sun isn’t extraordinary, even though it visits us less. . .”

lens 4

In his journals from the early 1850’s, K meditates on the forgiveness of sin in relation to how we perceive life’s accidents. He argues for an “altered view” that what God shows us isn’t the “punishment” but rather mercy, so no bad things are an “expression of God’s wrath” but rather a thing of suffering, to be born with God, who knows suffering through Christ. And now, K takes this further, saying that “Punishment is not the pain in itself” since the same identical pain or suffering happens to others as “mere accident.” Instead, “punishment is the idea that this particular suffering is punishment. When this idea is removed, so too, really, is the punishment.”

Socrates never sought to prove the immortality of the soul. Instead, he simply lived as if immortality were a fact about the cosmos. In this sense, says K, if there is no such thing as immortality — if the as if that governed his choices proves to be false —  “I still do not regret my choice; for this is the only thing that concerns me.” The choice. The decision. The commitment. A little Pascalian wager with his back against the wall.

lens 5

HE: What drew you to K?

ME: I recognized my own fear of commitment in him.

HE: Oh? But he is deeply committed!

ME: Committed to the thing he can neither see nor prove. Committed to uncertainty.

HE: False. Kierkegaard is committed to certainty. He knows what he knows by faith.

ME: Maybe. But who knows what the conditions of such knowing might be?

HE: You know what you are . . . or when someone says this, you think ‘a writer’.

ME: In our world, this breaks down into various categories, and each has its corresponding affect. I create texts, but what does that make me to you?

HE: A writer.

ME: Johannes de Silentio identifies as a ‘freelancer’ in Fear and Trembling.. . . I identify with K’s decision here, this choice to name the self as a freelancer in order to expand the field of thought. Don’t you think contemporary thought is drained by genre and brand?

HE: K calls himself ‘a kind of poet’ . . . in his journals, in his texts, in his discourses. Kierkegaard was a poet to himself.

ME: I think many philosophers are poets are heart. But taking K at his word, his books refused the given boxes. Prefaces, Either/Or, Postscript: all situate themselves uncomfortably in relation to communicative function because destructive of the text. The countergenre. A creature that offers itself apophatically by insisting on what it is not. He calls Fear and Trembling “a dialectical lyric” but it is also a mix of exegesis, fabulism, social commentary, farce, and dialectical study.  He says his Prefaces are “like tuning a guitar, like talking with a child, like spitting out of the window” and I hear him say, look, anything can happen, and everything that does may be an accident. Postscript, the text titled after the P.S., which is the paratext that names itself as an addendum to the original. It tells us that it is a “postscript to crumbs of philosophy,” the son of its father text. The subtitle calls it a “mimic-pathetic– dialectic compilation–an existential contribution,” a promise to break the cherished molds of thought and classification. K. never tells us where to land. He guts the immediate life at stake: he lays the “I” on the line and then, in the final pages, reminds us to leave this useless text, to abandon its author and his musings  just as he urged readers to leave Prefaces, that work of “a light-hearted-do-nothing.”

HE: (sighs) Losing your hair is most noticeable to you, A. Other people have to look closely to see what you’re hiding . . .

ME: I’d rather not. Look, I think what continues to provoke me in K is his obsession with finding a justified exception to the ethical.

HE: Sometimes I think take his subjectivity too far. He was going for an absolute, after all.

ME: But an absolute couldn’t absolve him of going for it. The self is disclosed in the reading, the labor of interpretation. There is no system that K wants to create. No temple or ideology. No comfortable institution that would enable the flourishing of police, or their cousins, the pastors.

HE: “I fear no one as I fear myself. Woe unto me in case I were to discover that there had been one deceitful word in my mouth, one single word whereby I had sought to persuade her —”

ME: Ha ha. God’s money in those worries. And maybe that is connected to what I was thinking, namely, how K refuses to tender the coin of the realm —

HE: And that coin is what?

ME: Respectability. Same game, different costumes.

HE: You mean flaying himself on the page in order to make sure that no part is left pure. I’m assuming. His refusal to offer an out.

ME: (nods) This refusal forces us into anxiety about our own choices–his dread becomes our own, the possible life, the one we could have lived if life and work was a thing we wanted to take seriously. Which is to say: existentially. As if eternity is at stake. One must choose.

I have the courage, I think, to doubt everything, to fight, I think, against everything. But the courage to recognize nothing, to possess nothing: that I lack. Most people complain that life is too prosaic, that life is not at all like those novels where lovers are lucky, as for me, I complain that life is not like those novels where one has hardened fathers to fight against, virgins' bedrooms to force open, convent walls to leap over. I have only the pale Figures of the night, stubborn and bloodless, to battle with, and I am the one who gives them life and being.

— Kierkegaard, in a journal entry several years before the Corsair affair

[What does it mean to exist as non-existent? I mean: what is the text Mallarme imagined?]

*

As a child, Flaubert had come to know the story of Anthony in the puppet theatre, later seeing the painting by Brueghel the Younger in the Balbi collection in Genoa. It is clear to him, however, that only the word can deliver what the picture cannot: it alone can leave the rivalry between the world and the book as open as is required.

No painter could show what Flaubert has the Queen of Sheba say to the hermit: “I am not a woman, I am a world.” That the saint uses the book to resist the throng of figures could have been shown iconically; only verbal mastery could intimate that it is the world itself and as a whole that seduces him in every phantasm of vices and mortal sins, against which the book must hold the balance. The spiteful threat with which the phantasmal Queen of Sheba departs the scene is that of the restored desert—Lichtenberg's empty space— penetrating the subject in the only way the loss of the world can be suffered: as boredom. What are the temptations the anchorite must withstand compared with the emptiness they leave behind— unless the book on the wooden desk in the middle of the saint's mud hut could be his world, just as the author's book should be the world of the reader?

— Hans Blumenberg, The Readability of the World

Again

“. . . now is supposed to be objective. And if one uses one's own person maieutically it is taken to be in the manner of Andersen. All this was needed to throw light on my position in the development. Objectivity is taken to be higher than subjectivity. Quite the contrary; that is to say, an objectivity which takes shape in a corresponding subjectivity, that is the goal. The System was something inhuman to which no person could correspond either as author or executor.”

— Soren Kierkegaard, Journals

IF.1

if she could stay with me and live in a little cupboard
if I could convince her that I was a scoundrel
if I work even harder
if that way had not been used
if that was what I wanted
if she had neither relatives nor friends
if she had understood me at the time
if she understands
if she or I must first be dead
if I fail in this

“[In the margin]”

[In the margin] She took out a small note on which there was. something written by me which she was accustomed to carrying in her breast; she took it out and quietly tore it into small pieces and said: So, after all, you have also played a terrible game with me.

[In the margin] She said: Only that it won't be too late when you regret it - she meant death. I had to make a cruel joke about that and asked whether she meant I should come like Wilhelm in Lenore.

[In the margin] To extricate myself from the relationship as a cad, an arch-cad if possible, was the only way to get her afloat and on course for a marriage. But it was also a piece of recherché gallantry. With my light hand I could have got out of it much more cheaply. The notion that behavior of this kind is chivalrous has been enlarged upon by the young man in Constantin Constantius and I agree with him. So we parted.

[In the margin: It's true, the day I picked up all my things from her I wrote a letter to the Councillor which was returned unopened.] I spent the nights crying in my bed, but in the daytime was my usual self, even more flippant and witty than called for. My brother told me he would go to the family and prove to them that I was no cad. I said: If you do that I'll blow your brains out. The best proof of how deeply concerned I was.

[In the margin:] The Seducer's Diary was definitely intended for her sake, to repulse her - and I know what agonies I endured when it was published, because the idea was like my own goal, to arouse everybody's indignation against me, something that misfired completely, especially as far as the public is concerned, which received me jubilantly, something that has helped to aggravate my scorn of the public - but so far as anyone was put in mind of 'her', it was also altogether the most recherché gallantry imaginable.

To reduplicate is to be what one says. [...]

IF.2

if I wanted to recount how ingenious I have been in fooling people about my life
if it is no longer true
if the dialectic turns away
if these great riches of thought still latent in my soul
if I were just a little less faithful
if it had been possible
if I should ever repeat it as author

IF.3

if in creating man God himself lost a little of his power
if that should tempt him
if he were all there was
if everything had to do with him
if it is a madman, what else is it but madness to fasten one's attention uninterruptedly upon him
if it needs to be emphasized again and again that it is the highest
if my aloneness were no higher than marriage but something much lower
if you want to
if it comes to that
if it comes
if that can be done
if no one

if I should ever repeat it
as author

list in volatile sway

1. Suppose I had married her. Let us assume it. What then? 

2. Just as a woman who is not happy in her house sits long by the window, so the soul of a melancholic sits by the eye to look for diversions. Another form of melancholy is the one that closes the eye altogether, so as to have darkness all around.

3. This girl had to be very costly to me, or I had to make myself very costly for her religiously.

4. How true, therefore, the remark I have often made concerning myself, that like S. who saved her life by telling fairytales, I save my life, or keep myself alive, by writing.

5. There is- and this is both the good and the bad in me - something spectral about me, something that makes it impossible for people to put up with me every day and have a real relationship with me. 

6. It is so second nature for me to hide what is best in inwardness.

7. I once put up with being regarded as a scoundrel, notwithstanding I am not exactly that. So let me also put up with seeming to be an oddity as an author, notwithstanding that is not exactly what I am.

8. After her engagement to Schlegel, she met me on the street, greeted me in as friendly and ingratiating a manner as possible. I did not understand her, for at that time I knew nothing of the engagement. I just looked questioningly at her and shook my head. No doubt she thought I knew about it and sought my approval. [...]

9. Then I have been continually vexed by doubts concerning the publishing of my finished products.

10. I had a tall palisander commode made when I lived in the second-floor apartment at Norregade. It was made to my own design, prompted in turn by something my beloved said in her anguish.

11.  O ye fools!

12. Never was the book as serious as at that time. Just that fact is the true expression of the fear.

13. Had the author himself looked serious, the fear would have been less.

14. The reduplication is what is monstrous in the fear.
    

(something inside me, indeed . . . )

it was prevented / and I didn't go / ahead and publish / The Point of View of My Activity as an Author /
(something inside me, indeed, was always against it) / the book itself / is true / but material like that /
can only be published after my death / in the way of stressing that / I am a penitent / on the subject /
of my sin and guilt / my inner wretchedness / I must be careful with / this thought of dying / the belief /
that I am going to die in half a year / then / I live / to be eighty-two / (something inside me, indeed /
was always. . . ) / material

completed / put in its desk / sealed and marked / 'To be opened / after my death' /

(something inside me, indeed, was always against it)

My relation to her. 24 Aug. 1849. Something literary …

Yet I can't risk writing anything down about my relation to her. I bear the responsibility
for all her later life, and so even now any direct communication could cause boundless confusion.

IF. 4

if the world’s nonsense was the only outside danger
if I had a friend to whom I said, “How annoying”
if I were able to travel without becoming productive
if what Miss Dencker told me is true
if that helps make the thought clearer
if only it were she who broke with me
if it were she herself who took the bold step of being the one who requests it
if one considers the relationship between masculinity and femininity and not a particular silly girl
if only I could win

IF.5

if you insist on reasons
if I’d read that first, I would not have been able to write it

IF. 6

if the place and context here did not require a signature
if this is a mistake
if the particular individual
if the universal says everything
if the universal is the demand
if the universal is the rule
if human science refuses
if they fight
if you step aside for it
if it would also take the trouble to understand itself

IF.7

if vanished from the world
if no trace at all is left
if it understands itself and its limits
if it does not
if in respect of love a because seems a minus
if I could easily do all this so gently for her that there was no danger
if anything is to help me
if only one persists in one’s calculations
if one does it in another way
if one just calculates correctly
if I could
if I did everything to try and minimize the affront
if people have an emotional conception of me as something out of the ordinary

IF.8

if I should need a new pseudonym in the future
if I dared to become reconciled with her
if she so desires
if she received from me any assurance
if she found out how things really were
if he is able to build the tower that high
if possible like a voice in the clouds
if she really does wish it
if she believed you
if she takes it that lightly

IF.9

if at times it has appeased my anger to be like an epigram for my contemporaries
if one gets him to act against his convictions
if you do that I’ll blow your brains out
if she could bear the rest
if only she might stay with me
if we didn’t meet

IF.10

if one uses one's own person maieutically 
if we should happen at the moment of contact to exchange identities
if in all innocence and purely intellectually
if I’d wanted it
if that was what i wanted

*

All text is excerpted directly from Kierkegaard’s Journals, including the “if” inventories.

Notebooks: horses, Perec, K, and the nightmare.

I journeyed to Fredensborg with two absolutely incredible horses—when they were supposed to stand, they fell down; when they were supposed to get up, they needed support; when they went slowly, they limped; but when they set off in a fast trot, they were the best runners.

— Soren Kierkegaard in his notebooks, at some point between 1840-1842

— Regine again.

Regine, whose favorite hero was Joan of Arc.

Regine, whose beloved could not imagine a heroine as flesh.

K, who made her his Beatrice, despite Regine’s protestations. The rose plant passed back and forth between them in early letters.

In Stages on Life's Way, Kierkegaard reprinted the note he sent to Regine when returning her engagement ring in 1841:

“Above all, forget the one who writes this; forgive a man who, even if he was capable of something, was nevertheless incapable of making a girl happy.”

Allegedly. The refrain in a word that nestles; a sinuation that nests.

In an essay titled “Love and Freedom of the Other,” Svetlana Boym considered the symbolic function played by Kierkegaard’s ring, and his references to it. “From a conventional symbol of union, the ring becomes a mysterious hieroglyph that finds its reflection in lovers' syntax (parenthesis) and body language (embrace),” wrote Boym. “In The Seducers Diary, it is Cordelia who breaks the engagement even though Kierkegaard believes that he has led her to it.” Boym continues exploring this “lovers’ syntax” by naming “the space around the wall” as “the space of their love in this world”: “Once they escaped and met near the cave, they were doomed to misunderstanding. He saw her bloodied clothes and rushed to kill himself, she followed him to the grave. Public disclosure threatens the authenticity of their love. The wall is neither merely an obstacle nor a synthesis, it is the space of the lovers' paradox, of the tragedy of the love experience.”

In K’s Repetition, there is that critical moment when the narrator looks at the young lover and says:

“Nothing could draw him out of the melancholy longing by which he was not so much coming closer to this beloved as forsaking her. His mistake was incurable, and his mistake was this: that he stood at the end instead of at the beginning.”

[This last bit appears in K’s sermon on the lilies as well, and had I more time or a heart less sooted, I’d comb through my notes and find it. . . .]

