The two-faced self-portrait.

The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,

— Delmore Schwartz, “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me”

On s′est perdus un matin station Quatre-Septembre
Éperdus ivres de ce vin qui vous fait les yeux en amande

— Benjamin Biolay

Jacopo De’ Barbari, Portrait of a Man, c. 1500, oil on poplar wood, Gemäldegalerie (Staatliche Museen), Berlin.

Reverse of Jacopo De’ Barbari’s Portrait of a Man reveals Nude Couple in an Interior, c. 1500, oil on poplar wood, Gemäldegalerie (Staatliche Museen), Berlin.

plucking

“Do not unveil me if freedom is dear to you, for my face is the prison of love,” wrote Leonardo da Vinci in Codex Forster III.

“I find no one who has written anything about how to make canon of human proportions except for a man named Jacob, born in Venice and a charming painter. He showed me a man and a woman which he had made according to measure, so that I would now rather see what he meant than behold a new kingdom,” said Albrecht Dürer said of Jacopo De’ Barabari, adding “Jacobus did not want to show his principles to me clearly, that I saw well.”

The painter De’ Barabari remains an enigma, a mystery which points to emptiness that wants to be filled. One could add this to the list of avenues into allegory, since allegory is what prompted my initial obsession with Jacopo De’ Barbari’s Portrait of a Man (pictured above) which plays with the two-sided self-portrait). Almost immediately, the greens of Nude Couple in an Interior caught my eye, as did the naming of the “interior” in the title.

The laurel in the right corner presides over the chamber. Laurel often symbolized the eternal and faithful nature of love, so there is a whiff of virtue in its presence, but there is also a contrast, a counterpoint— for laurels cannot last in human interiors. De’ Barabari plies the tension between exteriors and interiors, or inside and outside. He doesn’t give us a living laurel plant in bloom but something less wild, less alive, namely, a laurel sprig plucked and domesticated, placed inside a container (the water glass), still green but already fated to die, a life destined to wither slowly and dry out, despite being surrounded by water.

And Petrarch winks from the margins, the scent of Canzoniere wafting through the artist’s staging. The poet repeatedly evokes the laurel (or lauro) as code for his beloved Laura; he vows to carry her memory “in his heart” in the shape of a laurel after her untimely death. “Her chastity as laurel stays green,” Petrarch says in Canto 29, before returning to this laurel metaphor in Canto 228: “Fame, Honour, Virtue, Grace, chaste beauty in a heavenly dress, are the roots of this noble plant.”

Chaste roots abound but the laurel in De’ Barbari’s portrait is rootless. The plant has been torn from its roots, and the allegory— like the painting— approaches us with these two heads. Speaking of symbols, the half-open door also works doubly. Many ancient cultures took a half-open door to indicate passage from life to death. Catallus treated the cracked door as an indication that the beloved may be available to the lover. Giovanni Pontano took it to symbolize entry into the conjugal chamber. An allegory of love won or an allegory of love lost: both are possible. Every threshold has two faces.

This enegry meets me again in the margins of the recto-verso energy in Ron Padgett’s translation of Blaise Cendrars’ “Letter”—

Letter

You said if you write me 
Don’t type everything 
Add a line in your own hand 
A word a nothing oh nothing much 
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes 

My Remington is beautiful nevertheless 
I love it and we work well together 
My writing is sharp and clear 
You see very well that it’s me that’s typed it out

There are blanks that only I know how to make 
So look at the eye my page has 
Still to please you I add in ink 
Two three words 
And a big ink spot 
So you can’t read them   

— Blaise Cendrars, translated from the French by Ron Padgett

The rustle of yes yes yes yes yes yes yes….

rustling

I blame these threads on Roland Barthes, and his “rustle”, that sound of fabrics swishing against each other within a sentence or phrase, the position that welcomes friction, as he puts it in The Rustle of Language (italics mine):

“I am putting myself in the position of someone who does something, and not of someone who talks about something: I am not studying a product, I am taking on a production; I am abolishing the discourse on discourse; the world no longer comes to me in the form of an object, but in that of writing, that is, of a practice; I'm going on to another type of knowledge (that of the Enthusiast)” . . .

Elsewhere, Barthes mixes his musings, always imagining that projected work (ultimately, the Proustian novel that never happened). Under the title of “Book projects”:

Incidents (mini-texts, wrinkles, haikus, notations, playing with meaning, everything that falls, like a leaf).

What does that mean?

A non-book could be conceived: one which would relate a thousand incidents, by keeping itself from ever drawing one line of meaning . . . 

Incidents kept throwing palimpsests before me, to double the trouble of my overly-entangled interpretations.

Looking at this page from B’s book, I read the words and discovered them to be in dialogue with the traces of a photo on the back of the page. This palimpsest is accidental— I didn’t compose it or plan it— but it still offers a way into imagining…

Noting, too, an attention to surprise, incongruity in these efforts, even if Barthes was the sort of human being who did not appreciate surprises.

blinking . . . & winking

Another visual strategy: Barthes resets his vision by “blinking” his eyes repeatedly, trying to clear his assumptions and expectations from the moment in order to see like a child. A text can nudge or perform this blinking (often by resorting to ellipses or em dashes), but a text may also shift the terrain of the visual by winking at the reader.

The distance between a quick wink and a wince may be hard to distinguish in passing?

Barthes makes italics feel very suggestive. I was reminded of this yesterday while reading Brian Dillon’s Ambivalence: An Education. In the thrall of Barthes and theory, Dillon notes that he gets “more and more addicted to italics,” an aesthetic pleasure amplified by reading German and French philosophy and theory in translation as well as “Anglophone commentary on or continuation of that work.”

These italics, and now his own italics, are less a matter of emphasis or quotation— though they sometimes fulfill these functions— and rather have to do with terminological self-awareness, which can even apply to certain ordinary, non-technical phrases—will always already apply, in fact. Beyond it all, a dream of italicizing everything, inflecting every utterance, making language and life lean away from the solid, upright and reasonable. Obliquity is everything.

“The justification for a Diary (as a work) can only be literary, in the absolute, even if nostalgic, sense of the word,” wrote Barthes, before suggesting four motifs or themes to guide his writing: 

In the context of the book itself, this suggests treating the page as a field that doesn’t fear its own silences, hesitations, or incompletions.

Hiding one self-portrait behind another seems properly Barthesian, which reminds me of Edmund White’s “spider work” metaphor from The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir":

I sometimes think of my kind of autobiographical writing as spider's work, as pulling big glistening web out of one's very body, of searching about for the twigs to attach one's floating gossamer constructions to, as bodying forth sticky patterned threads, the silk extruded by one's spinnerets, meant to catch something — maybe just a creature's attention or its nourishing substance. When the writer-spider has spun all his silk, must he stop secreting.

Maria Loh says “Portraiture always betrays the artist as a necromancer,” and summer waits, hesitates, at the door…All the “mounting” summers, “brilliant and ominous” in this poem which remains one of my favorites by Delmore Schwartz:

As if all radiance rode over and roved and dove….

The concessions of possession and the successions of time’s continual procession. . .

*

Benjamin Biolay with Melvil Poupaud, “Station 4 septembre”
Blaise Cendrars, “Letter”
Brian Dillon, Ambivalence: An Education (forthcoming from NYRB)
Delmore Schwartz, “The Heavy Bear who Goes with Me”
Delmore Schwartz, “The Mounting Summer, Brilliant and Ominous”
Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir
Jacopo De’ Barbari, Portrait of a Man c. 1500
Jacopo De’ Barbari, Saint Sebastian c. 1509
Jonathan Jones, “Renaissance man: why Jacopo de' Barbari is the artist of the moment” (The Guardian)
Roland Barthes, Incidents
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
Roland Bathes, The Rustle of Language

Adorno dreams of a child dressed in light blue.

At that moment I realized that I was still clinging to my old, shabby, unmodern velvet or plush hat - at any rate, it was a sort of artist's hat. I blamed my hat for the frustrating outcome of my adventure, and awoke.

— Adorno

Los Angeles, end of May 1942

I dreamt I was to be crucified. The crucifixion was to take place at the Bockenheimer Warte, just by the university. I felt no fear throughout the entire process. Bockenheim resembled a village on Sunday, deathly quiet, as if under glass. I observed it closely on my way to the place of execution. I imagined that the appearance of things on this, my last day, would enable me to glean some definite knowledge of the next world. At the same time, however, I declared that one should beware of arriving at premature conclusions. One should not let oneself be seduced into ascribing objective truth to the religion practised there simply because Bockenheim was still at the stage of simple commodity production. That aside, I was worried about whether I would obtain leave from the crucifixion to attend a large, extremely elegant dinner to which I had been invited, though I was confidently looking forward to it.

Los Angeles, early July 1942

The dream was - or seemed to me in retrospect - one long, unusually complicated detective story in which I was personally involved. I have forgotten what it was about. I only remember the end. I was with Agathe, who was in possession of the three most important pieces of evidence in the case. These were a clasp, a diamond ring and a cheap little reproduction - perhaps a medallion - of a well-known picture (by Gainsborough or Reynolds?) portraying a small child dressed in light blue and with a white wig. It may have had something to do with soap bubbles. I felt reassured by the sight of these three pieces of evidence: they would prove my innocence at the trial. I then looked more closely at the picture of the child and realized to my inexpressible horror that it was a picture of me as a child.

This was proof of my guilt, which consisted in the fact that I was that child - or simply a child? I wasted no time with denials but said at once to Agathe that only two possibilities remained: either immediate flight and concealment, or suicide. She said very firmly that only the latter came into consideration. Overcome by fear and horror, I awoke.

Music in a skirt made from April’s medical bills, a document self-portrait with Alexandra Stepanoff’s “Drawing Music From the Air” (c. 1928), a press photo of one of Léon Théremin's first theremin students in the US.

Aside with Theremin, circa 1928/2026

Today I found the press photo by Alexandra Stepanoff (used in self-portrait above) at the Instagram of Eldritch Oculum Antiquarian. The description on the photo’s reverse reads as follows:

Stepanov, a trained musician, draws music from the air by means of the theremin, new musical instrument developed by Leon Theremin, While Dr. Paul R. Heyl (left) explains the phenomenon before the science forum of the New York Electrical Society. The electrical charge of the hand actuates a series of vacuum tubes through the upright antenna, thus creating what is equivalent to the preliminary howl of a radio set, save that the sound is musical. The tone produced is similar to a cello, the movement of the hands determines the pitch and volume of the sounds.

Stepanoff v. Stepanov makes me think of the ongoing Rachmaninoff v. Rachmaninov. And now, back to Adorno’s dreams, particularly the one featuring a double-bass. Dreams, too, are self-portraits of a sort.

Los Angeles, 21 October 1942

My friend told me that he had but one musical passion: playing the double-bass. But he added that this was not a hobby he could pursue. For one thing the existing solo repertoire for the instrument was far too small. For another, his wife would not stand for his having such a large instrument in the house; it would spoil the appearance of the home.

Another night

I was talking with my girl-friend X about the erotic arts with which I thought her conversant. I asked her whether she had ever done it par le cul. She responded very frankly, saying that she could do it on some days, but not on others. Today was a day when it was quite impossible. This seemed quite plausible to me, but I wondered whether she was speaking the truth or whether this wasn't just a prostitute's pretext for refusing me. Then she said that she could do quite different things, more beautiful, Hungarian ones, of which I had never heard. In reply to my eager question-ing, she said, 'Well, there was Babamüll, for example.' She started to explain it to me. It soon turned out that this supposed perversion was in reality a highly complicated, to me entirely opaque, but evidently illegal finance operation, something like a safe way of passing worthless cheques. I pointed out to her that this had nothing to do with the erotic techniques she had promised me. However, she stuck to her view and replied in a supercilious tone that I should pay close attention and be patient - the rest would come of its own accord. But since I had completely lost track of the connection, I despaired of ever finding out what Babamüll was.

*

A Moog theremin!
Cihan Gulbudak, “Polozhenie”, theremin version (see also * and * and *)
Leon Theremin playing his own instrument
Leon Theremin, “Deep Night” (1930)
Scriabin, Etude op.2 n°1 for theremin, cello and piano
Theodor W. Adorno, Dream Notes, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Polity Books)

Frank Stewart's "Marriage Among Friends"

You have dared call Time your “brother,” take as your ally the worst of torturers. On this point, our differences explode: you walk in step with Time, while I precede or drag after it, never adopting its manners, unable to think of it without experiencing something like a speculative sorrow. 

- Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered (translated by Richard Howard)

I don’t know who reads this. I don’t know who reads anything I write anymore, or whether that matters. I’m not sure it should… but writing, to me, has always involved this effort to transcend loneliness, however brief. A poem and a painting then, since poems and paintings are less canny than human beings. Poems and paintings cannot — and therefore do not— look down on you. Nor are they careerists. They have no ambition to queen or king themselves. However much the poet or painter who created the poem or painting may be a late capitalist careerist, the poem and the painting are free to repudiate their creators. In this sense, the poem and the painting will always be better than— and the best of — us.

Marriage Among Friends

after Lowell, for his student

In my doubts I move about the morning like a widow
looking into mirrors at my softening chin and arms
for reassurance, then shuffle to the coffee on the table
(the pile of books are just as fixed as dust and furniture),
then sit, then rise and start again, peering, letting hours go.

Yellow, all yellow, christ. And then your voice wanting approval
on the phone. Then I am again the dismissed lover, lifting
periodicals like slate to shape a summer mantel,
hefting each, looking along the gloss for what defense
might reside in unblinking faces: good looks, that's really all.

The air along the coast shoves its tongue into the throat
and fights along the spine of waves blown back, the spume
collapsing back with a false sigh, like dismay, outside my window.
Left to go on as before, I move like a camera through the room:
a moon, a dialogue worn out like woolen winter coats.

“When marriage is surmounted, what is left?” you offered.
My hands stumble to the brink of things but can't grasp
how that simple question made you hurry from the house,
and become the accidental woman, dividing herself into loaves
to feed the guests. The mute woman who is never chosen twice.

Frank Stewart

A stunning, stupor-inducing poem by Stacie Cassarino.

Snowshoe to Otter Creek

love lasts by not lasting (Jack Gilbert)

I'm mapping this new year's vanishings:
lover, yellow house, the knowledge of surfaces.
This is not a story of return.
There are times I wish I could erase
the mind's lucidity, the difficulty of Sundays,
my fervor to be touched
by a woman two Februarys gone. What brings the body
back, grieved and cloven, tromping these woods
with nothing to confide in? New snow reassumes
the circleting trees, the bridge above the creek
where I stand like a stranger to my life.
There is no single moment of loss, there is
an amassing. The disbeliever sleeps at an angle
in the bed. The orchard is a graveyard.
Is this the real end? Someone shoveling her way out
with cold intention? Someone naming her missing?

by Stacie Cassarino

Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape, 1942

"Alfie, honest mistresses are lauded..."

As the poem is languaged, it is a game, an imagined space, as is any use of language (at its base). But the poem heightens this as it purports to foreground its otherness, its distance from unconscious taken-for-granted language games.

- John Gallaher, “A Line is a Hesitation, Not a World”

It is not a piano he plays, but a beautiful woman, and he caresses her.

— Balmont, speaking of A. Scriabin

April, the end of.

My views on literary translation are closest to those of perhaps Pierre Joris. And April it remains, or at the sheer end of.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “Aus Einem April,” often gets rendered in English as “From an April.” Certainly it seems to be.

