Reading Beckett: "These are dark sayings."

During the process of writing I was under the impression that I was turning out something very smart and witty; on occasions a like thing happens in dreams: you dream you are making a speech of the utmost brilliancy, but when you recall it upon awakening, it goes nonsensically: “Besides being silent before tea, I'm silent before eyes in mire and mirorage,” etc.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

1. THE SCENE FROM MURPHY

Thanks to the intervention of JB Yeats, the first novel that Samuel Beckett wrote, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, was finally published posthumously, in 1992. Many refer to Murphy, published in 1938, as Beckett’s first novel— but the first published novel is not the first novel so much as the first novel that a publisher believes can make money.

A lot hangs on those firsts. If one takes sales and market values as proper measures, Beckett’s first failed miserably.

Murphy’s protagonist, an Irishman living in London, aims to withdraw from the busyness and suffering of the world by seeking a state of nonexistence. His preferred methodology involves typing himself to a rocking in chair and sitting in the dark to rock "himself into oblivion." Any action is a problematic for Murphy, who refuses a job and leaves his fiancée to sex work before finally abandoning her and taking on a job at an asylum. There, among the mad, Murphy finds satisfaction in his role as caretaker of the abnormals. Part of what is at stake is the cost of normalcy: getting a job, marrying, doing the proper thing that an Irish family expects of its native son. In detaching himself from the world, Murphy rejects that normalcy, and so the asylum is often read as an alternate universe, a novel of sorts where possibility isn’t limited by convention. There is no meaning to be had in Murphy’s modern life. Beckett ends the book with the protagonist’s seemingly accidental death by gas inhalation in his apartment. The irresolution—and the fascinating work done by posthumous mourning— makes for a wonderfully unsettling finale.

I want to focus on a particular scene wherein Wylie and Neary carry on a conversation while drinking and thinking. Wylie inquires about Neary's whiskers and Neary replies: “Suppressed without pity in discharge of a vow, never again to vent a virility denied discharge into its predestined chamber.”

Here is the basic dialogue, as removed from the text by yours truly:

What follows this dialogue is “Neary's account, expurgated, accelerated, improved, and reduced” of how he gave up and reached the limit of his loving endurance for his crush; how Miss Dwyer “became one with the ground against which she had figured so prettily”; and how this is attenuated by the difference between characters.

Beckett steps in as narrator to offer commentary: “The problem then became how to break with the morsel of chaos without hurting its feelings. The plaisir de rompre, for Murphy the rationale of social contacts, was alien to Neary.”

Varying social desires are at play, since Murphy and Neary will each approach the problem of wanting to end a relationship from their internalized (largely-unconscious) valorizations. Beckett tells that Neary elects the “hackneyed device” of calling things off on the basis of his own unworthiness. March brings Miss Counihan to Neary's attention but alas “her breast was preoccupied.” Brilliantly, Beckett takes the literal, sexual breast and forces the reference to reflect the heart inside it. And then Miss Counihan tells Neary “her affections were in bond” to a Mr. Murphy, who happens to be one of Neary's “former scholars.” All of this is being recounted by Neary to Wylie.

This is the basic scene, driven by dialogue.

Grateful to Nate Wolff for spotting a whale where all I could see was the ocean of my own mortality on twiiter today! And to the Critical Hand Gestures tumblr, from whence good things come.

2. THE PHRASE THAT PROMPTED THIS

Enter the tiny dialectic, and the consequent delight of disambiguations. In January of last year, I decided to re-read Murphy in order to jog my memory on something that felt resonant in relation to the thing I was (and am) writing. Always, the thing one is writing becomes the thing one is thinking around and this instance was no different: Murphy led me back to Watt who led me to Molloy who led me to The Unnameable (a favorite) and suddenly, without having planned it, I had re-read all of Beckett’s novels and took notes.

The fact that I hadn’t studied Beckett in classroom settings made this journey shadier, for it limited my ontological commitments to considering “my Beckett,” the one who meets me on the page. These notes — the tinny close readings that are the source of this post — can’t partake of the status afforded to an assignment, a commission, or an official responsibility, and so I am typing them slowly, here and there, as time permits. Each note is structured as a scattered response to a particular phrase or phrasing in Beckett’s novels. In this case, what caught my attention was Wylie’s assertion, “These are dark sayings.” The declarative darkness intrigued me, as did Beckett’s use of the word “sayings,” a word that implies a public and a history.

WYLIE: These are dark sayings.

3. THE ‘NATURE’ OF FRIENDSHIP

NEARY: As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places.

WYLIE: Cathleen.

NEARY: Betray me and you go the way of Hippasos.

Neary begins by comparing sexual desire with intellectual friendship: true intimacy (or “the full”) occurs when the lover or friend gains “admittance to the most retired places.” Already, we are looking at an ancient question in philosophy, a question that can be glossed as the responsibility humans incur by virtue of relating to one another. If Neary’s aphoristic statement locates the speakers in relation to this responsibility, then Wylie’s response is lightly provocative: he mentions a girl outside the distancing use of Miss or Ms and says a first-name, Cathleen.

This name prompts Neary to issue a warning about betrayal, a warning alluding to the Greek philosopher, Hippasos/Hippasus, an early follower of Pythagoras sometimes credited with the discovery of irrational numbers.

Betrayal implies that a trust has been broken, possibly through public exposure of a secret or privacy. In this context, betrayal also assumes the presence of a sort of knowledge that is not available to everyone but only to those who have admittance.

4. THE PYTHAGOREAN SITUATION

What is the significance of this allusion to Pythagoreans?

We know that Pythagorean thinking influenced Hellenist philosophy and culture. The last thing the Pythagoreans wanted was to discover irrational numbers. All Pythagoreans believed that reality is fundamentally mathematical and all physical things, from musical scales, the spherical earth, the cosmos, or mathematically related.

Pythagorean thinking influenced Greek culture, informing the Greek view that knowledge needed to resemble math, and to partake of math’s universality and permanence. Similiarly, knowledge was to arrived at through pure thought (rather than experience) untainted by the senses.

NEARY: Betray me and you go the way of Hippasos.

WYLIE: The Akousmatic, I presume. His retribution slips my mind.

Wylie is telling Neary that he can’t remember what happened to Hippasus. Perhaps Beckett is also telling us perhaps that the operant reading of Hippasus involves “retribution,” or what Merriam-Webster defines as “punishment imposed (as on a convicted criminal) for purposes of repayment or revenge for the wrong committed.” A wrongdoing occurred and Hippasus was punished to atone for this wrongdoing. But atonement, in this context, doesn’t refer to Judaic or Christian notions of sin.

“Akousmatics” were Pythagoreans of the Outside Circle who didn't live on the school grounds with Pythagoras. Instead, the Outside Circle folks went home to sleep and attended the school during the day. If this made the Inside Circle folks suspicious of the Akousmatics’ commitment to Pythagoras, then it is in the nature of things that such suspicion would lead to gossip and rumors.

The fact that the square root of two could not be expressed as a perfect fraction led Pythagorean's to the unfortunate discovery of irrational numbers, a blow against their idea of perfection and one they may have tried to conceal.

Imagine how groups evolve under conditions where knowledge establishes itself in incontrovertible relation to eternity, for this sort of imagining makes it possible to see how the Pythagoreans became a sect, a school including a small group of people devoted to keeping a secret. And sects are defined by their relationship to secret knowledge, gnosis, etc, so a condition of membership required Pythagoreans to adopt a code of silence (omerta) about the Big Secret, namely, that the dodecahedron represented the shape of the universe.

As the fifth polyhedron, the dodecahedron outnumbered by one the number of recognized elements. Any number that stands apart has a little glow, a halo of possible confetti, that grants the possibility for mysticism.  

5. THE DEMISE OF HIPPASUS

NEARY: Drowned in a puddle for having divulged the incommensurability of side and diagonal.

There are multiple accounts of Hippasus’ demise. One account has it that Hippasus drowned at sea (which is a much larger body of water than the middling “puddle” Beckett provides for drowning, a puddle being a piddling thing when placed near a lake) and that his death was a punishment inflicted by the gods who were angered by Hippasus’ incorrigibility and disorder-making. By announcing the discovery of irrational numbers as his own, Hippasus broke with the convention of crediting discoveries to one's school or the leading philosopher. On this view, Hippasus denied Pythagoras the respect he was due. The gods could not tolerate such breaches of order.

Another account(s) hold that Hippasus drowned in the ocean because he revealed how to create a dodecahedron inside a sphere, thus giving away an esoteric secret limited to members of his school or cult. Neary’s mentioning of “side and diagonal” suggests that Beckett wanted Neary (at least) to represent the dodocahedron account.

WYLIE: So perish all babblers.

Pythagoreans knew that breaking the vow of silence and leaking information about the dodecahedron to outsiders would result in their death at the hands of better, more rigorous Pythagoreans. (In Pythagorrea, as in the present, “rigor” shifted from describing the process of thinking and arriving at ideas to describing the role played by gatekeepers and guardians of the ideas. No one is as rigorous as the gatekeeper.)

6. OFFENSE AND OFFENDING ACTION

If Hippasus' crime was that of immodesty, then the offending action involved taking credit for a discovery that wasn't 'his'. If his crime was that of betrayal, then the bad action involved talking about what he had learned to those outside of the school, on the assumption that outsiders lacked the capacity to draw wisdom from it. But something interesting happens in the confluence between these two possibilities—for now it seems as if modesty is tied to the capacity of both not taking credit (i.e. respecting hierarchy) and not betraying the hidden knowledge of one's sect or small group. The immodest person cannot put the needs of the group (in this case, those needs also demonstrate the appropriate relationship to knowledge) before his own. This may be intentional or just a facet of clumsiness, but the absence of self-discipline is considered dangerous. And there is a textual basis for focusing on this confluence. In Life of Pythagoras, Iamblichus said Pythagoras examined those interested in studying with him to see if they could 'hold their tongue' and demonstrate modesty, which involved the ability to "keep to themselves what they had learned during the instruction they had received." The Pythagorean idea of modesty seems to conflate visibility and publicity, or the act of making public, with boasting. Ontology inches towards ethics here— but doesn’t it always?

7. THE PROBLEMATIC SENSORY ORGAN KNOWN AS THE EAR

We can’t properly defend ourselves against what we hear, and this leaves us with the capacity to be perpetually shocked and surprised by it.

In On Listening, Plutarch quotes Theophrastus as saying that the ear, or listening, is the sense "most connected to the passions. Nothing we see, taste, or touch produces so much panic, disorder and turmoil as those which grip the soul when certain ringing, crashing, and screeching noises strike our hearing."

No one gets ‘used to’ the blare of emergency sirens rushing past their house. If Odysseus could hardly resist the songs of the Sirens, it is because music and sound is the most irresistible facet of existence.

8. A NOTE ON TRANSLATION

BECKETT: The problem then became how to break with the morsel of chaos without hurting its feelings. The plaisir de rompre, for Murphy the rationale of social contacts, was alien to Neary.

I want to work backwards, from this second line where Murphy is painted as someone driven by the hunger to sate his plaisir de rompre. It is interesting that Beckett doesn’t translate this French phrase, so an English reader could take it mean the pleasure of romping: nothing in the context of the sentences prevents this, and homophonic energy encourages it. But rompre means “to break or to break-up” (synonyms include briser, rompre, casser, se briser, se casser, interrompre).

There are two reasons for which Beckett might have left the phrase in its original; neither reason excludes the other from also being true. If he translated the phrase, readers wouldn’t make a connection to Jules Renard’s play, Le plaisir de rompre, which was originally published in 1898. Renard’s title is often translated as “The Pleasure of Breaking.” Translating the phrase might also diminish the likelihood of it being misunderstood. Beckett’s obsession with misunderstanding surges throughout his work, and it’s hard to believe he’d relinquish an opportunity to amplify it.

9. HOW THE PROBLEMATIC OBJECT ‘FEELS’

Let’s return:

BECKETT: The problem then became how to break with the morsel of chaos without hurting its feelings. The plaisir de rompre, for Murphy the rationale of social contacts, was alien to Neary.

Starting with “the problem” expressed at the outset, we know that Neary elects the "hackneyed device" of calling things off on the basis of his own unworthiness, and we know that Neary makes this decision, allegedly, in response to the problem of how to “break with the more morsel without hurting its feelings,” or how to end a significant relationship without wounding Miss Myer. On the surface, this seems like a noble sentiment, and one could even believe in Neary’s sensitivity if not for the objectifying function of Beckett’s decision to have Neary refer to Miss Myer as it.

The “morsel of chaos” has “feelings”; and these feelings are intefering with Neary’s plans. But these feelings also evoke a repetition past, namely, the repetition deployed by Soren Kierkegaard (or his Constantius) in Repetition. For there is a sense in which the repetition calls for a “recollection,” or a recognition of the sort that drives Platonic consciousness.

KIERKEGAARD: Externality is too dense a body for resonance, and the sensual ear is too hard of hearing to catch the eternal's repetition (Works of Love).

Fine, but why should Kierkegaard care about what Beckett has Neary say? 

Because what Neary says allows Beckett to say something additional, namely, that Kierkegaard’s strategy to convince Regine that he wasn't worthy of her love was, in fact, an objectifying strategy. Hiding beneath a pseudonym couldn’t disguise that K. relied on a deep objectification to accomplish it.

The fact that Kierkegaard was dead when Beckett wrote this doesn't prevent Beckett from saying it to Kierkegaard.

The fact that Beckett is dead when I read it doesn't prevent Beckett from saying it to me.

What is fantastic about Beckett’s writing is his deliberate turn to philosophy under highly abstracted conditions that use intertextual references and allusions to deal with philosophical questions. The questions, of course, are eternal. And the author took Blaise Pascal at his word when he withdrew to the room of the cottage to wrangle with hypotheticals. Lest we forget it, this act of wrangling with hypotheticals happens within literature, and the problems posed by literature resemble the problems posed by philosophy, even if the style and formal commitments are different.

Beckett borrowed the form of the Platonic dialogue and deconstructed its charm to render it modern and to locate it within the space of contested meaning. This is the space of language as we know it since Wittgenstein and deconstructionism.

10. PATHOLOGY AND ANGELOLOGY

NEARY: That long hank of Apollinian asthenia, that schizoidal spasmophile, occupying the breast of angel Counihan.

Asthenia is a physical weakness or lack or energy. The “breast of angel Counihan” is the objective correlative of the Miss Counihan’s “heart,” which is the objective correlative intended to signify romantic love or commitment.

Beckett benefits from connotation by declaring Murphy to be a spasmophile, which, in context, could be read as an orgasm-junkie driven by the lust to sate his plaisir de rompre, all the while Beckett's jam of sonic proximities increases the misunderstanding between what superficially looks an awful lot like banality. 

Platonic knowledge relies on recognition. In the first hour of his lecture notes dated February 12, 1982, Michel Foucault expounded on this recognition as "the soul's grasp of its own being, which it carries out by looking at itself in the mirror of intelligibility in which, precisely, it has to recognize itself,” adding:

“Recollection is situated exactly at the point where care of the self and self-knowledge meet. The soul discovers what it is by recalling what it has seen. And it is by recalling what it is that it finds again access to what it has seen.”

11. THE PYSCHE’S PUDENDA

It is common knowledge that Beckett's characters are forever setting off on various and sundry journeys that involve going nowhere or staying put. And this is the our first glimpse of Murphy as well, for the novel that Beckett titled Murphy begins with our hero bound to the wooden chair by seven scarves so that "only the most local movements were possible," thus enabling him to be "alive in his mind . . .  And life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word."

