Workshop of Silence.

… but I wonder if this constant announcement of pain, putting one's subjection to work isn't a sort of gimmick, a trafficking in a type of disaster capitalism.

— Roger Reeves

under the bridges what springs up rises
out of a name more tragic than the absence
of lovers above

— Jean D’Amérique, “under the bridges what springs (up)

This is to confess my untold delight in the postal service’s delivery of a book titled workshop of silence, containing poems by Jean D’Amérique, as translated by Conor Bracken.

In his translator’s introduction, Bracken notes that Jean D’Amérique’s lived experience is unsettled by the boundaries of nation-states: “As a transnational person who splits his time between Haiti, France, and Belgium, not to mention a Black transnational person transiting through and living in historically white countries, he is subject to the rough, reductive, and at times lethally armed gaze of bureaucracy.” Borders, as written by this poet, “are not meant to be stopped at”; their existence is arbitrary and alienating.

Since D’Amerique began as a slam poet, Bracken says that “retaining this transgressive, playful, and dexterous attention to sound” was one of the primary goals of his translation— a goal that frequently leads him to slight departures from the denotative meaning of the original words. Translation is an art. As such, translators make choices about what to emphasize and convey across languages. Bracken elects the “enlivening of language” that restores “its fundamental slipperiness,” or, in his own words:

It is based as much in play and wit as it is in the political dimensions of the work that he's doing with these poems, which sometimes announces itself without embroidery, as in “moment of silence,”  wherein he situates his poems in the  political tradition of Nazim Hikmet, and at other times is more recondite, as in “under the bridges what springs (up),” where he points out through elaborate wordplay the continued but unexamined presence of the lexicon of shipping and chattel slavery in economic chatter. 

I hear this subversive jouissance trickling upwards through the sap of “solar brass,” a poem that tingled all the way to the tips of my fingertips when I first read it.

solar brass

my rhapsody
a cactus in the night-call’s port

for sale for tropical cents
I am a solar

powered brassy jacket
the horizon
looks punk to me

D’Amérique’s poems have a purpose in daily life: they process the banalities and polish the repetitions.

A day spills between the materials of living as found in the grocery store. . .

poem for running errands

to be recited aloud while
going up and down the aisles

coffee filters
daybreak mouth agape
onions shallots
fresh bread hitched to mornings
omelet of youthfully innocent sun
beans verging on green
dusk

a little olive oil
for sopping up memory grated cheese

poem running against amnesia
don’t stop
until you bail the basket out
and pay the register with tenderness

As if to welcome the small details of the day in each purchase by turning the grocery list into a way of loving the world.

The quantum of D’Amérique’s “building the burden” strikes me as the teens unpack boxes filled with decorations.

building the burden

flesh dressed in awareness when the blade appears
fills the absence we defies

here where the hour
finds the guts to weep for its childhood
the ditch brimes with future
interrogating a life
whose reply is a stele

here is a curtain
an ulcer on the sight
lacking passerby the window’s unfinished

forever metal the mouth exalts the eclipse
parallel sentences brooding over what’s withheld
if you want a burden
take this poem run aground by boundaries

The possibilities inherent in D’Amerique’s poems remind me of the energy inherent to the act of “calling a thing,” which is to both name the thing and to summon it into being while imagining one’s self in relation to it.

[Yes, what is a self? the poet wonders.]

Certainly, a self is something kinned to the selfing described by Roger Reeves in his essay, “Poetry Isn’t Revolution But a Way of Knowing Why It Must Come”:

A self that might like to lie down in a field in the rain and take a nap. A self that might want to cuss and cut up on a Saturday night and go to church on Sunday morning and be holy all in it. A self touching and seeing a self in a way that a self wants to be seen, touched —without the veil. In lowering the veil for our children and for ourselves, we allow them, we allow ourselves, to see, to know, to diagnose power and its abuse. We give ourselves a world, a sound for the sense and tense of our lives.