There is a poem written by Frank O’Hara in April 1954 titled after Rilke’s “Aus Einem April.” In Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters, Marjorie Perloff refers to O’Hara’s poem as a “loose adaptation” of Rilke’s. David Lehman has called it a “deliberate mistranslation.”

Frankly, I’m not sure what ‘translation’ has to do with O’Hara’s poem at all.

If I had to find words for it, I’d say O’Hara borrowed the structure of Rilke’s poem and cast it into the shape of Rilke’s “Aus Einem April.” The title acknowledges this Aus-Einem-April mode; there is no epigraph pointing to Rilke because the pleasure of an O’Hara poem (much like the pleasure of an Ashbery) comes from reaching the reader who recognizes the source. Even the way O’Hara closes this poem — “and out there everything is turbulent and green” — shares almost no bones with Rilke’s quiet glistenings and “still” details ordered by awe.

Speaking of shapes and modes and stanzas, Susan Stewart’s new poetry collection, Bramble, has sharpened my appetite for clusters of single-stanza poems composed from 8 lines. The duration of a morsel or instant, Stewart’s octets feel like cavalcades of close attentions. This one comes from a series of “Psalm Octets”:

Ps. 52

The little minds brag at the meeting,
while the rest yawn and read their mail.
The surface wounds smart, then itch,
while the deep wounds wash away
like shale on the cliffs. I was laughing
at you, not with you. I was meant
to be a sapling, supple and green,
and waiting alone in that wind.

Susan Stewart

I’ve been playing around with a draft of a concrete poem titled “liebestod,” which landed me in a rabbit-hole of Tristan and Isolde, which — at some point — led to my discovery of this poem by Thom Gunn titled “Das Libesleben”:

by Thom Gunn

Much luck to you, Member;

— Thom Gunn

The artist is higher than the Tsar, so kings must bow before him.

— A. Scriabin

O, how little you know, dad. And how I would die to prove you wrong.

— Ariadna

*

John Gallaher, “A Line is a Hesitation, Not a World”
Susan Stewart, Bramble (University of Chicago Press)
The Dandy Warhols, “Nietzsche”

postscript to April as a poem by David Berman

“CATALLUS CX: A TRANSLATION”

Alfie, honest mistresses are lauded;
The presents they receive they earn, but you,
Who lead me on with lies, leave me defrauded.
My anti-mistress, brazen what you do;
You keep my gifts but, suddenly demure,
Renege on my reward. Either be chaste
Before accepting fees or be the whore
That you pretend, your total body placed
Where just your mouth is. Greed and 'virtue' make
Strange bedfellows, each sure the other's fake.

David Berman

O'Hara-ing.

now the day has begun in a soft grey way
with elephantine traffic trudging along Fifth
and two packages of Camels in my pocket
I can't think of one interesting thing Warren
G. Harding did, I guess I was passing notes

— Frank O’Hara, “Poem”

ABOVE: collage with weekend birds on wire and Gadjo Dilo (1997).

BELOW: a smattering of recently-typed notes on Frank O’Hara, and what his poems do.

Forgive me for diving straight in without a lure or an introduction.

Small motions, often visual . . . as if stanzas were paintings arranged on a gallery wall, interacting with one another relationally. I’m thinking of the tiny couplet-duo diptych O’Hara uses at the end of his page-long poem, “Clytemnestra”, and what he accomplishes by setting his brushstrokes of sadness and longing to the left margin of the page, visually distanced by an open field from the jocular goofiness of the couplet on the right:

It takes nothing less than a diptych to pull off the wide-open wound — “your time is my ” —- the statement left open, unfinished, expectant, eager to reach across the divide and attach itself to the definitional form granted by “ouch is the balloon.”

*

The staging and borrowing of theatrical effects, as in “Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)” where O’Hara indicates a decision to leave the page and return to hearing music by writing it as a stage direction:

And the naming of plays that pass through the mind of the speaker or dawdle in conversations with Berkson, his alleged interlocuter:

ENDGAME WAITING FOR GODOT WATT HAPPY DAYS which means I love you
what is that hat doing on that table in my room where I am

*

This visual aspect again, in the second part of “Day and Night in 1952” where the end repeat of “of” flares outwards like a peacock tail or a perfect rose-colored fan swishing past a face at the opera:

Given the constancy of his questions bouncing up and down like a nervy knee beneath the cafe table, you can’t really avoid feeling Frank’s ontological restlessness. The co-feeling of things is how he loops in the reader as a collaborator in the living and being of poetry. Any distance he imposes is flipped by self-deprecation.

*

[On that note, to aside a bit, I growl when the teens refer to someone as a “pick me,” partly because it’s a stupid little Tiktok-token greased by empowerment culture, but mostly because it truly erases what it means to be human, which is always always always an uncertain endeavor, a grappling with selfhood that balances the performances of the selves others demand against our interiorities etc. Some people will never feel sure of themselves; some people will always have a complicated relationship with sociality and visibility; some of these people will be poets who title their poems, “In Memory of My Feelings.” The premium we place on branding and marketing keeps us from distinguishing the significant difference between “authenticity” (which begins with the assumption of a stable personhood that can be metered) and “sincerity” (which eschews the idea of personhood for the complicated, often humiliating, expression of being). Look, I’m not questioning the market-value of confidence or self-assurance in a culture based on selling things— we are raised into the world bequeathed by self-help and Dale Carnegie — but poetry, of all literary forms, resists this sort of emboldened aloofness. And that is where Frank comes in…]

*

Again and again, O’Hara sucks us into his yearning for things, people, places, colors, auras, sunsets, all the aesthetic ornaments poets are told not to mention, or else mention very sparingly, lest language get too maudlin or sticky. We know O’Hara cannot help it. We know he misses things constantly, ravenously, like “drunken Magi,” and then uses those figurations to evoke that “you” which keeps moving through his poems, never entirely settling on one face for long. Or just long enough for “a larger faintheartedness like loving summer”.

Voici an “always” of it in “Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)”:

I am always thinking of the moon rising / I am always thinking of you / your morality your carved lips —-

and when we flip a few pages further, past the dishes and foods listed under “(MENU) / Déjeuner Bill Berkson / 30 August 1961”, past the “Hors-d'oeuvre abstrait-expressionistes,” and up to the next stage direction:

—-a stage direction which turns a play on repetition into an endearment, or a condition of being, before turning again, and moving into a more elliptical reference, an allusion to “moments” that remain inaccessible.

*

I’ll return to this, perhaps in longer form, on a day when other things don’t demand my immediate attention, but I leave you with the drizzle on my front porch, where the sidewalk offers a stream of humans who are walking their dogs in the rain, and this ballade:

O! And a few links related to my recent study of O’Hara’s “Second Avenue” …. and Gadjo

I remember the first time I met Frank O’Hara. He was walking down Second Avenue. It was a cool early Spring evening but he was wearing only a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. And blue jeans. And moccasins. I remember that he seemed very sissy to me. Very theatrical. Decadent. I remember that I liked him instantly.

— Joe Brainard, “I Remember”

*

An issue of Audit devoted to O’Hara in 1964
Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of The Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture
Andrew Epstein, “‘I Want to Be at Least as Alive as the Vulgar’: Frank O’Hara’s Poetry and the Cinema”
Frank O’Hara, “Day and Night in 1952”
Frank O’Hara, “Poem” (the one referenced as epigraph and deserves laurels for its third stanza)
Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto”
Frank O’Hara Papers in the MOMA Archives
Leonard Cohen, “Moving On”
Rachel Blau du Plessis, “On Frank O’Hara, ‘Second Avenue’”

Proust may have never written the novel he wanted to write.

Shadows permeate our language.

Novels warn us of what is to come in foreshadowings.

The Grim Reaper reminds us of the shadow of death that stalks us. 

Shadow cabinets exist in case reality dissolves the actual cabinets.

A song brings the shadow of a smile to rest on an open notebook.

The shadow of a doubt tarnishes our anticipations.

Folk idioms warn us not to mistake the shadow for the substance.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth defines life as a walking shadow. 

“Shadows — hold their breath —” said Emily Dickinson, as Stephen Guy-Bray reminded me on twitter, on a March afternoon when I was thinking about how shadows sound.

Photo by Hervé Guibert

Marcel Proust’s Jean Santeuil barely guised its autobiographical nature. I returned to it last week when preparing for a workshop that explores how writers use shadows in literature. What captured my attention was the imminently spectral nature of the magic lantern Proust depicted in this early (and, according to the author, “failed” version of what would become In Search of Lost Time). So I will start there, in the room of childhood, where Proust sets us alongside Jean, who has barricaded the door shut by pushing the chest of drawers against it.

With the door sealed off, Jean looks around. He sees “the light which, a moment before, had fallen quietly on the table, now, in the sudden darkness, produced a patch of concentrated brightness on the wall.” And then, suddenly, we are introduced to “the ghost of a window radiant with red and blue and violet” —which is “not an actual window of blue and red and violet glass” which comes “tremblingly into view, advancing and receding after the manner of phantoms or shimmering reflexions”:

But perhaps the most mysterious moment of all this fascinating experience was, for Jean, when, though he was still in his familiar room, neighboured by the washstand, the chest of drawers, the bed, he suddenly saw those marvellous shadow-forms take shape upon the grey-patterned wallpaper. For that was the moment when; the curtains having been carefully drawn, and the light of the lamp concentrated in a long beam moving obliquely across the wall to an unknown destination, his room seemed to be no longer his room, the lamp no longer his lamp. On that wall where formerly in a riot of feting colour, when a fallen log blazed suddenly in the darkness, a great light had flickered for an instant, and across which were now passing the marvellous dyes of church interiors and the characters of legend, Jean could see, a little below the mysterious band of light in which these apparitions were made visible (beyond it they vanished from view) the splash he had made that morning on the paper while he was washing. What, from behind that reflector in front of which strips of mystically coloured glass were slipped, projected the light upon the wall, what had burned his fingers when, in adjusting the reflector, he had touched the chimney, was his old familiar lamp which, in a little while now, when the chest of drawers should have been moved back into its usual place, when the chairs should have been carried away, when the reflector should have been dismounted and the shade replaced, would once again, as though roused gleefully from a fantastic dream, spread its globular, its soft and honest radiance on his book, leaving the wall in a half-light where the mysterious spot, the invisible trap-door whence ghosts had emerged to play their parts, should once more have merged in the general surface, a friendly half-light with which, one felt, phantoms, apparitions and the sliding movement as of impalpable windows of stained-glass had nothing to do, and in which, most certainly, they would not show themselves. Of such a kind was the only picture that adorned, and then for a brief space, Jean's room. A spectral picture, composed of shadows; a phantom picture, a picture which did not last for long and, therefore, struck his imagination far more powerfully than would have done a motionless picture hung for him to look at all day long. 

Reviewing the spectral components of this passage, one notices the privileging of the inexplicable as something positive — not a futility to be explained away but rather a means of perceiving the world. For Jean, “the most mysterious moment” occurs while he sits there, “ in his familiar room” and “suddenly” glimpses “those marvelous shadow-forms take shape upon the grey-patterned wallpaper.”

The motion of the light beam “moving obliquely across the wall to an unknown destination” defamiliarizes Jean’s room: it is “no longer his room, the lamp no longer his lamp.” (Nothing really belongs to the child, does it? The child does not exist in an ownership of possession vis a vis objects and persons yet.) Old and new mingle as imaginary figures from books, paintings, and legends are “made visible” on the wall, just above “the splash” Jean “made that morning on the paper while he was washing.” But this condition (or way of seeing) only continues as long as Jean agrees to it— for it depends on his manipulation of the lamp’s reflector — just as the condition for the novel’s realization exists in our willingness to imagine it.

There is a spectral door, or a magic route between worlds. Proust calls “the mysterious spot, the invisible trap-door whence ghosts had emerged to play their parts, should once more have merged in the general surface, a friendly half-light with which, one felt, phantoms, apparitions and the sliding movement as of impalpable windows of stained-glass had nothing to do, and in which, most certainly, they would not show themselves.” The spot is what makes the spectral picture possible. The thing about spectres is that they materialize anywhere, can exist in any context, can return to haunt any room of the present that feigns solidity by denying their presence. 

Proust’s “spectral picture” is “composed of shadows; a phantom picture, a picture which did not last for long and, therefore, struck his imagination far more powerfully than would have done a motionless picture hung for him to look at all day long.” Constituted by the shadow’s ever-changing relation to light, the “phantom picture” cannot last: its duration is brief and intense as a first kiss on a path between houses. 

An excerpt from the same book, in a different section titled “Reading”:

[....] a man gazing on a precious fabric, another watching a dog, may be conscious of the presence of life before his very eyes, and strive to embrace it. But this was more: this was his life, this was the flavour which things have only for each one of us, and for us alone have kept it. 

It is, perhaps, good for the human spirit to see in the whispering air, the sea, a piece of rock, things that are contemporary with creation and have survived the Flood. But there is, perhaps, for the mind a still greater emotional thrill in the sight, not of what has been, but of what has come into existence, of what life, though it may seem an ever-passing sequence yet is a definite something, has left behind it, has changed. These things which were created while our youth was slipping by, have a great power to touch the heart, the green crust which has slowly spread upon tree trunks in the Park, the green surface which has formed upon the pipes which supply water to the fountain, and which the very water, as an ancient mirror catches the colours of what it has reflected, takes on as well; or, if you are one of those who never go to the country, the dark tan which daily lighting-up time deposits on the chimney of your lamp. That thing, of all things the most precious, that irreparable something, which no object, however beautiful it be, however gifted with intelligence, can keep and render back, the thing that you have felt, the hours that you have lived, experiences that seem to be all spirit, immaterial, remembered— in them you have it, the slow and charming product of the old sweet hours, real and living, with those same green tones which, as the result of slow infiltration, have dripped from the bronze statue of Pan in the Park down over the marble pedestal. We gaze with love upon such relics of our past, as we might upon some priceless piece of needlework at which loved hands have laboured, soft green stuff in which there lie concealed the pipes of the fountain basin, stuff that scarcely existed at all when we were young, but today is so thickly worked, woven of the silent hours when we were dining or reading, when we lost our father, when we walked the roads at sunset, when we slept in old worn sheets, stuff that has been made by time, by our time, the time when Monsieur Grandi was still the Etreuilles lawyer, the time that comes back when we hear the name of the lawyer who married Monsieur Grand's daughter and, later, made her so unhappy, the time when so great a coolness existed between the Radice Mayor of Etreuilles, who, nevertheless, was a great friend of my uncle and our own old friend, The Cure; when we hear the name of the pastrycook [. . .]

I am cutting out words here, and picking up at the edge of an image:

[ . . .] see above his shop in the main street and catch my mother's voice saying: “We must hurry along to Mongeland's for à tart.” That name still holds the sound of my mother's voice, the sense of time which even then was hurrying by, the memory of my schooldays, of the charm not of youth in general, but of my youth. I revere that name because it holds for me more of the divine, more of what will never come again, than could that of any artist or philosopher, more than a relic that might contain the blood of Christ. For that was my time. Even now I can recapture its midday warmth along the hawthorn path, the blinding light that lay along the uphill road on which we walked so slowly because the sun was hot, the smell of hawthorn trees, and of the tarts which I was carrying in a paper bag to eat when we should have come to Montjouvain.