I’ve been chasing a thread — a confusion between the postman’s trumpet and the spyglass — through K. for months, trying to fasten it to my reading of Vigdis Hjorth, whose books I consumed in a tantrum of reading earlier this year. Who knows what may never come of it?

Michael Wood: “I have sought to remain loyal to this hesitation, whose other name, I believe, it’s not indecision or undecidability, but patience.”

K and I go way back.

And also [Again] through almost every book I’ve written— including My Heresies, with its tribute to the rosewood dresser. Despair has its creative moments and unexpected promises, as with the moment when a despairing Regine told Soren that she could stay out of his way and live in his cupboard, as a part of his furniture.

Let it be known that K was a man of his word to the end! After ending their engagement, Soren granted Regine’s wish by building a special Shrine for her in his home. As he put it:

“I had a rosewood pedestal made. It was constructed after my own design, and after the occasion of a word of hers. She said that she would thank me all her life if I would let her stay with me, that she would even live in a little cupboard. With this in mind it was constructed without shelves. In it everything is carefully preserved, everything that reminds me of her, everything that can remind me of her. Here also can be found a copy of each of the pseudonymous works for her; always they were reserved only to Vellum copies, one for her and one for me.”

[Again] being the condition of the postscript as a paratext, or an addendum to the apparatus of the letter.

[Again] being the addition to a letter K sent to Regine at some point in 1836, as recorded in his notebook. I quote:

Die stehn allhier im kalten Wind
Und singen schön und geigen:
Ob nicht ein süssuertraumtes* Kind
Am Fenster sich wollt' zeigen?

Your S.K.

Postscript: When you have forgotten everything that lies between, I would only ask you to read the salutation and the signature, for as I myself have become aware, it has the power to calm or to excite as have but few incantations.

Piedestal (Danish) a pedestal-like cupboard. Kierkegaard had such a cupboard, custom made, in which he kept letters etc. related to Regine. See also “palisander.”

One of the provisional titles for Fear and Trembling was a neologism by K, who foraged Mellemhverandre (meaning literally "between each other”) from the Danish word mellemuarende (something between two persons, a "between-being"). Mellemhverandre is found in "From the Papers of One Still Living” and The Concept of Irony.

And a poem by Georges Perec, as translated by Jacob Bromberg —

I forgot to mention the nightmare! (I’ll come back to it when the days are a bit less hectic.)

Morton Feldman on "Coptic Light"

Wilhelm Lehmbruck's "Paolo and Francesca"

Mallarme's Hecate

Gospodinov again.

 The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular. Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce […]It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system. This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness.

— Teddie Adorno and Max Horkheimer,Dialectic of Enlightenment

The major nearly burst out laughing from joy. But nothing on this earth lasts for a long time, and thus even joy is not as vivid the second moment as it is the first; the third moment, it becomes still weaker, and finally it merges unnoticeably with the normal state of one's soul, just as a circle created on the water by a falling pebble finally merges with the smooth surface.

— Nikolai Gogol, The Nose

The Physics of Sorrow

Reading Georgi Gospodinov is like licking a balkan madeleine, and remembering the chaos of sweetness. My madeleine isn’t as pure or elegant as Proust’s — the scent of babas lingers in the aftertaste — and this is what draws me to Gospondinov. He writes the patchwork of self-mutilations that characterize the balkans. There, for example, the usual nationalist kitsch of the background. And the stories told by grandparents that don't stop in the real but unwind into the unwitting surreality. And family tree with branches lopped off by borders. And missing uncles and secrets and promiscuous silences. There is the balkan urge to hop fences and chat up the shepherds. 

One who comes from the balkans is never far from the carnival of their memories, and the loneliness of the language that carries them. A minor language cannot be dominant in the way that French or German or Russian is dominant. Against the academic impulse to be outraged by terms like "balkanization", I am tempted to embrace them, to celebrate the uncivilized hyper-awareness of fragmentation. (Peace to those who find “balkan” offensive: there isn’t really a good term to describe a part of the world that has been cut, divided, conquered, bombed, and refigured into various political constructions, many of which include large ethnic and religious minorities.)

In Gospodinov, memory is communicated by the elders who mix history with superstition, a goulash of the fantastic served up with absurdity. Absurdity is the bread that makes sense of the arbitrary shifts in power and borders. "My grandfather in me cannot decide," the speaker says,  as he rambles through his grandfather's memories. "So that's where I got the indecisiveness that will constantly torment me."

Inheritance is fabulist: it comes in mixed registers and varying dictions. “According to my grandfather's memory, he didn't go in here,"  the speaker says of the room at the local fair exhibiting the caged boy. "But now I'm at the Fair of this memory,  I am he, and it irresistibly draws me in.”

The speaker refuses his grandfather's silence about the horror he may have witnessed. Instead, he insists on imagining it further. There are many ways to deal with silences, but Gospodinov prefers to treat them mythically, to mark the way through the past as a labyrinth through which the mind elects to continue moving.  This gesture is is particularly breathtaking given the fear of seeing the unsightly, the skeletons in the closet, the war records and the Shoah, the nationalism that punishes refugees. 

There, at the Fair, in that "iron cage about five or six paces long,"  with its stool and mattress set next to its smattering of hay and bucket of water, the world is divided openly: "One corner for the human, one for the beast." The speaker isn't shocked by the fact that the Minotaur "looks like a beast, but that he is in some way human. Precisely his humanness is staggering."  The familiarity of his boyishness is uncanny. "There is a sorrow in him which no animal possesses," Gospodinov writes of the freakish half bull, half-human. The man who monitors the cage "(his master and guardian)" narrates the Minotaur's origins and journey, explaining how he wound up here, in a cage, on exhibit in a Bulgarian town. The "owner" unfurls the legends that account for the Minotaur's existence. (Someone will always tell you who you are, and who you are determines what you are allowed to be.)

The freak in the cage does not speak. His hybridity is defamed by the powerful owners of language. And the story is told again, " a story in which eras catch up with one another and intertwine"  so that some events happen in a recognizable present while others occur in an "immemorial past." In this story that "winds like a maze", the speaker knows he can never entirely "retrace its steps"— but to walk them again, to imagine them, is to insist on the "magic of that tale."

"The more inconceivable it looks, the more you believe it," Gospodinov says of the tale, or the space in which the ancient Greek myth meets the present. The balkans are not Proust's Paris with its heroic monuments and bourgeois aristocracy. In this land, the words of a grandfather lock up the sun at night and "drive the stars out into the sky" like sheep to pasture. In the balkans, language is magic and multiple. As in Proust, Gospodinov's madeleine evokes the child self. But Proust's childhood is relatively secure—his attachment to his mother speaks to a fear of abandonment but this fear has a different valence—it is particular to France, to his lifestyle. In Gospodinov, the madeleine is not recalled for the pleasure it brought but for the anxiety. 

The Minotaur is the abandoned boy, the child left behind: this is the story that the speaker chases through every side passage and corridor in his relatives' memories.

The Minotaur does not speak for himself. Like a defenseless infant or an animal, he is narrated by others' fear of him, he is defined by their discomfort with his hybridity. Here, to be hybrid is to be born into betrayal; the inability to be simply human or animal, the inheritance of living in a halved self, makes him unable to belong. No one can recognize the Minotaur as "one of them." The Minotaur is hamstrung by unrecognizability. 

Gospodinov also provides an aural madeleine. Whereas Proust extolled the church bells, Gospodinov locates memory in a sound that could be an animal or a human, a sound that straddles the divide of meaning and cannot ultimately declare itself as partaking of one world. (I thought of Birdsall's "earwitness" as the speaker mentioned the sound "Moommy?") . . . "The first cry, it’s not even a cry, it ends in a question mark." The sound emerges when the child is lost near the mill and he realizes his mother and sisters have vanished. The child, who happens to be the speaker's grandfather, doesn't know the word "abandon" yet. But "the absence of the word does not negate the fear, on the contrary," the absence of the word loads the sound and lengthens it into a sound memory that he will later recognize in the mood of the cow.

"Mooomy . . . Moooooommy. . . "

The open ellipses are paired. There is a repetitive evocation of absence, and the sense in which the child reads everything into it — and, himself into every story of those who have been abandoned.

If Proust's secret was that he could long for the past so faithfully that it provided him an escape hatch from the entanglements of the present, Gospodinov's secret is that he "can get inside other people's memories." But what he finds there is always himself, or a version of himself.

The final sentence?

“We was.”

(It should be noted that translator Angela Vogel mentioned Jennifer Croft's brilliant translation of Olga Toharczuk's Flights as an inspiring reference for her while translating The Physics of Sorrow.)

Adorno jamming.

Time Shelter

In an interview, Gospodinov mentioned thatTime Shelter was the first book written in Bulgarian to be nominated for the Booker Prize. He wrote it from a growing anxiety, a palpable awareness that something "had gone awry in the clockworks of time. Brexit was on the horizon. "I come from a system that sold a 'bright future' under communism… the stakes have shifted, and populists are selling a' bright past'. I know via my own skin that both checks bounce, they are backed by nothing." The novel probes the ways humans inhabit a "deficit of meaning and future.”

The past may not be innocent, but the past makes up for this in cleverness. The past is a "discrete monster" that haunts the clinic and the European referendum. The vehicle for this narration is Gaustine, the imaginary, vision-laden friend who first came to the author fifteen years ago as a character who imagined creating "clinics of the past” in order to invent a sort of "protected time for people losing their memory.”

This relationship to the self as a memory museum permeates G’s writing from the start. His early short fiction, "Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots," is about two people meeting in an airport lounge after inventing an entire past to exist between them. 

Since the temporality of Time Shelter shifts abruptly across decades of the twentieth century, Gospodinov used idioms and slang particular to eras in order to effect this motion. He hails his translator, Angela Vogel, for her creativity in translating not just the idioms but also the contextual layers of the multiple stories. Another challenge existed at the level of detail, in  finding a way to translate for example the "nationalist kitsch" of various countries. Vogel also managed to translate the intertwined voices of Gaustine and the narrator without effecting a structural and grammatical shift by adding quotation marks. This is an acrobatic move, a talent that preserves the original direct speech, and an example of translation at its best. 

The title,Time Shelter, is a neologism that plays on bomb shelters and tornado shelters—any spaces constructed by humans to protect themselves in the event of a catastrophe. To be protected from time is also to protect a particular view of time that becomes reified. 

After mentioning an "unbelievable laughter," Gospodinov turns abruptly to recollect the memory of reading German archival newspapers and finding a photo in one paper of an elder fellow at Frankfurt University in 1952. 

This fellow, Horkheimer, is holding a carnival with a paper ball dangling from its tip. And perhaps Horkheimer's awkward grin anticipates a viewer who is also an interlocutor, namely, Theodor Adorno. For there is a goofiness implicated in Horkheimer's thrall, in the physical fact of his participation of festive mass behavior and Gospodinov immediately posits Adorno's judgmental gaze. Horkheimer must be wondering whether his friend will see him, Gospodinov muses—and I wonder, separately, and in tandem, if this is because we are never performing the self more intensely than when imagining what the friend might think of us. 

"All the graveyards smell like roses," says Gospodinov.

Onwards, says Max!

*

Cory Oldweiler on Time Shelter for LARB
Georgi Gospodinov as a guest David Naimon’s “Between the Covers” podcast
Georgi Gospodinov. The Physics of Sorrow, translated by Angela Rodel
Gospodinov’s Booker Prize interview
The Cure, “The Same Deep Water As You”

Canetti's earwitness.

You name a city and you’ve already been there.

— Elias Canetti’s “fun-runner”

My grandfather in me cannot decide. So that's where I got the indecisiveness that will constantly torment me.

— Georgi Gospodinov

1

When I finished reading Georgi Gospodinov's novel, The Physics of Sorrow, translated by Angela Rodel, I was sitting on a bench near the Piggly Wiggly. The world of the book had ended, replaced by a random procession of humans entering and exiting the store, carrying plastic bags or brown paper bags or multi-colored reusable bags. I thought about lists, and how each person had come with a list of things they needed; each one had “something” in mind when they arrived at the store. 

On the walk home, carrying Gospodinov in my head for the duration of five city blocks, I considered the importance of lists in his novel.

2

List, as a noun, refers to “a number of connected items or names written or printed consecutively, typically one below the other.” 

To list, as a verb, is to create the noun form of this word, list. 

Synonyms for “list” include catalog, inventory, record, register, roll, file, index, directory, listing, listicle, checklist, tally, docket, ticket, enumeration.

In an anthology of Roland Barthes' writing edited by Susan Sontag, one finds two lists by Barthes, two inventories of likes and dislikes:

I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a “nose” make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.’s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.

And what does Barthes dislike? 

I don’t like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums, strawberries, the harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, the afternoon, Satie, Bartók, Vivaldi, telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin’s concertos, Burgundian branles and Renaissance dances, the organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don’t know, etc.

The list form underscores an implicit connection between the things that come to mind (or the things we think about) and noticeability, or the act of discovering our preferences. We notice what we like and what we dislike. Oddly, making a list of our preferences assumes that the unnoticed exists, and the unnoticed remains in the margins with the unremarkable. The noticed, and the noticeable, speaks to the biases inherent in the act of seeing; it also calls  the discourses of visibility into play.

3

Barthes’ lists use the construction “don't like” rather than “dislike.” This may be a question of translation that allows to consider the difference between claims of not liking vis a vis claims of actively disliking.

Speaking of lists, the table of contents for Elias Canetti’s Earwitness: Fifty Characters reads like a list . . .

Blending literary criticism, social psychology and parabolic swagger, Canetti’s fifty short portraits borrow their style from the Greek philosopher Theophrastus as well as that of seventeenth century English essayists. Word play, of course, doubles as punctuation; sarcasm dances through stereotypes; irony reigns in Canetti’s fabulist satirization of psychological and sociological categories. “The Corpse Skulker” delights in death; “The Fun Runner” consumes pleasure on a scoreboard with no capacity to savor; “The Defective” remains sure of themselves thanks to an inferiority complex. Some have wondered how much the writer, which is to say, the author himself, might have been implicated in the Canetti’s portrait of “The Earwitness” (which I share in its totality below):

The Earwitness

The earwitness makes no effort to look, but he hears all the better. He comes, halts, huddles unnoticed in a corner, peers into a book or a display, hears whatever is to be heard, and moves away untouched and absent. One would think he was not there for he is such an expert at vanishing. He is already somewhere else, he is already listening again, he knows all the places where there is something to be heard, stows it nicely away, and forgets nothing.