Murphy is the one who has strapped himself to the mast of the chair in order to court the sirens of his imagination. 

He is the "long hank of Apollonian asthenia" that tries to avoid the world's bustle and the distractions that prevent him from thinking. Here are the pudenda of my psyche. Alone in a room like Pascal, a man needs a god or a story to make sense of things.

WITTGENSTEIN: Philosophy hasn't made any progress? If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress?

According to a recklessly wonderful essay by Matt Seidel, the young Beckett quibbled with a critic's reading of Herman Hesse's Demian. Walter Bauer had described Demian's coming-of-age as “Die notwendige Reise” (or “The Necessary Journey”), a description that Beckett contested in his journal with the following words:

12. ADDENDA

Additional questions and answers in no particular order:

1. We lack clear evidence about Hippasus’ crimes. As if to inoculate themselves from death-by-puddle, no ancient writers credited Hippasus with the discovery of irrational numbers. 

2. “Imagine.”

3. How could work Kierkegaard’s repetition into an infinite demand that undoes Repetition? I don’t know, but Simon Critchley’s reading of Kierkegaard’s writing on love struck me as interesting. To quote Simon Critchley in the book he titled Bald: “If sin is the theological name for the essential ontological indebtedness of the self, then love is the experience of a countermovement to sin that is oriented to a demand that exceeds the capacity or ability of the self. Love is shaped in relation to what … can be called an infinite demand.”

4. No asterisks. No one will get this far.

Infinite with no center: the conditions of the speaker.

The story of my life doesn't exist. Does not exist. There's never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it's not true, there was no one.

– Marguerite Duras, The Lover

It is true that romance approaches the extremes of feeling and desire by way of a discourse of love: but love can be thought of as a way of managing the sheer ambiguity of romantic language and expectation.

— Lauren Berlant

1.

Describing her life as “completely screwed up” and therefore “fertile, abundant ground to write on,” Marguerite Duras named the personal terrain and then qualified it with the following statement: “When I say suffering, here, I mean the ambiguous ground of happiness.” For Duras, intelligence, consciousness, and thinking drive the hunger to write. The desire emerges from a commitment to interiority, but publication is its necessary condition: “Without the prostitution of publication, without the public act, there’s no writing.” The humiliation of publication is propounded by the labor of being one’s own pimp under late capitalism. For Duras, “the hell of a unique love story” is more compelling than the surrendering to the fear of writing it. Or finding oneself written by it. The Lover moves through her texts, appending the first to the last, for it the first love that gets carried into other stories. The first love is the template, the singular term of comparison: its subjects the lover are irrevocably marked by its languages, places, and topos. But the violence of writing, of attempting to give form to the things that deform us, supersedes the violence of love. 

Comparing writing to the birth of a child, Duras couldn’t "discern a difference between the two”; "writing is wholly equivalent to life,” a form of experience, a book is a time one lives through as a relationship. Describing her experience of being as “a writer” rather than “someone who lives," Duras blurs the distance between imagining and acting. Life is the thing which occurs on the page rather than in the room which the page creates, remembers, or dismembers.

"That people kill themselves because of my books won’t stop me from writing," Duras announced. "Catholic guilt” does not apply. She would continue writing if her books took lives, but not if her books created "reactionaries, political assholes."  

“A metaphor is a species of symbol,” said Anne Carson, “So it’s a lover.”

The lover is the thing one buries in a book. The book is a tomb for a time-space that reckons with its own limitations. The culture industry prefers to keep the dead out of sight, out of mind; the capacity to perform this erasure is taken to signify psychological competence, and to indicate “good mental health”. Not mentioning the dead, not airing their names like dirty laundry, forgetting them: all these expressions evoke an obsession with social hygiene that renders respect for the dead as a sign of a twisted psychic attachment, a mental deformation of a relationship whose only significance exists in the churn of presence across a daily life. 

There is a passage Hélène Cixous’ Steps Up the Ladder of Writing that refuses to oblige this injunction to render the dead unmentionable:

Writing or saying the truth is equivalent to death, since we cannot tell the truth. It is in every way forbidden because it hurts everyone. We never say the truth, we must lie, mostly as a result of two needs: our need for love and cowardice. The cowardice of love but also love's courage. Cowardice and courage are so close that they are often exchanged. Cowardice is probably the strange, tortuous path of courage.

Love is tortuous. So it is only at the very last page of a book that we perhaps get a chance to say what we have never said, write what we have never written all our lives, i.e., the most precarious, the best, in other words, the worst. I have respect and admiration for those writers who, in their lifetime, have approached that point where cowardice and courage are so close to each other they might fly into the flames if they were to say one word more. This is what Tsvetaeva describes, the point that I call the truth and which she calls the magical words in writing.

"Christianity's condemnation of degradation has also been responsible for the attitude that the whole of eroticism is something evil,” wrote Georges Bataille in Erotism.

2.

“Why does death come to mind when thinking of love?” wondered Michel Leiris, before pinning the blame on his parents’ passion for opera. The childhood association between love and death was nourished by the aria, and the cadence that bound pleasure to loss. Decades later, "those childish regrets in the theater" still made him "want to weep." But Leiris' anticipatory weeping is by nature confined to childhood recollections and involuntary memories. His texts rarely grant contemporary events such power over his emotional states.

“What is forbidden is unfortunately the best and that is joy,” Hélène Cixous wrote. “That is the definition of truth, see, right, it is the thing you must not say.”. And it recognizes us in a line, a scene, a light, a landscape. We encounter it with alarm, with horror, for the world cannot go back to its former self. Not unless we agree to lie, trivialize, to dissimulate – to collaborate in the reburial of truth— discursive collaborations which Cixous refuses.

Instead, the writer leverages language to depict “the scene of the crime,” or the space in which the criminal heart of humans is not hidden. “We must keep our crime in order to keep our crimes safe to avoid the terrible fate of being forgiven,” claims Cixous. There is no safety in lifting the pen.

The “lovecrimes” of writing are constituted by the expectations inherent to narrativity. No single narrative could satisfy the truth conditions of a relationship as defined within language, circumscribed by what is said and communicated between two parties who believe in an “us” they invented.

As for socialization, or social scripts, the princess needs the monster in order to have an excuse to marry the man. But she also needs the monstrous as an imaginary that turns the man she married into an erotic possibility.

“Now you know,” my Bunicu said, “that nothing is like your Disneyworld television. The princess is just an ornament until the demon or the monster arrives. The monster is that terrible unknown beast that threatens us, and the threat is what makes the princess precious.”

precious adjective (of an object, substance, or resource) of great value; not to be wasted or treated carelessly.
noun; used as a term of address for a beloved person, as in "don't be frightened, my precious"

The story anticipates the monster's presence: the character is shaped by waiting to meet the thing she imagines. This is why desire is monstrous. 

When Bunicu told me that “the monster, the threat, is what makes the princess precious,” he was speaking about literature, while inadvertently (or perhaps intentionally) referencing the economic and social conditions under which a female character is valorized. To be precious or valuable is associated with scarcity and uniqueness, as constructed through the ideology of romantic love. For the little girl listening to her grandfather speak of fairy tale heroines, the semantic difference is slight. For the adult, the difference is a market.

POSTSCRIPT

In esoteric Islamic philosophy, “Cloud” (a.k.a. Divine Breath or Imagination) is one of the intermediary terms that designates a zone of separation between opposing terms thus preventing their collapse into one another. According to Joan Copjec, these intermediary terms are where “relationships are established between terms that do no preexist their relationship, a fact that reinforces the intermediary’s status as first . . . Cloud is neither being nor nonbeing but ‘being in suspense’; it suspends or limits absolute power and maximizes tension.”

Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi (1617) includes an image of nonexistence. The black square is intended to represent the void or nothingness prior to the universe’s coming into being. Each of the four sides of the square includes the words, “Et sic in infinitum…” (And so on to infinity…”). And yet, this inscription—- perhaps more than the box, itself—- feels like a boundary, or a way of forcing us to reckon with observation’s inherent boundedness.

*

Anna Kornbluh, “Against Anti-Theory” e-flux journal, February 9, 2024.
Hélène Cixous, Sarah Cornell, and Susan Sellers, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (Columbia University Press, 1993) 
Marguerite Duras, Me & Other Writing, trans. Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan (Dorothy Project, 2019)
Max Cavitch, “Everybody’s Autotheory,” Modern Language Quarterly 83:1 (March 2022)
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (translated by Richard Howard)
The Hinternet Editorial Board, “Autofiction’s All We’ve Ever Known”

Twain's acknowledgements.

Philosophy hasn't made any progress? If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress?

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

I have left Llandudno for Oxford. I saw Bronowski. A talkative shit.

— Samuel Beckett to Thomas McGreevy, before August 5, 1930

No fluff— unless you count the embroidery-work of Lily Yeats pictured (in part) above.

Acknowledgments and bust.

The “Acknowledgements” section in Mark Twain’s A Horse’s Tale

Although I have had several opportunities to see a bull-fight, I have never seen one; but I needed a bull-fight in this book, and a trustworthy one will be found in it. I got it out of John Hay’s Castilian Days, reducing and condensing it to fit the requirements of this small story. Mr. Hay and I were friends from early times, and if he were still with us he would not rebuke me for the liberty I have taken.

The knowledge of military minutiæ exhibited in this book will be found to be correct, but it is not mine; I took it from Army Regulations, ed. 1904; Hardy’s Tactics—Cavalry, revised ed., 1861; and Jomini’s Handbook of Military Etiquette, West Point ed., 1905.

It would not be honest in me to encourage by silence the inference that I composed the Horse’s private bugle-call, for I did not. I lifted it, as Aristotle says. It is the opening strain in The Pizzicato in Sylvia, by Delibes. When that master was composing it he did not know it was a bugle-call, it was I that found it out.

Along through the book I have distributed a few anachronisms and unborn historical incidents and such things, so as to help the tale over the difficult places. This idea is not original with me; I got it out of Herodotus. Herodotus says, “Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.”

The cats in the chair do not belong to me, but to another. These are all the exceptions. What is left of the book is mine.

- MARK TWAIN.

Lone Tree Hill, Dublin, New Hampshire, October, 1905.

A statue from the sculpture garden outside the New Orleans Museum of Art… which I barely saw, thanks to Radu’s voracious appetite for squirrels.

And now, for a little bit of Twain in my favorite key, namely, the diaries of Adam and Eve— a few scattered excerpts, with more available online, should you seek them.

Extracts from Adam's Diary

SATURDAY.--The new creature eats too much fruit. We are going to run short, most likely. “We” again--that is ITS word; mine, too, now, from hearing it so much. Good deal of fog this morning. I do not go out in the fog myself. This new creature does. It goes out in all weathers, and stumps right in with its muddy feet. And talks. It used to be so pleasant and quiet here.

MONDAY.--The new creature says its name is Eve. That is all right, I have no objections. Says it is to call it by, when I want it to come. I said it was superfluous, then. The word evidently raised me in its respect; and indeed it is a large, good word and will bear repetition. It says it is not an It, it is a She. This is probably doubtful; yet it is all one to me; what she is were nothing to me if she would but go by herself and not talk.

SUNDAY.--Pulled through.

MONDAY.--I believe I see what the week is for: it is to give time to rest up from the weariness of Sunday. It seems a good idea. . . . She has been climbing that tree again. Clodded her out of it. She said nobody was looking. Seems to consider that a sufficient justification for chancing any dangerous thing. Told her that. The word justification moved her admiration— and envy, too, I thought. It is a good word.

TUESDAY.--She told me she was made out of a rib taken from my body. This is at least doubtful, if not more than that. I have not missed any rib. . . . She is in much trouble about the buzzard; says grass does not agree with it; is afraid she can't raise it; thinks it was intended to live on decayed flesh. The buzzard must get along the best it can with what is provided. We cannot overturn the whole scheme to accommodate the buzzard.

SUNDAY.--Pulled through.

TUESDAY.--She has taken up with a snake now. The other animals are glad, for she was always experimenting with them and bothering them; and I am glad because the snake talks, and this enables me to get a rest.

THREE MONTHS LATER.--The perplexity augments instead of diminishing. I sleep but little. It has ceased from lying around, and goes about on its four legs now. Yet it differs from the other four legged animals, in that its front legs are unusually short, consequently this causes the main part of its person to stick up uncomfortably high in the air, and this is not attractive. It is built much as we are, but its method of traveling shows that it is not of our breed. The short front legs and long hind ones indicate that it is a of the kangaroo family, but it is a marked variation of that species, since the true kangaroo hops, whereas this one never does. Still it is a curious and interesting variety, and has not been catalogued before. As I discovered it, I have felt justified in securing the credit of the discovery by attaching my name to it, and hence have called it Kangaroorum Adamiensis. . . .

Eve’s Diary

“Translated from the original”

SATURDAY.--I am almost a whole day old, now. I arrived yesterday. That is as it seems to me. And it must be so, for if there was a day-before-yesterday I was not there when it happened, or I should remember it. It could be, of course, that it did happen, and that I was not noticing. Very well; I will be very watchful now, and if any day-before-yesterdays happen I will make a note of it. It will be best to start right and not let the record get confused, for some instinct tells me that these details are going to be important to the historian some day. For I feel like an experiment, I feel exactly like an experiment; it would be impossible for a person to feel more like an experiment than I do, and so I am coming to feel convinced that that is what I AM--an experiment; just an experiment, and nothing more.

Then if I am an experiment, am I the whole of it? No, I think not; I think the rest of it is part of it. I am the main part of it, but I think the rest of it has its share in the matter. Is my position assured, or do I have to watch it and take care of it? The latter, perhaps. Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy. [That is a good phrase, I think, for one so young.]

Everything looks better today than it did yesterday. In the rush of finishing up yesterday, the mountains were left in a ragged condition, and some of the plains were so cluttered with rubbish and remnants that the aspects were quite distressing. Noble and beautiful works of art should not be subjected to haste; and this majestic new world is indeed a most noble and beautiful work. And certainly marvelously near to being perfect, notwithstanding the shortness of the time. There are too many stars in some places and not enough in others, but that can be remedied presently, no doubt. The moon got loose last night, and slid down and fell out of the scheme --a very great loss; it breaks my heart to think of it. There isn't another thing among the ornaments and decorations that is comparable to it for beauty and finish. It should have been fastened better. If we can only get it back again-- But of course there is no telling where it went to. And besides, whoever gets it will hide it; I know it because I would do it myself. I believe I can be honest in all other matters, but I already begin to realize that the core and center of my nature is love of the beautiful, a passion for the beautiful, and that it would not be safe to trust me with a moon that belonged to another person and that person didn't know I had it. I could give up a moon that I found in the daytime, because I should be afraid some one was looking; but if I found it in the dark, I am sure I should find some kind of an excuse for not saying anything about it. For I do love moons, they are so pretty and so romantic. I wish we had five or six; I would never go to bed; I should never get tired lying on the moss-bank and looking up at them.

Stars are good, too. I wish I could get some to put in my hair. But I suppose I never can. You would be surprised to find how far off they are, for they do not look it. When they first showed, last night, I tried to knock some down with a pole, but it didn't reach, which astonished me; then I tried clods till I was all tired out, but I never got one. It was because I am left-handed and cannot throw good. Even when I aimed at the one I wasn't after I couldn't hit the other one, though I did make some close shots, for I saw the black blot of the clod sail right into the midst of the golden clusters forty or fifty times, just barely missing them, and if I could have held out a little longer maybe I could have got one.