It is said that nothing in our lives is ever lost, that nothing can prevent its having been. That is why, so very often the weight of the past lies ineluctably upon the present. But that is why it is so real in memory, so wholly itself, so far beyond replacement. And philosophers say, too, that no tiny scrap of recollected happiness, no simplest occurrence of the past, can be felt by others as it is by us, that we cannot enter into their way of feeling, nor they into ours—a thought which sometimes brings so sad a sense of loneliness to those who brood upon it, can, nevertheless, give to our past the unique character which turns our memories into a work of art which no other artist, however great, can hope to imitate, but can only flatter himself that he has inspired us to contemplate within ourselves.

“And the books would beguile him until his eyes grew tired of reading, at which point he wandered into the kitchen to listen to the cook's stories as she walked up and down cleaning the shoes.”

This, too, partakes of the time’s narrativity, the listening and looking and watching and collecting of colors: 

It was one of those tranquil moments when all things seem hedged about with the beauty to be found in mere existence, the charm of which is in the shadows as the far end of the room where the younger children's bed stands, in the soft light which turns the bed's bottom end to whiteness, in the ticking of the clock,  in the lamplit face of the chattering cook, in then mysterious nooks and crannies of the kitchen lit by red reflections [...]

— and what he calls the “red constellations” of the kitchen, which exist “mysteriously supported in the air by a world of shadows, of the spotless tile-work of the range all brightly lit, of a red and unexpected glow, like a balcony with the unseen setting sun still full upon it at a corner of a street already dark.” The distance between interior and exterior collapses: the street is the house’s inner room. The light does the work of eliciting these coexisting worlds that enchant our childhoods and emerge from dialogues with close attention. 

So “[...] the incessant babble of the fire is more agreeable even than that of the cook, because there is no need to answer it — though one feels it unnecessary to think about what one says to her, and in her eyes there shines something which is no less lively, no less fond, than the flame upon the hearth.” Just as it is “delicious …to be able to talk when silence grows oppressive and one feels the need to break it with a trickle of words.” It is lovely to let silence linger, and lovely to banish it. “Things then are lovely by being what they are and existence a tranquil beauty spread about them.” 

And this beauty of being and seeing appears in the flowers, the dwarf hyacinths which Proust recollects garnishing the month of May:

Dwarf hyacinths were piled in heaps upon the altar, mauve-coloured curled, and tall columbines growing all the way up their stalks like a trimming of delicate and precious lace, of all the colours that one never sees on man-made things, in animals or cities, with the air, all of them, of having been born of those little clouds of heavenly tint which float for a moment after sunset in the sky, and tulips bright with all those glittering dyes which shutters make when they break up the strong glare of the sun. They stood in pots wrapped round with white foolscap paper. And nothing was more beautiful, emerging from the scroll of white and dazzling paper which hid it to the neck like a glowing shawl, than a great tree of Bengal roses, bearing not several roses on is stalk like pennants flying up the full extent of a mast, but bursting into one great scarlet bloom, a cup of dark and shining blood, from which unendingly were wafted, light and violet-sweet, invisible and unctuous, all the perfumes of Arabia.

[….]

Night came. How sad are those moments when rooms, as daylight flees, stay empty before those great reservoirs of warm radiance which men call lamps, have been opened! In the clear darkness, which grows deeper moment by moment, it is still possible to see the houses opposite from which the afternoon's bright colours have departed. They peer out with uneasy melancholy, like a troubled traveler arriving just as twilight falls at the strange street of an unknown cry. 

[postlude]

Touch me! Touch me not! The existential work of portraiture lies in the inevitable exposure of the “present absence” and “absent presence” that portraits always overpromise but can never deliver: I, the Truth, am going away. Encapsulated in this phrase is the violence and separation of the image from its fleshy referent – the artist/sitter/beholder who loses himself or herself in the desire and fear, the love and envy engendered by the subject that looks back from the work. What remains is the portrait as irruption, as lacuna, as object of loss.

– Maria Loh, Still Lives (2015)

The magic lantern's variations.

Frolicking across the range of narrative voices, Marcel Proust’s novel, Jean Santeuil, does little to guise its autobiographical nature.

What intrigues me is the spectral nature of the magic lantern Proust depicted in Jean Santeuil.

We are drawn into Jean’s room— which he has barricaded shut by pushing the chest of drawers against the door, and given to see “the light which, a moment before, had fallen quietly on the table, now, in the sudden darkness, produced a patch of concentrated brightness on the wall.” And then, suddenly, we are introduced to “the ghost of a window radiant with red and blue and violet” —- which is “not an actual window of blue and red and violet glass” which comes “tremblingly into view, advancing and receding after the manner of phantoms or shimmering reflexions.”

Here is the passage

Proust tells us that “the most mysterious moment” for Jean occurs when “he was still in his familiar room” and he “suddenly” sees “those marvelous shadow-forms take shape upon the grey-patterned wallpaper.”

The motion of the light beam “moving obliquely across the wall to an unknown destination” defamiliarizes Jean’s room: it is “no longer his room, the lamp no longer his lamp.” Imaginary figures from books, paintings, and legends are “made visible” on the wall, just above “the splash” Jean “made that morning on the paper while he was washing.” But this condition only continues as long as Jean agrees to it— for it depends on his manipulation of the lamp’s reflector — just as the condition for the novel’s realization exists in our willingness to imagine it.

There is a spectral door, or a magic route between worlds. Proust calls “the mysterious spot, the invisible trap-door whence ghosts had emerged to play their parts, should once more have merged in the general surface, a friendly half-light with which, one felt, phantoms, apparitions and the sliding movement as of impalpable windows of stained-glass had nothing to do, and in which, most certainly, they would not show themselves.” The spot is what makes the spectral image — or “spectral picture” — possible.

“. . . a spectral picture, composed of shadows; a phantom picture, a picture which did not last for long and, therefore, struck his imagination far more powerfully than would have done a motionless picture hung for him to look at all day long.”

What started with wax.

The poem written is mine. I belong to the poem. This thing I live with interacts with me . . . Each of us belonging to another, our self: this other.

— Patrick James Dunaghan

For you I'd do
the whole thing through
below, above
for now, for love.

— J. H. Prynne, “57”

There is a moment in Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s short story, “Peter Goldwaithe’s Treasure,” when Peter can’t seem to distinguish his own life from that of his dead father, whose spirit infuses the dilapidated house that Peter inherited and doesn’t want to sell or destroy.

After a series of dreams that envision a prosperous future, Peter slowly begins to take the house apart, demolishing its walls and floors. There, amid the dust, he celebrates the possibility of discovering his father’s gold, a treasure masquerading in the promise of financial stability. Hawthorne tells us that Peter is feeling the vibes that come from “being usefully employed” rather than dreaming or betting on luck.

“Nothing troubled, Peter: or nothing but those phantoms of the mind which seemed like vague recollections yet also have the aspect of pre-sentiments.” Peter finds himself pausing, ax in the air, delivering an aside to his shadow: “Peter Goldwaithe, did you never strike this blow before?”

At the risk of muddling the imagined with the actual, I found myself standing amid the dust of the ordinary yesterday with a small white pill in my palm, preparing to take a drug I had never taken seriously, which is to say, never sampled in circumstances that weren’t recreational. As I swallowed the Valium, I thought about its official prescriptive purpose, namely, to prepare me for the clinical procedure that would follow. A pill that would foment a fog to fall over my memory.

I use the verb prepare to indicate an absence of self— a conspicuous, necessary vacancy— in the humiliating interactions with clinicians and surgeons.

I use the noun Valium to indicate a particular detachment from physical being.

I use art to clear my mind of the anxiety nourished by the consciousness of waiting.

When A. and C. described the stillness and “peace” of their visit to Pompeii, I thought about serpents — and the fashion of faded green garlands dangling from ceilings.

“A snake,” I said, when one of the teens asked how my braid felt when it moved across my back.

Disney movies reveal how “mankind makes preparations to survive civilization,” Walter Benjamin wrote in a fragment from a draft at some point in the year 1931.

I made a mistake recently. I said Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood ended in “To the Planetarium” — but it was actually his One-Way Street that ended so cataclysmically.

The noun “cataclysm” comes from the Greek word kataklysmos, meaning “deluge” or “flood”. It entered English via the French cataclysme and Latin cataclysmus in the 16th century, referring originally to violent, water-based destruction, particularly Noah’s flood. It combines kata- ("down") and klyzein ("to wash").

“An absence that hisses when I touch my head,” I said, when asked to describe how it felt to lose more than 60% of my hair in a few months. A violence composed of thousands of threads. A cavalcade of nothingness.

Adolf Hitler adored Disney and Mickey Mouse. Mickey even showed up as a mascot on German fighter planes during the war. Even after the Nazi regime banned Disney (due to its association with the US enemy), Mickey cartoons continued to circulate in Germany. Hitler looped them in his room.

In an unpublished note to an early essay draft, Walter Benjamin thought about the “the usability of the Disney method for fascism.” He found that “the gloomy and sinister fire-magic” of Disney films recently released in color tended to “highlight a feature which up to now has been only present covertly,” namely, the reification of violence as an inevitable, inescapable part of life which “early fascism” appropriates and borrows.

Adorno always wrote Mickey Maus, as spelled in his mother tongue. Spelling may be a form of fidelity.

“In the 20th century poets turned a corner,” says Patrick James Dunaghan. “We’re finding ourselves around the bend, coming after sucking fumes, gagging but stoned.”

Stoned could mean two things here, but I’m thinking of yesterday’s fogginess — which makes the less lethal meaning of stoned more available to my reading.

Valium makes fogginess feel pleasant.

Valium blurs the needles.

But Valium doesn’t touch the way this world continues to disorient me.

The politics of collective laughter is shaped by strategies of plausible deniability like the LOL. And late capitalism’s pernicious sadism often masquerades as a form of sympathy with those who are suffering.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Phaeton, son of the sun god Helios, asks to drive his father’s chariot around the sun. If I were Phaeton, I’d probably make the same request, which locates me firmly under the sign of hubris.

When Phaeton crashed the sun chariot, and the earth threatened to catch fire, Jupiter ensured that chariot and driver fell into the river Eridanus.

Simone Moschino’s presents the scene in marble. The figures rise from the stone in multiple postures. The female figures and the horses illustrate the beauty of Florentine disegno. 

In the sixteenth century, the tragic fate of Phaeton was taken as a moral paradigm. 

Phaeton appears several times in the neo-Platonist commentary of Cristoforo Landino on Dante’s Inferno. There, in text, Landino warns fathers all over the planet not to grant the presumptuous wishes of their sons.

Although I saved several locks of my mother’s hair after her unexpected death, I can’t bring myself to save any of the hair I’ve lost in the past year. My disgust at the idea of preservation (which may be linked to self-preservation, or the desire to retain a sense of self) when it comes to my own hair is sensible, in a sense, if senses be the register of our material reckonings.

The hair cut from my mother’s head is a talisman.

The hair cut from my own is compost, helplessness, rot.

Victor Brauner’s Talisman was owned by Sidney Janis, who later said that Brauner “had painted these pictures in tallow from the candles that he was supplied when he was in the Resistance. He was underground and instead of burning his candles he used it as artistic material.”

“We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication,” wrote Jean Baudrillard. “And this ecstasy is obscene. Obscene is that which eliminates the gaze, the image and every representation. Obscenity is not confined to sexuality, because today there is a pornography of information and communication, a pornography of circuits and networks, of functions and objects in their legibility, availability.”

Valium makes the “pornography of information and communication” seem goofy, like too many gemstones galloping over a dress that someone has worn in the hopes of being noticed.

“Writing poems believing in something greater than self,” writes Patrick James Dunaghan, “the desire for an order to place alongside within this other stuff life. . . “

And there is this beautiful thing Ted Berrigan said, as quoted by Ron Padgett:

The gods demand of the system that a certain number of people sing, like the birds do, and it somehow was given to me to be one of those people—and I mean I did have a choice—I could have decided not to, to be a truck driver or a filmmaker. But I like doing that, and I feel that probably the major reason I write is because the gods might destroy... the whole thing could fall apart. I lift my voice in song. I lift my voice in song.

Valium numbs every part of the song that seeks to keep things whole in me.

The administrative precision of the hospital emphasizes the humiliation of being embodied. I will always dread it. But I won’t spend this week consumed by the worry of waiting for results.

I lift my voice in song instead, to quote Ted.

And I end (or begin) with excerpts from this resonant open letter by Patrick.

*

Aram Khachaturian, A. Dolukhanian, Masquerade Suite (for piano solo)
George Schneeman, Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan (1968)
Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. B and S. Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988)
Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication”, translated by John Johnston
Patrick James Dunaghan, “Open Letter to Weigh Station”, Weigh Station No. 1, Summer 2001
Ron Padgett, Ted: A Personal Memoir of Ted Berrigan (The Figures, 1993)

Horatiu Radulescu and spectrality.

Horațiu Rădulescu invented the spectral technique of composition (as a synthesis of Byzantine and Hindu music, sound itself and nature) even before he left Romania in 1969. He disliked the term spectral music. His music was incantatory, ritualistic, he believed in beauty as a salvation for society, he wrote for posterity. He was mathematical, poetic, magical. He was occult, he was Pythagoras. From what I can gather, he was - as other Romanian composers of his generation - a man of the world with a cosmic approach and ego.

— Victor Stutz

The four historical musical paradigms, monody, polyphony, homophony, and heterophony, are actually quite impossible to distinguish from one another within this sound plasma— living sound that can only be comprehended from a global perspective, resembling the blue image of earth as viewed from outer space.

— Horațiu Rădulescu

A tulnic, or bicium, is a type of alpine horn used by shepherds and those who live in Romanian mountain villages. The word comes from the Latin bucinum, an ancient instrument used by the Romans.

*

At the Voroneţ Monastery, there is a painted mural that reveals an angel playing a bucium to announce the onset of the Last Judgment.

*

Romanian-French composer Horațiu Rădulescu wrote his Piano Sonata no. 1 for unaltered piano while living and studying in Bucharest. From it, he later developed a version synthesized performance titled Piano Sonata No. 1: Cradle to Abysses, Op. 5 (1968). It was to be one of his few non-spectral works.

*

We owe the SOUND ICON to Rădulescu. Essentially, a sound icon is a grand piano turned on its sides and stripped of its mechanics before being retuned and played like a giant resonant harp. The sound icon is played by bowing the strings.

*

*

The BUCIUM, often played by women, announces the return of shepherds, but it also serves to notify villages of death. It tells the community who is coming— and who has gone.

*

Many scholars and musicians credit Radulescu with devising SPECTRALISM, though his focus remained on what he called “self-generative functions.” SPECTRAL MUSIC involves dispensing with all other parts of music and focusing entirely on the constant fluctuation of sounds based on the natural overtones of any given note. Radulescu’s spectral music required retuning of string instruments so each sting was a specific very high partial of an underlying tone. The result is simply a complex overtone series in line with Pythagorean logic.

*

Radulescu graduated from the Bucharest Music Academy in 1969 with a focus on violin and composition. In this same year, he composed his first spectral score, Credo for nine cellos, based on the first 45 harmonics of the cello’s lowest C.

*

Messiaen loved Radulescu for his mysticism, a counterpart to the violence and glorification of ugliness that came from the world wars.