He forgets nothing, one has to watch the earwitness when it is time for him to come out with everything. At such a time, he is another man, he is twice as large and four inches taller. How does he do it, does he have special high shoes for blurting things out? Could he possibly pad himself with pillows to make his words seem heavier and weightier? He does nothing else, he says it very precisely, some people wish they had held their tongues. All those modern gadgets are superfluous: his ear is better and more faithful than any gadget, nothing is erased, nothing is blocked, no matter how bad it is, lies, curses, four-letter words, all kinds of indecencies, invectives from remote and little-known languages, he accurately registers even things he does not understand and delivers them unaltered if people wish him to do so.

The earwitness cannot be corrupted by anybody. When it comes to this useful gift, which he alone has, he would take no heed of wife, child, or brother. Whatever he has heard, he has heard, and even the Good Lord is helpless to change it. But he also has human sides, and just as others have their holidays, on which they rest from work, he sometimes, albeit seldom, claps blinders on his ears and refrains from storing up the hearable things. This happens quite simply, he makes himself no-ticeable, he looks people in the eye, the things they say in these circumstances are quite unimportant and do not suffice to spell their doom. When he has taken off his secret ears, he is a friendly person, everyone trusts him, everyone likes to have a drink with him, harmless phrases are exchanged. At such times, people have no inkling that they are speaking with the executioner himself. It is not to be believed how innocent people are when no one is eavesdropping.

- Elias Canetti (t. by Joachim Neugroschel)

4

As a form, the LIST gestures towards infinitude — for how can a list be considered complete? Even granting the list's location in time and space, one cannot help thinking that the list might look different if the list-maker had spent a few more minutes wandering through his own mind. This tension between the list's efficiency, or its capacity to draw forth and enumerate, and its false relation to finitude makes it a wonderful thought device. 

“The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis,” Umberto Eco wrote. In an essay subtitled “the poetry of the archive,” David Levi Strauss noted how Eco's "wondrous hypotyposis . . . points to the work of lists as sketches, outlines, or patterns.” Tracing the word’s etymology, he adds: “The Greek hupotuposis derives from tipos, ‘an impression, form, or type.’ When lists become compendious, they list toward the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis, ‘by which a matter [is] vividly sketched in words.’”

The “list-lust” may be central to the craft, as Strauss writes in this eminently-quotable passage:

Strauss credits this engagement with Golub's lists as speculating forth “a new form of imagism—list imagism, or, as Leon might have it, 'jittery image-jism'.” The sonics of Strauss’ neologism, “jittery image-jism,” plays into the motion and tenuousness of the list form.

[Aside to self: represent the materials of a textual list non-textually in order to reveal their plasticity.]

Excerpt from one of Leon Golub’s lists, as quoted by David Levi Strauss.

5

Like Elias Canetti, Georgi Gospodinov was born in Bulgaria.

Unlike Canetti (who wrote in German), Gospidinov writes in Bulgarian.

I mention this because Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981, an event that some critics have interpreted as a win for the Bulgarians, an interpretation which strikes me as strange and yet perhaps much more common for winners that hail from Eastern or Central Europe. When Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize in 2009, it was a win for the German language more than a win for Romania or a nation-state. Given the entanglement of translation, publishers, profit, power, with the distance between major languages and minor languages, it might make more sense to qualify the Nobel with a mention of the writer’s language rather than their ‘nationality’. After all, nation-states die or are born continuously. There is no end to the parsing and confusion of awards attached to countries that no exist.

(As I have said elsewhere, it is my hope that Gospodinov receives international recognition for his extraordinary books. It is my humble opinion that the Nobel Committee might consider awarding a prize to literature written in the Bulgarian language.)

Coincidentally, in a friskier tenor, Susan Sontag regaled Canetti’s work in review essay published in the New York Review of Books in the year just prior to Canetti’s Nobel 1981 win. She praised Canetti’s particular sense of the grotesque and drew a connection between his early projected work and the monomania of Earwitness:

More on Gospodinov soon . . .

In the interim, I leave you with a little wit, a little exclamatory, and a little blasphemy as written by Canetti in one his portraits:

“The damage-fresh man has a wry face and a nasal twang. He cares little for people and seeks proof. He knows people only if something goes awry for them.”

— Elias Canetti

*

Carolyn Birsdall. “Earwitnessing: Sound Memories of the Nazi Period.” Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices, edited by Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck, Amsterdam University Press, 2009, pp. 169–81.
David Levi Strauss. “Inventory/ Fallen Figures &  Heads: Leon Golub's Lists.” Cabinet Magazine, Issue 13, Spring 2004.
Elias Canetti. Earwitness: Fifty Characters. translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: The Seaburry Press, 1979.
Frank Tonkiss, “Aural Postcards: Sound, Memory, and the City.” The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Michael Bull and Les Black, Berg Press Sensory Formation Series, pp. 303-309.
Georgi Gospodinov. The Physics of Sorrow, translated by Angela Rodel.
Susan Sontag, “The Mind as Passion: On Elias Canetti” (New York Review of Books, September 25th, 1980)
Steve Reich, “I. Strings (With Winds and Brass)” fromThe Four Sections, performed by London Symphony Orchestra.

My tattered old copy mit a sunflower face discovered on a nightwalk this week.

Jean Follain.

We measure depth
as a fathom of waters
as a keeper of otters
as a fear of disorder
as a phantom of operas

An exclamation point in the shape of a question mark
against the earth and your flesh
against the canopy

[Rene Char, “Continuous Truth” tr. by Nancy Carlson; Hannah Aizenmann, “As a Father of Daughters”; ibid.; ibid.; ibid.; Alberto Rios, “Seahorse in the Desert”; Christopher DeWeese, “If You Hide Long Enough, Sometimes You'll Forget You're Riding”; Rajiv Mohabir, “Leela”]

The Gust of Ghost-forsaken Places

Last week, I returned to my notes on Samuel Beckett, and thought about his relationship to the memorial, and to memorialization. Despite having lived through two extraordinary wars, Beckett rarely addressed the memorial form directly in his work. But there a poem — and a radio play — and a place.

Saint-Lô

Vire will wind in other shadows
unborn through the bright ways tremble
and the old mind ghost-forsaken
sink into its havoc

Samuel Beckett

“Ghost-forsaken” clings to “sink”: Beckett committed the site of Saint-Lô to the poem’s memory. But he also returned to it quietly in 1946, withThe Capital of the Ruins, an unproduced radio play he created for Radio Erin. And we don’t know where he stood or what he kissed when giving the following words to a play that got buried: “Saint-Lô was bombed out of existence in one night. German prisoners of war and casual laborers attracted by the relative food-plenty, but soon discouraged by housing conditions, continue, two years after the liberation, to clear away the debris, literally by hand.”

The Gust of Wind

Delivered by the postal service earlier the week, a book as mesmerizing as the leaves the leaves falling from the trees along our street this week—- yellow for an instant and then smitten by asphalt — Earthly, a collection of Jean Follain’s poems translated by Andrew Seguin.

Camille Corot’s lithograph, The Gust of Wind (1871), sits lightly on the cover, gesturing towards Canisy, the small village in Normandy where the poet in question was born and fed bread. In the translator’s introduction, Seguin paints a portrait of his subject: this writer named Jean Follain who saw the agricultural lifeways of small towns gutted by the new economy of killing, the human looking for words in the wasteland following World War II, an event sponsored by governments who caused the mass death of young men and starved village economies of the labor required for their continuance.

When Follain says the horses have vanished, one can almost hear the absence of hoof-breaths on the hardened dirt roads, the odor of new chemicals replacing the scent of summer-warmed manure, a vanishing sensorium of rhythms and temporalities attuned to their own being. Follain’s poetry offers the rawness and complex vitality of these “remembered landscapes,” in Seguin’s phrasing, without the romance of the pastoral mode. Spoken in third person plural, the poems cull intimacy out of tenderness for details and actions rather than the expression of first-person feelings. The poems reveal the “simultaneity of remarkable things” — things which vanish and exist in the ordinary, things that disappear and reappear as spirits, things that linger in what Mahmoud Darwish called “the presence of absence.”

Countless poems lauding war’s victory have been written; it is more difficult to remind the reader of what such “victory” involved, and how the history of modern warfare has shaped the mechanized inhumanity of the present. Like Beckett, Follain wrote about the annihilation of Saint-Lô. As Seguin puts it: Follain’s “poems began to appear in journals alongside some of the Sagesse group, and the first of his thirteen books of poems, La Main chaude, was published in 1933. Prose works soon followed, including, in 1935, Paris, a beautiful flânerie of the city he made his home, and several memoirs of his childhood in Canisy and the nearby city of Saint-Lô, which was decimated by Allied bombs in WWII.”

The Gust of Gestures

What happens in Follain’s poems?

Things are touched. Things touch back. Subjects pause like objects in a dark painting. Children “dressed in black rags” scamper through ruins.” A man’s smile “vibrates” alongside the spike of wheat in his scythe. Snails sleep as the bread burns. “The protagonist of dreams” savors wine flavored by “myrtle and cypress” as alcohol fuels arguments in the pub. Doors creak through “cold rooms.” The “rustle” of poplars near rivers rouses the blood. A novelist studies the wandering vapors. A glass blushes like a continental sunset. The “already yellow” of lindens in July crosses paths with violins who are napping in their velvet-lined coffins.

In “Landscape of Rural Hardship”:

A small garden of chives
trembles beneath the stars.

The hardship is expressed in trembling of tiny chives.

Follain opens his “Eclogue” with a man in a “shattered house” who “plays at the game of existing” as the wind groans through the orchard. With no transition, Follain abandons the man for “the lightning-struck oak” where a bird perches on a limb, singing, unafraid, slowly morphing into a haunting image:

an old man has placed his hand
where a young heart
vowed obedience.

Gestures consecrate the movements in Follain’s poems.

The gesture of the old man’s hand touching the place where a young heart made a promise — vowed love or fidelity to an ideal or authority — lingers like the edges of a memory in the mind of the reader. This simultaneity in staging is what Follain perfected. This simultaneity gives his poems the feel of paintings as eloquent as an allegory by Gustave Courbet.

“Chovanne” is a poem-portrait of French royalist insurgent from the late 18th century. It opens “In the thick of the old world” with all its shadowed brocades and heavy textures of darkness (darkness is a fabric in the years prior to electricity) where a woman removes her “apparel” in order to look closely at her body “in the light.” Light is precious and she is the chovanne, thinking of her grey horse out back, “enclosed” to better serve “history and magic”. Follain moves between the woman’s thoughts (we imagine her smile) and the animal outside, using the shared vitality of heart and lungs to mark the life between them. They have survived, however briefly

and all that sky above them
would be the same for the assemblies.
The same for stupefying wars.

Hopefully, Earthly will introduce a larger segment of English-language readers Follain’s earth-rousing poems.

With goosebumps, I offer this one for the road, an ars poetica as text alongside the absented image of Jean Follain finidng words for the wind that unleafs the trees near the emptied homes and ruined lives of Saint-Lô.

History

As history seems
sad to the world at times 
the heavy dinner gets cold 
the great orator never returns 
his mistress follows her dreams 
later on 
it's the uprooting 
the muffled gunshots
the bells of a grand congress 
on which night falls 
while out in the fields 
of his eternal childhood 
the poet is walking
not wanting to forget a thing.

*

Alexandra Stréliski, “Plus tôt”
Camille Corot, The Gust of Wind (1871)
Jean Follain, Earthly translated by Andrew Seguin (Song Cave)
Leos Janáček, “A Recollection” (performed by András Schiff)
Samuel Beckett,The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 (1995)

Assorted readings

We want fire; a little less mutton and a little more genius.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As I stood waiting, a scene from Kafka’s Trial flashed through my mind—with the help of a washerwoman, Josef K. gets to see what is in the judge’s law book: pornographic drawings.

Dimitris Lyacos

Is this not literature pleading guilty?

Georges Bataille after reading Lautréamont

---

/ hatred of poetry no. 9

In the summer of 1912, Franz Kafka and Max Brod took and trip to Weimar and visited the Goethe House and the Goethe-Schiller Archive. According to custom, the guest book lay open beside the front door. As he prepared to sign his own name, Kafka recognized the signature of novelist Thomas Mann. It seems that Kafka studied Mann’s signature and then opened his notepad to re-render the curves and sinews of Mann’s lettering. The notepad includes shorthand descriptions and key words from Kafka’s Weimar excursion, as well as his “forgery” of Mann’s signature— which he promptly crossed out. Kafka’s decision to scribble over the signature may have been a way of expressing his feelings about 1) the failure of the forgery 2) the failure of the man named Thomas Mann 3) the failure of the forger’s whim 4) the failure of the author’s forger 5) the death of the author as Other 6) boredom, contempt, or any human state Alberto Moravia used as a title for one of his novels. Beneath Kafka’s forgery of Mann’s signature sits “as a digital reconstruction of the signature without his cross-out,” as rendered in a book by Reiner Stach. The digital reconstruction opens a different story about authorial death and forgery. According to Stach, Thomas Mann’s signature in “the original” guestbook has never been located.

/ hatred of poetry no. 4

* Point of clarification, with gratitude to James Marcus, who noted on twitter that “Updike's father was a small-town schoolteacher and after his childhood in Shillington the future author lived in a small farmhouse with his parents and grandparents.” Updike came from a stable, loving, supportive family and attended Harvard on full scholarship. “Also, his mother was a writer and so his literary aspirations were respected from the beginning.” The third John may not have needed to pay for college, which is a good thing— a thing that should be the case for all students.

/ hatred of poetry no. 8

Heinrich Marx fumed as he paced across the freshly-swept floors of his home. His son, Karl, had been sucked into the fever of romanticism. He was wasting his life on poetry. Determined to reason with his son, Heinrich agreed that poetry was an art worthy of consumption — memorizing and reciting poems could even elevate a fellow’s social standing among peers — but, for gentleman, poetry could only be a noble side-stint, relegated to moments of leisure. Poetry, said Heinrich, was perfectly cultured activity as long as it remained marginal to a career in law. Among the bourgeoisie, the poet could only be a hobbyist. (Centuries later, Heinrich’s view is shared by most middle-class American professionals.) Nevertheless, despite his father’s harangues, the rankled young poet named Karl persisted in versifying. Perhaps his father’s careerist hectoring drove the son even more deeply into the realm where poetry constitutes rebellion? Perhaps Marxism owes its a splinter of its existence to the chip that bloomed on Karl’s shoulder vis a vis his father? Leaning on the conventions of Heine's Book of Love (1827), Karl Marx wrote romantic poems and titled his books thematically. He gave the Book of Love and the Book of Songs to Jenny von Westphalen. Obviously, she loved it. Perhaps History owes a debt to these love poems that inspired the educated woman to renounce her studies and become a housewife? Obviously, History owes its wives nothing. But on November 10th of 1837, Karl Marx announced to his father that he’d abandoned poetry. No more lyric, Karl said, no more of this “shattering” activity which he had pursued rather vigilantly for the previous five years. Surprising: Marx's condemnation of Paul Proudhon's “poetic images” as unserious fluff-balls that elide the logic of social utility. Unsurprising: to note how the son grows to resemble the father in his puritanical seriousness and practicality. 