So I cried a little, which was natural, I suppose, for one of my age, and after I was rested I got a basket and started for a place on the extreme rim of the circle, where the stars were close to the ground and I could get them with my hands, which would be better, anyway, because I could gather them tenderly then, and not break them. But it was farther than I thought, and at last I had go give it up; I was so tired I couldn't drag my feet another step; and besides, they were sore and hurt me very much.

[….]

Today I am getting better ideas about distances. I was so eager to get hold of every pretty thing that I giddily grabbed for it, sometimes when it was too far off, and sometimes when it was but six inches away but seemed a foot--alas, with thorns between! I learned a lesson; also I made an axiom, all out of my own head --my very first one; THE SCRATCHED EXPERIMENT SHUNS THE THORN. I think it is a very good one for one so young.

I followed the other Experiment around, yesterday afternoon, at a distance, to see what it might be for, if I could. But I was not able to make out. I think it is a man. I had never seen a man, but it looked like one, and I feel sure that that is what it is. I realize that I feel more curiosity about it than about any of the other reptiles. If it is a reptile, and I suppose it is; for it has frowzy hair and blue eyes, and looks like a reptile. It has no hips; it tapers like a carrot; when it stands, it spreads itself apart like a derrick; so I think it is a reptile, though it may be architecture.

I was afraid of it at first, and started to run every time it turned around, for I thought it was going to chase me; but by and by I found it was only trying to get away, so after that I was not timid any more, but tracked it along, several hours, about twenty yards behind, which made it nervous and unhappy. At last it was a good deal worried, and climbed a tree. I waited a good while, then gave it up and went home. Today the same thing over. I've got it up the tree again.

TUESDAY.--All the morning I was at work improving the estate; and I purposely kept away from him in the hope that he would get lonely and come. But he did not.

At noon I stopped for the day and took my recreation by flitting all about with the bees and the butterflies and reveling in the flowers, those beautiful creatures that catch the smile of God out of the sky and preserve it! I gathered them, and made them into wreaths and garlands and clothed myself in them while I ate my luncheon --apples, of course; then I sat in the shade and wished and waited. But he did not come. […] He does not care for me, he does not care for flowers, he does not care for the painted sky at eventide--is there anything he does care for, except building shacks to coop himself up in from the good clean rain, and thumping the melons, and sampling the grapes, and fingering the fruit on the trees, to see how those properties are coming along?

I laid a dry stick on the ground and tried to bore a hole in it with another one, in order to carry out a scheme that I had, and soon I got an awful fright. A thin, transparent bluish film rose out of the hole, and I dropped everything and ran! I thought it was a spirit, and I WAS so frightened! But I looked back, and it was not coming; so I leaned against a rock and rested and panted, and let my limps go on trembling until they got steady again; then I crept warily back, alert, watching, and ready to fly if there was occasion; and when I was come near, I parted the branches of a rose-bush and peeped through--wishing the man was about, I was looking so cunning and pretty--but the sprite was gone. I went there, and there was a pinch of delicate pink dust in the hole. I put my finger in, to feel it, and said OUCH! and took it out again. It was a cruel pain. I put my finger in my mouth; and by standing first on one foot and then the other, and grunting, I presently eased my misery; then I was full of interest, and began to examine.

I was curious to know what the pink dust was. Suddenly the name of it occurred to me, though I had never heard of it before. It was FIRE! I was as certain of it as a person could be of anything in the world. So without hesitation I named it that--fire.

I had created something that didn't exist before; I had added a new thing to the world's uncountable properties; I realized this, and was proud of my achievement, and was going to run and find him and tell him about it, thinking to raise myself in his esteem --but I reflected, and did not do it. No--he would not care for it. He would ask what it was good for, and what could I answer? for if it was not GOOD for something, but only beautiful, merely beautiful-- So I sighed, and did not go. For it wasn't good for anything; it could not build a shack, it could not improve melons, it could not hurry a fruit crop; it was useless, it was a foolishness and a vanity; he would despise it and say cutting words. But to me it was not despicable; I said, "Oh, you fire, I love you, you dainty pink creature, for you are BEAUTIFUL--and that is enough!" and was going to gather it to my breast. But refrained. Then I made another maxim out of my head, though it was so nearly like the first one that I was afraid it was only a plagiarism: "THE BURNT EXPERIMENT SHUNS THE FIRE."

I wrought again; and when I had made a good deal of fire-dust I emptied it into a handful of dry brown grass, intending to carry it home and keep it always and play with it; but the wind struck it and it sprayed up and spat out at me fiercely, and I dropped it and ran. When I looked back the blue spirit was towering up and stretching and rolling away like a cloud, and instantly I thought of the name of it--SMOKE!--though, upon my word, I had never heard of smoke before.

Soon brilliant yellow and red flares shot up through the smoke, and I named them in an instant--FLAMES--and I was right, too, though these were the very first flames that had ever been in the world. They climbed the trees, then flashed splendidly in and out of the vast and increasing volume of tumbling smoke, and I had to clap my hands and laugh and dance in my rapture, it was so new and strange and so wonderful and so beautiful!

He came running, and stopped and gazed, and said not a word for many minutes. Then he asked what it was. Ah, it was too bad that he should ask such a direct question. I had to answer it, of course, and I did. I said it was fire. If it annoyed him that I should know and he must ask; that was not my fault; I had no desire to annoy him. After a pause he asked:

“How did it come?”

Another direct question, and it also had to have a direct answer.

“I made it.”

The fire was traveling farther and farther off. He went to the edge of the burned place and stood looking down, and said:

“What are these?”

“Fire-coals.”

He picked up one to examine it, but changed his mind and put it down again. Then he went away. NOTHING interests him.

But I was interested. There were ashes, gray and soft and delicate and pretty--I knew what they were at once. And the embers; I knew the embers, too. I found my apples, and raked them out, and was glad; for I am very young and my appetite is active. But I was disappointed; they were all burst open and spoiled. Spoiled apparently; but it was not so; they were better than raw ones. Fire is beautiful; some day it will be useful, I think.

FRIDAY.--I saw him again, for a moment, last Monday at nightfall, but only for a moment. I was hoping he would praise me for trying to improve the estate, for I had meant well and had worked hard. But he was not pleased, and turned away and left me. He was also displeased on another account: I tried once more to persuade him to stop going over the Falls. That was because the fire had revealed to me a new passion--quite new, and distinctly different from love, grief, and those others which I had already discovered--FEAR. And it is horrible!--I wish I had never discovered it; it gives me dark moments, it spoils my happiness, it makes me shiver and tremble and shudder. But I could not persuade him, for he has not discovered fear yet, and so he could not understand me.

*

Beirut, “So Allowed”
Lily Yeats, embroideries
Mark Twain, A Horse’s Tale
Mark Twain, Eve’s Diary and Excerpts from Adam’s Diary

Some, sum, somme.

In space that her torque and lift have prefigured and set free   
between her mother and her child the woman stands   
having emptied her hands.

— Marie Ponsot, “Between”

“That zeal for free will get us in deep”

“Mistress of accurate minor pain, / Lend wit for forbearance, prideless Jane,” Marie Ponsot whispered in the privacy of her profanations, in the folds of the poem titled “Private and Profane,” where the enumerated saints are the humans who influenced her intellection rather than Jesus’ obedient followers. The supplicant’s voice knows its address is heretical.

This Kierkegaardian love/mistrust binary fuels the tension in Ponsot’s poetry, where recognition is often derailed by gender socialization and social constructions of identity qua being. I’m thinking of how Soren Kierkegaard put these “two equal possibilities” in Works of Love:

When deception and truth are presented as two equal possibilities in contrast to each other, the decision is whether there is love or mistrust in you. For example, one says, "Even what appears to be the purest feeling can nevertheless be a deception – certainly it is possible; it must be possible– ergo I choose mistrust or belief in nothing.”

The problem is the how much depends upon this facile presumption of equality.

“That the chance to choose be the one we keep”

Enter Louise Nevelson, the sculptor whose work moves in counterpoint to Ponsot. Nevelson crafted an exquisite persona from excess and old furniture fragments. She invented a usable childhood to leverage her countercultural choices and never sat still long enough to commit to her shadows and shades. Like Lady Gaga, she was ‘born this way,’ hatched by artifice, wed to self-fashioning as a means of escape. Nevelson’s Philosophy of the Egg, in her own words:

I remember when I was six years old at play recess in school. One girl was taking advantage of another. So I went up to the girl who was being bullied to reassure her that she didn’t have to be conned. And she wasn’t even a friend of mine. At six years old you don’t battle for people unless you’re born with it. It’s like an egg; you can scramble it, soft-boil it, hard-boil it, even devil it. But it is an egg. The ingredient of an egg is an egg.

After turning a hue of metaphysical blue with Ponsot, I burrowed into Louise Nevelson’s genderfucking sculptures for respite.

Louise was raised in Rockland, Maine. Most schooldays, she sat in the back of the classroom and rarely raised her hand. Her shyness came from knowing herself to be the tallest girl in the class, and the most attractive girl in the city of Rockland. Being born in Ukraine to Jewish parents, being the most attractive didn’t seem to result in acknowledgment. Louise served as captain of the high school basketball team; she won all sorts of prizes, but not the prize she desired most, namely, the prize that would designate her as belonging to Rockland, as being worthy of Rockland. Unlike the resident WASPS, Louise felt herself ineligible for the honor of being named “Lobster Queen” at Rockland’s annual lobster festival. 

“Every year, since Louise had been a little girl, people told her that she would one day be named the lobster queen. Decades later, Louise looked back on that event which never happened and said ‘I wanted to commit suicide . . .’”

Wanting to die because she hadn’t been named Lobster Queen seems like an overly simplistic way of describing her daily suffering at remaining unnamed. We look back at the lack and see a lacuna.

“I eludicate even greyness by my greys and greys and greys.”

These are Ponsot’s words, not Nevelson’s. Grey is the palette for her meadow, her physics, her tree.

Anti-Romantic

I explain ontology, mathematics, theophily,
Symbolic and Aristotelian logic, says the tree.

I demonstrate perspective's and proportion's ways.
I elucidate even greyness by my greys and greys and greys.

Gravity's laws, the four dimensions, Sapphic imagery,
Come from contemplating me,
Says the tree.

I perfectly exhibit the functions of earth and air:
Look up, at and through, my branches, leaved, budded, or bare
Laid in their luminous degrees against lustrous infinity:
Your seeing relates you to all of space, through me.
Here's aesthetics, too. No sight's nearer to perfectly fair.
I am mediate and immediate, says the tree.

I am variable, exquisite, tough,
Even useful; I am subtle; all this is enough.
I don't want to be a temple, says the tree.
But if you don't behave, I will be.

Ponsot’s “Anti-Romantic” was first published in 1958. In it, a tree refuses the ideology of romance. The poem’s speaker (who also happens to be the listener, the witness to the tree’s monologue) encounters the confidence and self-assurance of the fourth-dimension-citing tree.

There is no equidistance in Ponsot’s implications.

Nor is there anything resembling an Archimedean viewpoint, or a way of shared seeing.

And this absence of a mutual vantage divides the speaker from ‘being’ a self.

Taking furniture as the setting of middle-class households, Louise Nevelson broke tables, chairs, sofas, and dresser into bits and pieces, creating art from the fragments of a settled house and family. 

Louise Nevelson puts it differently:

Queen of the black black
In the valley of all all
With one glance sees the King.
Mountain top
The climb
The way
Restless winds
Midnight blooms
Tons of colors
Tones of waterdrops
Crystal reflections
Painting mirages
Celestial splendor.
Highest grandeur.
Queen of the black black.
King of the all all. 

She works a different frame than Ponsot, calibrating her energy against “amongness.” There is sealant in “the all all” of Nevelson’s final line; there is a sense of self-assuredness, of self-assurance.

Compare this to Ponsot’s “Among Women”:

Among Women

What women wander?
Not many. All. A few.
Most would, now & then,
& no wonder.
Some, and I'm one,
Wander sitting still.
My small grandmother
Bought from every peddler
Less for the ribbons and lace
Than for their scent
Of sleep where you will,
Walk out when you want, choose
Your bread and your company.

She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.”

She looked fragile but had
High blood, runner's ankles,
Could endure, endure.
She loved her rooted garden, her
Grand children, her once
Wild once young man.
Women wander
As best they can.

Ponsot answers the questions she poses on tiptoe, slightly off-balance, in a tone of resignation rather than assurance.

Have nothing to lose may be a sort of permission.

Against the curse of loving the rooted garden, there is the consensus intended as a consolation: “Women wander / As best they can.”

Watching the passion form a right angle to truth in a series of shadows.

Taking the texture of a tree trunk as a model for the space where the sound of bark communicates its embodiment as tree skin.

“From lack of despair keep us, Djuna and John Donne.”

Ponsot would occasionally shift into italics for effect. I’m thinking of how that sudden shift ripples the memory’s surface in her poem titled “The First, At the Last”:

  Under the under
          of what I remember
          we are both twenty
         and except with each other
          underemployed.

Under the under — under the layers of distance, there is this fleeting sensation of equality, a way of being that is no longer accessible to the speaker as a thing which could be spoken or assumed. The change in this “we” designates a shift in the self’s relation to being and knowing and being known as.

But italics are sparse in Ponsot; her eyes see things at angles and attunements, often in form—- and informed by geometry.

Not always, of course. Or, not in this modified epithalamium, a wedding song written by the bride for the event which binds her to the groom, a sonnet that sings supplicates love for its future.

Ponsot’s speaker could be the wife speaking to the bride she was, or to the white dove she charges with symbolism.

Wedding Song

Be between us in our making love
Wake us together burn burning fuse
Our two slept mysteries to truth. Holy dove
Strongly inform us lest we refuse
Each other all the joy we owe our making love.

Be close, disarm our kniving selfishness.
Unblind us to our true selves. Give us,
To give each other, our right clear images.
Strip from us what is, to our love's early Eden, spurious.
Let each strip down, and burn, the other's selfishness.

Put our double strength to your one school.
Teach our whole selves, holy dove,
The far free reach of your ecstatic rule.
Teach us all we can learn of your hard lesson, love;
Then rectify, enlarge us; put us back to school.

Be light and fire to us in our matching love.
Make bold use of us find build and bind us.
Blind us to what is in us not love.
Be quick beyond us for us holy dove.

I could end here, on Ponsot’s hope-swarmed didactic note. But there is something else…something about Louise Nevelson— an image that became part of a mythos.

As she would tell, Louise was 11 years old, and on her way to school, when she saw a black horse in a meadow. Struck by the size of its torso, her young eyes absorbed how this “color of black against a nature of green” stood out. “Everything was foliage… in bloom,” Louise later said, “and the horse was right for the environment.” The horse suited the space in which it was fenced. The horse contained all of nature’s energy and symmetry and its body. She never forgot that image.

The fenced-in horse was freer than Louise ever felt in Rockland, Maryland.

“Strike deep, divide us from cheap-got doubt/ Leap, leap between us and the easy out”

And it was this fence which appeared last year in New Orleans, as I sat in the grass outside the art museum with M.

The sun beat like a hat of pure heat on my head; words almost slurred by the greens and the light, my verbs desaturated, passive, dried to a grayish tone. The dark structure towering above me, a monument of granite and bronze, a story of tenderness.