*

Radulescu’s fascination with sacred spaces began in his Romanian youth and extended through the cathedrals of his western European days. After moving from his hometown in Bucharest to Paris in the early 1970s, Radulescu turned to the Catholic Church of Saint-Saturnin in Champigny-sur-Marne as a site for rehearsing his highly experimental music with the Psyche Ensemble.

Many decades passed before Radulescu returned to the piano sonata form. Written on commission for the equal-tempered, unaltered piano rather than a modified one, Radulescu’s Piano Sonata No. 2 – being and non-being create each other was composed in 1991, two years after the fall of Ceausescu’s dictatorship. The sonata was written on commission for the equal-tempered, unaltered piano rather than a modified one. This would his first work for the unaltered piano since his days as a student in Bucharest.

*

In 1993, Radulescu composed yet another sonata, this one titled Piano Sonata No. 4, Op. 92.

*

A fragment may be a site of return, a bench beneath a tree in the imaginary homeland’s cartography.

*

Horaţiu Rădulescu’s The Quest, for piano and orchestra (1996) quotes a particular morsel of a Romanian folk song in its first and third movement. But he also quotes it in “Movement III: Doina” of his Piano Sonata No. 3, “you will endure forever” (1992/1999). . . . . And perhaps in Doriund (1975/1976) as well, perhaps Doriund is where it began, though I am stretching my ears a bit here. 

*

Rădulescu’s sense of temporality and coexistence pushed the hybrid form beyond its dialectic underpinnings and collapsed linear time and melody into the spectral and ancestral, the prehistory of stones speaking. Unlike most Romanians, he did not change the “escu” to an “esco” when he became a French citizen. He also spoke in multiple languages, mixing metaphors and idioms, dragging German into French and then whipping both with a Balkan expression, thus refusing to stay in the indicated linguistic lane. Being and sound were not separable for him.

*

“The nature of acoustical phenomena lives in the folklore,” Radulescu told a friend.

*

Between 1993 and 1994, Radulescu composed Angolo Divino, op. 87.

*

In 1984, Radulescu composed a choral piece for the voices of 34 children in spectral accord. The title, Do Emerge Ultimate Silence, is an acronym: D-E-U-S. When I read as an amalgam of languages, in accordance with Radulescu’s penchant for mixing languages, I see “De Us” in that acronym.

*

For the performance of Do Emerge Ultimate Silence, Radulescu returned to the Church of Sacré-Cœur in the small town Villeneuve-dʼAscq in northern France, where his piece Sensual sky was also performed. The church is small — nothing like its grandiose sister in Montmartre — and looks almost out of place with its red brick exterior. He dedicated this work to his “spiritual father” Giacinto Scelsi, and imagined it being performed in the most famous circular temple in ancient Rome, namely, the Parthenon. Radulescu’s efforts to perform music outside the official concert halls of prestige was linked to his belief music’s “single aim and reason to exist” involved putting the listener in an alternate state of mind.

*

CLEPSYDRA op. 47 for 16 Sound Icons (1982) takes its title from a temporal instrument. In ancient times, the clepsydra refers a contrivance that measuring time by the flow of water, a water-clock — but also may allude to intermittent fountain or ebbing wells. Most of us tend to think of the ancient time-telling piece known as the hourglass, or clepsammia, whereby time is measured by the flow of sand in a glass, but not Radulescu. In the 16-part for this composition, the shape of a horizontal clepsydra emerges and gradually filters a single pitch from a rich sound spectrum. The music then “passes through” this pitch to develop into a new spectrum, becoming richer and more expansive. Each spectral element is activated by different bowing techniques on the Sound Icons, thus playing, once again, into Radulescu’s fascination with the “spectral heterophony” of sound sources.

*

Frenetico il longing di amare, for bass voice, octobass or double-bass flute and sound icon (1984-87) was performed by the Orchestre Français de Flûtes with Pierre-Yves Artaud on flute and Horațiu Rădulescu as conductor. Now I quote from the recording’s description: “The score describes a figurated choral based on the theorical components of an E-spectrum, in between the 6th and the 53rd harmonic. The sound icon, a concert grand piano vertically placed and played with bows, is offering and sustaining - as to its spectral scordatura - the strict pitches of non-equal intervals on which the voice and the flute are meeting themselves. The sound icon remembers the role of a tampura in the indian rags. The flute and the voice are coloring these pitches by means of special sound-production techniques. Thus on the spectral components which became now fundamental pitches these techniques are producing an enriched and unstable “micro-spectrality” - “émanation de I'émanation”: —micro-rhythm and phase-shifting, and other aural informations capable of captivating other perception with that intrinsic life of the sound-matter.”

*

It is commonly called the Radulescu’s Fourth Quartet. The Ardetti Quartet performed it — Streichquartett Nr. 4, Opus 33: “Infinite to be cannot be infinite, infinite anti-be could be infinite” for nine string quartets or a string quartet surrounded by an imaginary 128 string-"viola da gamba." The CD liner includes the following note written by Robert Reigle: “Horatiu Radulescu's Fourth Quartet illuminates a new spectral sound world by juxtaposing a 128-pitch, "viola da gamba" scordatura (using a'= 433 hertz) with 29 orbiting spectra based around a'= 431. Fifteen years have elapsed between the Quartet's premiere and the availability of this beautiful work's first recording. Ironically, despite our instant communications, recording, and reproduction technologies, some things happen more slowly now than in the past.”

*

In Sound Plasma – Music of the Future Sign, first performed in Munich in 1975, Radulescu expressed his belief that music should place the listener in contact with an alternate reality or way of being. Like Scelsi and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Radulescu understood the performances of his works as a kind of religious rituals. According to Radulescu, music is a “ritual of all senses & of the beyond senses”.

*
Written in commemoration of Giancinto Scelsi’s death, Radulescu’s Byzantine Prayer for 40 flautists was composed for the harmonic spectra of a low A, the same A that Scelsi used in his Quattro Pezzi una nota sola (1959).

*

*

As I walk through the cemetery of Bellu, futile sibyls drag their wings over our faithless echoes—all the sounds are sorcerer-ed from sepulchres whose laments escort each enigma closer.

*

Immersed in the wonder II op. 96 (1996) for cello and trombone takes its title from the sixteenth chapter of Tao te Ching: “Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, / you can deal with whatever life brings you, / and when death comes, you are ready”. Shushan Hyusnunts describes it as “an intimate dialogue between a trombone and a cello" in simple ABA form, written in memory of Toru Takemitsu and dedicated to Robert Aitken and Catherine Marie Tunnel. “The culmination of the work (its middle part) consists only of the natural harmonics of a fundamental note, with a use of spectral cello scordatura,” writes Hyusnunts, noting the “Renaissance-like arpeggios of cello.” The work takes its leave of the audience with a sense of unfinishedness, as if occupying a cyclic time that could very well begin again, and turn to its own repetition.

*

Return is the movement of Tao.

*

Radulescu, Outer time (Versailles, 1980)

*

Alone when I learned Bunica had hip surgery after slipping on ice in a Bucharest park. She is fine, a little bored and dehydrated, my grandfather said. I borrowed money for the ticket, packed IV fluids in a suitcase,  prepared to tell her of my betrothal to none  except the infant in me — the one

she raised must be the one my parents left in Romania. The child I was
met the child I was
carrying.

*

Radulescu’s The Origin

*

2003 brought Radulescu’s Intimate Rituals XI (for one or two violas) into the world, as performed by Vincent Royer, Gérard Caussé, Horatio Radulescu and Petra Junken. The composer defined the subject as “private, maybe even erotic situations.” 

*

Intimate Rituals was released a short time before the death of its author.

*

In a statement given in Amsterdam, Radulescu said that he composed Intimate Rituals XI (a work for viola) “using the tape of the pre-recorded sound icons with a viola in a spectral scordatura, a very special tuning-chord; the open strings simulate the 3rd, 4th, 13 th and 20 th harmonics of an F monesis, giving C half-sharp, F half-sharp, a slightly lower D, and A half-sharp. He continued: 

With this scordatura you also have the presence of the 7th harmonic in the air; the 3rd and 4th harmonics in sum give 7, and the 13th and 20th harmonics in difference also give 7. So the 7 th is there too, in the subconscious, even though it is not directly present. The piece is dedicated to Vincent Royer; it was composed in Clarens / Montreux, in 2003 and premiered by him in Chicago. The timing is very strict; the techniques are those already known from Das Andere and Lux Animae but otherwise activated; the macro-form is also directed by the Fibonacci proportions. The viola is in constant dialogue with the sound icons (I don't like to think of the piece as viola and tape; ideally the sound icons would be live). The viola and the sound icons are dependent on each other, sometimes crossing, sometimes not. There are very intense moments as the sound icons describe a high register climax at the Golden Section; the viola attains its highest sounds there too and then decays, very strangely, reaching again in the low the richest timbres.

*

Radulescu again, elsewhere: “Intimate Rituals are very private, maybe even erotic, situations. From the original recording of the sound icons in the Lucero studio in Versailles in 1986 to the premiere of Intimate Rituals XI with the viola in 2003 is a big span of 17 years, but the same atmosphere should be achieved, a sort of spiritual intimacy.”

*

In 1985, Radulescu and Petra Junken recorded two improvisations on different sound icons. By alternating the rapid and slow pressure of the strings, they created an inexhaustible amount of harmonics. The tape of Intimate Rituals came together through a superimposition of these two improvisations, turning into a sort of “sound carpet used as a burden.” Although the work is usually performed with tape rather than live sound icons, Radulescu said it was critical for the performance to reach an atmosphere of spiritual intimacy in correspondence to the intimacy of the original improvisations.

*

“Iubiri for 16 instrumentalists (2 flutes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, horn, trumpet, trombone, percussion and string quintet) and sound icon” (1980-1981). “To my mother,” Radulescu wrote, in the dedication.

*

Liner notes: Franck Mallet, July 1994, translated by Mary Dibbern. The paragraph below is a direct quotation from these liner notes, as well as Dibbern’s translation:

Iubiri is the Rumanian plural of “iubire” (love). The word iubire is a Latinization of the Russian word «lioubovi», just as the words «Liebe» or «love» are derived from Sanskrit. The work consists of 343 unique «iubiri» («loves»), 343 unique «micromusic/orchestrations» that during forty-seven minutes integrate seven acoustical spectrums in the style of seven large historical tonal regions. «The fundamentals of these seven acoustical «solar» systems, are themselves the seven first new harmonics of the initial C: C, G, E, B flat, D, F monesis, G triesis. This progressive macro-formal modulation gives a sentiment of continual ascension even if the global evolution of the registers is written in a «sleeping hourglass»> of seven octaves -, focal unison with «halo» -, and progressively reopens to seven octaves. The 343 unique «micro-musics» («loves») arrive like explosions/implosions, «illuminations» issuing from a <musical sphere», a sphere with equidistant meridians by which these 343 < musics » pulse with a «< divinely diabolical » periodicity. The seven macro-speeds of this periodicity themselves describe an irregular curve: 6-5-4-2-7-1- 3. The pitches used by the musicians are spectral components with an intense «<life-timber », spectrality of spectrum, « emanation of the emanation ». The formants/chords (zero degree of this music) describe zones: explicit compact spectrums; inverted spectral regions - secondary functions, tertiary in low pitches, primary functions in the high pitches; spectral functions, auto-generating spectrums, p.E. « ring functions ». By very complex and often complimentary dynamic profiles, these spectral functions - «frequency plateaus» with intense life (timber, dynamics, micro-rhythms, etc.) - acquire the perceptive qualities of monody, polyphony or homophony that change at high speed.» From this extremely detailed writing, a sonorous plasma arises, rich with various kinds of information. The listener can perceive melodies that are not played directly by the interpreters, but whose origin is found in the harmonics.

*

After Radulescu moved from France to Germany in the 1980s, the Speyer Cathedral animated his musical imagination. Apart from the architectural grandeur and the glorious history of this Romanesque basilica, Radulescu was drawn to its unique acoustics. The Speyer led him to compose his first piece for solo organ, Christe Eleison op. 69 (1986).

*

Christe Eleison was also Radulescu’s first work for an equal-tempered instrument after a long break of eighteen years (his piano sonata Cradle to Abyss was composed in 1968). The fact that he avoided the equal-temperament follows the journey he started in 1969 with Credo for nine cellos, his first piece that systematically relied on the proportions of the harmonic series.

*

“I am more and more attracted from ancient sources,” Radulescu said, in conversation with a friend. “They [ancient sources] are archetypes, sounding genetics. Certain melodies, which are "verified" by millions of people and by the history, are so beautiful... Like a stone that has been cared for by the sea for ten thousand years. Its surface is smooth, perfect.”

*

In Amen, Radulescu used the monodic line as a base of a canon, in which the same melody is to be performed with time shift in five different tempi according to five voices of the heterophonic texture. This phase shifting coaxed new melodic textures to the surface.

*

“The creative path of the Romanian composer Horatiu Radulescu can be seen as a multifaceted exploration of space – understood as sound space (the sound spectrum with his infinite harmonic series), as transcendental space, as inner space of the listeners mind as well as performing space,” said Shushan Hyusnunts.

*

*

“Horatiu Radulescu was a man who stayed in the centre. He was totally unconcerned with fashions in the arts, with opportunism, with career-building. He was prepared to work hard to secure good performances of his music by interpreters he trusted. He could be pushy at times, and probably seemed arrogant to some; but what concerned him was making music, making art, of the highest integrity, and sometimes that effort involved a little pushing. In a composing lifetime of over forty years, and through 110 opus numbers – his total catalogue is much larger as many works exist in multiple versions – he created a body of music that is among the most courageous, most beautiful and most inspiring of the modern era.”

— Bob Gilmore, on his dear friend, Radulescu

*

Raise your horns
tell the sky

there is no home
and no final land
ing.

*

All the texts superimposed on the videos of Radulescu’s pieces come from the pen of yours truly, and the collages from my hands or screens.

Bob Gilmore, “Remembering Horatiu.” Journal of Music, 1 October 2009.
Bob Gilmore, “‘Wild Ocean’: An Interview with Horatiu Radulescu.” Contemporary Music Review 22, nos. 1-2. March–June 2003: 105–22.
Bob Gilmore, “Spectral Techniques in Horatiu Radulescu’s Second Piano Sonata.” Tempo, 62.
Horatiu Radulescu, “Brain and Sound Resonance: The World of Self-Generative Functions as a Basis of the Spectral Language of Music.” International Lucero Academy.
Horatiu Radulescu, String quartet no. 1 op. 4 (1966-1967)
Horatiu Radulescu, DO EMERGE ULTIMATE SILENCE (1984)
Robert Reigle, “Radulescu’s Streichquartett Nr. 4. Op. 33.” Liner notes to CD with 16-page booklet in German, English, and French.
Richard Toop, “Radulescu, Horatiu.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan, 2001.
The Classical Nerd. “Great Composers: Horatiu Radulescu”. Accessed on February 27, 2026 via Youtube.
William Dougherty, “Horatiu Radulescu's Piano Sonatas & String Quartets, Vol. 1.” Music and Literature,  July 26, 2016.

The adventures of B. and P. in letters: 1873-1880.

While still children, we fondle with a naive sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed woman, and mingle with her in her sleep); thus, woman was an alluring mystery for me, one that troubled my poor childish head. From the feelings that arose in me when a woman happened to fix her gaze on me, I already sensed that there was something fateful in that arousing glance, something that causes men's willpower to melt—-and it filled me simultaneously with fascination and fear.