/ hatred of poetry no. 63

“What joins me to B. is the impossible, like a void in front of her and me, instead of a secure life together. The lack of a way out, the difficulties recurring in any case, this threat of death between us like Isolde's sword, the desire that goads us to go further than the heart can bear, the need to suffer from an endless laceration, the suspicion even—on B.'s part—that all this will still only lead, haphazardly, to wretchedness, will fall into filth and spinelessness: all this makes every hour a mixture of panic, expectation, audacity, anguish (more rarely, exasperating sensuality), which only action can resolve (but action ...).” Thus reads a paragraph from George Bataille’s The Impossible, a hybrid work written as he filled the notebook that would later be published as Guilty. In 1942, Bataille was writing and reading poetry, including Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell, Emily Bronte's poetry, and Lautréamont’s Maldoror and Poetic.

/ hatred of poetry no. 2

“Mystic hagiographies are writings that challenge the divide between immanence and transcendence and that often include poetry or otherwise heightened poetic language alongside theological reflections.”

/ hatred of poetry no. 19

According to François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs From Beyond the Grace: “Frederick the Great, when he ascended the throne, had an intrigue with an Italian dancer, La Barbarina—the only woman he ever went near: he was satisfied to play the flute on his wedding night, beneath the window of Princess Elisabeth of Brunswick. Indeed, Frederick had a taste for music and a mania for poetry. The intrigues and epigrams of the two poets, Frederick and Voltaire, disturbed Madame de Pompadour, the Abbé de Bernis, and Louis XV. The Margravine of Bayreuth played a part in all this, as did love such as a poet might feel. Literary gatherings at the king's house, with the dogs on the unclean armchairs; then concerts in front of statues of Antinous; then enormous banquets; then heaps of philosophy; then freedom of the press and strokes of the cane; then a lobster or an eel pie, which put an end to the days of a great old man, who wanted to live: such are the things that private society took up during those days of letters and battles.—” Poetry and pet lobsters: the dream of any self-respecting dandy, as well as the scourge of an respectable bourgeois professional.

/ hatred of poetry no. 2025

24 January 1943:

“In this case it would be necessary—and also possible, easy— for us to make this wound a festival, a strength of the sickness. The poetry that loses the most blood would be the strongest. The saddest dawn? Announcing the joy of the day. Poetry would be the sign announcing the greatest inner lacerations. The human musculature would only be entirely at stake; it would only attain its highest degree of strength and the perfect motion of decision— that which the being is [incomplete sentence]”

/ hatred of poetry no. 117

 "And so I dismiss these matters and accepting the customary belief about them . . .I investigate not these things, but myself, to know whether I am a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet lot is given by nature," Socrates said in Plato's Phaedra. Like Socrates, sometimes the poet must compare herself to Typhon and ask what sort of monster am I? Certainly I am more clever than Hesiod's serpent version, who gives himself away with his hundred serpent tail legs and hundred serpent heads. But I am also dumber than Typhon, who can imitate any sound and speak and countless voices including the language of the gods with his many mouths. Typhon's goal was to replace Zeus as the most supreme being in the cosmos. The battle between Typhon and Zeus ended badly for Typhon; Zeus used his thunderbolts and threw him into Mount Etna. But Typhon had the last word by inscribing his rage in the sky. Whenever Typhon thinks long and hard about what Zeus did to him, whenever that fury is fondled and recollected to the point of obsession, Mount Etna rumbles and its volcano spews lava into the sky. Zeus strikes those of us on the earth with a thunderbolt, while Typhon strikes at Zeus from inside the earth with lava and smoke. Both are monstrous. What will my desire to unseat the powers that be cost me? What harm will I revisit upon other humans in fighting this battle? This is what the volcanic mind must ask. But this is also what the hero cannot consider when battling the monster. And maybe this is one indirect way of answering your question about why the poet cannot be a hero.

/ responses to hatred[s] of poetry

Toti O’Brien’s interview with the extraordinary Dimitris Lyacos
May Ray, Adrienne Fidelin and Nusch Eluard (1938)
The hatred of poetry
The art of hating
The hatred
The gender of sound
The unfortunate fate of childhood dolls
The work of fire
The plastic semiotic
The behavior of mirrors on easter island
The phaedra
Eva Hesse, Untitled (1962)
Michael Hamburger, “No Hatred and No Flag”
The conditional
The hairpin curve
The custom of wearing clothes
The absent meow
The scythians
The well-ventilated conscience
The grocer’s cat
The autobiography of death
The privilege button
The art of inhumation
Brisees by Michel Leiris
The illusion of historic time
The palimpsest of the human brain
J. M. W. Turner, Death on Pale Horse (maybe 1825-1830)
Benjamin Fondane’s Philoctetes
The collective afterlife of things
The surreality of community
The postscriptum
Rosa Boshier González’s “Philip Guston Now”
Material in Seurat’s nude study of an old man: “powdered vine charcoal and charcoal with stumping and lifting, on laid paper”

Paul Klee speaking B.

*

François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800 (NYRB Classics) tr. by Alex Andriesse
Georges Bataille, The Impossible (City Lights Books) tr. by Robert Hurley
Georges Bataille, Guilty (Lapis Press) tr. by Bruce Boone
Georges Bataille, Guilty (State University of New York) tr. by Stuart Kendall
Harold Brodkey, Sea Battles on Dry Land (Metropolitan Books)
Reiner Stach, Is That Kafka? (New Directions Press)

Two Sundays in 1954, from the diary of Witold Gombrowicz

*

When returning to my notes on Witold Gombrowicz’s magnificent diaries this weekend, I came across an entry in 1954 that is given as two Sundays in a row. Not one Sunday that follows another but one Sunday that becomes many Sundays and then another Sunday that will be in the future. As an aside on chronology and the uses and self-abuses of selfhood in modern prose, I offer Gombrowicz’s two Sundays, excerpted from Gombrowicz’s Diary (as published through Yale University Press’ fantastic Margellos World Republic of Letter Series and translated by Lillian Valee) below.

---

Sunday

The cold wind from the south swept a mass of hot and humid air out of Buenos Aires and now it is blowing at a clip, howling, whistling, buzzing and slamming windows, throwing papers into the air at the intersections and causing real orgies of invisible witches. This pseudoautumn wind grabs me, too, and spurs me on into the past. It has the privilege of evoking the past in me and sometimes 1 submit to it for hours, sitting somewhere on a bench. There, blown through and through, I attempt something that is beyond my power but nevertheless ardently desired: contact with the Witold Gombrowiez from irretrievable epochs. I spend a lot of time reconstructing my past: I diligently establish a chronology and stretch my memory to its limits, looking for myself the way Proust did, but to no avail. The past is bottomless and Proust lies. Nothing, one can do absolutely nothing. Yet the southern wind, in causing certain upheavals in my organism, creates in me a state of almost amorous desire in which, desperately losing my way, I attempt to awaken my old existence in me for just an instant with a grimace.

On avenida Costanera, staring at the waves dashed into the air with relentless fury by the stone masonry of the shore, I, today's Gombrowicz, summoned that distant protoplast of mine in all of his tremulous and youthful vulnerability. Today, the triviality of those events took on (for me who already knew, who was now my own past, the solution to the riddle of that boy) the sanctity of legends about distant beginnings and today I knew the seriousness of that ridiculous suffering, I knew it ex post. I reminded myself, therefore, how one evening he-I went to the neighboring village of Bartodziei to attend a party, where there was a person who transported him– me into raptures and before whom I-he wanted to show off, shine. I-he needed this. Instead I walked into the salon and there, instead of admiration, l was greeted by the pity of aunts, the jokes of cousins, the crass irony of all those local landowners. What had happened? Kaden Bandrowski had “run down” one of my novellas in words that were actually full of indulgence but which categorically denied me any talent. That newspaper had fallen into their hands and they, of course, believed it because, after all, he was a writer and he knew what he was talking about. That evening I did not know where to hide my face.

If he-I was helpless in situations like this, then it was not at all because he was not up to them. On the contrary. These situations were irrefutable because they were unworthy of being refuted— they were too silly and frivolous to take the suffering that they caused seriously. You suffered and, at the same time, were ashamed of your suffering so that you, who at that time could easily handle far more menacing demons, broke down at this juncture, disqualified by your own pain. You poor, poor boy! Why hadn't I been at your side then, why couldn't I have walked into that drawing room and stood right behind you, so that you could have been fortified with the later sense of your life. But I—your fulfillment—I was—I am—a thousand miles and many years away from you and I sat—I sit—here, on the American shore, so bitterly overdue .. and thus, staring at the water that shoots up from behind a stone wall, filled with the distance of the wind speeding from the polar region.

Sunday

Today, years later, when I am a lot calmer, less at the mercy and the lack of mercy of judgments, I think about the basic assumptions of Ferdydurke regarding criticism and I can endorse them without reservation. There are enough innocent works that enter life looking as if they did not know that they would be raped by a thousand idiotic assessments! Enough authors who pretend that this rape, perpetrated on them with superficial judgments, any kind at all, is something that is not capable of affecting them and should not be noticed. A work, even if it is born of the purest contemplation, should be written in such a way as to assure the author an advantage in his game with people. A style that cannot defend itself before human judgment, that surrenders its creator to the ill will of any old imbecile, does not fulfill its most important assignment. Yet defense against these opinions is possible only when we manage a little humility and admit how important they really are to us, even if they do come from an idiot. That is why the defenselessness of art in the face of human judgment is the sad consequence of its pride: ah, I am higher than that, I take into account only the opinions of the wise! This fiction is absurd and the truth, the difficult and tragic truth is that the idiot's opinion is also significant. It also creates us, shapes us from inside out, and has far-reaching practical and vital consequences.

Criticism, however, has yet another aspect. It can be seen from the author's side but it can also be seen from the side of the public and then it takes on even gaudier tones of scandal, mendacity, and deception. How do these things look?

The public desires to be informed by the press about books that appear. This is the source of journalistic criticism, manned by people having contact with literature.

Yet if these people really had something to do in the field of art, if they really were rooted in it, they certainly would not stop at these articles. So, no, these are practically always second- and third-rate literary figures, persons who always maintain merely a loose, rather social, relation with the world of the spirit, persons who are not on the level of the concerns that they write about. This then is the source of the greatest difficulty, which cannot be avoided and from which arises the entire scandal that comprises criticism and its immorality. The question is the following: How can an inferior man criticize a superior man, how can he assess his personality and arrive at the value of his work? How can this take place without becoming absurd?

Never have the critics, at least the Polish ones, ever devoted even a single minute of time to this delicate matter. Mr. X, however, in judging a man of Norwid's class, for example, puts himself in a suicidal, impossible position because in order to judge Norwid, he must be superior to Norwid but he is not. This basic falseness draws out an infinite chain of additional lies, and criticism becomes the living contradiction of all of its loftiest aspirations.

So they want to be judges of art? First they must attain it. They are in its antechamber and they lack access to the spiritual states from which art derives.

They know nothing of its intensity.

So they want to be methodical, professional, objective, just? But they themselves are a triumph of dilettantism, expressing themselves on subjects that they are incapable of mastering. They are an example of the most unlawful usurpation.

Guardians of morality? Morality is based on a hierarchy of values and they themselves sneer at hierarchy. The very fact of their existence is in its essence immoral: there is nothing that they have exhibited and they have no proof that they have a right to this role except that the editor allows them to write. Giving themselves up to immoral work, which consists of articulating cheap, easy, hurried judgments without basis, they want to judge the morality of people who put their life into art.

So they want to judge style? But they themselves are a parody of style, the personification of pretentiousness. They are bad stylists to the degree that they are not offended by the incurable dissonance of that accursed "higher" and "lower." Even omitting the fact that they write quickly and sloppily, this is the dirt of the cheapest publicism. ...

Teachers, educators, spiritual leaders? In reality, they taught the Polish reader this truth about literature: that it is something like a school essay, written in order that the teacher could give it a grade; that creativity is not a play of forces, which do not allow themselves to be completely controlled, not a burst of energy or the work of a spirit that is creating itself but merely an annual literary "production," along with the inseparable reviews, contests, awards, and feuilletons. These are masters of trivialization, artists who transform a keen life into a boring pulp, where everything is more or less equally mediocre and unimportant.

A surplus of parasites produces such fatal effects. To write about literature is easier than writing literature: that's the whole point. If I were in their place, therefore, I would reflect very deeply on how to elude this disgrace whose name is: oversimplification. Their advantages are purely technical. Their voice resounds powerfully not because it is powerful but because they are allowed to speak through the megaphone of the press.

What is the way out of this?

Cast off in fury and pride all the artificial advantages that your situation assures you. Because literary criticism is not the judging of one man by another (who gave you this right?) but the meeting of two personalities on absolutely equal terms.

Therefore: do not judge. Simply describe your reactions. Never write about the author or the work, only about yourself in confrontation with the work or the author. You are allowed to write about yourself.

“The truth about Hamlet is that Shakespeare made him up.” (Witold Gombrowicz) My italics.

Guyotat's Idiocy: Impressions with repetition.

Restraint deepens passion by refusing to give it easy vent.

— Garry Willis, Lincoln of Gettysburg

I take androgyny for granted in everyone.

— Harold Brodkey, “Translating Brando”

NOTE ON “POSITION”

Like Pierre Guyotat in his table-less studio in Passy, I write with my notebook pressed against my knees, the scent of dust in the corners of the hardwoods, transfixed by the sculpted eros of the unswept. This position is ordinary for me: a repetition, a motion that involves returning to a familiar place and position, in order to ascertain what has changed. With my notebook in my lap and the couch behind my back, I reconvene the scene of small details.

Notice— the new dog bone under the gray sofa, the vine strangling the birdfeeder near the window, the virulent green of the man’s pants in the framed drawing, an undated pastel piece that escaped time’s signature. It is this green on my wall that calls to the green parrot in Pierre Guyotat’s Idiocy.

Green pants to the green parrot who recites its repertoire of apartment sounds in the scene where Guyotat helps an elderly woman write the detective novel she has dreamed.

The parrot recites (or cites again,re-citing being another way of re-saying): the elder’s cough, “the creaking floors, the hubbub of voices on the avenue, the paintbrush twirling in its pot, my footsteps” — cut by the flashback of twins’ sexual escapades.

The woman holds her paintbrush, just as she has held it for many years and offers him “her other hand” which he kisses as he has done since “tall enough to do so.” The narrator returns to the woman’s text, which must be set on a particular street “where she passed one night during the interwar years in a taxi taking her home from a Boulevards theater with her husband, also a rentier.” This is the ride the woman wants to continue: to go from there, where a protest halted their taxi near the oysterman she can’t forget. This the scene she returns to sketch, now that her husband cannot prevent her from imagining the mystery, or inventing an amorous intrigue with “his young, half-niece from Brittany.”