A series of hoodies on hangers.

At least seven simple T-shirts.

A blue or white plastic bin used to store socks and underwear in dorm room closets.

A baseball cap.

An author: Jim Hodges.

A title: Craig’s Closet (2023).

A eulogy protected from change by the fact of its being painted completely in black.

I thought of Louise Nelson‘s Moon Garden + One.

I thought of her Sky Cathedral.

And of Hodges’ tribute to Craig, with its black paint annihilating the shadows within the closet, bringing all the surfaces forward on that flat sense of blackness, a dimension without secrets.

My “I” cannot be anything more than the light removed by my presence. This is what Claude Debussy wanted me to know in the gentlest waltz ever imagined, La plus que lente. It is what Ponsot knew in her poems, and what Nevelson fought until her death.

The wrist of the afterlife curls around
A stem. Immortality comes first 
If ever it comes afterwards. Suffer 
The rebuke and move on, which is to say 
Upwards into the sainted, oldest tree.

— Donald Revell, “A Hint to Plotinus”

I shake, close to you, close to you. 
You have a path to clear, and so you do.

— Marie Ponsot, “Winter”

My life is an open book, but there is a subterranean life I don't want to reveal to anyone. And why the hell should I?

—Louise Nevelson, as quoted in Katrine Ames’ "Gothic Queen," Newsweek, December 4, 1972

*

Antonia Pocock, “The Alchemy of Louise Nevelson’s Black Majesty (1955)” (Whitney Museum)
Claude Debussy, La plus que lente
J. S. Bach & Henry Purcell, Dido & Aeneas, Z. 626: “Dido's Lament” (transcribed by Leopold Stokowski)
Jim Hodges, Craig’s Closet, 2023
Henry Purcell, The Loves of Dido and Aeneas
Louise Nevelson, Sky Cathedral, 1958
Louise Nevelson as interviewed by Barbaralee Diamonstein, ARTNews (October 1974)
Louise Nevelson, “Queen of the black black,” ARTnews (September 1961): 45. 
Marie Ponsot, “Berceuse”
Marie Ponsot, “Between”
Marie Ponsot, “Private and Profane”
Marie Ponsot, “The First, At the Last”
Marie Ponsot, “Winter”
Nils Frahm, “Some”
Nils Frahm, Solo
Piano Day, the 88th day of each year

Jack B. Yeats, briefly.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

– W. B. Yeats, “VI—The Stare’s Nest By My Window”

This is a tale of a small town, where no one ever spoke the truth but all thought about it.

— Jack B. Yeats, Ah Well. A Romance in Perpetuity (1942)

Jack B. Yeats’ self-portrait… the position of the hands, a musical resonance, a sort of feminine flourish in the way they incline towards the black ruffle bowtie. If you squint and then look at the portrait quickly, you can almost imagine a person with a black fabric carnation held between thumb and forefinger?

And the barrage of images below?

A sketch of sorts. An small gallery of paintings by Jack Butler Yeats, whom Samuel Beckett admired so deeply, and whose admiration emerges in various rooms and scenes which depict the intense loneliness of Yeats’ figures. Humans standing side by side but yet faceless to each other. Given the haste with which I downloaded these paintings today, I’m not even sure of their titles. …. a fault which will be corrected, if not here, then certainly in the final version of my current project.

And for no reason whatsoever—- which is to say, the role played by the river — I leave you with an excerpt from Jack B. Yeats’ experimental novel, Ah Well. A Romance in Perpetuity, published in 1942, and vanishing from the face of the earth very quickly, with little commentary from the literati:

It was a town with one internal idea, and that was the brown river. Every evening, rain of shine, you would see two or three persons leaning over the rail alongside the back of the letter E and with their mouths open filling their lungs and their bellies with the fragrant, woolly, ever lovely, unsatisfied boggy breathing of that fulsome, flattering, simple-hearted flood. No man within an hour of coming from that river ever beat his child, even in gesture, and that was all the correction the children ever received, first a gesture of punishment and then a gesture of apology. And no dog coming from that river side barked for a space of time. The children of that town did not rule the town as anyone might suspect. No one ruled that town. Not the Mayor, for all he had his golden chain. It ruled itself. He ruled himself, with the varied tone of the river. Ah, she was a bonny river. It was lucky for the old shells and pebbles within a hundred yards of the falls' edge before she tumbled into the sea. They, it didn't matter how strong the stream was, were always caught up among the rocks on the Easterly side of the falls, and never went out to sea. Never again out to the sea they came from long ago when the earth was blazing hot and volcanoes were pitching sea shells above high water mark. These shells and pebbles being ever caught up by the rocks worked their way back again a few yards every now and again up the river. And then would come a freshet and pitch them downward again, past the townsmen leaning over the rail, a foot on a lower rail. A foot on the rail. So human, so docile. The foot on the rail, the arms reclining on a swilled counter quaffing brimmers like their little piggy wiggy grandsires when they were able. All liquids look alike to man, but they feel differently. They go down, they go down. With some the first floor is enough. With some the basement must be reached before the rafters in the garret shake and illuminate themselves with wreathed roses golden edged. But with the men of the town I'm telling you about the river was nearly enough. It was a mountain still frothing its way with the pure elixir of the high places. Three parts the river, a quarter label and the rest some drossy fire from an ignorant unknown crucible, and the townsman went back into the sandy square and kissed his hand to the falling fountain drops.

There were a lot of people in this God-damned town, most of them different, different in wedges, not in families. Precarious corralling of human beings under roof trees. So these wedges, these different wedges, came from different families and mixed themselves. Perhaps each wedge contained all the necessary ingredients of a wedge, wedge into wedge, and then wedge. That's a non plus. No, they broke away when they felt that coming and starred out into groups of character. It was a slip of the tongue calling this town a 'God-damned town'. I should not have used that description. It's lost its original meaning. There was a time when a lot of thin hawk-men standing about on their thin soled boots would know the way I was using the description. It's an affectionate term, and as long as I live I'm not going to tell you any more about affectionate terms. If you don't understand them when they drop from my lips, then you never will, God help you.

*

In the gallery: Debussy’s Estampes, L. 100.
A different image of Jack in the National Gallery of Ireland.
Jack B. Yeats, Ah Well. A Romance in Perpetuity (1942)

Dreams, stories, and writing.

In Sterne's Tristram Shandy the naming of his newly born protagonist goes wrong owing to a mistake; his intended name, Trismegistus ('thrice- greatest'), ends up as Tristram ('sad sack').

— Jorg Heiser

Off you go, and may all the whores on Olympus look favorably upon us

— Samuel Beckett to George Reavey, 23 June 23 1934

“'Connection reflection neglection correction erection,” Polke wrote in Kunst-Nachrichten in 1977. Words that name all essential components: these were the fundamental conditions of artistic production in West Germany.

— Jutta Koether

*

In the mid-1960’s, Gerhard Richter, Manfred Kuttner, Sigmar Polke, and Konrad Lueg (better known later as the gallerist Konrad Fischer) pioneered a sort of Pop that was drained of eye-popping color and commodity allure. They called it “Capitalism Realism” and doused its affect with the grey winter coat of West German middle-class culture. The name played was a combination of plays —challenging the insincerity of Warhol’s Pop Art; revealing the rigorous positivity-cult of Socialist Realism and its idealization of an abstract People in the name of their Leaders; opposing the evasive sophistication of the still hegemonic 50s' styles of abstraction for its erasure of humans.

I’ve been admiring Sigmar Polke’s art this week, after falling into the sort of rabbit-hole which appears when I think about how to approach the writing of fiction. Every rabbit hole makes itself known in the presence of a poem, and it would take hours to describe how an Ashbery led to me to the dots of Sigmar Polke. Respect for the inclines me to offer the poem and spare you the said description.

The year was 1985. John Ashbery wrote a three-stanza’d creature titled “Dream Overture.” The poem went unpublished. Nonetheless, another poet named Phillip Crymble shared it on twitter, thus does the work of publishing continue— for publishing, if anything, involves the sharing of text.

Dream Overture

Saddled with understanding,
It takes some getting used to,
The little bar
In which two people sat
And talked and smoked together,
The thirties.

In the streets outside it was clean,
But cheap. Inside all was fair—
All the air
That can only be inside.
There are men in cowboy hats,
Children who want no attention,
And get none.

This is what understanding
Creates: the chorus.
And if it is meant all ways,
On certain days
Becomes thin and plain again,
Trim.

And now, for a different poem, less thin and plain, saddled with its own understanding, and situated as a little bar above several pieces by Polke which continue to captivate me.

Present

by Frank O'Hara

THE DREAM SERIES. Since I’ve been lingering, visually, on purple things and dreams, it’s an honor to be the Writer-in-Residence for the Conscious Writers Collective this year, and the following collective “workshops” or dreamscapes will be happening on a zoom near you, courtesy of CWC:

October 15 — “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”
November 15 — “Palavering”; or Dreaming Aloud with Bohumil Hrabal
December 20 — “Bottled Climates; or Worlds Made from Textures and Aromas

Once one lived in a seamless experience of wordlessness. Wordlessness means that everything is continuous. The later dream of an ideal language, a language which says all simultaneously, perhaps begins with the memory of this state without memories.

— John Berger, “Once in Childhood”

*

Françoise Hardy, “Rêve”
John Ashbery, “Dream Overture”
John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (NYRB Classics)
Jorg Heiser, “Cosmic Rays.” Frieze, October 2007.
Jutta Koether, “Bad Dad” (MOMA 2014)
“What Does Sigmar Polke Still Have to Teach Us?” on Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

Jim Dine in small frame.

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

— T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems”

Some of my advisers think im hysterical

— Jim Dine

“Name Painting No. 1” by Jim Dine

“Bishop” is where the coincidence happened, but the end-notes is where this painting began. I’m referring to the explanatory notes for Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, particularly the note of identification murmured about “Bishop”:

“Jim Dine: American pop artist, born in 1935.”

Do not tell me about wasting time until you have written a self entire from it. Call it a name painting, if you need a convention or an excuse. Call it a failure of the will which resulted from other failures. For there are so many others involved. Among them, there are these other things one might glean from the notes to Sixty Stories, and there is my desire to impose an abecedarical order upon them.

AIR is the acronym for an Artist in Residence in a shower of gold.

Arne Jacobsen was a Danish architect and designer who gets mentioned in a critique of the quotidienne life.

Aria is the title of a piece by Barthelme which he later identified as “a woman’s monologue.”

Battologized refers to something repeated excessively.

Bibblemann is an apparently fictional composer who appears in Paraguay.

Boudu Saved From Drowning is a film by Jean Renoir from 1932 which inspired Barthelme’s titling.

Cabochons are highly polished, convex unfaceted gemstones.

Caracoling is a half-turn on horseback.

Chrysoberyls are a class of gemstones that includes alexandrite, which changes color from green to violet-red, and cat’s eye.

Condylarths are extinct, horsy-ratty looking mammals about the size of a cocker spaniel.

Confusion Oil is used to bring confusion to those working against you in the emerald.

Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”) is Gustave Mahler’s 1909 symphonic work that set translations of Chinese poems for two singers to music, and lands in the leap.

Diktats are strictures in a new music.

Diet of Worms is the Imperial German Reichstag, which issued an edict in 1521 against Martin Luther which appears in the party.

Dimidiation is halving.

Dog cart is a small, light carriage which originally had a box under the seat for a dog.

Dwale is another name for belladonna or deadly nightshade.

Esse est percipi means “to be is to be perceived,” as promulgated by British idealist George Berkeley who maintained that physical existence is an idea in the mind, and that the whole of reality (including human life) exists as ideas in the mind of God, as it appears in a preliminary account of nothing.

Fumaroles are openings in a volcano that let out steam and gases which creep into the king of jazz.

Gamomania is an obsession with issuing marriage proposals.

Golden Earrings is a song by Raymond B. Evans, Jay Livingston, and Victor from the 1947 film of the same title, with Marlene Dietrich and Ray Milland, as mentioned in a shower of gold.

Gree is an archaic word for goodwill or satisfaction.

Gustave Aschenbach is the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

Happy dust is cocaine.

Harmonica rascal is a reference to Borrah Minnevich’s Harmonica Rascals, who performed from the 1920s to the 1950s, and landed in Alice.

Hock is a White Rhine wine associated with dreaming.

Imperator is another word for an emperor.

Intimations of mortality is an allusion to William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”

Ixias is a South American plants of the iris family.

John Masefield was a British poet who makes an appearance in the glass mountain.

Komsomol was the Soviet Union’s communist youth organization.

Krummhorn is an early double-reed wind instrument involved a new music.

Lost-horse principle alludes to the lost-wax process, a method of casting using a wax mold that melts away during baking in Paraguay.

Messalina was the notoriously lascivious third wife of the Roman emperor Claudius.

Montane refers to a cool, moist zone near a timberline involved with the king of jazz.

“Nothing: A Preliminary Account” is one of my favorite stories by Barthelme who plays very well with another B who loved negative theology.

Olympia Press was founded by publisher Maurice Girodias in 1953. It printed both trash erotica and then-controversial fiction by the likes of Terry Sothern, J. P. Donleavy, and Henry Miller, as well as Nabokov’s Lolita, and appears in the falling dog.

Padparadscha sapphire is a pink-orange sapphire.

Palestrina was a sixteenth-century Italian composer of motets and masses.

Paxwax is a dialect term for the ligament at the back of the neck in many mammals, which helps support the head.

Peridots are green gemstones, also called olivine.

Petronius mothballs are a treasure to which I shall return a little latter.

Preen glands are the oil-secreting glands near the base of a bird’s tail.

Putzi was Franz Liszt’s childhood nickname which returns in dreaming.

Quetzal is the royal bird of Central America, as found in a story on angels.

Red rock is landscape feature as well as an allusion to a line from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Only/There is shadow under this red rock,/(Come in under the shadow of this red rock).”

Registration refers to the labor of matching the position of lines on opposite sides of a single sheet printing successive layers of color in our work and why we do it.

Robert Kennedy is a plot device.

Sardonyx is a banded variety of quartz.

Surd is a sum containing one or more irrational roots of numbers, or the homophone of being deaf in Romanian.

Sunderland pink is a glossy metallic pink luster glaze used in nineteenth-century England which appears in aria.

Sunfishing occurs when a horse writhes violently from side to side, turning its belly toward the sun.

The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian is Debussy’s score for Gabriele d’Anunzio’s 1911 sacred drama, as referenced in Barthelme’s prior golden shower.

Träumerei (“Dreaming”) is the familiar heartbreaker from Robert Schumann’s piano suite Kinderszenen (“Childhood Scenes”).

Travel dust is a poem involving two eggs.

Unwraps the sky may be an allusion to a line from John Dryden’s poem, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” — “And music shall untune the sky.” — made available in the new music.

Victimas del Pecado is the 1950 Mexican film noir which appears in city life.

Viridian is a bluish-green which appears in Rebecca.

Whoring after beauty occurs twice: once in dreaming, and then again in a manual for sons.

Williwaw is a sudden cold wind in far northern or southern latitudes and/or a state of turmoil, as well as the title of a 1946 novel by Gore Vidal which wiggles through B’s aria.

Wine of possibility is a drink concocted in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or; called into being by the exclamation: “What wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!” This can be sampled in the leap.

Wrasse is a marine fish.