Building his essay through repetition of a line from Solmaz Sharif’s poem, “Look,” Reeves repeats: “It matters what you call a thing.” And again:

“It matters what you call a thing.” When calling a child child in a Black household, it means so many things. It is calling them love, young, be here with me. It is calling forth a hedge of protection around them not as a way of absconding from danger but because of the awareness of it, because there is no out from danger. In this way, a Black parent is a poet; they call a thing into being. Child. But they have also called their child into language. In this way, a parent is always their child's first poet; an announcement of liberation- “not less of love but expanding / Of love,” to borrow from T. S. Eliot's “Little Gidding.” The parent becomes the child's first instantiation of ecstasy, of know— knowing how to use language, to author, an invisible future into being.

In the year of my unmooring, I could not have imagined that Roger Reeves’ Dark Days would mean everything to me— and this is precisely the joy of it. The reminder that I can be astonished; the muddle in my head turned to mush; the smallest syllables reconnecting into utterances.

And so, what follows is a length excerpt from an essay by Reeves aptly titled, “Reading Fire, Reading the Stars” — because we are still reading the worlds that need imagining in order to inhabit a future. . .

As Frederick Douglass noted in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, reading promotes an imagining, a worldmaking that can directly and emphatically contradict one's present circumstance, contradict the language weaponized against oneself-slave, three-fifths, chattel, property. When reading, one does not passively receive the words of others, one makes — makes a sentence, makes a paragraph, makes a book, makes a world, makes an argument. One authors. And sometimes in the reading, in the authoring, one creates a counter-narrative and counterargument particularly when reading something like Thomas lefferson's assessment of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley or reading the pathologizing of Black families in the Moynihan Report.

In other words, one makes a possibility, a possibility that hitherto did not exist. In reading (which is also an act of interpretation), one finds language for what is possible, what is untenable about the present, what must persist beyond the present. Reading, therefore, is always an act of making a future, an act of speculation. Even if one is only speculating about what one wants at the grocery store later. I should explain. In graduate school, I took a course on performative rhetorics with a brilliant rhetorician and philosopher named Diane Davis. In the class, we were discussing the prognosticative nature of language, how we never write for who we are but for who we will be; that language is always imagining us in the future. And she gave the great example of the grocery list. We sit down and write a grocery list in order to remind our future self of what the past self wanted. The list anticipates our forgetfulness, our future self being somewhere else, in some other headspace, after waiting for the bus, for example, or working all day. In this way, writing anticipates need, what the future self needs even if, for a moment, unaware.

This is why reading is dangerous— because it points.

Reading points to the necessity of pleasure, of longing, of desire—- even if in the words of others, even if desire is nowhere in the text that one is reading.

Reading itself is desire, desirous, a playing in and with the illicit because reading allows one to occupy a dream, the not-yet inhabited. Reading points to the invisible, to what must be created that doesn't exist.

Reading can also point to what exists but is not always acknowledged—one's freedom, for example.

Again, think of Frederick Douglass—his coming into literacy as an enslaved boy. In the act of resisting his master's desire for him not to learn to read, in disobeying the slave codes that made it illegal for enslaved people to learn how to read, Douglass began to cultivate not just literacy but the stuff of his abolition, his self-making. Reading became the introduction and practice for his personal revolution. Reading helped to prepare Douglass and his imagination for the question, What might my freedom look like? And, the practice of reading helped him answer it. Reading points to that which is against genocide. Or at least the reading I'm interested in doing, the reading that begins on the edges of plantations, in small groups of study, away from the eyes, appetites, laws, and codes of the masters and their policing patrollers; reading that announces the future, reading that disobeys, critiques the present through pointing, pointing away to the swamps and marshes where we might convene something like freedom.

Maybe we begin here— at the end, at what feels like the end of a certain type of America, the end of a certain type of democracy, a certain type of truth or at least an allegiance to it. Maybe this troubling of truth has been the question of art, art in America, all along— how do we begin democracy, how do we extend democracy to all the animals?

And if you can bear one more subjunctive statement, maybe a poem will show us how to begin or extend democracy to all the animals.

(Note: some italics in the excerpt are mine, as is the dissolution of Reeves’ paragraph including the sentences that begin with “Reading” into separate lines or celestial trajectories.)

Sophie Calle.

“Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places. There is a goal, but no way; what we call a way is hesitation.”

— Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

*

Decostruttori Postmodernisti, “Gnossienne n°1” by Erik Satie
Decostruttori Postmodernisti, “If the Theremin was Pavarotti”
Eleni Karaindrou, “Ulysses' Gaze”
Jean D’Amérique, workshop of silence, translated by Conor Bracken (Vanderbilt University Press)
Roger Reeves, “Poetry Isn’t Revolution But a Way of Knowing Why It Must Come” (from Dark Days: Fugitive Essays)
Roger Reeves, “Reading Fire, Reading the Stars” (from Dark Days: Fugitive Essays)
Sophie Calle, “Silence”

Listening to music while reading Bataille's "A Story of Rats."

“The problem proliferates in Nabokov, banality and longing chasing each other. Perhaps a real life is not an existence, however solid and undeniable, but the best or most memorable moments of an existence, instants of exaltation or insight, times when the self is most itself: real life rather than mere living. In The Eye, 1930, Nabokov's narrator glosses what is real for him as oppressive and tender, provoking excitement and torment, possessed of blinding possibilities of happiness, with tears, with a warm wind'. Or - we now approach one of the most subtle and urgent suggestions of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - what is real is the life we lead when we lose ourselves, when we abandon or are driven from the rational fiction of our identity; when we fall in love, for example, and especially when we fall deeply, hopelessly, brutally, stupidly in love.”

— Michael Wood

An overcoat, winter, a man facing no “imaginable” return. A “trembling” he equates to “cowardice.” A specific cowardice, a cowardice suitable for this “half-bearded man” wandering through the ice-cold corridors of train station hotel, “ready to weep,” ready to fall to his knees— there, in a snow-covered nowhere, unable to distinguish between being and not-being, “reduced in this world to that trembling.”

He makes a phone call to the castle whose owner is absent. A voice unmoving (SP?) his absence. A desperation to communicate with this person, to know if he is alive, to tell him that someone alive is calling him. The sound of dishes breaking inside a voice. The moment Bataille felt Kafka understood the “endless time” in writing for the operator to return and confirm no one was there. “Nobody is talking. Nothing can be done.” The line is busy. The person who wants to find the man forgot about the man on the line who seeks him. A series of groans rising from the chest as if from a frozen well. Hopeless. Even “the shadow of hope” is obliterated by this. And the man in the overcoat realizes a liberation: “I was dominated by the idea of knowing — at all costs.”

Snow falling across the station building. Nostrils prickled by the scent of the virgin snow crunching underfoot. The helpless accordion of chattering teeth. The sound emerging from his throat, “tremulous…oh…oh…oh…” – and the cello. The violin. The question of whether to continue and risk losing himself in the snow. The sound of things freezing: the silence of a world whose breath has been turned to ice. The man reminds himself that now, in this condition, “the only thing left for me to do is beyond my strength.” The blinding lashes of wind against the skin of his face. The curse raised “in the darkness against” the black of a “doomsday silence.” The crunching of shoes through ice. Snow quietly covering his tracks. The soothing realization that all bridges to the past had been cut, severed, slashed–there was no recognizable path backwards. Only forward. “In the night.” Only into the building with a lit interior. A body drawn to the heat of the stove, laughing with pleasure. Three railroad workers playing billiards. The bar owner pouring a grog. The humiliation of launching a joke that matches the ambiance. The feeling of degradation, finding oneself “the accessory of these people who expected nothing.” The slow dissociation, becoming “unreal, light,” a species of sight. Existing near a game of football players. Stimulated by caffeine pills and alcohol. Feeling courageous. Leaving the bar and setting out on the road to the castle, encountering the cold air. The stopping of the snow. An absurd “test” now avoidant, but with no metaphysical justification. Not willed by God. Not ordained by a choir of angels. Simply an effort to pursue his own “mania for questioning to the end.” Life gave him oranges. Life gave him what he loved. The world had given and taken away. The wind lifted the snow in small spirals and tunnels. No imaginable way out apart from the castle, the delirium of his days, all energy “strained to the breaking point,” a bit lip, a laugh cutting the air like a cry. “Who knows B’s limits better than I?”