The writer types the woman’s words onto paper and a “new phrase” appears, a phrase that ends with a flourish “which delights her.”

“At the heart of love”: he types it.

The parrot repeats the woman’s words but the writer’s ear hears: “the hurt of love, the hurt of love” – and the dance between monosyllabic near-homphones (heart, hurt, heart, hurt) continues as he repeats the conventional act of closure at the end. “The hand re-kissed, the thing half- written, the story interrupted by the murmur of faraway water and “half-light” on the street outside. 

The re-petition. (To petition again.)

The seasons recur (return, recurve) in stories of phosphorus–the mark of early spring when leaves turn dark green and then deepen into purple as they grow deficient in phosphorus, a mineral that isn’t available or active in cold, wet soil. The first signs of warming beneath us involve this darkening of the leaves.  

NOTE ON PARROTS

Mornings inch towards autumn only to be defeated by the dry heat which conquers the front porch by afternoon. This is the weather of the week, a background of sorts. And Guyotat’s heart/hurt — his Kierkegaardian distinction between the said/heard— returns on an afternoon when I find myself studying Auguste Renoir's paintings with one of the teens.

We agree that Renoir makes sumptuous use of black paints . . . BLACK, on his canvas, is a charged enigma, offering itself as a bridge between foreground and background.

Pierre Auguste Renoir, Woman with Parrot (1871)

Amid this orgy of deep blacks, I pause near Woman With Parrot, Renoir’s portrait of Lise Tréhot. She is holding a small green parrot in an elegant room, her pointer finger flush against the bird’s head. The fern to her right is given in a loud green, a rakish, vaguely-decadent green that draws attention away from the yellowish-green of the parrot.

My eye inclines to Renoir’s signature, placed neatly beneath the fern in a small oval on the carpet, as if to remind the viewer that color is a discipline. Color is how Renoir tames the scene. When I remove my glasses, the painting appears as from a distance, forcing me to consider his distribution of color. Forest green fronds on the wall; green patterns set atop grey on the wallpaper. Renoir’s greens draw the eye upwards from the fern to the ceiling. But Renoir’s reds draw the eye downward from the ribbons to the floor, down towards those marooned splotches covering the carpet. A sickly yellowish-green occupies the center, linking the cage to the parrot and the olive undertones of Lise’s skin.

Lise appears in at least 16 of his canvases during the six-year period when she and Renoir were companions. This painting was finished in 1871. In April of the following year, Lise married wealthy architect and never set eyes on Renoir again.

Certainly, he resented this. In a letter dated from March of 1912, Renoir downplayed the significance of this painting. He relegated Lise to a lost sight, a thing no longer given to his seeing. “I’m returning the photographs of the two paintings along with this letter,” Renoir wrote, adding that “The Woman with Parrot must have been done. . . in 1871 at the latest, because after this time I lost sight of the woman who posed for this picture.” Either way, Renoir continues, the paintings “are of no value, especially the Woman with Bird [sic].”

Colors and pictures on paper. Juvenilia.

“Pray do not get too excited over such daubs,” Renoir advises his correspondent.

The bright red of Lise’s necktie align with the gash of red ruffles pouring from back of her black dress, lending a dignity and respectability to the scene at this precise moment when she refuses our interest, electing, instead, to offer herself entirely to the bird in her hand. Aloof— but not really pensive so much as eager to withhold her attention from the painter? One wonders what thoughts whisk through the decidedly-hidden interior.

According to the Guggenheim Museum, genre paintings of the 1860s and 1870’s often featured “richly dressed young women” who were assumed to be “lorette, or high-class courtesans.” In these genre paintings, “the parrot and the gilded birdcage are sometimes interpreted as erotic symbols.” The way Renoir leans into this genre might have upset Lise as she sought to varnish her reputation for a marriage into the ruling classes.

The Guggenheim also mentions that the subject of woman holding parrot “appears in works from the 1860s by Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and Edgar Degas,” a statement clearly worded as an encouragement to share one of my favorite parrot-themed portraits, namely Gustave Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot.

Gustave Courbet, Woman with a Parrot (1866)

The woman in this painting hides nothing from the parrot. Like Renoir’s woman, her interest is given entirely to the bird on her hand — but the expression is one of fascination rather than disdain. Her fingers are spread open, resembling the gesture of a statue I saw last week in New Orleans: a posture of the hand that beckons winged things. And the parrot complies. In Courbet’s painting, the walls are tent-like, set to sway and curve like the fabrics beneath the nude: the distance between inside and outside is permeable, as illustrated by the slight crack in the wall — with its chlorophyll-warmed greens — that enabled the parrot to enter. Courbet’s parrot is an expected guest who visits and delights the woman. Renoir’s parrot is a caged creature intended to please the residents of the cultivated bourgeois interior. I could riff on this forever . . .

NOTE ON THE BOOK, ITSELF

Pierre Guyotat in an interview from 1985

My diversion into Guyotat’s green ignores one of the primary themes in his work, namely, his experience in Algeria, where he discovered his own solidarity with the anticolonialist struggle of Algerians. HisTomb for 500,000 Soldiers (1967) was based on these experiences and scandalized the French reading public with its depictions of war, servitude, and sexuality. Idiocy traces a similar space: its most riveting parts occur later in the book, in a testament of the atrocities he witnessed as a French soldier in the Algerian war. Guyotat details his own arrest for inciting desertion as well as his three-month imprisonment in a hole in the ground. Where mystics sought solitary confinement as a means to apotheosis, Guyotat learns nothing from the hole. He is not transfigured or redeemed.

When Edmund White called Guyotat “one of the few geniuses of our day,” he was not lying. Idiocy’s searing condemnation of colonialism and militarized violence implicates its speaker. In refusing social constructions of personal innocence, Guyotat writes against himself, against his culture and the cult of ‘decent men’. His sentences wind through the mind like those of a Proust who dared pledge his fides to a queer icon of Saint Sebastian.

I must keep quiet for a little space and then walk very slowly along that bright sound of pain, towards that blue, blue wave. What bliss there is in blueness. never know how blue blueness could be.

– Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

*

Claude Debussy, Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien: Fragments Symphoniques (1911)
Gustave Courbet, Woman with a Parrot (1866)
Pierre Auguste Renoir, Woman with Parrot (1871)
Pierre Guyotat, IDIOCY, tr. by Peter Behrman de Sinéty (NYRB Classics, 2025)
“Pierre Guyotat Reading Matter Pt. 1” a feature from CABINET

Fondation Azzedine Alaia, from the catalog titled Pierre Guyotat, la matière de nos œuvres

Harold Brodkey on Walter Winchell.

Harold Brodkey (Source: Alto de la Luna)

Take “order” as the arrangement of sensible things that permits repetition, ritual, and recognition. Then go for a walk with Radu, head tingling with recent readings. Enter Harold Brodkey’s 1995 essay, “The Last Word on Walter Winchell” — and my urge to excerpt abundantly, if only to imagine talking to other humans about it.

Brodkey begins in his feelings, as usual, regardless of what you might prefer. For Brodkey writes in the world that is Brodkey, for the page of his own reckonings. Love him or hate him, at least he doesn’t prevaricate a feigned neutrality or emotional disconnection.

Biographers claimed that Winchell invented the modern gossip column, perhaps as a way of defending their interest in him, but Brodkey disagrees. Journalism as gossip predates Winchell “by at least half a century.” Winchell merely revived a “dying form” and “made it commercially viable” among a mass audience.

It’s no shiner to say Winchell looked fantastic in the bootstraps department. Raised in Manhattan, he left school after the sixth grade. Although Brodkey was raised in a smaller town, he and Winchell were both socialized by a similar American conception of masculinity and nuclear family. Respectability and new money had altered the social terrain. “The rich, the people who mattered, were (with some exceptions) arrivistes, newcomers to power since the Civil War,” wrote Brodkey, emphasizing their inclinations to be “genteel.” The performance and display of “gentility was a constant issue,” and the fiction of the time attested to “this hypocrisy.” Media entered the market fray. “Newspapers were power and blackmail: they printed scandal, often unsubstantiated.”

Perhaps the myth of the American gentleman has always been nostalgic. “America was not gentlemanly except as a quality of longing,” wrote Brodkey, before segueing into a description of early alienation that confronted him when he moved from a small town into a larger city:

Angling into this sociology of small-town abandonment, Brodkey concentrates on the sense of scale; how considerations of scale shaped Winchell’s persona, or provided the terrain for his reactions and self-makings. “The thing about going back in history is that it is difficult to keep your sense of scale”:

Like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Winchell “kept this sense of a party through much of his working life” — and the sense of party may have influenced his style, or what Brodkey calls his “swiftness and nastiness and outspokenness.” Style, here, is prophetic and smug in its clapbacks and near-aphorisms. It draws on common language and sounds personal, easygoing, honest as a televangelist. This isn’t why Brodkey traces Winchell’s style back to “Bible, with its air of truth.” What he borrows from the Bible is a certain pithiness: “Winchell's idea of a story was Jezebel in five lines.” He never used “schooled rhetoric” and “his riffs depended on rhythm, brevity, and mocking parody, in ways reminiscent of song lyrics and vaudeville.”

Walter Winchell.

In the absence of authoritative institutions, Winchell’s instincts presumed the market would drive values. Decades later, Pop would be disavowable king around which American culture could be constructed. To quote Brodkey, “Not simply because his work was entertainment but because in a country with so many ethnic divisions and a maddening variety of manners of speech, show-biz vernacular was the only common language.” If Winchell was anything, he was “show biz, was a placeless American, someone who could not be kept down on the farm after he'd seen Paree.” He stayed conversant with trends and presented himself as an afficianado of immediacy and instants.

Perhaps this caused a sense of giddiness in his respectability-battered audience?

“Winchell's constructed persona was based on his being truant, on his autonomy, and it granted us, the citizen audience, our autonomy,” said Brodkey. The man didn’t bother with ancestors or history or “dead men's and women's greatness” or even “memories of greatness.” Instead, Winchell “was absolutely topical. Now. Our lives.” The popularity of his work depended on how he played to “his two lifelong interests . . . sexual reality and conspiracies.”

Content aside, Winchell’s performance had polish. He knew his audience. He met them in their loneliness. “His métier was the folksy deconstruction of officaldom and of lies about class differences.” He finessed headlines and didn’t bother with telling “the ‘truth’ except in a sportive or arch manner, and even then he didn't do it because he was truthful by nature.” He kept his eyes focused on the lies of others. He took so many notes on those lies and contradictions that J. Edgar Hoover assigned agents to listen to Winchell and reap details.

As a medium, radio foregrounded voice and vocalization. Winchell’s voice ranged an “octave higher than usual” when he was on the air. His “verbal style” celebrated “childishness” and the patina of innocence required for shock. According to his biographer, “Winchell liked to broadcast with his pants undone.” According to Winchell, radio “added to his already terrible nervousness, his stage fright, and helped increase the urgency and drama of his voice on his broadcasts.”

Beginning in 1933, Winchell dedicated his broadcasts to opposing the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. He wrote frequently about the activities of pro-Nazi groups and funneled this information to a very-grateful Herbert Hoover at the FBI. By 1934, Hoover had even assigned FBI agents as a personal protection force for Winchell, since — in Hoover’s words — Winchell “has been very active in the anti-Nazi movement and feels there may be some efforts to cause him harm or embarrassment.” Protection rackets proliferated, and Winchell received protection from The Mob for several years (though Brodkey doesn’t mention what this cost him).

The next passage deserves quotation in full, if not for its grist with fragile masculinity and fascism, a topic that Brodkey never tired of challenging in his fiction:

Brodkey also takes issue with the biographer’s depiction of Winchell’s relationship to Roosevelt (i.e. Winchell started stumping for Roosevelt’s policies because they shared a similar sense of judgement, and not because he was fawning for significance) as well as his relationship Judaism (i.e. Winchell wasn’t deeply indebted to his ethnicity or religious belief for a sense of identity). With a note that he might be projecting a bit, I give you Brodkey’s words on this:

In this directed, ceaseless opposition, Winchell altered the stakes of activist journalism. Policies were not distinct from their consequences on the speaker.

The pleasure of Brodkey’s hard-nosed sentimentalism surges through his irreverent description of the self-styled Great Men — Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, etc.

Speaking of gender, Brodkey loved pontificating from his androgyny platform. No literati did more to elevate the humbug, totally- average androgyne than Brodkey. Take the way he marveled at the newness of Marlon Brando's “questionable morality and the questionable morality of his art, its graffiti quality, its shitting-on-you wildness… “ and described Brando's eyes as “clever, androgynous, hauntingly threatening eyes, somehow also soft and weak, satyr / American-storm-trooper eyes (though they are less famous than his profile).”  This is only to provide context for Brodkey’s survey of the “huge, androgynous vanity” of the Yalta bros . . .*

After the war ended and the troops came home, American triumphalism leaned into the profits made by weapons manufacturers. It was a rich man’s war, which is simply to acknowledge that modern warfare tends to expand the ruling classes to include men who get rich from war. In a sidelong manner, Brodkey suggests that Americanism didn’t properly exist until the War created it. All that nostalgia for the 1950’s among MAGA-heads gives credence to longing for a sense of community that was manufactured by media and the culture industry.

In Brodkey’s words:

And then, “we” — by which Brodkey means the Americans — “tried to go back in time.”

Women got shipped back into kitchens—”and into waist cinchers” (which are back, by the way). Tradwifes were more than fifty years away, but the seeds for the domestification of wifey had been planted and women’s magazines would sow the profits. Lawnmowers entered the national lexicon and “the country made suburban noises.”

Behind June Cleaver’s smile brewed resentment. Brodkey traces the rise of xenophobia and McCarthyism to our war-generated obsession with personal safety and greed. The “Roosevelt legacy was so complex and generated so much power and aroused so much ego that moral cowardice and personal safety and corruption and self-doubt and unlimited greed became national characteristics and national virtues.” No one knew how to behave in the newly-minted context. Women clearly weren’t stupid but they acted dissatisfied. Pastors and churches began plotting the Culture Wars that would define the 1960’s (and later make Evangelicals the most faithful voters and supporters of Trumpism). Social change scared the average Joe. “It felt as if this were a country consisting entirely of recent converts, and everyone went on tiptoe,” wrote Brodkey, noting that “McCarthyism came first,” and defining McCarthyism as “an attack on the upper-caste white Protestants that Roosevelt distrusted” and then on Hollywood folks and theatre people before finally becoming “a move toward a popular coup.”