— Gustave Flaubert, “November: Fragments in a Nondescript Style” (translated by Andrew Brown")

THE ADVENTURES OF B. AND P. IN LETTERS, 1873-1880.

“I have abandoned B. and P.,” Flaubert confessed to Turgenev in a letter signed “Your old wreck, G. Flaubert” on the evening of October 3, 1873. Flaubert’s schedule that day had included waking up at nine, “stuffing” himself with lobster, taking a nap, walking on the beach, going to bed at 10 PM, “reading nothing”, “living like an oyster” dedicated to indulging in “boundless melancholy” on a regular basis. 

“I’m working on B. and P.'s geology and on Monday I start writing again,” Flaubert said Turgenev five years later, in a letter dated July 27, 1877.

On September 12th in the same year, Flaubert told Turgenev that he was starting B. and P.’s “archaeological and geological excursions.”

“Come and dine here, and I’ll read you what’s finished,” Flaubert wrote to Turgenev a year later in a letter dated June 26th, 1878. 

On January 28th of 1879, Le Figaro announced that Flaubert had slipped on a patch of ice in his garden and broken a leg. 

Two days later, Flaubert told Turgenev that he had broken his leg five minutes after reading a letter from Turgenev recommending that he walk more.

“I’m finishing B. and P. ’s Magic and I’m exhausted by it,” Flaubert told Turgenev on May 26th. “Unless the world comes to an end next week, I will see you in the middle of it,” he added. “In Paris.” 

“B. and P. are wearing me out,” Flaubert told Turgenev on August 7. “On certain days it seems that all the blood is drained from my limbs, and my death is imminent.”

“B. and P. send their respects,” Flaubert said in a letter to Turgenev dated November 8.

“I wish B. and P. the necessary contrition for their great religious act – the more intense it is, the more vigorously they’ll rebel against it afterwards,” Turgenev wrote to Flaubert on November 13, 1879, in a letter that he signed as “Your, Iv. Turgenev”

“B. and P. are wearing me out,” Flaubert told Turgenev on December 2. “Frankly, I can’t take anymore.”

“B. and P. are not coming on very well,” Flaubert said to Turgenev on December 3rd. “And the weather is very sad,” he added. 

“B. and P. are getting me down, I’m exhausted,” Flaubert said to Turgenev on April 15th in the year 1880. Among other things, Flaubert missed his friend. “How I’m longing to embrace you!” he wrote, and signed off as “Your old, G. Flaubert.” This was the last letter that Flaubert  ever wrote to Turgenev.

“I’m darting about like a squirrel in a cage,” Turgenev wrote to Flaubert on May 6th of the same year. “I embrace you and I’ll see you soon,” Turgenev added in the last letter he ever sent to his old friend, Flaubert. 

Flayed skin.

it will not seem so strange or hard a thing
to learn how families unmake themselves,
for even cities have an end at last.
All things in your world have their death, as you
yourselves do, but in some it's hard to see,
for they last long, and human lives are short. 

— Dante, Paradiso, Canto XVI (76-81)

While wandering through the translator’s end-notes to Dante’s Paradiso, I found myself searching for a particular chapel in Crete, and then falling into a rabbit hole named Saint Bartholomew. 

I blame it on this particular fresco on the wall of the one-room chapel of Agia Pelagia in Ano Viannos, Crete, with its byzantine figurations and dim interior.

The bright Grecian light is filtered, dimmed, enclosed; the sense is that of the cave-womb rather than the majesty and grandeur of the Roman empire and Catholic church. Bartholomew holds his flayed skin over his shoulder– his head still attached to his body, the aureole marking his status as a saint. 

Flaying is the removal of skin from the body by a sharp object. 

Saint Bartholomew supposedly preached in India and was martyred through torture, flayed, and eventually beheading. In the altarpiece from 1412 painted by Catalan Jaume Huguet (below), Bartholomew is offered in more detail, though the grotesque nature of the torture is impossible to depict.  

His wrists are bound, his arms raised in that vulnerable position often depicted across the iconology of Saint Sebastian— the axial pose, arms lashed to two poles— his flesh already flayed to the waist. Two executioners are present: one wearing an apron to protect his clothes and the other holding a spare knife in his mouth, concentrating on carefully removing the skin in one piece. 

Agia Pelagia’s frescos date back to 1360, which may be coincidental with my reading of Dante. Among the various depictions in this tiny space, there is one representing the punishments of the hellbound/sinners, the betrayal of Jesus, and the Last Supper.

“Martyrdom, then, is a difference-obliterating mind-set that leaves death as the only thing to venerate,” writes Tom Bissell.

The dome of Agia Pelagia features three scenes of Saint Pelagia, and the lute player might reference her life as an actress?

And the rabbit hole deepens, landing me near the Menologion (or Menologium) of Basil II, a Greek illuminated manuscript designed as a church calendar or Eastern Orthodox Church service book (menologion) that was compiled c. 1000 AD for the Byzantine Emperor Basil II (r. 976–1025). It contains a synaxarion, a short collection of saints' lives, compiled at Constantinople for liturgical use and around 430 miniature paintings by eight different artists. It currently resides in the Vatican Library.

There are many Pelagias. There is Pelagia the Virgin of Antioch and Pelagia the Harlot of Antioch, both of whom are honored on October 8th, a feast day originally shared with Pelagia of Tarsus, who lived in southeastern Asia Minor during the reign of Roman emperor Diocletian. Notably, Diocletian had a daughter but no sons (and this makes part of Pelagia’s legend highly unlikely). Nevertheless, Diocletian did conduct the final intensive persecution of Christians in Roman history, many of whose victims were indeed burned alive.

Now for the legend. According to the Eastern Orthodox tradition, dreams are dangerous. For the wealthy Pelagia, daughter of a pagan mother, was visited by the Lord in a dream. The following day, Pelagia ran into Bishop Linus on the road and immediately recognized him as the person who had appeared to her in the dream. She fell at his feet, requesting Baptism. At the bishop’s prayer a spring of water flowed from the ground.

Linus made the Sign of the Cross over Pelagia, and angels appeared and covered the chosen one of God with a bright mantle when he baptized her. Linus gave her holy communion, said a few prayers, and then sent Pelagia to continue her journey. She exchanged her expensive clothing for a simple white garment, and distributed her possessions to the poor. Returning to her servants, Pelagia told them about Christ, and many of them were converted and believed.

Infuriated by her daughter’s defiant dalliance with a heretical cult, Pelagia’s mother sat on the patio and watched flies circle the carcass of a dead dog. The scent of cultivated roses drifted through the air as the mother composed her message to Diocletian’s son. Pelagia had fallen for this dead man named Jesus and it was impossible to distract her. Pelagia’s mother told the young man that his beloved refused to become his wife. 

Realizing that he could not win a battle with a lover whose kingdom was out of this world, Diocletian’s broken-hearted son fell upon his sword and died by suicide. 

Pelagia’s mother feared the emperor’s wrath, so she tied her daughter up and led her to Diocletian’s court as a Christian who was also responsible for the death of the heir to the throne. The emperor was captivated by the unusual beauty of the virgin and tried to turn her from her faith in Christ, promising her every earthly blessing if she would become his wife. 

The holy virgin refused the emperor’s offer with contempt and said: 

“You are insane, Emperor, saying such things to me. I will not do your bidding, and I loathe your vile marriage, since I have Christ, the King of Heaven, as my Bridegroom. I do not desire your worldly crowns which last only a short while. The Lord in His heavenly Kingdom has prepared three imperishable crowns for me. The first is for faith, since I have believed in the true God with all my heart; the second is for purity, because I have dedicated my virginity to Him; the third is for martyrdom, since I want to accept every suffering for Him and offer up my soul because of my love for Him.”

Diocletian sentenced Pelagia to be burned in a red-hot bronze bull. Not permitting the executioners to touch her body, the holy martyr signed herself with the Sign of the Cross, and went into the brazen bull and her flesh melted like myrrh, filling the whole city with fragrance. Saint Pelagia’s bones remained unharmed and were removed by the pagans to a place outside the city. Four lions then came out of the wilderness and sat around the bones letting neither bird nor wild beast get at them. The lions protected the relics of the saint until Bishop Linus came to that place. He gathered them up and buried them with honor. Later, a church was built over her holy relics.

The Orthodox church commemorates the holy Virgin Martyr Pelagia of Tarsus on October 7th, and a church was built at Pelagia’s burial place during the reign of Emperor Constantine, when the persecution of Christians had diminished. This is simply to say: Dante can lead a mind to the most uncanny places, and I keep thinking of lyres and virgins and harlots and hands making music on strings.

imposed a silence on that holy lyre
and brought to stillness all those lovely strings
that Heaven’s right hand makes looser or more tight.

– Paradiso, Canto XV, 4-6

*

Nicola Matteis Jr., Fantasia in C Minor, “con discretione” performed by Théotime Langlois de Swarte
Pelagia of Tarsus, miniature from the Menologian of Basil II (c. 1000 A.D.)
Tom Bissell, “A Most Violent Martyrdom” (Lapham’s Quarterly)

Lisztiana.

your lips are indeed a disaster of alienated star-knots

— Frank O'Hara, from Second Avenue

Also, he let language have its way with him.

—Frank O'Hara, talking at a Club panel, 1952, as quoted in Brad Gooch's City Poet

Lisztiana, Much Later

I sit in your T shirt
with its spots of paint
as a certain fierceness pours
outside, perhaps, too, on you.

I’m smoking a CAMEL now
and I have a big hole in my
shoulder from washing away
a lot of dirt. Are you there?

there, are you? I am here
and the storm is not enough,
it should crash in and wet,
there should be maelstrom where

a privileged host is smiling.
And naked in debris I there
should be, but, being here, should
bend to you, pick out of rubble

a scrap of painted shirt,
as if it were soiled ivory from
a grand piano, possessed of us
both, and ruined now by storms.

Frank O’Hara

A few letters and an O’Hara translation

John Latta is the only reason I was able to read these letters, and so any confetti must fall on him before going elsewhere. Latta translates a letter from Frank O'Hara to Fairfield Porter dated June 25, 1954, which turned out to be an interesting date, an asterisk date, so to speak, given Latta's thrilling asterisk (“According to a note in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara “Meditations in an Emergency” is “Dated June 25, 1954” with “the earlier title: ‘Meditations on Re-emergent Occasions.’”), all of which cannot diminish the fact that it was an unusually hot late June, as noted in the references to 'dog-days' peppered throughout O'Hara's letter. “I simply, in such a heat, cannot type you René Char’s great long and questionable lyric Exploit du Cylindre à Vapeur but I have collated the promised A*** and hasten to add another gem,” O'Hara writes, excerpting: 

                         L’Amour

                Etre
Le premier venu.                                          

which he translates as:

                         To be
The first comer.

Char “is far more fun to do into English than the loquacious Mallarmé,” O’Hara writes, adding that when they meet again, he “will have a sumptuous divertissement by Jean Genet Un Chant d’Amour (it’s easy to see what’s on our minds these dog-days) which JA has pronounced one of my best works—I hope this doesn’t mean that it’s a terrible translation, but can’t figure out what else it could mean. There you are, he giveth with one hand and taketh with the other.”

His friends saw “an enchanting movie The Holiday of M. Hulot” which Frank has yet to watch, though it comes highly recommended. “I came rather late to the party (back from dinner) but it was fun at Grace’s ne’ertheless; I’m sorry you didn’t either come earlier or stay longer,” he says, spooning in one of those archaic contractions that indicates fondness or sentimentality to Frank, who suspects that John Ashbery will soon have to pass the title that Larry Rivers “assigned” him, namely, “Last of the Gay Blades”, to Frank himself, —”but then John should rest this summer anyway.”

Jesting, playing up that smirk of sadness, Frank says “Baudelaire had the funds to be a dandy but the most I can manage is to be a petit boulevardier.” He pokes Fairfield for impressions of Joan Mitchell, adding his own ambivalence: “I found her rather grumpy that night at Grace’s though she kept announcing how friendly she was feeling. At other times I have found her charming when she was terribly self-announced-depressed and had everyone else fleeing in droves. I guess it’s not her, then.” Maybe it's me, Frank intimates, ruffling the page with his chameleon-like slinkiness, changing his mind about dinner plans mid-sentence, shifting tenses as if in the middle of making plans— “Mike and I are having dinner tonight but it’s so hot I rather think we should forget it.” — and then swooping in with an affectless, casual delivery of the punchline: “Maybe we’ll just eat Ice Cream. I always eat that on Friday because of my upbringing.”

The word upbringing situates itself awkwardly, at the edge of a bed, one shoe on the floor, the other shoe in hand, like a photo I recall seeing of O'Hara himself, with a painting nearby. Speaking of seeing, since the eye often guides his pacing, the following paragraph dives into that space of expressive motion, moving from glimpsing an alumni bulletin and cringing, to firming himself by loosely identifying with a dandy or a cucumber or a cliche:

I saw a copy of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin which John has in the bathroom and I must say it is more disgusting almost than the McCarthy hearings, complete with a photo of Lyon Phelps at Hazens with two Radcliffe admirers. It must be wonderful to be an elder poet at 29, with all of the pretensions and none of the mistakes. (As you see, my spleen is fresh as a daisy and cool as a cucumber.) 

He reports that Ashbery “received a note from Jimmy which was sweet and had that I-really-should-be-working tone common to all us pros so I guess he is digging in without much trouble.” And perhaps this digging calls to a mind a shovel, which is too heavy an instrument to lift or use in the insufferable heat, and so O'Hara returns to the raison at hand, signing off in one of his lofty self-debasements, that scent of Charlie Chaplin tap-dancing across the stage of the page, suited in that painstaking and excruciating earnesty that feels so out of step with the seriousness and insincerity of the surrounding world: “This letter started out of the vain desire to write you a letter, but I don’t dare keep it up having just reread it.” Yes and — “Call when you get in and give my love to Katy,” he adds, attaching “the promised A***”, which Latta notes that O'Hara “campily misattributed” as Franz Liszt, the casanova of composers and performers whose reputation raised flighty wrists and bourgeois fans across Europe.

And Frank’s translation:          

The generous John Latta also includes his translation of Fairfield Porter’s undated reply, acknowledging the receipt of Frank's letter, correcting (without making of a point of doing so) O'Hara's spelling of Katy's name which should be "Katie", whom Porter walked to the station while reading O'Hara's letter, noting that “At the station a drunk made friendly passes at Kate, showing me that there are always new problems and that little girls must be protected without causing them alarm.” After depositing “Kate” at the station, Porter returned and discovered “a sarcastic note from Anne in the typewriter about the cracker barrel touch system motto in the typewriter, 'It is work that gives flavor to life'.” As for O'Hara's query about Joan Mitchell, Porter responds in kind: “I felt as you did about Joan Mitchell. She seemed unfriendly to me, but then I expect painters often to be mad at me, so I mistakenly took it to myself alone.” He continues to move down O'Hara's letter, responding to his questions and comments, adding “It is typical of JA to give and take at once," and thanking O'Hara “for remembering To ****, which seems a perfect translation, but which I prefer in your English, I suppose that is a compliment to the strength of the original.” As for “L’Amour, it contains the open secret of my feared and attained failures,” Porter tells him, opening the door just wide enough for the air to whistle over the knob. Of course, beautiful notes abound, and thus Porter and Larry received a “beautiful note from Jimmy, whose sweetness follows from the fact that his politeness directly expresses his true feelings, and is never a cover but the outward expression of exactly what he thinks,” and there was a heart-warmer of a missive from Janice, and “the picture of Kitty is done.” 