At this inconceivable distance from “the world of calm reflections,” the man in the snow discovers that “unhappiness had that empty, electric sweetness which is like fingernails turned back.” The cold slowly drains his energy. The fact of “desiring” that “miserable” cold — drawing the cold deep into one’s lungs in order to keep moving —  “transfigured these painful moments.” The wind coiling through the surrounding air, tracing a resemblance to that “eternal senseless reality known only once, in the room of a dead woman: a kind of suspended leap.” And so Diane meets Laure in the snow, in the misery of Bataille’s desiring.

*

Claude Debussy’s Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon, L. 150
George Bataille, A Story of Rats

"Likely Images"

*

Likely Images

With Pelléas and Mélisande, Claude
Debussy turned to sleeping figures:
the garden was growing cold, its trees
pancake hatted, leaned Orient-
wards: but otherwise bare chested:
gesture absented melody,
gesture absented memory.
No mirrors. No history.
Voices alive to themselves alone.

Music can’t be itself
like a thought can be itself the gesture
in the glass shaped like itself: music
wakens the heart, skips or weakens the head.
He said: me too at times its charm rubbed raw:
its wayward grace wronged,
distracted, was made indistinct, pallid
as a boat or bar of soap
glistening where it rises to the surface
and floats sitting up.

His legs outstretch doll-like, while Chou-Chou
beside him on the lawn busies herself in prayer;
she is a child and it is understood prays for herself
alone and doesn't know someone takes this photo,
nor why Daddy’s eyes and heart and hands grow cold.
It would be simple now for him to pay his debts,
but in a short while he won’t have to.

— William Hunt

II est des nuits où je m'absente
Discrètement, secrètement...
Mon image seule est présente

— Jean-Roger Caussimon

*

Dan Ward, “(Tell Me, Your Name) Is It Up In Lights”
Jean-Louis Murat, “Aimer” (Live)
Jean-Louis Murat, “Cours Dire Aux Hommes Faibles”
Jean-Louis Murat, “Charles & Léo: Trois titres”
Léo Ferré, “Avec le temps”
Mark Lanegan, Jack Bates, Jeff Schroeder & Shane Graham, “Disorder” (cover of Joy Division original)
”Nuits d'absence” de et par Jean-Roger Caussimon
”Nuits d’absence” Lyrics by Jean-Roger Caussimon; Music by Léo Ferré; Singing by Jean-Louis Murat

Notes on intonation.

These are not recollections. They are words written, published, spoken, recounted, recorded during the period from early January 1933 to May 1945. They all have an unintentionally familar ring. Each image of those years, whatever its origin, has something hypnotic about it. This was the peak of black and white, in cinema and in life. When Technicolor appeared it seemed a hallucination. Time seemed to have been shaped into an ever narrower spiral, which ended in a bottleneck.

— Roberto Calasso, a preface

There is no viewpoint from which the box has the appearance of a cube: one always sees only a few sides, the corners do not seem right angles, the sides do not seem equal. No one has ever seen, no one will ever see a cube. For like reasons, no one has ever touched nor will ever touch a cube. If one moves around the box, an infinite variety of apparent forms is generated. None of these is the cubic form.

— Simone Weil, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”

1

Yoko Tawada’s “Barcelona: Stage Animals” . . . the meaning of the text depends on how it is read. Halting readings make the text seem ambiguous; opening the gaps leaves more space for making meaning. Repetition read for sound makes language 3D rather than simply reading it for meaning. “There are multiple voices inside each person,” to quote Kierkegaard, king of ‘autofiction.’

2

In a conversation with Edward Said, Daniel Barenboim said the primary difference between a Shakespearean sonnet and a symphony by Beethoven is that the text serves a realization for one but not the other. The words are “a notation of Shakespeare's thoughts —in the same way that the score is nothing but a notation of what Beethoven imagined”, and so the words are “the thoughts existed in Shakespeare's mind and in the reader's mind.” He argues that this is different from Beethoven’s symphonies, where one is faced with the “added element of actually bringing these sounds into the world: in other words, the sounds of the Fifth Symphony do not exist in the score.” Although I’m not sure I agree entirely (since the performance of the play, or the sonnet, is also central to its existence and relies on performance for this aspect, which is to say, our minds make sound for the textual languages we can read, and the presence of this sound is not that dissimilar from the saying of a text …), I love Barenboim’s phenomenological description of sound’s relation to silence. Thus do I excerpt a chunk of it below:

That is the phenomenology of sound—the fact that sound is ephemeral, that sound has a very concrete relation to silence. I often compare it to the law of gravity; in the same way that objects are drawn to the ground, so are sounds drawn to silence, and vice versa. And if you accept that, then you have a whole dimension of physical inevitabilities, which as a musician you try to defy. This is why courage is an integral part of making music. Beethoven was courageous not only because he was deaf but also because he had to overcome superhuman challenges. The sheer act of making music is an act of courage since you are trying to defy many of the physical laws of nature. The first one is a question of silence. If you want to maintain the sound and if you want to create the tension that comes from sustained sound, the first moment of relationship is between the first sound and the silence that precedes it, and the next one is between the first and the second note, and so on ad infinitum. In order to achieve this, you are defying the law of nature; you're not letting the sound die as it naturally would tend to. And therefore, in the performance, besides knowing the music and understanding it, the first important thing for a musician to understand is how does sound operate when you bring it into this world, when you bring it into this room. In other words, what is the reverberation? What is the prolongation of the sound? And the art of making music through sound is, for me, the art of illusion. You create, on the through sound is, for me, the art of illusion. You create, on the piano, the illusion of being able to let the sound grow on one note, which the piano is totally incapable of doing, physically. You defy that. You create the illusion through the phrasing, through the use of the pedal, through many ways. You create the illusion of growth of a tone, which doesn't exist, and you can also create the illusion of slowing down the process of decreasing volume. And I think, with the orchestra, it's different because some of the instruments can sustain it. But the art of illusion, and the art of defying physical laws, is the first element that strikes me in a performance. And this is what one has to prepare and rehearse—not, however, to arrive at a formula for performance, which is, unfortunately, in my opinion very often the case.

Phrasing, tone, and other “illusions” you create. Two questions that continue buzzing through my notebooks: “In other words, what is the reverberation? What is the prolongation of the sound?”

3

Intonation in epistolary punctuation and titles of address: the combustible exhalation of an official appellation. As in perhaps this passage from a book by Roberto Calasso:

. . . which made me think of Augustine’s statement: “You’ve put off the day of reckoning a bit, but not canceled the debt.”

4

Intonation as a facet of the footstep, or the pace. The breath between steps.

I blame George Bataille’s “Big Toe" for expressing his view of feet and the foot fetish. As Bataille tells it, the foot is what treads on the ground and connects us to base reality it is despised, whereas the head, which is nearest to the sky and clouds is venerated. Of course some people will take the contrary view and worship what is generally held in contempt. Hence the thrill of the profanation. Notably, there is nothing akin to the “halo” for feet.

5

Of course I blame Luis Bunuel’s tracking shot of Catherine Deneuve’s black pumps as she climbs the stairways to Madame Anais brothel for the first time in Belle Du Jour, which makes us hyperaware of the relationship between her thoughts and her steps.

6

I also blame Meret Oppenheim’s My Nurse (as well as the traditional Turkeyfication of the present) for this train of thought with no endpoint or destination.

Meret Oppenheim, My Nurse

As for My Nurse, with its white leather heels gussied up and tied together like a turkey on a silver platter, Oppenheim said “it evokes for me the association of thighs squeezed together in pleasure. In fact, almost a 'proposition. When I was a little girl, four of five, we had a young nursemaid. She was dressed in white. Maybe she was in love, maybe that’s why she exuded a sensual atmosphere of which I was unconsciously aware.”

It’s the wear of the sole that fascinates me: the particular shape that indicates the tread. We never see each others’ soles; it is an expected part of being in relation to others, this underside that marks our own particular movement through the world.

7

I lined up the shoes in the house and stared at their soles.

None of the kids “walks like me,” if I read the markings on our shoes as a vague score for the music of made by our feet. But these intonations of wear — of wearing and tearing and where-ing — strike me as a sort of portrait. A series of secret portraits that involve reading a part we rarely see in each other. A sonnet series. . .