Unsurprisingly to pesso-optimists like me, Winchell swiftly pledged his troth to McCarthy “and publicly attacked Truman and Stevenson, calling them ‘un-American’.”

Like any abstraction based in smug superiority, Americanism is whatever the corporations and politicians desire to emphasize safety against the internal enemy. Brodkey says Winchell later abandoned McCarthy, but I’m more intrigued by his claim that McCarthy spoke for the veterans:

Brodkey ends on a note of demystification (or perhaps remystifying the Everyman as American). “Winchell had a Job aspect and a Noah aspect and a bit of Lot's wife in him, too. He railed at fate, he fought it, and he won for a while and, of course, he lost in the end. And it broke him. It is practically everyone's story.”

As for safety, it always lacks an endgame. Pandering continues. A politician’s vow to offer safety to their constituents is also a promise to build more prisons, more bombs, more carceral spaces, and more violent deportations of underprivileged persons. Investors and the corporate leaders are listening. The “new social reality” shares much with the old social reality of American capitalism: the rich get richer.

*

Denis Donoghue, “Harold Brodkey: A Proustian Progress” (Vanity Fair, March 1985)
Harold Brodkey, “The Last Word on Walter Winchell” (1995)

Hesitation and found poems in Ben Lerner.

We mixed in the doll, as if in a test-tube, everything we were experiencing and could not recognize. We watched it change color there and come to the boil. That is, we invented this too. The doll was so utterly devoid of imagination that what we imagined for it was inexhaustible. For hours, for weeks on end, we must have been content to lay the first fine silk of our hearts in folds around this immobile mannequin, but I have to believe there were certain abysmally long afternoons when our twofold inspirations petered out and we suddenly sat in front of it, expecting some response.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls”

. . . but I have to believe there were certain abysmally long afternoons when our twofold inspirations petered out and we suddenly sat in front of it, expecting some response.

*

Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls” (Paris Review blog)
The Replacements, “Sadly Beautiful” (2008 Remaster)

Anne Carson's towns.

“Introduction” to The Life of Towns

Towns are the illusion that things hang together somehow, my pear, your winter.

I am a scholar of towns, let God commend that. To explain what I do is simple enough. A scholar is someone who takes a position. From which position, certain lines become visible. You will at first think I am painting the lines myself; it's not so. I merely know where to stand to see the lines that are there. And the mysterious thing, it is a very mysterious thing, is how these lines do paint themselves. Before there were any edges or angles or virtue— who was there to ask the questions? Well, let's not get carried away with exegesis. A scholar is someone who knows how to limit himself to the matter at hand.

Matter which has painted itself within lines constitutes a town. Viewed in this way the world is, as we say, an open book. But what about variant readings? For example, consider the town defined for us by Lao Tzu in the twenty-third chapter of the Tao Te Ching:

A man of the way conforms to the way; a man of virtue conforms to virtue; a man of loss conforms to loss. He who conforms to the way is gladly accepted by the way; he who conforms to virtue is gladly accepted by virtue; he who conforms to loss is gladly accepted by loss.

This sounds like a town of some importance, where a person could reach beyond himself, or meet himself, as he chose.

But another scholar (Kao) takes a different position on the Town of Lao Tzu. “The word translated 'loss' throughout this section does not make much sense,” admonishes Kao. “It is possible that it is a graphic error for 'heaven.'” Now, in order for you or me to quit living here and go there-either to the Town of Lao Tzu or to the Town of Kao—we have to get certain details clear, like Kao's tone. Is he impatient or deeply sad or merely droll? The position you take on this may pull you separate from me. Hence, towns. And then, scholars.

I am not being trivial. Your separateness could kill you unless I take it from you as a sickness. What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for one another? Can you eat winter? No. Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? No. But there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see pear and winter side by side as walls stand by silence. Can you punctuate yourself as silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world of another kind— back into real emptiness, some would say. Well, we are objects in a wind that stopped, is my view. There are regular towns and irregular towns, there are wounded towns and sober towns and fiercely remembered towns, there are useless but passionate towns that battle on, there are towns where the snow slides from the roofs of the houses with such force that victims are killed, but there are no empty town (just empty scholars) and there is no regret. Now move along.

— Anne Carson

Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking

Their faces I thought were knives.
The way they pointed them at me.
And waited.
A hunter is someone who listens.
So hard to his prey it pulls the weapon.
Out of his hand and impales.
Itself.

Memory Town

In each one of you I paint.
I find.
A buried site of radioactive material.
You think 8 miles down is enough?
15 miles?
140 miles?

Detail from Rembrandt’sThe Toilet of Bathsheba, 1643.

Town of Bathsheba's Crossing

Inside a room in Amsterdam.
Rembrandt painted a drop of life inside.
The drop he painted Rembrandt's stranger.
Dressed as a woman rippling.
With nakedness she has.
A letter in her hand she is.
Traveling.
Out of a thought toward us.
Her foam arrives.
Before her even when he.
Paints Rembrandt's stranger.
As Rembrandt he shows.
Him bewildered and tousled.
As if just in.
From journeys.
On tracks and side roads.

Lower portion of Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream, 1655.

Pushkin Town

It has rules.
And love.
And the first rule is.
The love of chance.
Some words of yours are very probably ore there.
Or will be by the time our eyes are ember.

Town of the Death of Sin

What is sin?
You asked.
The moon stung past us.
All at once I saw you.
Just drop sin and go.
Black as a wind over the forest.

Hölderlin Town

You are mad to mourn alone.
With the wells gone dry.
Starlight lying at the bottom.
Like a piece of sound.
Props hurtle past you.

Town of Uneven Love
(But All Love Is Uneven)

If he had loved me he would have seen me.
At an upstairs window brow beating against the glass.

Judas Town

Not a late hour not unlit rows.
Not olive trees not locks not heart.
Not moon not dark wood.
Not morsel not I.

*

Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
Claude Debussy, La plus que lente, L. 121 performed by Daniel Barenboim

Notebooks with green: 25 greens, at least.

I am ready to take the woman with the white scarf
in my arms and stop her moaning,
and I am ready to light the horse's teeth,
and I am ready to stroke the dry leaves.

— Gerald Stern

If rain won't change your mind,
Let it fall.
The rain won't change my heart
At all.

— The Magnetic Fields

1

In Pale Fire, Professor Pnin stands next to a young instructor named Mr. Gerald Emerald, who wears a bow tie and a vivid GREEN VELVET JACKET, in a house. Or a villa. At a party. The way Nabokov binds his characters to a color that grows from an idiom.

2

The GREEN QUEEN who threads the seams of Wallace Stevens’ seemings in the first section of the delirium-inducing marvel titled “Description Without Place”:

The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.

Thus things are like a seeming of the sun
Or like a seeming of the moon or night

Or sleep. It was a queen that made it seem
By the illustrious nothing of her name.

Her green mind made the world around her green.
The queen is an example. . . . This green queen

In the seeming of the summer of her sun
By her own seeming made the summer change.

In the golden vacancy she came, and comes,
And seems to be on the saying of her name.

3

The unappeasable VIRESCENCE and VERDURE of the chlorophyll-infused SIGN OF THE WEED in Bruno Schulz’s “The Republic of Dreams”:

Just now, for example, the yards are drowning in nettles and weeds, tumbledown moss-grown sheds and outbuildings are up to their armpits in enormous bristly burdocks that grow right to the eaves of the shingled roofs. The town lives under the sign of the Weed, of wild, avid, fanatical plant life bursting out in cheap, coarse greenery-toxic, rank, parasitic. That greenery glows under the sun's conjury, the maws of the leaves suck in seething chlorophyll; armies of nettles, rampant, voracious, devour the flower plantings, break into the gardens, spread over the unguarded back walls of houses and barns overnight, run wild in the roadside ditches. It is amazing what insane vitality, feckless and unproductive, lives in this fervid dab of green, this distillate of sun and ground water. From a pinch of chlorophyll it draws out and extrapolates under the blaze of these summer days that luxuriant texture of emptiness, a green pith replicated a hundred times onto millions of leaf surfaces, downy or furred, of veined translucent verdure pulsing with watery plant blood, giving off the pungent herbal smell of the open fields.

In that season the rear window of the shop's storage room overlooking the yard was blinded by a diaphragm of green glitter from leaf reflections, gauzy flutterings, wavy foliated greenery, all the monstrous excesses of this hideous backyard fecundity. Sunk in deep shade, the storeroom riffled through all shades of virescence, green reflections spread in undulating paths through its vaulted length like the sibilant murmur of a forest. The town had fallen into that wild luxuriance as into a sleep raised to the hundredth power, supine in a daze from the summer's heat and glare, in a thick maze of cobwebs and greenery, empty and shallow of breath. In rooms greenly lit to underwater opacity by the morning glory over the windows, platoons of flies struggled on their last wings, imprisoned forever as in the bottom of a forgotten bottle and locked in a dolorous agony that they proclaimed by drawn-out monotonous lamentations or trumpetings of fury and grief. In time, the window became the gathering place of all that lacework of scattered insectdom for one last premortal sojourn: huge crane-flies, which had long bumped against the walls with a subdued drumming of misdirected flight and made a final torpid landing on a pane; whole genealogies of flies and moths, rooted and branching out from this window and spread by slow migration across the glass; pullulating generations of meager winglings, sky-blue, metallic, glassy.

4

The soft chroma of PEA-GREEN WALLS in The Dreamers —

Eva Green with Louis Garrel in The Dreamers

5

The first page of Donald Barthelme’s “Florence Green Is 81” . . . with its lentils, new girls, and geostrategizing of the “strongest possible move” — the TERRE VERTE feel of that muddy, brownish undertone. As if Barthelme was looking at lentils when he wrote:

6

The treacherous GRASSHOPPER among the litany of refusals in Gerald Stern’s “Blue Skies, White Breasts, Green Trees” —

7

On the writing desk of Lev Tolstoy sat the GREEN CRYSTAL PAPERWEIGHT given to him by the workers of a glass factory in Bryansk, engraved with the message: “Let the Pharisees and the Holy Fathers excommunicate you as they wish; the Russian people will always hold you dear.”

8

In a clearing among the darker greens of the surrounding forest, a smattering of grass-green shawled round the mound that marks Tolstoy's grave. This is the spot where he wanted wished to buried, “near a ravine where he and his brothers, when they were youngsters, believed that a GREEN STICK had been buried on which was written the secret of happiness for all human beings,” as Alexander Theroux tells it. No cross, no grave marker: only the stickiness of the green twig from childhood.

9

“. . . a warm trickle of coffee seeps through the cracks onto my forearm, and a constant CHASM OF GREEN owns the air to my right.” A different trip to New Orleans. One that reminds me of the BLISTERED DARK GREEN in Laurie Anderson’s For Instants, a color that catches my eye after she mentions Glenn Gould’s favorite battleship gray because, yes, “It's sunny today” and Laurie is starting to “sand down the four beams that hold up the roof” in her new loft. “The first layer of paint is battleship gray, cracked and flaking. Underneath the gray is a sturdy layer of dark brown, thick and tough as leather. It spews off in tiny hard chunks that ricochet against the walls. Underneath is an even thicker layer-blistered dark green. I sand it away. Underneath is an oozing liver- colored substance, which gums up and breaks the sander. I start to scrape it off but the stuff begins to slither down the beams with a horrifying kind of liveliness.”

10

The site where the green that opens Ana Božičević’s poem, “About Nietzsche” —

Softly, Nietzsche landed on earth. He found
it green. He was alone, save for the horse—
it stood off to the side of a fallen wood
fence. There they had this talk.

— meets the CHROMIUM OXIDE GREEN and the CADMIUM GREEN that tears through the night sky of John Longstaff’s Sirens (1892) —

11

The way Michael Taussig’s suburbs emblazon greenways through my head in the extraordinary turns and torques of his take on the realness of real estate:

The Greeks and Italians left, for the leafy suburbs, I guess, and now those same inner city suburbs, such as Paddington, are among the wealthiest in the world, the vivid colors painted over by ochres, greys, and white or else stripped back to the original brick. You can’t get realer than real estate.

The leafiness of SAP GREEN, with its slightly yellow undertones, and the sign of the dollar in that green as Taussig traces this ‘realness’ — this profit-based, capitalist ‘reality’ — to the life being “sucked out of the blue-and-green mountains in the distance” in the oscillations of staging:

As for the ambiguity tied to color as both deceitful and authentic, take the mural painted by John Pugh as described in the New York Times the other day; his recent work Drain shows “a big rusty drainpipe etched with the letters LADWP, for Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, sucking the color and, metaphorically, the water out of the vista.” Here draining color stands for the belief that for close to a century the evil city of Los Angeles has been stealing western rivers and, as depicted in the film Chinatown, lying about it, while at the same time color in this mural also stands for authenticity, for the lost vitality of nature being sucked out of the blue-and-green mountains in the distance, foregrounded by that nasty, ever so efficient-looking big rusty pipe decoloring ever more parched flatlands.

“For them color is fluid, the medium of all changes,” wrote Benjamin with reference to what he took to be the child’s view of color. Tying color to water as John Pugh has done is useful because, like a river, color is a moving force, and like the world’s water supply under the present climatic regime of politically enhanced global warming driving our planet to destruction, color like heat is now subject to unpredictable oscillations that, in the case of color, amount to oscillations between deceit and authenticity, something that does not seem to have been factored in by Isidore of Seville, when he drew attention to the similarities between calor and color.

It is this oscillation that accounts for color’s magic, thereby attracting that energetic stage magician, conjuror, and trickster, that master of deceit, George Melies. No sooner had he begun to make films in Paris circa 1900, pulling rabbits out of hats thanks to the film editor’s scissors, than he found it hard to resist painting color over the black and white of his films. To the reality-effect of film was added the magic-effect of color. To the truth-effect of film was added the deceit-effect of color. And so it goes. I don’t know how they looked then, but now a century later the color is filmy and faint, like the whisk of a horse’s tail, flourish of the color spirit, not painting by numbers, but that true excess of the heart that can only come across through the untoward hint.

Could it be that in this scheme of fear and desire, truth and deceit, color is the excess that allows forms to come alive and that this is why my Webster’s tells me color is both pretext and sign of the authentic?

Like Davenport, Taussig always reconfigures the possible ways of naming and framing, leaving us (in this case) with an inventory of effects: the magic-effect of color, the truth-effect of film, the deceit-effect of color . . .