Porter mentions a slight dissatisfaction with John's portrait, which remains incomplete, unfinished. It’s a decent “likeness” but he hopes “it does not stiffen up. He has to pose again. He seems to have made up his mind to endure a certain amount of boredom. Maybe if he doesn’t come out next weekend, he will come under your chaperonage later.” Signing off professionally, politely, obliquely, like a gentleman dropping a ten dollar bill into the tramp's hat, Fairfield says he'll phone when he comes to Paris, in sum, “I did very much enjoy the other day with you.”

Fast forward 6 years —

O'Hara is no longer in Paris. Now he is in Boston, near the site of the alumni letter publishers, writing from Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 26, 1956, to Anne and Fairfield Porter, including them both in his greeting, and starting off on a complimentary note expressing happiness at receiving a letter from Kitty on the particular day when he received it, since that day coincided with span of time after O'Hara “had been reading her poems the day before and off and on since I got here and was wondering how the prettiest poet in America is.” He is surprised to be back, to “be here,” as he puts it, an experience that is both odd and familiar, so he turns to the weather without turning to the convention invoking the word weather, electing to slide over it instead with his eyes: “There has been snow on the ground and replenishing flurries ever since I arrived, which I like, and I have a room quite large with eaves, on the third floor of Molly Howe’s house.”

Of course my ears itched a bit upon reading this, since Molly Howe may be the mother of poet Marie Howe, and I have recently fallen into the whirlpool surrounding a possible dalliance between Molly and Samuel Beckett, who grew up in the same Irish small town, and who are rumored to have parented a child or else an abortion or perhaps both, unclearly, uncertainly, in a fashion worthy of literature that is rarely the entirety of a life. As for O'Hara, he says that Molly is in “the theatre des poètes and also is the one who adapted Finnegan's Wake for their production.” As a person, she is “nice and amusing and rather Irish and thinks I’m even Irisher than she is (which is doubtful since she acted in the Abbey Theatre and has a great appreciation of the mournful interpretation of trivial things—she compliments people in the following general form, for instance: “Isn’t it a shame! Bunny was so wonderful on stage last night, and she just doesn’t do anything serious with it, she doesn’t act enough!”).” At this point, I catch my breath at this gorgeous O'Hara-style parentheses that twirls so many batons at once and then looks up at us with exclamation points, realizing that hearsay is sure to follow, and when it does, the hearsay nevertheless is as giddying as receiving personal hearsay that makes poetry worthwhile for an instant, however brief, since O'Hara gave a reading with Roger Shattuck and Molly didn't say a thing to him about it even though they live in the same house, O'Hara tells Porter that Molly “told Bunny” … “Frank is the real thing, all right, but he has the terrible affliction of the Irish—he doesn’t trust his heart.” As if preparing to double one of his double-volts in a poem, O'Hara's speaker then mentions a worried response that Molly expresses about a play that hinges on a joke, and holds up this response to the Porters, asking, in jest, “Now don’t you think she’s more pessimistic and therefore more Irish, than I am?”, concluding, in seriousness, “She’s very nice anyhow.”

O'Hara nudges Anne to send her translation (if finished) of Supervielle’s La Belle Au Bois to The Poets’ Theatre for a staging or reading, at least, since the submitted scripts so far have been “heavily formalized, rhetorical, full of verse and empty of poetry, with an insight every 75 lines, as if most of the poets had just gobbled up a History of the English Drama that ended in 1850,” which is why the board of 8 humans would benefit from the Supervielle as both “a beautiful work and as a kind of play which is more poetry than those filled with verse that limps along about incest or the impossibility of communication.”

“Radio”

Frank O'Hara's “Radio” was first published in Poetry, March 1956. The commentary that follows was found in John Latta's exquisite “Stray Notes” . . . and I quote:

In Donald Allen’s note (fromThe Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara:)

Dated December 3, 1955 . . . Kenneth Koch wrote: “RADIO is perfect. I was in the Cedar Tavern last night and Bill de Kooning was there, so I asked him if he’d seen your poem about his picture. He said, Yeah, is that right? He said, Yeah, but how can you be sure it’s about my picture, is it just about a picture? I quoted him ‘I have my beautiful de Kooning / to aspire to. I think it has an orange / bed in it . . .’ He said, ‘It’s a couch. But then it really is my picture, that’s wonderful.’ Then he told me how he had always been interested in mattresses because they were pulled together at certain points and puffed out at others, ‘like the earth.’” (KK to FOH, March 22, 1956.) 

James Schuyler, in a letter dated 27 March 1956 (from The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara):

This nonsense is only to tell you I love your poems in Poetry; as always, in that cutting garden of salmon pink gladioli, they’re as fresh as a Norway spruce. Your passion always makes me feel like a cloud the wind detaches (at last) from a mountain so I can finally go sailing over all those valleys with their crazy farms and towns. I always start bouncing up and down in my chair when I read a poem of yours like “Radio,” where you seem to say, “I know you won’t think this is much of a subject for a poem but I just can’t help it: I feel like this,” so that in the end you seem to be the only one who knows what the subject for a poem is.

Brad Gooch, in the O’Hara biography City Poet, quoting a 16 February 1956 letter to Michael Goldberg, seems (wrongly) to suggest that “Radio” was composed in Cambridge during O’Hara’s unhappy few months there with a playwright-in-residence fellowship at the Poets Theatre:

“Some times it seems to me that I’m operating myself by remote control from a broom closet in the Empire State Building but I guess I really am here . . . Before this there were a couple weeks of foul depression, gnashing teeth, pacing and boredom, when I felt that I would never, NEVER (like in those moves about concert pianists who’ve been in an accident) be able to play the typewriter again. But the presence of this Steinway you all gave me has finally asserted itself, and I now stagger from bed, stride to the desk, and begin my scales each morning, or almost each.” O’Hara’s sense of place was ameliorated by pasting to the wall a photograph of James Dean as well as by hanging a small de Kooning painting of a couch lent him by Fairfield Porter that had hung at East Forty-ninth Street. The painting appeared in “Radio,” published in Poetry in March . . .

---

Franz Liszt, Réminiscences de Don Juan, S.418 1849 played by Masaru Okada
Jasper Johns, Skin with O'Hara Poem, 1965
John Latta, “Two O’Hara Letters and a Translation”
Richard Hell, Godlike. NYRB Classics.
Willem de Kooning, Summer Couch, 1943

Cut-up as "inadequacy and tenderness"

CRISWELL THE PSYCHIC:

We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.

POLICEMAN:

Inspector Clay’s dead… murdered… and somebody’s responsible!

EROS THE ALIEN:

You earthmen are idiots. Stupid! Stupid!

PAULA TRENT (to her husband, who’s an airline pilot):

Don’t worry about me while you’re gone. I have your pillow to keep me company. While you’re up there, I’ll be down here. Now, off to your wild blue yonder!

— Ed Wood, Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

from Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) directed by Ed Wood

1

Art as a found object draws on the surrealist attraction to chance. It fondles the frisson of contingency and the startle of accidentals while honing the juxtapositional impulse of collage and sampling. 

2

On September 23, 2006, Mark Fisher spoke to John Foxx about electricity and ghosts. Foxx said he admired the films of Ed Wood, who created films “simply because he was in a place where it could be done.” Reading Wood as “a sort of advanced naive artist,” Foxx credits him with inaugurating the cut-up movie, a form that he built from fragments, including “props he came across in warehouses and stock footage he discovered in the vaults of Hollywood cutting rooms.” Wood's cut-up films are an early exercise in “inadequacy and tenderness” to Foxx.

3

At one point during his conversation with Foxx, Mark Fisher turns towards the reader, parenthetically, and says that Pop is “virile mongrel . . . capable of effortlessly demonstrating, manifesting, absorbing, remaking any sort of academic intellectual construct” and doing this so effortlessly that prior versions seem diluted, insufficient, or “even redundant.” Rock n' roll can “prefigure avant garde concepts by arriving at them from a totally different direction.” 

4

The two begin discussing citational specters. Fisher asks Foxx why thanked Paul Auster in the sleeve notes for his album, Tiny Colour Movies.

Taken from John Foxx’s album, Tiny Colour Movies (2006)

Foxx says that, back in the 1980's, he wrote “this thing called The Quiet Man . . .in fact, I'm still writing it” — and then, he just so happened to read Paul Auster's New York Trilogy — which “struck so many chimes.” According to Foxx, “it was as if I had written it, or it was the book I should have written. I have to be very careful to find my way around it now.” This “occurrence” was both “rewarding and terrifying”: it suggested that there was “something in the air.” Exhilaration came with a sense of recognition: “it feels as if someone has published first, and therefore registered their claim to where you discovered gold.” And so Foxx thanked Auster in order to “acknowledge the effect, and the odd sort of encouragement of recognized themes, as well as the continuing parallel interest in the idea of lost movies and fragments.”

5

Ballard, Burroughs, Dick: Foxx listed the sci-fi writers who deployed thought experiments in order to think about “the near future.” We have entered the counterfactual space in considering the way “the unrecognized present” may have consequences and result in a world different from what we predict, know, or imagine.

What is unconscious resonance? What can resonate for us without becoming clear? Fisher and Foxx grope for words about the abstracted ‘feelings’ in Foxx’s films. 

FISHER: You often use the word angelic, or angel . . . 

FOXX: Yes,  very perilous territory, especially since those terms have been co-opted by New Agers. [Foxx proceeds to outline a few of his “thought experiments.”] The idea … of parallel evolutions — imagine something that may have evolved alongside us, something we're not quite aware of yet, that we haven't discovered… invisible because of their proximity. 'Hiding in plain sight' . . . could give rise to situations that are tremendously moving, fragile, tender. Metaphorically very resonant. Another one.. .the concept of singularity. An event that only happens once, or once every thousand or million years. There may be rhythms which extend over tens of millions of years and are therefore unrecognizable to us; except as single unconnectable and unexplainable events.

How does resonance play into Walter Benjamin’s eerie evocation of the planetarium at the end of Berlin Childhood, his cosmos, his cosmology, his constellations?

FOXX: Another thought experiment posits the concept of Angels as a connection between things. An entity that only exists between. A sort of web or connection [that arises] . . . purely as an intrinsic, and visible, and unsuspected component of the evolution of the ecology that supports whatever they exist between. They cannot exist on their own. Many of us have these little incidents—everything from coincidences onward— things we can't explain using the references we commonly employ.

FISHER: On the LPs with Harold Budd… you get that sort of aching plateau,  where you slow down so much that any perturbation has a massive effect . . . it allows an alternative ecology to emerge— one based on events that are much less frequent. And that affects their significance. You are drawn to them in a sort of smiling fascination, rather than the usual pop music method of lapel-grabbing bombardment. 

The bombardment of Pop is not Alexander Kluge's angels, but Kluge's angels may nevertheless be present as a material possibility between the bombs and the ruins of the sound, particularly in the language of architecture and ‘new developments’.

FOXX: The lack of jostling allows that sort of elegant notional space to open up. Dreams are a very important component . . . not simply the image you present yourself with in a dream... also the emotional tone of the scene. You can see a cloud, but this will be accompanied by a sense of wonder or by a sense of dread, and it is that accompaniment that determines its meaning. 

How is atmospherics being tied to clouds here? Why do clouds seem to pose this contrafactual role across soundscapes and visual media?

FOXX: When your parents are away for even an hour, it feels as though it goes on forever and you really deeply miss them — and the obstruction, the tone component of that just carries on through life. Gets applied to different situations. These longings . .. join the repertoire of tones we carry and apply. Some moments last forever.

FISHER: There's almost a positive side . . . an enjoyment of longing and ache.

6

At one point in the third book of Nocilla Trilogy, Agustín Fernández Mallo demonstrates his writing practice, namely, sitting down with an intention and then deviating from it. He envisions a projected work, a “cartography of the sounds in a campsite” composed of the campers’ favorite sounds. After asking various campers to share their favorite site-sounds, he would then request that they draw a map identifying the location of that sound on the campground. He would also take photos of these sounds, and caption them (i.e. “Photo of the sound of my tree” etc.). The photos and maps and descriptions would then be assembled into a catalogue.

A few pages later, the speaker meets himself, or his writing persona, who introduces himself as “Mallo” and hands him a stack of papers from a dresser drawer. The papers are titled “Our Project”; the pronoun attaches a plurality of authors to the the project. While flipping through these papers at random, the narrator finds “the same obsession that, we then found out, had its inception in Las Vegas, on those nights of mineral silence in which we had read a book called The Music of Chance by someone called Paul Auster before sparking up a Lucky Strike and listening to the sounds of thousands of waiters mixing cocktails . . .”

7

Speaking of speculative strategies, when Ed Wood had trouble financing a film titled Grave Robbers From Outer Space, he reached out to the Southern Baptist Convention and persuaded them that a successful science fiction film could provide them with a substantial cash flow. If Plan 9 did well, the money could used to finance another film that would segue with their own interests. namely, a film about the Twelve Apostles. The Baptists liked the idea of projecting the Bible onto cinema screens, but they were offended by the title Wood had originally selected for the film. So Grave Robbers From Outer Space became Plan 9 From Outer Space. The Baptists also insisted that the film entire crew be baptized before working on the project. Desperate for cash, Wood agreed. The crew took part in a baptismal ceremony. The film itself was made in five days for $20,000.

*

Agustín Fernández Mallo, Nocilla Trilogy. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2002.
John Foxx, Tiny Colour Movies, 2006.
Mark Fisher. "Electricity and Ghosts: Interview with John Foxx." Ghosts of My Life. Zero Books: Winchester UK, 2014. pp. 160-170.

Emanations of elapsed time.

An echo is a trace of an event that reverberates through time.

— Stephen Frailey

The trilling wire in the blood sings below inveterate scars.

—T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

Language of Echoes (1987) by Adam Fuss. At first I thought it was a fabric, the surface of a textile spattered with self-circling stitches. I noticed the dimpling of the surface material near the larger circles — marks of impact. Tears and rumpled bedsheets. The minimalist music of rain dripping from the porch eaves into the small portion of dented cement that collects water. A series of variations in visual resonance.

*

“I work a lot in a territory which I feel is not invisible, but on the edge of perception,” said Adam Fuss.

*

In the novel, a man walks into the room carrying his wife’s notebook. His clothing is clean-cut, his figure symmetric, but face above the white shirt is blank. Something develops as he stands between the gray armchair and coffee-table, a stack of books at its feet. She is trying to read him. She is silent when he says that there is no point, he already knows what she is thinking. Her notebook in his hand, motionless. He has read it. He doesn’t look at it as he drops the notebook on the table. I’m leaving, he tells her. It is finished.

*

First impressions failed me in my reading of Language of Echoes. This became apparent as soon as the room of the book grew audible. The room of the novel and the room of the photogram are not entirely dissimilar. The distance between the faces and hands and eyes of the figures, the density of the furniture, the sonic possibilities of what is spoken, and what may be felt yet unsaid. Like the surface of that puddle in the porch corner, each word and motion falls upon given material, creating a particular circle which emanates from the points of impact. Each point has its own.