X is totally absent, so I offer the usual streetflower, as immortalized by Eliot — “You gave my hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.” — and then recounted by Barthelme in an ejaculation “— Go peddle your hyacinths, Hyacinth girl.” X marks the spot it is not.

Yataghan is a Turkish sword involved in a manual for sons.

Ya Ya Oil is a magic oil to increase fertility and potency.

Zocalo is a South American term for marketplace that shows up in a manual for sons.

Jim Dine in performance of Car Crash, 1960

“Travel Dust” by Jim Dine

two eggs follow me to the Food Derby
I set my sights on toast and loads of tea and pumpkin seeds
mix with 4 or 5 grapes in my mouth
so I have the energy to breathe
going real slow
by foot
down river
to smell fumes belching out of you in Moscow
there would be heavy guards around your smokestacks
here the interior is painted cream with a pale blue trim
all the greasy machines get down on their knees to spray hearts on clear plastic
the red rubber rim covered by my jock strap
and an old sock
soup meat tramps along
my throat with horseradish already there to receive the mixture
pumpkin seeds again and sky with a few grapes and now an inch of yogurt
it seals off the chest fumes
the spray bomb lays down a silver heart on the dirt
kissed by a red nail
silver removes the stencil, reverses it, then acetone hits the yogurt puddle
smack on the sycamores stick to my face
the Thames washes eels up.
they carry me to the pavement
letting it all melt at my feet like tigers
pumpkin seeds and lime stone drip along the sidewalk
a few more lunatic hearts appear celebrating Ron Padgett & Reverdy & Sky
the scum of which is silver mixed with green
tomatoes bubble on the stove to prepare for the lemon colored moth
that just this minute came alive on your forehead smiling

*

Dine’s “Travel Dust” was first published Paris Review in the 70s. I love how the pumpkin seeds and lunatic hearts recur like chords that link particular places and affects. It makes me think of how Donald Barthelme re-uses a line from Mikhail Lermontov’s introduction to his 1849 novel, A Hero of Our Time. “It is a portrait, Hubert said . . . of their development,” Barthelme quotes without attribution in the story titled “Will You Tell Me?” It makes a place of the portrait’s development, as well as the postmodern mistrust of heroism.

Like Dine, Barthelme played with resonance and quotation. He stared at museum paintings and noticed his own reflection superimposed on the protected domestic interiors of nineteenth century tropes. In one of B’s stories, we are presented with “the hinder portion scalding-house”; it particular to a passage where Barthelme employed his “pointillist technique,” which he later described in a 1981 interview. With pointillist writing technique, said Barthelme, “what you get is . . . merged meanings, whether from words placed side by side in a seemingly arbitrary way or phrases similarly arrayed . . . ‘Petronius mothballs.’ Of course you can do this all day long and the results will be fully as poor as the specimen furnished. Still, it’s a North Sea to be explored.”

And this brings me back to the smokestacks in Dine’s poem, and their proximity to “Moscow” — which brings me to Walter Benjamin’s Moscow diaries. In an essay titled after the city itself, a city which housed his paramour, Benjamin said “each thought, each day, each life lies here as one laboratory table.” Moscow’s residents wore black armbands on the anniversary of Lenin's death; flags stood at half-mast; “the mourning for Lenin is, for Bolsheviks, also mourning for heroic communism,” wrote Benjamin. Beneath the longing for Lenin, he sensed nostalgia for a purer time, prior to the end of NEP and the onslaught of the purges. “In the optic of history—opposite in this to that of space—movement in the distance means enlargement.”

It wasn’t the smokestacks so much as the pumpkin seeds. In Moscow, sunflower seeds had been criminalized: it was illegal to chew them in public places. Street vending was also illegal. And the sale of icons was made part of the paper and pictures trade so icons stood in booths next to other paper goods “flanked by portraits of Lenin, like a prisoner between two policeman,” as Benjamin put it. The essay, itself, stutters a little, as if Benjamin isn’t sure how to interpret what he sees. So he oscillates: cynicism seems gone; social conscience “opens purses so much wider than does pity.” Taking the public treatment of beggars as a measure of community and shared social trust, Benjamin bases this trust on the belief that no human being can deserve being placed as the lowest in the pyramid of struggle. Only the “unchanging wretchedness” of the beggars stayed the same as everything else in Moscow shifted and changed.

“Newyorkerism” by Edmund White

A heart too big too verdant, made of all feed & just as I didn't plan to think of you & the
best sex we ever had sitting over the orchestra silent & barely touching
Michael Tilson Thomas conducted Rachmaninoff's third aural orgasm my hand bruised by your clench of delight.

— Jill Bergantz, “For Jim Dine’s Green Piece in My Meadow”

*

I woke up thinking about a conversation related to psychiatrists that I might have read in Edmund White’s City Boy, a memoir covering White’s earlier years. Sure enough, after much flipping through and flopping about, I found the excerpt where White chats with Ashbery.

“While writing U.S. history, I, of course, still wanted to write fiction,” White confesses. And he “was talking to John Ashbery, who had been to see a shrink who specialized in writer's block.” Ashbery quoted the conversation with his shrink to White, and this is how it wound up in City Boy, as excerpted below:

Shrink: So tell me what your daily schedule is.

Ashbery: Well, I wake up and get up and-

Shrink: You do what?

Ashbery: I get up-

Shrink: You must never, never get up. Okay, pee and make a cup of coffee, but then get back in bed if only for half an hour every day and write longhand in a notebook.

Ashbery: Why?

Shrink: That way your inhibitions will still be low and you'll be closer to your dreams. That's the surefire way out of writer's block

A few lines later, White returns to his fiction issues:

But my sense of personal identity required that I write fiction. If I thought that my only take on life would be the clever remarks or vague thoughts I might be able to cook up on the spot, then I wouldn't be able to recognize myself. I knew I had to keep on writing or else I'd let the ambient cultural noise drown out my thoughts, which weren't paraphrasable wisecracks or wisdom but rather a way of looking at the world or the self. French people dismiss the cultural chatter and self-centered attitudinizing of Paris as parisianisme. A similar noise is generated by hip New Yorkers, though we don't have a word for it and perhaps we haven't isolated it yet as a reprehensible phenomenon. This “new yorkism” is so opinionated, so debilitating, so contagious with its knowingness, its instant formulas that replace any slow discoveries, that only people who are serious and ponderous can resist its blandishments, its quick substitutes for authenticity. No wonder the psychiatrist had said one should write first thing in the morning before the tide of newyorkism swept over one, washing away actual honest thought and replacing it with trendy pronouncements.

“But my sense of personal identity required that I write fiction,” White declares at the outset. He is a fiction writer explaining why the book we are reading is actually a memoir. Unlike White, I’m not sure I have a sense of “personal identity,” per se, or what such a sense as mine would require if it existed. The truth is that fiction, poetry, and critique all serve similar purposes for me, which is to express what feels necessary or urgent.

Sometimes the urgency is ontological. Sometimes a story of origin sates it. Usually, the wires get tangled and, if my best moments, I tend to follow them rather than fiddle with sorting one from the other. “My mother was . . . and my father a shower of gold,” said Perseus, whose mother, Danaë, was impregnated by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold. In one of his stories, Barthelme mentions The Cow on the Roof, a restaurant in Paris named after a Brazilian pop song which also became the title for Darius Milhaud’s 1919 composition, “Le boeuf sur le toit.” Which came first— the feast or the song? How does art commit itself to collaboration across time and space? How to express my pleasure to Barthelme for the fictive historical intervention titled “Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning”? In this case, the story grows richer with the author’s explanation — and this is true for many fictions which endeavor to theorize rather than entertain.

In a 1975 interview, Barthelme sliced open the back of “Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning” and showed us its entrails:

There’s nothing real in the Robert Kennedy story whatsoever, with one single exception—where Robert Kennedy comes into a gallery and looks at a painting and makes some joke. . . . That actually took place, because I was in the gallery, and I believe it was a Kenneth Nolan show. . . . It was a story I wrote in Copenhagen, about a year before he was assassinated, I believe. I always want to put a date on that story when it’s reprinted so that people won’t think it was written after he was assassinated.

Hail to all the great literature written in Copenhagen, including that of Barthelme’s long-savored muse, Soren Kierkegaard. Cheers to “the cuckooflower, the doctorfish,” the “Report” Barthelme used to carry them, and the end-note insisting: “Yes, they both exist.” I raise my mug, again, to the “banjo splint” in the ibid. And the libido of the endnote which reads “So does this.”

“In the optic of history—opposite in this to that of space—movement in the distance means enlargement.”

— Walter Benjamin, “Moscow”

“I never met Robert Kennedy nor did I talk to people who had. The story was begun while I was living in Denmark in 1965...the only 'true' thing in it was Kennedy's remark about the painter. I happened to be in the gallery when he came in with a group; I think the artist was Kenneth Noland. Kennedy made the remark quoted about the ruler---not the newest joke in the world. The story was published in New American Review well before the assassination. I cannot account for the concluding impulse of the I-character to 'save' him other than by reference to John Kennedy's death; still, a second assassination was unthinkable at that time. In sum, any precision in the piece was the result of watching television and reading the New York Times.”

—- Donald Barthelme to Arthur Schlesinger, July 16, 1977.

*

Edmund White, City Boy
Darius Milhaud, Le boeuf sur le toit, Op. 58 (1919)
Donald Barthelme, explanatory notes to Sixty Stories
Donald Barthelme, “Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning”
Jill Bergantz, “For Jim Dine’s Green Piece in My Meadow” Memoir Mixtapes, v. 11
Jim Dine, “Express”, 1969
Jim Dine, Name Painting No. 1 (1968-69)
Jim Dine, “Travel Dust” The Paris Review
Julia Blaut, “‘Painter's Theater’: Jim Dine's Environments and Performances”
T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems”, 1922
Walter Benjamin, “Moscow”, 1938

"The Painter" by Hannah Hoch

Then he decided with a heavy heart to abandon the female soul and to devote himself solely to chives from now on.

— Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch, Untitled (Self-Portrait), c. 1920-30

“Doppel-belichtung.” Shooting a photo twice on the same piece of film. Meeting the traces forged from superimposition.

The way she holds herself in the doubling. The varieties of tenderness our doubling permits.

I left my thoughts on Hannah Höch’s hands and elsewhere, near Raoul Hausmann, and seaweed. But here is the shooting twice of things. Here is where I sate my interest in a handless sort of doubling, namely: the visual portrait in dialogue with its partner text.

At some point around the year 1920, Hannah Höch wrote a story titled “The Painter.”

---

“The Painter” by Hannah Höch (c. 1920)

Once upon a time there was a painter. He wasn't called Dribble, or anything like that, as he might have been in earlier times. It was around 1920—the painter was a modern painter—so his name was Heavenlykingdom. Unlike the real painters of earlier times, he was not asked to work only with brush anti palette. This was his wife's fault: she thwarted the boundless flight of his genius.

At least four times in four years, he was forced to wash dishes - the kitchen dishes. The first time, actually, there had been a pressing reason. Sh e was giving birth to the baby Heavenlykingdom. The other three times had not seemed absolutely necessary to Heavenlykingdom, Sr. But he wanted to keep the peace—because after all God had created the male to do just that and so had no choice but to obey her Xanthippian demand. Yet the matter continued to weigh on him. He felt degraded as a man and as a painter under its dark shadow. On the days of crisis he would suffer nightmares. He kept seeing Michelangelo washing up the cups.

He knew enough about psychoanalysis to confront the woman with the truth that such demands always arise out of the desire to dominate, no matter what other reasons there might be. As a modern person he felt that in theory he had to agree with the equality of the sexes—still, if one looked closely at the situation one could not—and then, especially in your own house—her demand seemed to him comparable to an enslavement of his soul ...

Now one day he began to paint a picture. A dark force moved him, because h e was full of dark forces. He wanted to represent, to cube really, the essential likeness between the nature of chives and the female soul. In theory the whole problem was solved. He saw the emptiness that fills both these objects precisely and with total intellectual clarity. There is more to genius than intellect, however, and, when he connected the herb's snake-like form with the previously mentioned soul, his unusually developed instinct gave him mystical knowledge. No genius would deny a certain complement of mysticism.

Our Heavenlykingdom was deeply wounded by something he had also heard about from his fellow men: although these little women are often really tiny, they can still not be shaped and modeled into the form one needs for physical and psychic comfort. Had he been a writer, he would have been compelled to enrich literature with a ponderous work on the theme, “When you go to Woman, do not forget the whip.” But under the circumstances that you know about now, his painting was to be called, “The Chive and the Female Soul: A Comparison.” I think it was already announced for exhibition, while the canvas still shone blankly, spotlessly receptive. One has to do everything in good time. Gotthold—that was Heavenly kingdom's first name—suffered under the female soul in th e totality of his manhood. And we all need to confront what makes us suffer. No wonder, then, that Heavenlykingdom (secretly) began to think of himself as on a level with a redeemer—let's admit it, with Christ—because of the likeness he has discovered.

But you have to imagine the painting properly—as it were, a scientifically dissected representation—the female soul, totally clear in a segmented cubist painting—so that everyone able to adopt an abstract point of view could read, there she is, th at's her innermost being. And next to that the analogy and parallel: chives. Wouldn't everyone see it as clear as day? We also know that when we recognize what ails us, we are cured. So what perspectives would open up with the creation of this painting? Wouldn't the most burning question of our time be solved? Yet we have had to admit too often that theory and practice don't coincide. He had worked on his picture for two years and two days already. He labored and labored mightily, unable to advancebeyond the chives. In the first place, the painting remained green. As soon as he used a different color, the disturbance that resulted was so great that he covered it with green again. For a while he thought that the treacherous female soul (treachery no doubt its most important element alongside emptiness) could appear as a cubist lemon-yellow spiral among the green—a shape more or less like one of those sofa-springs that winds crookedly upward. But alas, painting is color as well as form. The yellow refused to meld with the massive green of his chive allegory.

He had no choice but to remove the winding spiral. A painter must remain enough of an aesthete to refuse to paint badly for the sake of his idea. The same thing happened with the composition. He tried and tried, even falling into trances, but nothing beyond the dull repetitive up-and-down of the chive motif would develop. Over and over again he hoped to fix the damnable female soul in a fluted doughnut-shape. But his eye remained objective and told him the truth without pity: this fretwork muddies the powerful melody of the chive movement. His most intimate friend, looking at the painting, remarked that it had the kind of power that liberated itself in an overwhelming sense of bore ... No, that's not what he said. He said, liberates itself in sameness. Then he decided with a heavy heart to abandon the female soul and to devote himself only to chives from now on.

A month later, and the President, who has just opened the exhibition, is propelling his presidential belly around the myriad chambers that display the works of all the painters of the realm. Suddenly he stops. His face displays emotion. His entourage observes closely. He begins to speak. “A masterpiece,” he stammers. “Has my administration ever produced anything better?” He questioned everyone around him. All that green - what can it remind me of? His adjutant (unless an assistant goes by another name in a Republic) suggested helpfully, “Of the revolution? Of the revolution, my President?”

“Absolutely right. The revolution.”

They say the State bought the painting for the National Gallery. They say that when its creator was asked for the title, he omitted mention of th e chives and proudly called it “The Female Soul.” They say Gotthold Heavenlykingdom will be the next candidate for a Nobel Prize.