12

The vintage texture of GREEN METALLICS that demarcate the hue of Phillip Morris in David Antin’s Three Musics for Two Voices —

13

The vexation of countless theologians who needed answers about eternity. Theologians who needed to know what color angels could inhabit without losing their supernatural distance. The perplexity of poets among them. Tomaž Šalamun being one of them:

14

The SONOROUS SHRUBBERY in John Ashbery’s poem, “Caravaggio and His Followers”:

The song of the shrubbery
can’t drown out the mystery of what we are made of,
or how we go along, first interested by one thing and then another

15

The chorus of yellow-greens in painting. Articulations of VERIDIAN in the final layer of paint on the wall, with streaks of CHARTREUSE beneath it, as in John Hiatt’s album cover for Mystic Pinball — and the hint of iron oxide in the hue of his hat pulling out the CELADON. Or not. The sense in which something keeps moving and pinging, even when frozen.

16

The muted warmth and earth tones of Mahmoud Darwish’s olives linking arms with the OLIVE GREEN that recurs through every memoir of a stolen homeland authored by Palestinians . . .

17

. . . returning in the hue of the OLIVE HARVEST that became a glue in Jean Genet’s self-portrait after living with Palestinian fedayeen, as given in three sentences from The Thief's Journal: “Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flowerbeds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all interrelated, had a meaning: my exile.”

18

The PHTHALO EMERALD brushstrokes that resemble fingertips in Egon Schiele’s Self-Portrait In Green Shirt With Eyes Closed (1914).

And the GHOSTED GREEN of Raoul Ubac’s Fossil of the Eiffel Tower (1939). The possible Eiffel-fossil energy. The desaturated hues that remind me of the fin de siecle’s death portraits.

19

The blue-green orientation sketched by John Updike in his little “Shipbored”:

That line is the horizon line.
The blue above it is divine.
The blue below it is marine.
Sometimes the blue below is green.

20

My goosebumps when happening upon Alexander Theroux’s connection of ALBERTINE-GREEN to LOLITA-GREEN:

Just as Proust tended to see shadows in terms of colored tones, so at times he also often viewed sunlight, not conventionally as white or yellow or orange, but the impressionistic way it happened to appear at specific times and places, as for example in Albertine’s despair, when seen through an open window, above the shimmering Venetian waters of the canal, as weirdly greenish: “le soleil verdâtre.”

 What about a green sun? Nabokov—or Humbert— knew his Proust. Remember the poem in Lolita? 

My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister?

21

The FLAT EMERALD FIELD of Pablo Picasso’s Green Still Life, painted as he summered in Avignon in 1914, perhaps in response to Henri Matisse’s Red Studio (1911). The way the pointillist spider web captures the yellow light and links up with the light falling on a surface in Stephen Merritt’s song, “One April Day,” before becoming solid in the fragment of pear-flesh held by the outline of a pear. The green and black circles forming a cork in the bottle. The dots shading the letters J O U, eliciting the French verb for play, jouer, or the shorthand for a toy, jou-jou, or even the sparkle of jewelry in bijou. And the absence of grenadine in the cut-glass vessel that serenades the hand wrapped around a grenade in the lower right corner.

22

The TRANSGRESSIVE APPLE-GREEN evinced by Michael Taussig in the context of modernity, WB, profanity and “the holy,” a category which “can be also impure, evil, and accursed—dependent on continual infusions of transgression—as with [Walter] Benjamin’s observation that ‘the language of color’ was characteristic of the posters that flourished in the shopping arcades of Paris in the early nineteenth century but that these posters were the cousins of ‘obscene graphics’.” WB “recalled an advertising poster that reminded him of opera with Siegfried bathing in dragon’s blood; the cape was crimson, the sylvan solitude green, the flesh, naked.” WB thought ‘falser colors are possible in the arcades’; arcades being the spaces where red and green combs were naturalized. WB said “Snow White’s stepmother had such things, and when the comb did not do its work, the beautiful apple was there to help out—half red, half poison-green, like cheap combs.” WB said — and keeps saying.

23

The moment when a young Hans Richter began going to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and the National Gallery in Berlin in order to copy the paintings of the Masters: Velázquez, Tintoretto, Rubens . . . Van Dyke. “I learned a lot about art in this way; not only the technique the masters used but also what they were striving for,” Richter later said, adding that he was “especially fascinated by a very unobtrusive painting by Velasquez . . . a huge portrait about two meters high and one and a half wide, a portrait of a court lady, very dark reddish-brown hair, the background green-black, the clothes completely black,” a painting that intrigued him “more than any other painting because of its simplicity.” The young Richter wondered “how Velázquez took himself back behind the painting, so to speak; how he invented a black that was more completely black than you ever saw black before; it lived.” How could Velázquez paint black clothes and a black background and yet land with “two different blacks”?

“The intensity of the color, though there was very little color in it,” mesmerized him. “I felt that I had come in contact with something divine, with something that was above the poetry of the person there in the painting, with something that was being said through this painting by Velasquez,” Richter told his readers. This “very distinct impression” made by this painting marked one of the first steps he traced in his “development” as an artist — “this contact with the spirit of Velázquez not only with his technique.”

I don’t know which painting Richter was referencing? Nevertheless, I imagine the BACKGROUND GREEN-BLACK that Richter never got over in that portrait by Diego Velázquez.

24

The “nacreous green-gray light, evoked with lightly hatched strokes of paint” in the room Jed Perl discovered in L’Enseigne de Gersaint by Antoine Watteau.

25

The GREEN FABRIC SURFACE of Franz Kafka’s desk, as described in the self-portrait of his writing desk, tinged by the same disorder that prevents the writer from focusing on the world in his head. “Now I’ve taken a closer look at my desk and realized that nothing good can be produced on it,” Kafka says. “There's so much lying around here, it creates disorder without regularity, and with none of that agreeableness of disorderly things that otherwise makes every disorder bearable. Whatever disorder is on the green desk-cloth, it is no worse than what might be permitted in the orchestra section of the old theaters. But when papers pour out of the standing room section, out of the open compartment below the raised platform in the back— brochures, old newspapers, catalogs, postcards, letters, all partly torn, partly opened, piled up like a staircase— this undignified state spoils everything. Individual items in the orchestra, enormous by comparison, spring into action, as if the spectators in the theater were suddenly given free rein, the businessman to put his books in order, the carpenter to hammer, the officer to wave his saber, the lovers to cast aside their inhibitions, the priest to speak to the heart, the scholar to the understanding, the politician to the civic spirit, etc. Only the shaving mirror on my desk stands upright, as required for shaving . . .” 

26

THE PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT of the green behind the horses in my head —

Everything beautiful is indeterminate.

We still know how to mark the hours, but no longer how to ring them. The carillon of our clocks is missing.

[. . . ]

The white markings of the snow, here and there, scattered on the greenness in time of thaw.

— Joseph Joubert in a notebook from the early 1800’s

*

Amy Millan, “Hard-hearted (Ode to Thoreau)”
Ana Božičević, “About Nietzsche” (from War on a Lunchbreak)
Bruno Schulz, “The Republic of Dreams” tr. by Walter Arndt
Clem Snide, “Bread”
Clem Snide, “Joan Jett of Arc”
Crooked Fingers, “Atchafalayan Death Waltz”
Crooked Fingers, “You Must Build a Fire”
David Antin, Three Musics for Two Voices
Diego Velázquez, The Lady with a Fan (1638-9)
Donald Barthelme, “Florence Green Is 81” (from Come Back, Dr. Caligari)
Eef Barzelay, “Love the Unknown”
Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait In Green Shirt With Eyes Closed (1914)
Gerald Stern, “Blue Skies, White Breasts, Green Trees”
John Longstaff, Sirens (1982)
John Hiatt, “I Know How to Lose You”
Mark Lanegan Band, “Love Will Tear Us Apart Again” (Live in Belgium, 2017)
Michael Taussig, “What Color Is the Sacred?” (Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2006)
Pablo Picasso, Green Still Life (summer 1914)
Stars, “No One Is Lost”
Stephen Merritt, “One April Day”
The Magnetic Fields, “It’s Only Time”
Tomaž Šalamun, “Are Angels Green?”
Wallace Stevens, “Description Without Place”

Notebooks with red

A hero’s only a lucky fool, you see

— Crooked Fingers

… whose frothy mouth bepainted all with red.

— Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Crimson: the color of 8-year-old Beatrice’s dress when Dante first set eyes upon her.

Watteau’s little red crayon.
Leonardo’s preference for red chalk to do his drawings.
The afterimages of red that haunt the childhood memory of Rilke’s Malte Laureds Brigge.
The reds we use to sketch the imagined, the incomplete, the not-yet….

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second.
Color is seen when a wavelength of light is reflected by an object and all other wavelengths are absorbed.
Each color has a different wavelength, but red has the longest wavelength. 

In maritime space, the rule of “red right returning” means that moving boats must keep the red buoys to their right.

Boats and airplanes always have red lights on their left and green on their right wing or side.

The idea of going somewhere — with its colors, flags, markers, and navigational routes.

The Red God was another name for Priapus.

Maria Callas collected matching shoes and purses in her favorite color, red.

Red salvia.
Red tulips.
Poppies.
Bougainvillea.
Red anemone.
Snakeweed. 

My loathing for red roses —

Shortsightedness is also called “an elongated eye.” It influences color perception, making reds, for example, seem more starkly defined.

WILLIAM GASS:

“Although the sensual is an experience of intense satisfaction and approval, it is not competitive. Things seen or touched or tasted this way are what they are: a red so saturated with its hue it mesmerizes the eye, an insect slowly rubbing together legs as thin as a line, a cottonwood puff lighting on a blade of grass, the trail of a finger across a thigh, the union of two voices through a series of compelling notes. The sensualist treats qualities as terms, not as relations. He gathers up relationships into entireties, not like a handful of straw but like the thatch of a hat.”

The deeper one goes into the benthic ooze of the ocean, the fewer the colors of fish.
Blue is the last color to go and red is the first. 

Say from the Heart, Sire
Dipped my back in it
If the Tune drip too much
Have a tint too Red
Pardon the Cochineal–
Suffer the Vermilion

— Emily Dickinson

Michael Burkard's blue line.

Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.

— Yves Bonnefoy, “Passer-By, These Are Words”

Look at the light in the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means we're inconsolable.

— Richard Siken, “Scheherazade”

A BLUE LINE

for Denis Johnson

Hey, look, when you used to come into my kitchen
I didn’t even know where to stand, it was my kitchen,
but it was yours, that quickly. And the evening had
a metal mouth which was meant to scare us, but we
listened to the desert instead.  You taught us.
Unemployed, fuck the moon.

Years later there’s a dog biting into my book.
I pass the book on before too long. I hear feet
running toward the bank, then back again. It’s
night.  The wives have come home to look at
the husbands who are thinking through
someone from earlier in the blue day.

The blue line.  The blue hat.  The blue Atlantic
and that incredible blue distance to the small
apartment on the other side of the blue continent.
The blue judge, the blue court, the blue copywriter
good enough to say goodbye instead of staying.

Hey, once in the blue rain I was screaming for
you. It was more foreign than a foreign city.
Every time I left the house the rain got bluer,
and I had to turn back. Worse, I felt trapped.
It went on and on. I went nowhere.

I didn’t even know there was still a blue line
from me to you, that if I had just followed it
I would have found you: lonely like me then,
with your mouth to the window, and the stars
blinking but saying write darkly for now.

Write darkly.

by Michael Burkard

Nanos Valaoritis and the “Problems of an Empire”.

We’re stuck with a certain vision of what an essay should be, when in fact its possibilities seem limitless. That’s what attracted me to it⁠⁠—it was this kind of unexplored territory. I do find it dreary that these essayists end up writing about themselves so much. Even if they’re taking documentary information, they add a lot of personal response to it, which seems to be what the new quote, unquote lyric essay is. I have no interest in first-person investigation. Personally, I’ve never found myself an interesting person.

– Eliot Weinberger in conversation with Srinkanth Reddy

NOTE: All of the linked excerpts below refer to Nanos Valaoritis’ “Problems of an Empire,” as published in A Public Space, No. 27.

/

In Dante’s Purgatorio XIX, 7-15, there is femmine balba, the “bubbling siren” or “stammering woman” whose presence exhibits indecency and has been read as a figure of “non-song” by critics.

/ /

“It is said that cripples, amputees, notice a prodigious development of their faculties,” wrote Francis Ponge. “So with plants: their immobility accounts for their self-perfection, their complexity, their gorgeous decorations, their lush fruits.”

/ / /

Nanos Valaoritis . . .

“A metaphysic is a means of orientation in the confusion of the world, a path on the endless expanse of the ocean’s water. An Ariadne’s thread in the twisting labyrinth.”

/ / / /

Nanos Valaoritis . . .

“A metaphysic is an imaginary line dividing an invisible territory. The division enables us to measure the territory and to determine our own position in it. A compass with which human beings are supplied from birth.”

/ / / / /

Nanos again . . .

“A metaphysic is first manifested in dreams, a mysterious language of undeciphered signs whose meaning is obscure, dictating our behavior. Then one by one the signs are unveiled to reveal the familiar forms of our experience. Then one still walks in the same forest but knows the names of the trees.”

/ / / / / /

Francis Ponge on the flora and fauna . . .

“Or rather, and even worse, nothing accidentally monstrous: despite all their efforts “to express themselves,” [the flora] only manage to repeat a million times over the same expression, the same leaf. In the spring, when tired of restraining themselves and no longer able to hold out, they let loose a flood, a vomiting of green, and think they are humming a tuneful hymn, coming out of themselves, spreading out over all of nature, embracing it— they are still only producing in thousands of copies the same note, the same word, the same leaf.

There is no way out for trees by the means of trees.”

/ / / / / / /

Dogberry to Conrade, in William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing . . .

“O that she were here to write me down an ass! But, masters, remember that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass. No, thou villain, thou art full of piety, as shall be proved upon thee by good witness. I am a wise fellow, and, which is more, an officer, and, which is more, a householder, and, which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina, and one that knows the law, go to; and a rich fellow enough, go to; and one that hath had losses, and one that hath two gowns and every thing handsome about him. O that I had been writ down an ass!”

/ / / / / / / /

Nanos Valaoritis . . .

“Two or three days ago I saw F. Tiresias, holding in his hand the light, intricate web that is woven among the families, the glittering surface of their lighter relations to each other, the juxtaposition of their names with their qualities and reactions, creating the dazzling magic of their comic, unexpected encounters as if they were tumbling out of one another and themselves like newborn puppies, in the present the past and the future, brought into focus as F. was speaking, and compressed by the force of his poetic vision in a single, instantaneous medium. Then I saw M. as the youthful Atlas before he had shouldered on his powerful arms the full weight of the sky, bracing his as-yet unused muscles rolling about in the grass like a happy giant, or weighed down already by the mere idea of the weight that he was going to shoulder in the future. The invisible world, which he had already in his imagination assumed the responsibility of holding up.”

/ / / / / / / / /

Francis Ponge on the three shops near the Place Maubert . . .