*

I imagine a slender line of small circles at the lower left edge of the image, where each circle is one of the husband’s footsteps, pausing a third of the way into the room. There is solidity and symmetry in the shapes, but even this seems accidental rather than purposive. A contour of chance and contingencies, the room creates itself from the relatings of the bodies within it. The room recreates itself continuously. Sounds and circles overlap at points of high impact. This is the set-up for a short story; so much of fiction’s staging depends on the ways sounds and gestures mingle, interact, and overlap.

*

Larger, less distinct ripples from earlier droplets are barely visible against the image’s gray background. The presence of these points of near-invisibility turns Fuss’ photogram into a record of duration in dialogue with elapsed time. Time lapses and elapses.

*

Language of Echoes is a gelatin silver print (or “photogram”) created by Adam Fuss without the use of a camera. Rather than asserting the artist’s gaze through the lens, Fuss relinquished his own perspective and laid the piece open to chance by placing a piece of photographic paper in the bottom of a tray filled with water and setting this tray in darkness, or under a safe light, while dripping water onto the still layer of water in the tray. As various droplets hit the surface, Fuss flashed a light to expose the paper and capture the shadows of the emerging wave patterns.

*

Fuss has described the faint imprints on his photograms as a “visual echo of the real object.” It is figuratively compelling, this language of echoes rippling across a medium’s surface. To “develop” the droplet . . . To see what develops from the conditions set by the process.

*

Echoes are sounds that exist in relation to their origins. An echo locates the originary sound in time-space. In a parallel fashion, Fuss’ flash-frozen droplets develop from the experimental conditions he created for their emergence. We invent games to devise ways of seeing how things play out, or how they shape the behaviors of the players.

Adam Fuss, Untitled (2007) gelatin silver photogram

An echo represents a trace of an event that reverberates through time. The echo cannot carry the entire sound but instead offers a slice of it, a reduced fragment, a wisp or a trace that points us to its existence. We recognize that a larger (or louder) version must have existed in order for this insufficient copy to evoke it. Echoic traces are like tiny testaments to the unseen.

*

“Less representational than percussive, certain photographs suggest sound—a plucked string or a minute fluttering of the vocal chords, emerging from the throat in a wordless hum,” wrote Stephen Frailey of Fuss’ photograms.

*

“A nineteenth-century child's dress is carefully laid out for our viewing. Perhaps, because we are aware that it is a part of lost time, our thoughts go to its missing inhabitant—an ethereal presence, intricate to the weave of the fabric before us. And then there are the birds, scattering in a grey photographic dusk, soundless. Now, the mirrored surfaces of the daguerreotypes flicker before us, never completely giving up their secrets. In this body of work the artist essays loss and its attendant ghosts.”

These are the words Neville Wakefield used to describe Adam Fuss’ My Ghosts, a book published in 2002 by Twin Palms Publishers.

*

Of his ghosts, Fuss has said that they are “not some external phenomenon but rather an emotional state or an unconscious state that acts as an intruder in the mundane or ordinary, frequently manifesting as the presence of an absence.” By nature of its being, “the ghost is neither fully physically and materially present nor completely nonexistent but in a state of ‘in between’.” 

*

A few questions I posed to the language of echoes: Where are the areas of relative intensity? How do the areas of impact relate to one another? How do they interfere with the ripples’ physical tendency to move outwards? What sort of drive or urge is configured in the physics of ripple and flashbulb?

*

Svetlana Cemin made a film about Adam Fuss’ work. She titled it A Landscape of Imagination. A hybrid resonance or intersection of wave forms led me to think of John Cage’s “In a Landscape,” and musical figurations of landscape more generally.

*

All of this attaches itself to recent readings on unconscious resonance, as explored in conversations about cinema between Mark Fisher and John Foxx, which I may share later this week, unless spring fever and life gets the better of me.

*

“Adam Fuss: Visual Resonance”. April 25, 2025 - September 29, 2025, Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
Adam Fuss’ profile for Frankael Gallery.
Adam Fuss, “Two Photographs”. Bomb Magazine.
Adam Fuss, My Ghost. Twin Palms Publishers, March 2002. Currently out-of-print.
John Cage, “In a Landscape” performed by Alexei Lubimov
Max Richter, “Love Song (After JE)”
Stephen Frailey, “Thin Air: The Photograms of Adam Fuss”. Artforum.
Svetlana Cemin, dir. Adam Fuss: A Landscape of Imagination

Social hygiene and shadows.

The demon, like the painter of dreams, is an artificer. Yet for the would-be skeptic, possession by a genio maligno overcomes the drawbacks of mere sleep in its total separability from reality. In this perfect nightmare, all that belongs to us— our bodies, our sensory apparatuses, as well as the colored, figured worlds they take in– can be reduced to the "mockeries of dreams." The condition of true skepticism is the condition of complete painting. Both in its total invention and in its pure illusion, possession promises to be an artifice with nothing behind it. Possession is an art of absolute fiction.

— Rene Descartes

Hey I’ve been thinking!
I been thinking about nothing, yeah . . .

— The Dandy Warhols, “Smoke It”

Maya Popa opened the envelope of my dreams this year. This is the only explanation I can devise for the fact that I am giving a lecture each month on prose-related topics that fascinate me.

The official version involves serving as the first Writer-in-Residence for the Conscious Writers Collective . . . and I keep pinching myself to see if I am real, or possibly just to amuse Radu, whose consternation and notebook-envy remains unparalleled in the Kingdom of Mammals.

As result of Maya’s nudge, many untyped notebook entries have returned to the table of my thinking— a combination of music, images, and textual encounters which have shaped (and continue shaping) themselves into one of my favorite literary forms, namely, the “lecture.” How does one thank a fellow writer for the opportunity to revisit readings and theories that sat, undeveloped, like tadpoles in an ice-cube? I don’t have an answer to that. Nor do I know what I will eventually do with these “lectures,” apart from savoring the pleasure involved in writing them and living (however briefly) in that state of co-presence with language and being that admits and explores its entanglement with the world.

Radu says I have wasted my life. “There is too much material! What is the point of collecting and saving more material than you need?” His eyes are darker than Goya’s untold secrets. One must listen to such darkness, if only to dismiss it with exculpating nouns like research. Or statements including these nouns, as with “Research, dear Radu, as you should know, given the number of pillows and cushions you have sniffed before hiding your bones in the most random corners of our home.”

As for shadows — and shadowgraphia —-

“Five o’clock shadows: a whispering campaign”: a razor blade ad

As found in Time Magazine (October 1937), the platform of Henry Luce’s New American Century as well as the medium of communication for empire’s Exceptionalism issues. The target audience for this ad is men and the women who love them. Women, here, are subtly encouraged to shame men into purchasing Gem razors that work more efficiently at reducing the grime of the five o’clock shadow.

The danger of the gendered “whispering campaign” is stated at the outset: women might think “that things aren’t good with you!” O how I love studying this bladed whisper as a set piece in the construction of gender that was central to cultural notions of “family values” propagandized by the US government after World War II.

. . . And there is a similar play on notions of social hygiene deployed by S. D. Chrowstowska in her doppelganger-dandying “Shadows”, a short story originally published in her collection, A Cage for Every Cage (Sublunary Editions).

. . . And there is the awkwardness of wanting to share the contents of my thoughts, both present and forthcoming, by tying these to the workshop titled “Shadowgraphia: The Uses of Shadow in Fiction,” that will happen at the end of this month.

. . . And there is a ceaseless stimmung of birdsong that surrounds me as I type in shadow of Radu’s critical eye— an eye which wants walking rather desperately.

. . . And there will be flowers and pollen stains on this walk, which is now my excuse for leaving, but not without adding, awkwardly, that if by some wild, April-stung perchance you are interested in this chiaroscuro (or others) here is the relevant link.

. . . And there is the official part, prior to the unofficial parting.

Shadowgraphia: The Uses of Shadows in Fiction (April 25, 12-2 EDT) “Possession is an art of absolute fiction,” declared Rene Descartes as he considered the relationship between art and demonic possession. Despite the demonic associations, fiction has always made use of shadows to develop, characterize, and complicate narrative. Lucifer was an angel whose maleficent spirit got the best of him. Witches are dangerous because they make use of “dark magic” to meet their ends. The artist who fashions his work as godlike enters the realm of “deception.” God was the first Creator, and Satan was the first actor to zealously imagine himself in God’s place. In this generative workshop, we’ll examine how authors use shadows to tell stories, from Peter Pan to Marcel Proust. Then, we’ll use shadows to tell our own stories. 

Sophie Calle, Self-Framing, and Writing Through Imagined Encounters (May 23, 12-2 EDT) This session will explore how artists and writers construct intimacy, perspective, and narrative through imagined encounters. Using the work of French artist and writer Sophie Calle—known for projects that blend photography, storytelling, surveillance, and performance—we will examine how creative constraints can generate unexpected narratives. Calle often creates elaborate situations in which people unknowingly become part of a story, following strangers through cities, inviting others to interpret personal artifacts, and inventing fictional frameworks that blur the boundary between fact and imagination. These unusual narrative strategies have inspired writers such as Paul Auster, Grégoire Bouillier, and Enrique Vila-Matas, who have incorporated Calle-like devices into their own work. In this workshop, we will look closely at how intimacy is created in writing—through voice, pronouns, address, and narrative framing. We will also examine several of Calle’s staged scenarios, which rely on collaboration, chance, and invented rules, before writing our own short pieces inspired by Calle’s methods.

New Worlds On the Page: Imagining the Painting’s Infinities (June 20, 12-2 EDT)  

​HE: Why do you write?

​ME: To trick myself into being satisfied with what exists. Writing releases me from my fear of running away. The imaginary holds me in place, pinned to the scene for an instant. 

​HE: But isn't it real, then? Aren’t you bringing these characters into the world of your reckoning in order to give yourself a false sense of company? I mean, do you believe in them?

​ME: I do. That’s the worst part of it. I believe in them.

​HE: How?

​In A Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci described a new method for “awakening the mind to a series of inventions…by looking attentively at old and smeared walls, or stones and veined marbles of various colors, you may fancy that you see in them several compositions, landscapes...with an infinity of other objects.” And, so, we will look attentively at three paintings and invent worlds for them. This workshop dives into the untamed parts of our imaginations and honors the possibilities that hold us in place.

"Love Letters Mostly" by Deborah Digges.

Last April I copied a (beloved) poem by a Deborah Digges into my notebook titled “Love Letters Mostly.”

Today, one April later, I find myself returning to its waters in order to study how it moves, or notate the steps of its dance within (and with) language, the particulars set into motion.

One stanza, twelve lines, ragged edges. Not a sonnet. Not stepping into the shape of a recognizable form, whether to constitute it or subvert it. 

The speaker is alone, standing near a shoreline. The tone is desolate and expansive, almost as if deserted by its own vantage. It surveys the scene and asks questions, but refuses to identify the questions as such by using punctuation. 

Unpunctuated questions may indicate that asking is either futile or humiliating, or perhaps too difficult an activity since the speaker reveals parts of themselves in asking the question.

What do we reveal when we ask? 

I mean, what do we say about ourselves when we constitute a question that identifies itself and addresses itself to others as such?

What does the poem want when it does that while celebrating the surreptitious cigarette smoked beneath an awning during a rainstorm. What does the poem want when it asserts this singular moment against the interrogatory mode? 

How did punctuation alter the atmosphere of the prior sentences? 

I mean isn't it strange how the presence of a question mark indicates an openness, a disinhibition, a willingness to be read as part of a potential future dialogue? 

What about the absence of punctuation inhibits the self and builds a horizon into the spoken.

I’m not sure it's because the period, itself, is a terminus. I think we say things in a landscape that may include the dead, as for example, when Digges references both Osip Mandelstam and Paul Celan by citing their view of the poem as a message in a bottle that may be on route to the reader who needs it. That is where Digges begins, in that image of the poem sallying forth:

Notes in a bottle floated up the bloodstream,
scripts hardly audible, a ringing in my ears,
love letters mostly, transfused through centuries,
once thrown from breakwaters
or cliffs. 

One sentence, this motion from the notes in the bloodstream that become a ringing in the ears, a non-signifying noise similar to tinnitus —- and Digges' use of the word 'transfused' in keeping with the river of blood on which the poems of poets travel —- there is soft demarcation here of the distance between the exterior (or public) water and the interior (or private) water, and Digges does nothing to bridge that gap or explicate it. 

The poems thrown from rocks or cliffs in ancient days— she calls them “love letters mostly” — are the things which return by becoming internalized. At the very least, they become internalized in the case of Digges' speaker, who then quickly picks up the next sentence without a line break, adding “And the writers,” — this is where she breaks the line, leaving us peering over the cliff near the water for the writers, suddenly present in that shimmering conjunction:

And the writers,
unrequited, walked toward home.

The 'unrequited' writers, this image of utter loneliness that infuses the poem.

And the perfection of those unmarked questions that intervene while also threading themselves into what poetry does, or what the poem asks of the poet and the world. 

Who knows how they lived out their lives,
if those they so desired did finally turn to them.
Who made me who I am.

And now the turn into an image of the speaker, smoking in the rain, alone, watching the skies. The other writers have left; their ghosts barely present here:

I love to stand under an awning, smoking,
while some storm hits hard the ports of Boston.

And then the flourish of that elliptical finale. If a razor can be a flourishing thing — 

What knows to do so dives deep as it can.

The poem takes it leave in the abyss, or what Heidegger called the “bottomless,” that homeland from which no one human is exempt, perhaps the originary that we build our obsessive homelands against. (Notably, Hannah Arendt references this abyss as the philosopher’s medium, in a section of The Life of the Mind titled after Valery.)

The questions posed in the poem are answered by the title—though we cannot realize this until after having read it, especially since the questions aren't indicated by punctuation. 

Other small things that strike me: Digges' dispensation with ordinary forms and conventions of address; the unstable temporality that carves the fleeting moment inside the eternal; the sense that eternity, itself, is unrequited and unrequitable.

*

Aaron Copland, “Nocturne”
Deborah Digges, “Love Letters Mostly”

Milena; or M no. 7

“Touch me! Touch me not! The existential work of portraiture lies in the inevitable exposure of the present absence and absent presence that portraits always overpromise but can never deliver: the Truth, am going away. Encapsulated in this phrase is the violence and separation of the image from its fleshy referent - the artist/sitter/beholder who loses himself or herself in the desire and fear, the love and envy engendered by the subject that looks back from the work. What remains is the portrait as irruption, as lacuna, as object of loss.”

— Maria Loh, Still Lives (2015)

The story of an M.

Her name was Milena Jesenská.

She was born in Czech and rendered motherless at the age of 13 (or 16, depending on the source). She described herself as a sentimental, rebellious, difficult teenager who found it difficult to respect her father‘s patriarchal control and competitive cruelty. Like other bourgeois bullies, he spanked her. He locked her in closets. He put a premium on social standing and obedience. He had a vicious temper. He was a moralist, a conservative, a dentist, a businessman, and an antisemite.

Once she began reading, her world opened. Milena read voraciously. Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Meredith, Lev Tolstoy, Knut Hamsun, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Thomas Mann were among her favorites. As a teen, she snuck out of her father’s house to sit on the wall of a nearby cemetery and watch over the dead in their dealings with their living. She loved beauty and giving gifts. She strolled through Prague like a pre-Raphaelite, loose hair, arms filled with flowers. What stood out was her intense fellow-feeling for others, her disregard for social state status or material wealth, her fascination with fallen humans. From an early age, she valued love and relationality above positional status and market-based success. Friends said she “glided through life” as if not entirely grounded in it.