---

Hannah Hoch, Self-Portrait with Raoul Hausmann, 1919

*

Alexander Malofeev, Fragments, Op.posth by Sergei Rachmaninov
Hannah Höch, Self-Portrait with Raoul Hausmann, 1919
Hannah Höch, Untitled (Self-Portrait), c. 1920-30
Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Hoch, 1915
Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, 1920

Dos Passos almost lost his mind when seeing the Roman arches in France.

The future is a form of dark ;
compare it to a midnight's quiet;
there, in that future, too abstract
for us to have a right to eye it

— Joseph Brodsky, “A Song to No Music”

Verra Ia morte e avra i tuoi occhi.

— Cesare Pavese

The young Americans are going to Europe to fight in the war. Or join the brigades. War is the story everyone is telling. War is the bright opportunity for the sons who wish to escape the land of their fathers. John Dos Passos is there, volunteering with the American Red Cross, making his tour of southern Europe in a cloud of sirens. The scent of bombs pricks the nostrils. The older man recalls his younger self and makes a book of this recollection: The Best Times: An Informal Memoir. Flash to Dos Passos, in that ambulance en route to Italy:

Our convoy of ambulances, amid every conceivable sort of comic misadventure, proceeded by slow stages to Nevers, then up the Loire, and across the wine country to Macon and Lyon, and down the Sonne to Valence. Every gray castle and turreted church was a revelation. It was marvelous to come out from under the leaden sky of northern France into the valley of the Rhone and sunlight and the pollarded planetrees of the Midi. We almost lost our minds at the sight of the first Roman arches. We kept straying away from our ambulances to see the sights and guzzle the vintages.

Now flash to Marseilles, which Dos Passos hardly remembers apart from the car crash that occurred while trying to back his ambulance into line. And the solace “a macabre dockside dive where the girls picked up coins with their private parts if you set their tips on the corner of the table.” All within a single paragraph; no transition or technical segue between the former and the latter.

Marseilles. . . a city that will hold memories for Kracauer, Arendt, Benjamin, Feuchtwanger, Werfel, and so many others ….

And then there is Paris. We follow Dos Passos back and forth through the city, noting that his final memory of Parisian literary life appears to be “an odd one”:

Don Stewart and I somehow got mixed up with a Manifestation Dada. I believe it was after dining with Louis Aragon and Drieux La Rochelle. Aragon was very much the dashing young poet. He certainly showed talent. Drieux, his best friend, was a tall aristocratic youth, whom I thought at the time was the coming French writer. I liked him particularly; he seemed completely on the level; the aristocratic French are more like the wellborn English than they are like the smalltown French bourgeois or the mercenary Parisians. The men had strangely diverse histories. Aragon ended up an orthodox and respectable Communist Party dignitary, but poor Drieux, like quite a few of his more fastidious compatriots, ended up a Fascist and blew his brains out one fine morning during the German war.

Anyway that night we were all full of beans and wanted to do something outrageous. We joined Tristan Tzara in a glary café somewhere near the Tour St. Jacques. He was surrounded by some mighty odd fish. I've forgotten their names but it was a prime collection of zanies.

Everybody was racking his brains to think up something abracadabra-ting to do. Suddenly Tzara, a sallow Rumanian who looked like a chartered accountant, rose and cried "Follow me" The Dadas jumped to their feet leaving half their saucers unpaid for. Don and I, as so often happens to trusting Americans in the hands of the European literati, found ourselves settling their score with the waiters.

It turned into a game of follow the leader. Tzara, trailed by the rest in a solemnfaced cue, marched about the streets executing a number of idiotic maneuvers. They had a little chant: Dada, Dada. Any other place we would have been arrested but the French in those days were tolerant of anything which would pass as a manifestation artistique. We ended marching pokerfaced through a Turkish bath. Fat men sweating in steam rooms or dunking in swimming pools looked up astonished but offered no resistance. The attendants asked “What the hell?” All any of the marchers would say was “C'est le Dada.” It certainly wasn't very funny. When we got back out in the air again, Don and I slipped into a cab and made for our respective hotels. Dada left us feeling just a wee mite squeamish.

The Dada, of course, is always on you.

As for fascism, that’s on us, too. Albeit, the Drieuxs don’t die by suicide anymore. Instead, they get a podcast and move to Washington D.C. to work for the MAGA kleptocracy where the only required skill and expertise is the capacity to lick the leader’s boots and flatter his ginormous ego.

That’s our meeting place. A spot
in clouds. A seraphic grotto.
A pergola in spheres. A sort
of corner—a good one. I ought to

admit: there is no one to seize
us hiding in those fleecy orchards
owned solely by our eyes:
the ultimate attempt to purchase.

—- Joseph Brodsky, “A Song to No Music”

Danse-moi à ta beauté avec un violon en flammes,
Danse-moi dans la panique jusqu'au repos de mon âme,
Lève-moi comme un olivier, sois ma colombe de retour

*

Graeme Allwright, “Danse‐moi vers la fin de l’amour”
John Dos Passos, The Best Times: An Informal Memoir
Joseph Brodsky, “A Song to No Music” (from A Part of Speech)
Uwe Wittstock, Marseilles 1940: The Flight of Literature

"...in the branches of ourselves..."

The more invisible something is,
the more certain it’s been around,
and the more obviously it’s everywhere.

— Joseph Brodkey

since the bright beams cannot cut the cloud in two, the light gathers into itself

– Anaximenes, translated by Dan Beachy-Quick

La foule les chante un peu distraite
En ignorant le nom de l'auteur
Sans savoir pour qui battait leur cœur

— Charles Trenet

*

Among my notes on Hélène Bessette’s Twenty Minutes, there is an aside on Walter Benjamin’s address to forgotten future in A Berlin Chronicle. And there is a hat-tip to Chronos in the title’s reference to the mode known as “chronicle.” Time is what “makes personal the condition / life calls itself,” says Dan Beachy-Quick in a poem titled “T.” — which he published in a collection of poems that grew alongside his translation of pre-Socratic philosophers. Poems may create the site where the past enjoins the present, a feat accomplished by expanding the terrain of address, as seen in the last verse of Joseph Brodkey’s “Roman Elegies” (To Urania):

Lean over. I’ll whisper something to you: I am
grateful for everything: for the chicken cartilage
and for the chirr of scissors already cutting
out the void for me—for it is your hem.
Doesn’t matter if it’s pitch-black, doesn’t matter if
it holds nothing: no ovals, no limbs to count.
The more invisible something is,
the more certain it’s been around,
and the more obviously it’s everywhere. You
were the first to whom all this happened, were you?
For a nail holding something one would divide by two—
were it not for remainders—there is no gentler quarry.
I was in Rome. I was flooded by light. The way
a splinter can only dream about.
Golden coins on the retina are to stay—
enough to last one through the whole blackout.

“Golden coins”: this image of an ending, glistening on the surface of an eyelid. But not even gold can keep the eye from re-membering, as Marcel Proust knew. If one abandons chronology, it’s hard to know where to begin chronicling a July in France . . .

Where to begin?

In the again of this daunting question, there is an effort to match fragments and pieces of memory, to make a map of the mind. One might, for example, leave a page from a notebook on the kitchen table, promising to return to it and find a strand. One might walk the dog and return to the table. One might stare at the paper and prevaricate, maybe spin a wheel to see where the urge to narrate lands. One might procrastinate and pace the summer-warmed floor and settle on the place in the Cote d’Azur where the mouth of the wolf meets the beach.

Plage du Loup in Villeneuve-Loubet

Lean over. We stayed in the bottom floor of a house in the village of Le-Bar-Sur-Loup, nested between pre-alpine massifs and the Loup, a coastal river which runs for 48 kilometers from its source in a mountain-side (at 1,217 meters) to its confluence with the sea at a beach which may or may be not be called Plage du Loup, where the seven of us threw ourselves into the Mediterranean. After thanking the beach for allowing us to meet in the mouth of the Loup, I surveyed the local swans, catcalled the thriving minnows, and studied the adolescent boys strutting through sand in jelly-shoes with snails dangling from their fishing poles. I am grateful for everything. Le Plage du Loup deprived us of proximate gorges, but the water was extraordinary. After swimming a distance of 30 feet away from the shore, the small pebbles at the bottom were still visible. At a depth ranging between 8 to 10 feet, I marveled at how much I’d forgotten: the salinity of the Mediterranean, for example.… and how buoyant the water. When I removed my bikini top while treading water, far from the shoreline ruled by the teens, I lost my swimsuit for a moment, only to discover that it floated up to the surface. The more invisible something is, the more certain it’s been around… The always-concerned teens noted that there was less nudity on this beach than what we’d encountered in Normandy, which seemed surprising. And so we discussed nudism in France, which officially began when Kienné de Mongeot opened the Sparta Club in 1926. But nudism as a lifestyle practice really took off when André and Gaston Durville, a pair of doctor-brothers, opened Héliopolis in 1930 on Île du Levant, making it officially the first village where you could practice nudism. While naturists like to share a lifestyle and a state of mind with others, nudists live alone or in closed circles that are more comfortable for them. Nudism isn’t necessarily communal or ideological: it can be a matter of preference, impulse, pleasure, etc. What matters in the eyes of the law depends on how the law sees things. There is no gentler quarry. Article 222-32/Section III of the French penal code equates nudism with exhibitionism and makes it an offense to public decency. Although the law is rarely applied, certain communes have by-laws banning the practice. Those who break the rules risk paying a fine. France currently claims to have at least 225 nude-friendly clubs and associations with a total of 85,000 members. Anyone who wants to stay at a naturist club or holiday resort has to join the Fédération Française de Naturisme.

I was flooded by light. Dazzled by the “novelist-narrator” of Bessette’s Twenty Minutes of Silence and a literary context populated entirely with “cardboard, collapsible” persons. The way a splinter can only dream I was looking for post office hours so I could buy stamps. And there are passages where the narrator’s memories collapse into those of the child who may have killed his father. Freud would not be surprised. The French have a word for how old you were when that horrible thing happened. I wish I knew it. In lieu of the word, I give you an excerpt from the aforementioned by Bessette:

excerpt from Hélène Bessette’s Twenty Minutes of Silence translated by Kate Briggs

Ou, quelque part au bord de l'eau
Au printemps tournera-t-il sur un phono

*

In Thesis II of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin questioned the notion of history as a description of ‘what happened’ and hinted instead at its (controversial) immanent meaning. There were others there. In the passage. Marcel Proust and Karl Marx rubbed shoulders in Benjamin’s understanding of Erfahrung as experience which forms the substance of narrative as well as the praxis of transmitting wisdom from one generation to another.

Benjamin celebrated Proust for making the novel relevant in the abyss after the war, when all dominant narratives were dictated by the victors. He relished how Proust brought the chronicler back into literature, thus sacrificing the chronos-driven novel as a genre in order to preserve its capacity to communicate the concept of experience perched on the verge of dissolution. And there is a coincidence in the fact that Bessette was vacationing in Proust’s Normandy when the gunshot went off in her hotel, inspiring her to write a novel which also dissolves any sense of solid, settled history. No single narrative wins the tussle. 

It would be scandalous to claim there is a Proustian strain in Bessette’s experiment, but I sense a resonance in her use of literature to study reality and truth. Resonance is where so many things begin. . . . in the fragments and shards of broken bottles, in the pieces that ask to be lifted and touched and reassembled differently. The scandal is endemic to poetry, for poems gnaw the bones and taste a different story. And in my ear the clear voice, the brutal voice, the dry voice, the one in the mirror.

All the wist in this gift of knowing one’s voice and one’s shadow is nothing unique and nothing spectacular but rather one more little lyre in the chorus:

Longtemps, longtemps, longtemps
Après que les poètes ont disparu
Leurs chansons courent encore dans les rues

*

Benjamin Biolay, “L'Âme des poètes”
Georges Moustaki, “L’Amant du Soleil et de la Musique”

The metaphysics of others in metaphysical Others.

La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
La, la, la, la

— Georges Moustaki, “La Philosophie”

when the swans and geese have sunk under the pink lakes of the South,
when this chair is up in final smoke, and I have not yet said it,
you and I, we will still be trying to say it in other ways,
which is, finally, the best way, like saying Amaryllis,
when you don’t mean that gorgeous hunk of fragile flower,
but mean an old girl sitting in the fertile rain, humming to death.

— Brad Gooch, “H.”

la

Sitting on a beach in Normandy earlier this month, I admired the seagulls riding various plumes of wind. It was too windy and cold to swim, which left me with words and thoughts and the realization (once again) that the waves of science are jammed by the presence of angels and metaphysical Others. 

I say “once again” because I touched on this in a poem titled “The First Gust of Special Relativity is Weightlessness” (published in My Heresies). Susanna Lang was right: the poet could not stop seeing what the scientist might have seen when imagining the theory of gravity. 

la la

Although raised in a secular home, the young Albert Einstein attended Catholic school, and he felt aesthetically implicated in its devotions until the age of twelve when he renounced religion completely. He later wrote of losing the “religious paradise of youth,” and transformed the epiphany into a universalism, a call to be a priest in the cathedral of science, or— in his own phrasing –  “a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the merely personal, from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings.”

Losing his religion made it possible to be seduced by physics, science, the realm of ineffable questions. Einstein referred to this movement from religion to science as “being in flight from the I and the we to the it” . . . But there is an aporia here— a gap between the universalist aspiration of theory and the attraction between individual bodies. Einstein corresponded with his maternal first cousin, Elsa. In one such letter, he framed his relationship to his wife, Mileva, as a business enterprise. “I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire,” he wrote. “I have my own bedroom and avoid being alone with her.” 

Addressed to a lover, Einstein’s letter had implications for the woman who would later become his second wife. He tells his mistress what the word “wife” means to him. He gives her a blueprint to the space she might covet. Maybe infidelity is the wrong word for Einstein’s behavior? In a poetic moment, he had claimed that science could be the only love to which he remained faithful. No god or human institution could compete. By locating science at the heart of his life, he set other relationships in its shadow. His second son, Eduard Einstein, died in 1965. At the time of his son’s death, Albert had not seen him in thirty years. Despite his brilliance, he couldn’t  find a way to relate to the human who shared his name and lived with schizophrenia. 

Yport in Normandy.

la la la

With the waters of the English Channel raging around me, I recall being told that schizophrenia runs in families. Medieval priests attributed its hallucinations and delusions to possession by demons. Exorcisms are still offered at various churches in Alabama. Whatever else one believes, it is clear that demons possess the quality of insatiability. 

la la la la

Astronomer Arthur Eddington said that Albert Einstein had banished ‘the demon of gravitation’. Although agnostic on demons, Einstein believed that his theory of relativity had successfully scared off the ‘ghosts’ of absolute time and space. But there are other demons and ghosts that his theory was addressing. Take, for instance, the supernal being of science known as “Maxwell’s demon,” a demon who has the capacity to detect the location of all molecules. Physicist James Clerk imagined him in order to test the second law of thermodynamics. Lest this demon be lonely, Louis Filon and Karl Pearson imagined a peer for him. This peer, the “Filon-Pearson demon,” could teleport itself, travel at impossible speeds, and indulge in freaky actions at a distance. Male physicists named their hypothetical demons, and history passes those demons along to us.

la la la la la

Some of these legacies are hallowed by the discursive regimes of “genius,” which S. C. Cornell glossed in “Special People”. Ostensibly a review of Helen Lewis’ The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, Cornell unpacks her argument that “what we call genius depends on the norms of a given period, ‘on what our society values, and what it is prepared to tolerate.’”