“Brown, because brown lies between green and black on the way to carbonization, the destiny of wood still holds –  though minimally – the possibility of action, meaning error, blunder . . . and every possible misunderstanding.”

Joseph Brodsky’s “October Tune”

*

Balthus, The Living Room (1942)
Francis Ponge, “Fauna and Flora”
Francis Ponge, “The Three Shops”
Joseph Brodsky, “October Tune” (from To Urania)
Leonard Cohen, “To A Young Nun” (from The Book of Longing)
Nanos Valaoritis, “Problems of an Empire” (A Public Space, No. 27)
The Durutti Column, “Requiem Again” (2024 Remaster)
Yo La Tengo, “Our Way to Fall”

Nick Cave's "soundsuits".

I don’t ever see the Soundsuits as fun. They really are coming from a very dark place. The Soundsuits hide gender, race, class. And they force you to look at the work without judgment. You know, we tend to want to categorize everything. We tend to want to find its place. How do we, sort of, be one on one with something that is unfamiliar?

—Nick Cave, 2016

The best Ashbery poems, I thought, although not in these words, describe what it's like to read an Ashbery poem.

— Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

Nick Cave was trained as a fiber artist and dancer.

His Soundsuits series is named for the rustling he heard as he moved around in them.

The first such “costume-sculpture” was created as an artistic response to racial profiling and police violence, particularly violence of L. A. police against Rodney King in 1991.

Imagined as protective shields that masked a person's identity and voided notions of race, class, and gender, the Soundsuits provoke us anew, in this hypervigilant present driven by billionaires, neoliberal ruling classes, and “National Greatness” issues.

“My identity is really only protected in the privacy of my own home,” Cave has said, of his own experiences with police as a Black man.

Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2010)

Patches of crocheted doilies. Yarn rainbows for legs. A reference to Barnum and Bailey’s Circus.
A garden of toys and noisemakers blooming from the doily-covered head.

Was does it mean for our universities and local governments to ban “masking” in public places?

Curators have said each Soundsuit creates “a symbolically charged second skin, an imagined means for protection from physical and psychological harm.”

The use of thrifted, upcycled material isn’t coincidental. The material focus of Cave’s Soundsuits alters our relation to time and progress.

Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2009)

With skin grafted from the doilies Nick Cave purchased from thrift stores. The yarn-based testimonies of grandmothers and mothers and aunts dumped in give-away bins by their inheritors. “Junking” stuff is par for the obsession with newness and planned obsolescence that characterizes late capitalism’s accelerated commodity-drives. Elaborate consumption and throwaway plastics. Landfills livid with the excrement of packaging.

“How do we . . . look at things that are devalued, discarded, and bring a different kind of relevancy to them?” Cave asks.

Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2006)

In the caption to the 2006 Soundsuit made of paper, Cave poses the question: “How do I exist in a place that sees me as a threat?” How does a gay Black artist in the US live his joy, nourish his passions, and build communities and forms of being that refuse the ongoing terror of white supremacy?

The suits are performed by Cave and others in choreographed events.

Assembled from diverse materials and fabrics, the Soundsuits “speak” by deploying an aural dimension that must be imagined.

*

Art Beat, “Nick Cave’s Soundsuits,” PBS Newshour
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
London Art Roundup, “Soundsuit 2010”
Nicole Burish, “Voice and Resistance in Nick Cave’s Soundsuits,” National Gallery of Canada
Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2006) with paper
Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2009) with doilies
Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2010) with toys
Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2010) with buttons
PJ Harvey, "The Faster I Breathe The Further I Go (4-Track Version)”

Crumpled.

I have been popping corn tonight, which is only a more rapid blossoming of the seed under a greater than July heat. The popped corn is a perfect winter flower, hinting of anemones and houstonias. For this little grace man has, mixed in with the vulgarness of his repast, he may well thank his stars.

— Henry David Thoreau, notebook entry dated 3 January 1842

Poetry as a whole is always directed at a more or less distant, unknown addressee, in whose existence the poet may not doubt, without doubting himself.

— Osip Mandelstam, “About an Interlocutor”

Minneapolis Museum of Art:

In this graphite still life drawing of crumbled sheets of paper, Rosana Castrillo Diaz reveals a mastery of careful and deliberate observation, belying the apparent simplicity of the work. Her choice of subject is deliberate, reflecting her interest in the ordinary objects of daily life. As she explained of this drawing, “In this body of work, there is a direct connection between memory, emotions, and the physical hand at work. Each mark is a feeling, a chord, each drawing a score witness to a moment in time, a mood, a place. In the silence and introspection engendered, the quietest gesture may very well be the loudest.”

/ / / / / / / / / . / / / / / / / / / / . . / / / / / / / / . / / / / / / / . . . / / / / / / / / / . / / . / / / / / . . / / /

”The shipwrecked sailor throws a sealed bottle into the sea at a critical moment”

“A cast iron statue representing the poet was lost, a victim of metal looters”

“The popped corn is a perfect winter flower”

“The city where Osip Mandelstam is said to have died (no one is sure of this)”

“Lost, a victim of metal”

“The indigenous art of all epochs destroyed by missionaries”

“Hinting of anemones”

“All epochs” “sealed”

“Lost, the rope given to Marina Tsvetaeva by Boris Pasternak”

“The sea at a critical moment”

“Is said to have died”

“Corn is a perfect winter”

“A cast iron statue”

*

Henri Lefebvre, The Missing Pieces
Henry David Thoreau, “1842” in The Thoreau Log
Mark Sandman, “The Ring” (Extended version)
Osip Mandelstam, “About an Interlocutor”
Rosana Castrillo Diaz, “Untitled” (2014)

Us has: Lorenzo Thomas' "Inauguration"

Inauguration

The land was there before us
Was the land. Then things
Began happening fast. Because
The bombs us have always work
Sometimes it makes me think
God must be one of us. Because
Us has saved the world. Us gave it
A particular set of regulations
Based on 1) undisputable acumen.
2) carnivorous fortunes, delicately
Referred to here as “bull market”
And (of course) other irrational factors
Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps,
Our man in Saigon   Lima   Tokyo   etc   etc

Lorenzo Thomas

The filiative scheme belongs to the realms of nature and of ‘life’ whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society.

– Edward Said

In Rilke, the synecdoche constellates.

— William Gass

1 /

The land was there before Us was the land.

The land was the land in the year 1950, when Joseph McCarthy went to West Virginia and gave a speech in which he alleged that the U.S. State Department was filled with Communists, and the Population Registration Act legalized apartheid in South Africa, and the Soviet Union developed an atom bomb. Us was imagining itself in this same year, when genocide was legalized by the Us who looked away and Diners Club International introduced the credit card. 

2 /

Then things began happening fast.

On November 19th in 1913, Franz Kafka recorded the following thoughts and impressions in his diary: “I purposely walk through the streets where the whores are. It excites me to pass by them, that distant but still real possibility of going with one of them. Is that vulgar? But I know of nothing better, and it seems like a basically innocent thing to do, I have almost no regret. I only want the fat older women, their dresses are outdated, but somehow their various ornaments make them seem luxurious. One woman probably knows me already. I ran into her this afternoon, she wasn't dressed for work yet, her hair was still lying flat on her head, she didn't have a hat on, she was wearing a work blouse like a cook's, and carrying some sort of bundle, maybe to the washerwoman. No one but me could have found her exciting. We looked at each other briefly. Now it's evening, It's gotten cold, I saw her in a close-fitting, yellowish-brown coat on the other side of the narrow alley that splits off from the Zeltnergasse, where she promenades. I looked back at her twice, and she caught my Glance, but then I actually ran away from her.”

3 /

Because the bombs Us have always work, there was a ladybug on the strap of my brown sandal, which might have passed unnoticed, if not for the moment when I glanced up after reading the following passage from Adam Phillips’ Missing Out, wherein he considers when human survival “. . . was a function of closeness, and closeness was a function of knowledge (closeness means wanting to be close to those who know, especially to those who seem to know us). Knowledge, Freud tells us, is of absence; it is the way we measure distance. If overinterpretation is the rather frantic desire to be as close as possible, skepticism may be deemed to be, whatever else it is, a wariness, a suspicion, about what we might be up to - what we might be wanting to put out of our minds - through our so-called knowledge of other minds; skepticism being not just a doubting of what we can know about others, but a doubting of the value of such knowledge, and therefore a broached imagining of what knowing might prevent or preclude us from experiencing with each other.”

4 /

Sometimes it makes me think God must be one of us, like a flash of green light in the alcove when James Joyce wrote to his publisher in June 1906: “It is not my fault that the odor of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”

5 /

Because Us has saved the world, offal remains a word that evokes tenderness in the reader. Just as archaic language evokes the charm of a blessing one no longer believes — we relish the sound of it. The hooves of a fairy tale galloping towards a tower. The idea of rescue. The assumption that boys don’t cry. The way solastalgia infuses our involuntary memories with the scent of dry grass from summers past. The part where Fred Davis looked at the bright side, writing: “If, as I have maintained, nostalgia is a distinctive way, though only one among several ways we have, of relating our past to our present and future, it follows that nostalgia (like long-term memory, like reminiscence, like daydreaming) is deeply implicated in the sense of who we are, what we are about, and (though possibly with much less inner clarity) whither we go. In short, nostalgia is one of the means – or, better, one of the more readily accessible psychological lenses – we employ in the never-ending work of constructing, maintaining, and reconstructing our identities.”

6 /

Us gave it a set of particular regulations based on the blurring of thoughts between private and public, which is why hermits have been tasked with branding their hermitage, as Henry David Thoreau surely knew when he said of a fellow writer that “his critics have for the most part made their contemporaries less that they might make Shakespeare more,” and recorded this saying in his Journal of 1842.

7 /

Undisputable acumen is what Nathaniel Hawthorne noticed in his frenemy, Henry David Thoreau, whom he called “a genuine observer”; Thoreau, whom he saw as the “especial child” of Nature who “shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness”; Thoreau, who remained “on intimate terms with the clouds” as the two men ate watermelon and muskmelon from Hawthorne’s garden; Thoreau, who had written a piece for The Dial containing “passages of cloudy and dreamy metaphysics, and also passages where his thoughts seem to measure and attune themselves into spontaneous verse, as they rightfully may, since there is real poetry in them.” Thoreau, whose words contained “a basis of good sense and of moral truth . . . which also is a reflection of his character.” Thoreau, whom Hawthorne found to be “a healthy and wholesome man to know,” like the granola cereal boxes lining the shelves of the 20th century’s market for good health.

8 /

Carnivorous fortunes, delicately referred to here as “bull market.” Obviously, Hans Richter continued to mourn his unfinished cinepoem, Minotaur, as the heart of the art mourns the unfinished and the unwritten.

“This isn’t what I imagined,” said the active child.

At some point near or around the year 1935, Mary Sully created a portrait that was closer to an evocation than a realism-based representation of celebrity scientist Charles Steinmetz, an electrical engineer who discovered the Steinmetz Curve of electric alternating currents. In Sully’s panel, blue energy waves alternate with arrow-like cross currents which appear and concentrate in the center panel. Loosely resembling a circuit diagram, red diamonds connect with the green ovals, and the bottom panel links the alternating currents with the cosmologies indicated in Dakota and Lakota patterns.

“This isn’t what I had in mind,” the child remembers saying.

What was the heart doing on March 17, 1922, when Rainer Maria Rilke sent a letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Coury, announcing the completion of his Duino Elegies, and connecting the lyrics, themselves, to the destruction of Duino Castle during World War I? Where was the heart when Rilke told Countess Sizzo that the elegies felt true— “the more so” — shaped by their form, since the war had destroyed the castle that had inspired them. What carnage of the heart led Rilke, in this same letter, to employ the word “constellation” in a manner that might have reached Walter Benjamin, whose first love was reserved for the idealistic poet friend that died by suicide?

9 /

And (of course) other irrational factors, including the desire to accept the selves we performed in the past— which may be what sat like a toad on Fred Davis’ forehead when he wrote: “The proclivity to cultivate appreciative attitudes toward former selves is closely related to nostalgia’s earlier-noted tendency to eliminate from memory or, at minimum, severely to mute the unpleasant, the unhappy, the abrasive, and, most of all, those lurking shadows of former selves about which we feel shame, guilt, or humiliation.”

9 /

Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps.

Awful — a word that could have rested in its sublime etymological origins, where “awe-” attaches itself to “full” and looks down from the romantic cliff on the ineffable below. But the perspective has changed. Awful, the look on my daughter’s face when she dreams of her grandmother wandering through the icecaps of Antartica. In the nightmare, the glaciers retain that excruciating brightness, the blue-white of so much light encountering itself in millennia of ice. “Dream,” I tell my daughter. The nightmares know water. We move like a bad scene, shot in the dark.

10 /

Our man in Saigon, Lima, Tokyo etc.

The poet ignores our man and keeps her eye on the bottle.

She thinks of Mandelstam and all those Egypts — all those possibilities of place and homeland tucked into the correspondence of the writers she can’t forget.

11 /

Etc etc., or the way the umbrella moves through John McGahern’s short fiction, “My Love, My Umbrella”

It was the rain, the constant weather of this city, made my love inseparable from the umbrella, a black umbrella, white stitching on the seams of the imitation leather over the handle, the metal point bent where it was caught in Mooney’s grating as we raced for the last bus out of Abbey Street.

[...]

We went to cinemas or sat in pubs, it was the course of our love, and as it always rained we made love under the umbrella beneath the same trees in the same way. They say the continuance of sexuality is due to the penis having no memory, and mine each evening spilt its seed into the mud and decomposing leaves as if it was always for the first time. 

[..]

‘Would you think we should ever get married?’ ‘Kiss me.’ She leaned across the steel between us. ‘Do you think we should?’ I repeated. ‘What would it mean to you?’ she asked.

What I had were longings or fears rather than any meanings.

Umbrellas protect us from getting wet. The umbrella is also slang for condoms, I think?

Perhaps protection is the “constant weather” of failed love. I mean, “imitation leather” never handles the dead animal; it never risks the unprotected part of it.

Looking forward to thinking aloud with other writers this week, while also thinking on paper, in notebooks, on screens, about filiative schemes, inaugurations, synecdoches, constellations, decomposing leaves — and the Kierkegaardian repetition in the “always for the first time.”

*

Active Child, “Diamond Heart”
Chelsea Wolfe and Mark Lanegan, “Flatlands”
Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press, 1979.
Henry David Thoreau, “1842”, The Thoreau Log.
John McGahern, “My Love, My Umbrella”
Junior Wells, “In the Wee Hours”
Lorenzo Thomas, “Inauguration”
Man Ray, Gift, 1921.
Mary Sully, Steinmetz, c. 1935.
Paul Bogard, ed. Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World. University of Virginia Press, 2023.