There is a dress in this, and a hue of bright purple.

Crouched on the steps of the concert hall, Milena was studying the musical score when a man appeared behind her and began reading along. Ernst Pollak. The two of them fell in love over music. And it was in the name of love that he agreed to hike one of the hills near Prague to watch the sun rise, as she wished – though love did not prevent him from complaining about the cold and exertion as he made his way up the incline. That sunrise turned into a locus for friendship. A circle of friends grew around Ernst and Milena, and they would hike Prague’s hills and read poetry or recite poems from the hillsides. Since folk songs were one of the few art forms that had not been suppressed or excised from Bohemia, culture and poetry developed from its bones and conventions. 

Milena means “loving one.” And this she did fiercely.

In 1917, as a result of her lax behaviour and moral misconduct, her father had her confined for nine months in the Veleslavín insane asylum on the grounds of ‘moral insanity’. At the time she was having an affair with Ernst Pollak, a bank clerk from the provincial town of Jičín, well-versed in music and literature, whom she married when she came of age at 21 and left with him for Vienna.

The first time she and Ernst had sex, she appeared in a friend‘s room afterwards. Her cheeks were flushed, eyes sparkling, childlike joy radiating from her heliotrope-colored dress. She didn’t think twice about leaving Prague and going with him to Vienna in 1918. She never thought twice about things she knew. Milena was enamored with his mind, his appetite, his culture, his intellect. He insisted on free love, and she obliged him. But she felt out of place among the cultivated Viennese women whose passion had never burned fingers or slammed doors. She was reckless in love, and generous in friendship. She taught Hermann Broch how to read and speak Czech for money. In conversations with friends, Milena complained of feeling  limited by the ways Ernst beheld her. She suspected he didn’t desire her because she had only one dress. She did cocaine, published articles in Tribuna, and translated texts by Rosa Luxemburg, Hermann Broch, Franz Werfel, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Paul Claudel. 

Then, in 1919, she read a short story by a minor writer named Franz Kafka and wrote him a letter seeking permission to translate from German into Czech. The following year, she went to meet Franz Kafka in a small town where he was being treated for tuberculosis. He described her as the “loving one” in their letters. There was no shame in her approach to love, no coquetry or manipulation. She told a friend, “You know nothing about a person until you’ve loved him.” Franz and Milena spent four blissful days together in Vienna. The chestnut trees burst into flowers around them.

The Nevertheless appears, as Kierkegaard hums in the margins.

In a letter dated September 18th, 1920, Kafka condemns himself for making things too hard, acknowledges that his fear made it difficult to keep from catastrophizing - “I was living off your gaze,” he tells her. Milena sees him as he wants to be seen. There is no “solid ground” beneath a divine gaze. One cannot live on earth at the same time. They had Vienna, and then the failure of the next meeting. Kafka is ill. He lists sanatoriums. His syntax stutters and recuses itself. Exhaustion perfuses his letters; he indicates resignation towards death as well as loss.

Believing yourself to be loved is not the same as living or inhabiting the difficulty of love, Kafka suggests on the evening of Sept. 20, 1920, when he looks at the speech acts of lovers, adding: “But those aren’t really lovers, they’re just grammarians.” He dreams that she is on fire and he cannot save her — it takes a fireman. But the Milena that survives as a wan, lifeless, sort of shadow of the self.

The “nevertheless”: this is what Kafka craves in her marriage to Pollack, the nevertheless which she articulates in her essay as why happiness is a silly goal for marriage. 

And the Neverthelessness gets published a few years later, in January 1923, as  “The Devil at The Hearth” by Milena Jesenská. Marrying for happiness is selfish, frivolous, and stupid, Milena argues. It is the same as marrying for money, for title, for luxury goods. “The only good reason for two people to get married is if it is impossible for them not to. If they simply cannot live without each other. No remorse, sentimentality, tragedy: it happens.”

Although Pollack cheated on her constantly, she had given him her “nevertheless” - her partnership - and this unconditionality is what Kafka most craved and refused of the world. There is no way to know the person one is marrying, Milena says. The countless “risks of disappointment” exist from the nature of marriage, and accepting them is critical to relationships. Against “the modern hysteria a la Anna Karenina,” she says, we should see each human as a world unto themselves and accept each other in order to affirm “feeling justified in being” one’s truest, least performative self.

“Proof that he is loved ‘nevertheless’” is more ethical and precise than the vow of romantic love until death. Milena mocks the “miserable, shabby happiness” of the marriages in which partners sacrifice everything and have every good fortune and still can’t be happy. The vow itself amounts to the “accepting a promise that can’t be kept” and then acting victimized a year later. Variance in emotional needs (and some have “a talent for being happy") makes it impossible to form a baseline guarantee of conditions to produce this inexplicable state. Because there is “a talent for being happy,” and because some find happiness in less, there is no guarantee of conditions to produce this inexplicable state. “Longing for happiness” is the cupcake of a relationship, and the rot of all teeth.

Franz replied to her (and it) with a lengthy letter dated “January-February 1923” which ends: “The evil magic of letter writing is setting in and destroying my nights, even more than they are already destroying themselves. I have to stop, I can no longer write. Oh, your insomnia is different from mine. Please let’s not write anymore.” After this — and between his death in June 1924 —  Kafka sent only two curt postcards (one mentioning his forthcoming death) and two about notes which seem to struggle for breath, for oxygen, for life.

By the time of Kafka’s death on June 3, 1924, Milena had broken up with Ernst Pollack. She returned to Prague, and married an architect, Jaromir Krejeor, a few years later. In 1928, she gave birth to a daughter named Jana. A few years later, she divorced Jaromir in order to live her life, and to continue writing and thinking. She joined the CP and wrote for them, addressing social issues like abortion and censorship in her articles. She did this despite the eye-rolls from men on the left. She wrote about socialization and gender at a time when social issues were considered irrelevant to the revolutionary economic issues at hand. In 1936, she stopped broke with the Party after the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev. She worked to help Jews escape to Poland and was arrested in November 1939.

Milena’s final years were spent in Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp. She never stopped writing and studying the world. One of Milena’s friends in the camp described a grotesque scene she had witnessed: a withered fellow prisoner made a pass at a “hardened criminal” and the two humans as if nothing could stop the dance of lust from surging between them. Milena smiled at her friend’s disgust and said, “Thank God love is indestructible. It’s stronger than any barbarian.”

Milena Jesenská, 1939, arrest

Grigory Zinoviev, 1920 (Bulla Studio)

* Heliotrope means “to move with the sun,” in reference to the flowers that follow the light of the sun throughout the day.

"These masses were made of fire."

She and the mountain’s genius
licking at her ankle.

Living out its other life
while she considers this one.

— Elizabeth Willis, “Madame Cezanne as Saint-Victoire”

1

All firsts lead back to Paris. In Paris, the artist reckons with the work of others, and the hierarchies that anoint the new stars.

“I will astonish Paris with an apple,” declared Paul Cézanne, after leaving his childhood home in Aix-en-Provence for the capital city.

Cezanne’s early oils linger in a dingy, sober palette; the paint applied in thick layers of impasto; a focus on color and perfection of silhouettes and perspectives as emphasized by the French Academy and the jury of the annual Salon. The artist must prove himself to others. This proof occurs formally, in the adoption of dominant styles and motifs, but also takes us space in the subject as conventions get pulled into the work.

2

Louis-Auguste Cézanne, the Artist's father, Reading “L'Evenement” (1866) Cezanne includes his own still life in the background. Maybe he hopes to solicit recognition from his scornful, disapproving father, Louis-August, who is depicted reading a liberal newspaper even though he was annoyingly outspoke about his conservative politics. A sort of idealization . . . or a joke about the artist’s power to change the world?

3

Parisian artists and their patrons are talking, and the artist must paint something that is worth discussing. He can’t set the tone of the conversation, so he borrows the motif and plays with quotation.

A Modern Olympia (1869-70) Cézanne's adaptation of the theme of the demi-mondaine, or high-class prostitute suggested in Édouard Manet's scandalous Olympia of 1863. Notes of anxiety and unease in the expressive, abbreviated figures, their faces outlined as masks rather than flesh. A vacancy of the face while bodies are dynamic and contoured with curves. Unlike Manet, Cézanne portrays the prostitute recoiling awkwardly in her nudity, drawing apart the figure of her suitor (which Manet rendered completely invisible) as a stranger, an outside. Some assume that the suitor is Cézanne himself.

4

All Cezanne's submissions to the Academy’s Salon were refused. In between seasons, he returned home to Aix regularly to be shamed by his practical father. Despite rejection, everything kept happening in the city, in the family, in the art world, in the salons, on the canvas. Three years— from 1870 to 1873— a frame that emphasizes the horizon.

In 1870, Cezanne moved to L'Estaque in southern France to evade the military draft. There, he fell in with the Impressionist Camille Pissarro, who convinced him to experiment with a brighter palette and to leave behind the heavy impasto technique for smaller, more vibrant brushstrokes. The Mediterranean sunlight touched everything; the landscape of cliffs and water beckoned as did the blues of the sea.

Cézanne then returned to Paris, where his son Paul was born, to his mistress, Hortense Fiquet. Cézanne painted over forty portraits of Forquet, as well as several enigmatic portraits of their son.

In 1873, Cézanne exhibited in the Salon des Réfuses, the notorious show of artists who had been refused by the official Salon (he counted himself among a circle that included Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro, among others). The critics slammed the avant-garde artists, which apparently hurt Cézanne deeply. In the next decade he mostly painted away from Paris, in either Aix or L'Estaque, and he no longer participated in unofficial group exhibitions.

5

Aix-en-Provence, the land of hidden ruins and ancient stones, windswept trees whispering to anise twigs, processions of stately cloud-shadows painting the hillsides of my memory. Cezanne moved to the countryside in Aix-en-Provence to paint “nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone,” in his own words. His dearest friend, Émile Zola, also hailed from Aix-en-Provence.

Paul Cezanne, Montagne Saint-victoire (n.d)

6

Never underestimate the power of a train window to focus the gaze. On April 24th, 1878, Cézanne wrote a letter to Émile Zola from the cabin of the newly inaugurated the Aix-Marseille train. The “beautiful motif” of Mont Sainte-Victoire struck the painter as the train crossed the Arc River Valley bridge. Cezanne wanted his friend to know he had seen something indescribable. After this letter, Cezanne commenced work on a series of paintings devoted to Mont Sainte-Victoire. This mountain would become the subject of almost eighty paintings and watercolors for Cezanne.

7

The artist composes himself from inspirations, longings, and desires that elocute possibility. The mountain he has studied for decades becomes a proxy for the self’s perception. Critic Joachim Gasquet said that Cézanne urged him to look at Ste.-Victoire, to note its spirit, its “imperious thirst for the sun,” and the “melancholy” that descends upon its slopes “in the evening, when all this weightiness falls back to earth..” The mountains cull favor with the eye. “These masses were made of fire,” Cézanne said. “Fire is in them still. Both darkness and daylight seem to recoil from them in fear, trembling. There above us is Plato's cave: see how, as large clouds pass by, the shadow that they ast shudders on the rocks, as if burned, suddenly swallowed by a mouth of fire.”

8

Cezanne treated the canvas as a sort of screen to register the artist's visual sensations and perceptions as he gazes intensely at a given subject. There is, I think, a sculptural dimension to his later works, visible in the way he applied pigments to canvas, using a series of separate, rhythmic brushstrokes to construct rather than paint a picture.

The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L'Estaque (1885), with its bright colors and architectonic houses defining the foreground; sky and sea concentrate the blues and complementary colors create illusion of pictorial depth. 

9

In 1886, after the death of his father, Cezanne married Hortense, and she became the official Madame Cezanne. The title of his paintings begin to reflect this shift, as in Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress (1888-90), where the various tones of red in the dress seems like the subject more than Hortense. The sitter's figure is rigidly imposing, almost soldier-like, her face plain and asymmetrical with only one ear visible. Geometrical accents dissect the canvas in both horizontal and vertical directions, thus creating the impression of a carefully arranged, monumental still life, as opposed to a portrait of a lifelong companion or lover. There is something of Cezanne’s late mountains in this portrait? Something of that constructive impulse?

10

Towards the end of his life, Cezanne painted one of the last landscapes of his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire, offering the view in an abstracted, elliptical vocabulary.

Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire c.1905

Rather than depicting rocks and trees in detail, Cezanne daubed them lightly, as if to soften and illume the representation. The mountain looms over the objects, its hues presenting the eye with a sort of assembled puzzle. Seams between colors are visible, loosening the grip on pictorial representation. Forms overlap; cool and warm hues interpenetrate; light is the story—- this relational light that burrows inside each object, bodies touched by light, surfaces altered by an earnest commitment to this two-dimensional aspect. (Egon Schiele was also driven by longing to relay what light does to each body. . .)

11

I mentioned Cezanne’s portrait of Hortense earlier —- there is an exquisite poem by Elizabeth Willis that treats “Madame Cezanne” as the mountain Cezanne adored:

And, of course, there is another “late” painting of the mountain, an painting that Cezanne left unfinished, a painting that might be more properly called the final brush with the mountain.

Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen From Les Lauves, 1902-1906

Marginalia on the self’s “composition”

“Of what use is biography in assessing someone who made himself up?” wondered Peter Scherjahl in a piece on Arshile Gorky’s art and persona. “Gorky told people, including his wife, that he was Russian, a cousin of the writer Maxim Gorky (evidently unaware that Maxim Gorky was a pen name) born in the Caucasus in 1905 and educated in France,” Scherjahl noted. But that is a false story. A story that made Arshile legible to an American audience who knew very little about Armenia or the rest of the world.

As PS tells it: “Actually, [Arshile Gorkey] was an Ottoman Armenian, Vosdanig Adoian, born circa 1902, in a village near Van. He couldn't speak Russian and never saw France. His father emigrated to America in 1908. His mother died in Yerevan, perhaps of starvation, in 1919, four years after the remaining family had fled the Turkish massacres. In 1920, Adoian and a sister joined relatives in Watertown, Massachusetts. The first evidence of his new identity appears as the signature Gorky, Arshele, on Park Street Church, Boston, a skillful pastiche of Neo-Impressionism that he painted in 1924 while teaching at an art school in Boston. He admired the work of John Singer Sargent before latching on to Cézanne as a god of art second only, later, to Picasso. Early imitations of Cézanne, in the show, are astonishingly acute. Cézanne is the foremost of painters who unfold their majesty to close-up inspection. (Gorky stumbled in his tyro emulations of Matisse and de Chirico, artists more reliant on overall design.) With Gorky, influence is no incidental issue. I think he never ceased to regard his own creations vicariously, through the conjured eyes of heroes—he cited Uccello, Grünewald, Ingres, Seurat. He spoke with scorn of "originality" as a criterion of artistic value.”

Dark days the bright gods willed,
Wounds you bore there,
Argos old soldiery
On Troy beach teeming,
Charmed out of time we see.
No life on earth can be
Hid from our dreaming.

— The Sirens

*

Brenda Hillman, “Cezanne’s Colors”
Elizabeth Willis, “Madame Cezanne as Saint-Victoire”

How Brenda Hillman describes the animating hope that Rainer Maria Rilke studied in Cezanne.