If I am not mistaken, Lewis is a staff writer for The Atlantic who has expressed an inability to tolerate trans women, and has repeatedly voiced her trans-exclusionary palaver across platforms and media. It is not clear where she stands on demons. Nevertheless, in the genius discourse as described by Lewis, the Romantic theory competes with the Scientific theory of genius. Where the Romantics “believed that genius was a natural, childlike quality, and that too much education could corrupt an otherwise promising case,” the Scientists sought to establish a hereditary aristocracy of genetics that eschewed notions of “inspiration” and “madness” associated with socially-inferior human beings. 

Cornell takes issue with the Romantic conception of inspiration, which harked “perilously near to the voices heard by the insane”—a particular problem for him because insanity appeared also in the “lower races.” As for insanity and losing one’s mind, once upon a time, back in the 1900’s, I went on a date with an economist. He took me to dinner and then to the cinema where we watched A Beautiful Mind. Condemned to my bucket seat, I wept into the lower half of my shirt as the life of John Nash, the Nobel-Prize-winning creator of game theory, proceeded on screen. The economist had no way to game the scenario he’d been given: a date crying during a first date. A time out of mind. A mind out of time.  

la la la la la la

John Nash once told a colleague that he took supernal ideas seriously because “the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did.” Ultimately, his forced hospitalization for schizophrenia would make Nash ineligible for the genius of Scientists. 

What Helen Lewis calls “the deficit model of genius” evokes a subconscious desire to balance out the uniqueness of the gift with an exacting cost. The toils of genius is usually relegated to their partner or caregiver; Cornell lists Vera Nabokov, Sophia Tolstoy, and Alice B. Toklas.

Cornell’s most intriguing contention is figurative: he likens the correspondence and objects genius to relics, quoting a letter that Albert Einstein sent to his wife, Mileva Marić, a few years prior to publishing his theory of general relativity:

You will make sure:
that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room. . . .

You will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;

You will stop talking to me if I request it.

Cornell adds that this letter was “part of a bundle that sold at a Christie’s auction for almost nine hundred thousand dollars” in 1996. “The demand for the ephemera of genius might be viewed as an update on the medieval crowds who flocked to the (various) churches that claimed to have the foreskin of Christ,” Cornell continues, as “both pursuits satisfy our craving for signs of humanity in a being thought to be divine.”

The Romantic genius has an uninheritable gift, an accident of fate that frees them from committing to the struggles of status in the world. Of course, the Romantic genius dies young: only a handful live past their forties. Like Cornell, I’m galled by our obsession with genius. “A better inoculation against the idea of special people may be simply to abandon the idea of genius and its underlying assumption that, at a certain point, an unusual talent transfigures into something more mystical.” From a beach in Normandy, it is still possible to see that Trump and his crew of white supremacist genetic geniuses are deeply invested in their romance with the Scientist genius, and will make accommodations for any genius or demon who corresponds to the laws of Social Darwinism.  

S'ils passent parmi vous, regardez les bien vivre
Et comme eux soyez fou, et comme eux soyez ivre

— Georges Moustaki, ibid.

*

Brad Gooch, “H.”
Georges Moustaki, “La Philosophie”
S. C. Cornell, “Special People” (New Yorker)
Susanna Lang, Review of My Heresies (RHINO Poetry)
My Heresies (Sarabande Books)

"Since failure follows me into my dreams..."

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.

— John Keats, “Lamia”

Paris met us with its insatiable sunlight— and the sun set around 10 pm, adding hours to the day. Reviewing photos, catching up on emails, and (inadvertently) thinking about Morya Davey's Index Cards as structure for a series on nostalgia as a vehicle for structuring “re-turns”. . . Short essays shaped by short, bracketed interludes engaging subjective reflections inside the body of texts and intertextual conversations, a sort of company in the time of multiple forms of distance. Close attention to etymology (the whorls of) and linguistic entanglement. Thus, I offer a few random interludes drawn from threads I met in France.

[excerpt from Moyra Davey’s Index Cards as posted by Patrick Cotrell]

---

FUGACE

Latin Root is fugere (to flee, escape) → fugax / fugacem (fleeting, swift). Passed directly into Italian and French as fugace (and Spanish/Portuguese as fugaz), retaining the literal sense of something that slips away or vanishes quickly.

• “Fugace is an adjective in French and Italian that means fleeting, brief, or short-lived. It describes something that passes by very quickly, disappears fast, or does not last.” (Cambridge Dictionary)

• In Italian, fugace (pronounced foo-GAH-che) literally means: “Without haste, but without stopping.” Or, “slowly, but steadily.” In English, fugacious means “fleeting, transitory, or lasting for a very short time.”

• “Fugace” shares the same Latin root with the English words fugitive, fugue, and the rare adjective, fugacious ("fleeting").

• “Tantôt, tu me reviens fugace / Et tu m'appelles pour me narguer / Mais chaque fois mon sang se glace / Ton rire vient tout effacer (Salvatore Adamo, lyrics from “La Nuit”)

• Homophones. Adamo’s pronunciation of “fugace” (keyed to rhyme at a slant with “se glace” and “effacer”) could easily be mistaken for la fougasse, a delicious traditional Provencal bread often served with olive oil. “Etymologically tied to the Latin focus (hearth), fougasse was historically used by bakers as an oven-temperature tester before baking main loaves, inspiring the regional French proverb "Il ne faut pas brûler la fougasse.” (Wikipedia)

• “Fougasse is often referred to as focaccia’s French cousin.” (Food Republic)

• “Fougasse was the exponent par excellence of society at war, at home, in the street, on the road (he drew vehicles beautifully).” (London Historians Blog)

• Cyril Kenneth Bird was the artistic editor and later editor-in-chief of Punch from 1949 to 1953. His cartoons were signed under the name “Fougasse,” which he took from the name of a type of military mine used in World War I.

• Apollinaire’s wartime letters to Madeline, written while he was stationed in Provence, mention fougasse, playing on the homophonic relation between the bread and the bomb.

THE WINGS OF ONE’S YOUTH

• “It was all very venerable, to be sure; but I far preferred the swallow that woke me in my youth, and the Muses that populated my dreams. The rays of dawn which, striking the bodies of the swans, cast the shadows of those white birds upon a golden billow; the rising sun that appeared to me in Syria in the trunk of a palm tree, as if it were the phoenix's nest—these were the things that pleased me most.” (Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1815-1830)

• Chateaubriand’s efforts to detach himself from the machinations of the royal court, using the memoir as a re-visioning of official narratives. Intrigued by the role tenderness plays in creating the world of his youth, and how this relates to constructions of “innocence.”

• White as the color of statues and winged things and innocence and angels.

• “The pallor of death and Hope,” as quoted by Chateaubriand from a description of Vittorio Alfieri's death mask in Ugo Foscolo's Dei Sepolcri (1806), a Romantic meditation on death and burial written in response to the Napoleon's regulation of the sites and size of tombs.

• Josip Novakovich’s re-turn to a place on paper establishes a very particular sort of tenderness, a tenderness that can only be mustered from across an impassable distance where the object no longer exists.

• Roland Barthes and Jorge Borges on the way tenderness insists on keeping its childhood.

• Adam Zagajewski’s use of the child voice in poetry as a way of reflecting a time prior to fragmentation as well as keying historicity. Twentieth century as time of political theology when expanded identitarian notions of citizenship implicated individuals in the defense of mechanized abstractions. Flags and other sacred symbols bind those guilty of crimes committed in its society. Existentialist approach threatens structural reading by accepting blame but in the end, you cannot put a ‘country’ or social group on trial without erasing the critical class and social distinctions which motivate political claims.

• The originary blank which asks for a childhood, and something sacred, per Svetlana Boym on sacralization and the spectacle of Stalinism. Eschatology and teleology, per how the child is right to wonder, wise to believe everything and nothing in tandem.

• Looking at statues of Dionysus could lead to madness, as happened to Eurypylus who opened a chest that was left in Troy as it was burning. The chest belonged to Cassandra and it contained a curse that concealed an image of Dionysus that others were forbidden from viewing. But he opened it, and words followed the image.

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven . . .

— Keats

*

Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1815-1830. Translated by Alex Andriesse (NYRB Classics)
Guillame Apollinaire, Letters to Madeline (excerpt at Brooklyn Rail)
John Keats, “Lamia”
Salvatore Adamo, “La Nuit”
Stine An, On Managing Oneself: Poetry Lessons from a Former B-School Basement Research Goblin (Sundress Publication)

France notebooks: Paris in a blur.

Please send me your translation - I can't have enough of you in my hands.

— Franz Kafka to Milena

In this relationship, where the miles between them were travelled more often in words than caresses, the act of unsealing an envelope was equivalent to unbuttoning a blouse, and holding one of her letters was like stroking her hips.

— Maïa Hruska, Kafkaesque

Or: an inventory of the blur between continents.

1. The usual turbulence of winging it. At one point over the Atlantic, I learned that Milena J. would send her handwritten drafts to Franz Kafka for commentary as she translated him. And Franz would reply with annotations.

2. At no point did I sleep more than an hour, particularly after eating a horrible chicken-like substance which I had chosen over the ravioli on the airplane menu.

3. Whiskey did not reduce my insomnia, so I mulled my notebooks, and reconsidered Simone Weil’s definition of liberty as the ability to choose. One could argue that Americans (like other citizens of late capitalist democracies) have freedom without liberty, or freedom without the ethical commitment that making a choice involves. When we explain or justify our choices on the basis of choices made by others, and then refer to those choices as a ‘reason’, falling back on social conventions as moral guidelines, parroting the market values sold to us by corporate culture, we wind up with the performance of choice. Performance can be more or less rigorous; more or less believable; more or less consistent— but it begs the question it cannot answer. Acting free, or performing consumerist freedom, is not a choice, exactly. More like the performance of chicken.

4. We landed on July 4th, and had two days to see the city before setting off towards Normandy. This meant that I saw almost zero humans who live in Paris, as my time was not quite mine (though we did get to share a meal with Tino and David). I didn’t even get to visit Shakespeare and Company, which was rumored to feature a copy of My Heresies on a small table!

5. I took photos, collected words, scribbled fragments on paper and wrists… while juggling the part of life known as “mothering”. No one else in my family speaks French, so there was quite a bit of translation involved— which I enjoy, admittedly, that messy entanglement with language.

6. Despite the hurry, my serpents met me in the margins, beginning with an allegory of prudence in the Paris metro stop near the Louvre, where Thibault Poissant’s two-faced statue, La Prudence, sits — noseless — holding a mirror that has been encircled by a serpent. A hand and a snake.

6. Long long ago, according to Greek mythology, the world was ruled by the Titans. During the Age of the Titans, different species were still permitted to mate and breed across the line that demarcated. This age permitted the creation of monsters, for the Monstrous is the familiar made slightly different, mixed with the impossible. The minotaur and the unicorn and the donkey, the centaurs, the hybrids, the beastly– all resulted from sex and carnality across borders and lines. Desire bred the beasts in us. At the time, only friends (and friendships) existed, but the gods grew suspicious and angry. They watched the world from Mount Olympus and decided that desire had the power to create, a power that rivaled their own.

7. Listened to Vincent Delerm’s pink album at night. Felt “serious like a boy of 13,” to quote Clarice Lispector, “serious like an open mouth singing.”

8. Dreamt of a dance that could only be undertaken by footnotes. Woke up and returned to recent favorite.

*

Claude Lelouch’s film, “La Vie, l’Amour, la Mort” (1969)
Maia Hruska, Kafkaesque translated by Sam Taylor (Harper Collins)
Marcel Pagnol, La Gloire de mon Pere (which I found in a little free library in Paris)
Matthew Abbott, “On Not Loving Everyone”
Max Reger, Modulation
Paul Verlaine’s love letters from during the war
Thibault Poissant, La Prudence
Vincent Delerm, “La vie la mort l’amour”

A. O. Scott on criticism.

The most interesting part of A. O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism is the Afterword. This is not to disparage his critical writing so much as to express my own preference for self-deprecating self-interviews as performed and staged by literary critics. What follows is excerpted from the thing in italics…

Q: Just to get us caught up: after years— too many years, maybe—of dishing it out you decided to see if you could take it. You wrote a book about criticism and tossed it, like a lamb into a den of lions, in front of your critical peers. How did that work out for you?

A: More or less as expected.

[…..]

Q: Your refusal to make a commitment, to take a stand, drove poor Leon Wieseltier (The Atlantic) into a paroxysm of rage. His erstwhile acolyte Adam Kirsch (Tablet) took your dithering as a sign of “anxiety.” They both accuse you of lacking the confidence, the sureness of judg-ment, that is the hallmark of true criticism. What’s more, you fail to articulate a credible defense of the critical enterprise, Instead, you splash around in the shallows of pop culture—Kant and Keats and various Greeks not-withstanding—and embrace the supreme postmodern vice of relativism. You’re a feckless dilettante and, much worse, the cause of dilettantism in others.

A: Well, I’m glad to see that you’ve been keeping up with your reading. Let me correct you on one small point. You say that I fail to articulate a defense of criticism as Kirsch, Wieseltier, and others of their kidney (notably Joseph Epstein in Commentary) define it, which is to say as the application of verifiable, externally existing standards to works of art. But I don’t fail to do that. I refuse to do that. I reject the terms of the assignment.

Q: Are you saying that they misread you? That sounds like the oldest, stalest anti-critical self-defense in the book.In this book, even. You’ve been misunderstood! Poor thing. But doesn’t that just mean you didn’t make yourself clear enough?

A: On the contrary. There are some reviewers, I guess, who wrote about a book I scarcely recognized as my own. They were obviously projecting their own biases and neuroses onto my work. But that’s perfectly normal, and part of the correct (which is to say the permanently and productively errant) practice of criticism. Recall [Oscar] Wilde: “The highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there.” The book’s most furious assailants, though, understand it perfectly well. They see it, correctly, as a betrayal of, an attack on, or at best an irresponsible departure from norms and canons they hold sacred. Wieseltier’s review, for example, is amusingly personal— a portrait of me as a vain, vapid dabbler, distracted by trivia like Hollywood blockbusters and Marina Abramović and lacking the spine to fight for what /I believe in. Not that I really believe in anything at all. Or rather, as Wieseltier puts it, “he believes in many things. But most of all, he believes in brunch. As opposed to, say, lunch at the Four Seasons, which is the kind of meal Wieseltier enjoys. “The battle for aesthetic integrity is not over,” he declares, “but I’m not a combatant, just ‘a man on the scene?”

Q: Brunch?

A: It’s a metaphor. Serious thinkers eat breakfast or lunch, and don’t need to invent reasons to drink before noon. But the thrust of his review is not that I’m just a twerp. I’m a symptomatic twerp, a sign of the rotten, relativistic, unserious times. Which in a way I am, given that the difference between Wieseltier and me isn’t merely temperamental. It’s philosophical. He and I have fundamentally opposed ideas about the nature and purpose of criticism. His “battle for aesthetic integrity” is essentially defensive. There is this knowable thing called beauty (or excellence or value) that is perpetually under siege. The critic’s job is to keep the bad stuff out, to police the boundaries, secure the gates, and correct errors of judgment.

Q: But isn’t that accurate? Doesn’t a critic function as a gatekeeper?

A: Certainly there are many people who perceive it that way, though I’m not sure most working critics do. Maybe that’s part of the source of Wieseltier’s despair— that modern critics, like modern parents, see themselves not as authorities but as friends. But the gatekeeper notion is an odd and oddly hostile way to think about art—as an enclosure that needs to be protected. A critic in this view is like the bouncer at an exclusive club, patrolling the velvet rope and turning the undesirables away. Of course what often happens is that the undesirables go off and start their own party. After a while the old establishment grows dull and stale and the crowd thins out. Eventually the place may be rediscovered, or else it quietly changes its standards of entry and welcomes the kind of customers that had previously been turned away.

Q: That’s quite a metaphor for someone who is usually in bed before ten. But this is where the charge of relativism sticks to you, I think. And also the accusation of aloofness. You stand at a remove from the daily rough-and-tumble of criticism, which often precisely involves throwing people out of the club, policing lines that should not be crossed. You do that all the time in your job, of course-you are hardly above a choke hold or a sucker punch when you think the occasion calls for it-but you’re shy about making a case for the value of what you do. Instead you take such a long, tolerant view of the history of taste that everything becomes equivalent to everything else just because at some point somebody liked it. You don’t have the guts to look at empty or meretricious work and say, as Leon Wieseltier does of Marina Abramović: “Who cares?”

A: Well, as you say, I make negative judgments all the time. I just don’t find them inherently more valuable than positive judgments, which is the implication of both Wieseltier’s view and his long record as a commissioner of hatchet jobs in the back pages of The New Republic. But What occupies me here, in this book, is the possibility that “who cares?” might not be a rhetorical question. Surely it’s worth asking in earnest who might care about performance art or video games or Beethoven’s late string quartets. Which is not to say that such things are interchangeable, but rather that they are all plausible objects of intense human interest. want to think about why people care about art, plea sure, beauty, and truth, and also to wonder if there can be judgment without prejudgment. What if we went into a given experience not knowing what to expect or how to think and had to invent our standards and reasons on the spot, with whatever conceptual tools we might have handy?

Q: That’s all very abstract.

A: Yes, but that’s part of what I mean when I say that this is a philosophical argument rather than a personal quarrel or a literary spat. At the risk of getting too academic, and also of drastically oversimplifying, I’d say that Wieseltier—and also Kirsch and Epstein—and I belong to antithetical traditions of thought. Although I try not to make a big deal about it in the book—I don’t want to bore readers more than is absolutely necessary-among my principal guides are Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Dewey. If there’s an implicit allegiance here, a school of thought in which I might claim membership, it’s some version of pragmatism. That is, I believe that our understanding of art emerges from our experience of it, and that our notions of beauty and value are the result of our arguments about them, rather than the conditions of such arguments. Truth is the lovely echo of our noisy, contending ways of being wrong. And one big way to be wrong—perhaps one I should have addressed at more length—is to buy into the fantasy of critical authority, to confuse the decidedly democratic power of persuasion with other kinds of power.

Q: And yet you yourself are, according to Calum Marsh in The New Republic, “A. O. Scott, Last of the Power Critics.”

A: A title I’m only too happy to disavow. I’m not the last of anything, and I’m not interested in power. Marsh is, I think, succumbing to his own careerist daydreams. He’s entitled to them, of course. Writing is a tough hustle. Envy is part of the lingua franca of the guild, and so is the thirst for inside dope. A few critics, some but not all of them younger than I am (Marsh makes a point of mentioning my age in his review) may have looked forward to (or looked forward to attacking) a more polished account of my professional life, or a more forthright embrace of the prerogatives and perks of my day job. Some readers may have been nonplussed by my apparent lack of interest in such things, and smelled some bad faith in my disinclination to write explicitly from the position of a New York Times critic. My modesty could only be false and my optimism can only be forced given the prestige of my institutional connections and the abysmal state of the trade in gen-eral. It’s easy for me to promise “better living” when my living is easy.

Q: And what about that? In the age of social media, sponsored content, cultural glut, and rampant touchy-feely dumbness—

A: Leon, is that you?

Q: —at such a moment your equanimity is pretty jarring. Maybe even tone deaf. Even one of your champions, Daniel Mendelssohn, concludes his review in the Book Review section of your own newspaper) with the melancholy thought that you and he and the rest of your generation “may be the last professional practitioners” of the art of criticism. Your uptempo, major-key, sing-along anthem is really a funeral march, and you either don’t know that or don’t want to admit it.

A: To be honest, I have wondered sometimes if my faith is misguided. Maybe this time the declinists and nostalgists are not wrong after all. The sky really is falling. The wolf is descending on the flock. The great work has all been done, and the great critics are all gone. But if I really thought that—

Q: — you’d be Joseph Epstein, whose plaintive review has the headline “Where Have All the Critics Gone?”

A: A piece of writing I will always cherish. I’m proud to have provoked such sustained and undiluted rage. Epstein begins by invoking Edmund Wilson and other great critics of the mid-twentieth century, a golden age that continues to cast a long shadow. Wieseltier worships at the shrine of Trilling. Adam Kirsch, a more cautious fellow, summons the shade of Stanley Edgar Hyman, a hardworking hack of the Eisenhower era. Compared to them, I’m a joke. I’m not even a critic, according to Epstein, but a mere reviewer, dispensing summaries and canned nuggets of consumer advice. (I’m also an obnoxious leftist, as evidenced by my use of the phrase “late capitalism.”) And, once again, I’m a noxious symptom of a much larger cultural catastrophe, which can be summarized as the shocking failure of the rest of the world to keep up with Joseph Epstein’s tastes and interests. Or rather, its failure to freeze in place and continue to worship at the shrine of high culture as he recollects it. Criticism used to be all about James and Dreiser and Eliot, and nowadays it’s all about movies and television and rock and roll and other things he doesn’t much care for.

Q: “Were he alive today, [Randall] Jarrell might have to seek work reviewing video games.”

A: Video games are to Epstein what brunch is for Wieseltier. Once upon a time there were titans like Jarrell and Wilson, who bestrode the world of letters far more coLossally than any of our current pip-squeaks could dream of. And there was also a culture worthy of them, even if it lay mostly behind them, in the masterpieces of previous centuries. But they were never so foolish as to imagine that the rising tide of popular culture Masscult,” as one of their contemporaries, the polemicist Dwight Macdonald, liked to call it—might toss up anything worth taking seriously. But what if Randall Jarrell was actually interested in video games, or at least found something interesting to say about them? (Not that he would have necessarily found a lot of paying work reviewing them, at least in conventional publications.) I don’t think that’s altogether far-fetched. As an admirer of Jarrell’s, I think it’s altogether probable. And I wonder, speaking of video games, if Epstein has read Tom Bissell or Anita Sarkeesian or Chris Suellentrop, all of whom have written very well on the subject. Okay, I don’t wonder that at all. Nor do I really wonder if he has read Emily Nussbaum or Wesley Morris on television, any of his own contemporaries (Ellen Willis, Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs) on rock, or any of the generations who have followed them. Or for that matter, any of the vigorous and contentious literary critics in our midst, some of whom (like Laura Miller, Christine Smallwood, and Laura Kipnis) didn’t even like my book all that much. If you define “all the critics” as “all the critics who mattered to me when I was in college,” then of course you’ll mistake ordinary mortality for mass extinction. But again, let’s take this question as something other than rhetorical. Where have all the critics gone? They’re all around you. You just refuse to recognize them.

Q: But can any of them match Edmund Wilson?

A: I’ve never said this to you before, but what a stupid question! Edmund Wilson, when he was alive and writing, couldn’t live up to the shibboleth his reputation has become. It’s not a very happy fate for such a resourceful and unpretentious writer to survive mainly as a cudgel to be used against later generations. He’s better than that. Far more interesting than Epstein gives him credit for being.

Q: And you are too?

A: That’s not for me to say. Criticism is an art of the voice, and I can’t complain if some people don’t like mine (that “of a man who vastly overestimates his own charm,” according to Epstein) or prefer the sound of their own. But I nonetheless insist that my version of criticism is stronger than that of my critics—in spite of their fetish for power and authority-because it includes theirs. The narrative of doom and decline is a story that must be told anew in every generation. But it will always crumble in the face of new and contrary evidence. To proclaim the end of criticism is really to express the wish that criticism would stop. But as we have seen, it won’t.

Q: Keats and Yeats are on their side....

A: But they lose, because Wilde is on mine. But I don’t fool myself that quoting Morrissey will convince anyone of anything, least of all an optimistic view of human possibility. Gloom is more appealing because it seems so much more serious, and fosters a feeling of lonely heroism.

Q: You’re prone to that as well. Haven’t you set yourself up as a heroic figure-the critic fighting for criticism in the face of disdain, indifference, and incomprehension?

A: No no no. You have misread everything! I’m not the hero of this book. You are.

Elsa.

It was right in the middle of our tragedy
And she sat at her mirror for the longest of days

— Louis Aragon, “Elsa at the Mirror”

Marc Chagall. Hommage à Elsa Triolet. 1969-72.

LETTER 1: BERLIN / Viktor Shklovsky to Elsa Triolet

I love you a little more than yesterday.

I wish I could unlearn how to write, so I could learn to write again and only to you.

Unlearn how to speak, then learn again, and let my very first word be “Elsa.”

I love you beyond reason. I could just as well lie down and die.

Your kiss, Elsa, is rectangular and bottomless.

Your eyes are blue, and the curve from your cheeks to your chin is marvellous.

Your shoulders and neck are better than the whole world, and your head is more precious than the stars.

You have a pair of ears and auburn hair, Elsa, and I’m grateful to you even for buying yourself backless shoes.

Mistress, beloved.

You’ve opened my eyes to life.

Your head is like a sun-bright gemstone.

And if your head is like the sun then what can compare to your lips.

And yet, you’re a girl.

A girl named Elsa.

Irreplaceable. Lonely. More beloved than words can say.

Once again, I swear to love you till the grave.

Your Viktor.

LETTER 2: BERLIN / Viktor to Elsa

Shlovsky opens “Letter 2” with a declarative — I will go to Russia, or to a Russian prison — before taking a Slavophie-adjacent swipe at Europe and landing on his addressee’s hands —The Chekists will be merciful to me, they aren’t Europeans and won’t scold me if I scream in terror of death or moan as I do now, wounded by your hands that know how to touch. He reassures Elsa and plies the banter of distance — Little one, I’m not blackmailing you. They won’t actually kill me in Russia — and sandwiches love between the ideal and reality— I love you and believe that it’s your life that makes you cruel. Perhaps he shoots a little vodka in the pause between that line and the wager which follows — My father gave up vodka, I’ll forget love. Love is a bourgeois sickness, as we know, and Shlovsky leverages multiple forms of deniability in this letter, developing a range of cover stories from humor and terror. I don’t want to torment you, he says.Tell me “go away.” he adds, ordering her to be the one that ends things. — Give me the bite de grace. Then he pivots sharply; the tone changes from love to literature — My own letters have arrived. I need them for my book. The book will be good, and, the devil knows why, cheerful. He signs off as Viktor followed by a sort of postscript without a “p. s.” — Cheerful, that’s what I am, sisterling brotherling mine Elsa.

LETTER 44: MOSCOW / Viktor to Else

Dear Elsa.

It’s morning. Snow outside the window. Everyone’s asleep. You are flying away tomorrow. I kiss the wings of the plane that will protect you; I kiss them on their stars.

Twenty-two years ago, I left for Russia, my son was born; my son has been killed.

I’d tried to build a life without you and failed.

For twenty years, I’ve been writing about our separation.

[ . . .]

Louis Aragon in a camera booth, 1929. “The hand on his cap is probably Elsa’s…”

At this point, I would like to direct your attention to my source for this correspondence, an email from Tamizadat Project which offers excerpts from a book titled Viktor Shklovsky to Elsa Triolet: Letters about Love. The book features Shklovsky's original letters to Elsa Triolet, written between 1922 and 1970, during his exile in Berlin and later from Moscow, spanning nearly fifty years. These previously unpublished letters inspired Shklovsky's celebrated novel Zoo, or Letters Not about Love (1923).

And the word tamizdat refers to literature written under dictatorships that was banned or censored by the state, smuggled across the state borders, and published in democracies with press freedom. The word originated in the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc states whose residents were ‘guarded’ by the Iron Curtain. As a portmanteau word, tamizdat combines two Russian words: tam (meaning “over there” or “abroad”) and izdat (an abbreviation for “publishing house”).

While tamizdat crosses borders, samizdat (meaning “self-published”) referred to the practice of manually copying and circulating banned manuscripts underground within these dictatorships. Samizdat was for the drawer, if anything, and many writers preferred to share it orally through recitation or reading, rather than commit their words to paper and leave traces that could be surveilled and lead to prison.

48° 51.282′ N, 2° 19.277′ E. Marker is in Paris, Île-de-France, in Département de Paris. It is in Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin. Rue de Varenne.

Elsa and Louis can be found in their posthumous residence at du Moulin de Villeneuve à Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines dans les Yvelines.

According to the Russian Ministry of Justice, Tamizdat Project is a “foreign agent.”

Support Tamizdat Project.

*

Louis Aragon. “Elsa at the Mirror.” TLS Poem of the Week, translated by Alan Jenkins; introduced by Andrew McCulloch.
Louis Aragon and others. “"Le bonheur existe, et j'y crois’ à la Maison Elsa Triolet-Aragon.” Radio-France. 26 July 2021.
Viktor Shklovsky, Viktor Shklovsky to Elsa Triolet. Letters about Love. Ed. Valerie Pozner. Translated by Alexandra Berlina. (forthcoming from Tamizdat)

Louis and Elsa.

Bonnard's red cupboard.... and writers on writing.

The spirit is most alive when it is lost.

— Guy Davenport

Sometimes I don’t know why we do it.

In these (and those) times, with Prelude 2 by Max Richter and Mari Samuelsen in the margins, I return to the words of others, seeking wine in their metaphors and similes.

Writing is wrestling, said Chinua Achebe. The writer sits in a room and wrestles with ideas in the struggle of story. It requires tremendous energy, Chinua Achebe said, but it is very exciting. “It is both difficult and easy. What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing. I have said in the kind of exaggerated manner of writers and prophets that writing, for me, is like receiving a term of imprisonment — you know that’s what you’re in for, for whatever time it takes.”

Writing is an addiction, said John Updike. “Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly, the unbearable,” said Updike. We are surrounded by death and conversant with our tiny little mortality. “That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world — it happens to everybody,” Updike continued, and sometimes we can forget this, or blunt the edges of it: “In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy.”

Writing is a kind of miracle, said David Foster Wallace. The challenges of self-reflexivity never diminish. The irony of failed escapism seems inherent to the medium. “The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you’d first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox,” said David Foster Wallace,” but this particular paradox “isn’t any kind of bind at all.” This paradox that calls us to the brutality of the page is a gift, in Wallace’s reckoning: “What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the rewards of strangers’ affection is as dust, lint.”

Pierre Bonnard, The Red Cupboard (1939)

Oil on canvas. Bonnard’s restless yellows pulling and pooling light.

A nervous melancholy in the red tones . . .color transfixing the objects.

Claustrophobia. Subtle chromaticism.

Spatial ambiguity, an insecurity of place . . . the cupboard’s fragile artifice.

The way shadows impose upon inanimate objects and shush them. Silencing as a facet of shadows.

Forget the reds.

Forget Bonnard’s elaboration of a shadow that doesn’t make sense.

Forget the mysteries which transfix you and pull you out of the ordinary.

“Forget the books you want to write,” said Henry Miller. “Think only of the book you are writing.”

If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.

— Leonard Cohen

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