*

Augustine, Book 3, 15.1
Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society
George Bataille, “Big Toe” (Documents)
Jeanne Balibar, Rodolphe Burger, and Pierre Alferi, “Le tour de monde”
Luis Bunuel, Belle Du Jour (1967)
Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force
Yoko Tawada, Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, t. by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (New Directions)

Our way to fall.

Canetti tells a tale of an arsonist, someone, that is, who follows the urge to become fire. She begins as a young child and spends many years in penitentiaries. She likes fire, but she also likes confessing. When she starts a fire, people come to watch, and so when she confesses, she reconstitutes that scenario—people come to watch her, and she becomes the fire. “She must, early in her life, have experienced fire as a means of attracting people,” writes Canetti. “She keeps it alive by suddenly transforming herself into the fire. This she achieves very simply: she confesses that she caused it.”

— Lesley Stern, “Lighting Up”

"A history of imaginary films”

Wim Wenders served as guest editor for the 40th issue of Cahiers du Cinéma devoted to “A history of imaginary films.” His editorial begins by thanking his peers for the honor and adding an apology for lateness, or for being “out late.” The issue will be late, he says. “As with everything I write, it will be late and miss its deadline. It's the only way I've ever written. Writing is fear: a script, an article, a letter, it's always the same, the words are inevitably late; it seems to be in their nature.”

Many films remain unmade, or “locked up in scripts that are never shot,” at a particular point in the process. Wenders admires the paradox quietly: “films begin with words . . . words determine whether the images are allowed to be born. The words are like the headland that a film has to steer round to reach the image. It's at that point that many films go under.”

Words fail the image at every level. Words are the land mass that stand between the image’s motional fluidity and its existence. Wenders explains the adapted theme, divulges logistical diddles, and then begins thinking with the reader. “At what exact moment is a film born?” he asks. “Or perhaps it would be better to say conceived?” Conceived strikes him as closer to the energy of the making. His own films seemed to emerge from “the meeting of two ideas or two complementary images.” If each film is a tree, then their respective roots “seem to belong to one of two great families: images (experiences, dreams, imagination) and 'stories' (myths, novels, miscellaneous news items).”

But, Wenders says:

I don't know anything about the way a film is born, nothing about the manner of it, the lying-in, the 'big bang', the first three minutes. Whether the images in those first three minutes are born out of their author's deep desire, or if –  in an ontological sense –  they merely are what they are. I wake up one morning with my head full of images. I don't know where they come from, or how or why. They recur in the following days and months; I can't do anything about them, and I do nothing to drive them away. I'm happy to contemplate them and I make notes in my mind, which I write down in a book some time.

And the conclusion is Wenders, falling and marveling at the opportunities he has been given, agog at imaginings that have been realized, grateful and perhaps uncertain:

The childish panic still upsets me.

“Like flying blind without instruments”

Speaking of Paris, Texas in May 1984, Wim Wenders said:

A lot of my films start off with roadmaps instead of scripts. Sometimes it feels like flying blind without instruments. You fly all night and in the morning you arrive somewhere. That is: you have to try to make a landing somewhere so the film can end.

For me this film has come off better than, or differently to, my previous films. Once more, we flew all night without instruments, but this time we landed exactly where we meant to. From the outset, Paris, Texas had a much straighter trajectory and a much more precise destination. And from the beginning, too, it had more of a story than my earlier films, and I wanted to tell that story till I dropped.

. . . and I wanted to tell that story till I dropped.

“Reverse angle”

Wenders again:

“It was night, it was another arrival at another airport, in another city. For the first time in his life, he felt he'd had enough of travelling. All cities were as one to him. Something reminded him of a book he must have read in his childhood. His only dim memory of it was this feeling of being lost somewhere, which he felt again today..”

A story or a film might begin with those words, or words like that. Cut to a close-up of the hero. But this film can't start like that. This film has no story. What's it about, then?

— What's it about, then?

— This she achieves very simply: she confesses that she caused it.

“Who am I? If I were to rely on a proverb this once, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I haunt… who makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be WHO I am. “

— Andre Breton, Nadja

*

K. Jacobson, K. “I will open my mouth in a parable”: ‘History’ and ‘metaphor’ in the Psalms.” (Acta Theologica, 41)
Lesley Stern, “Lighting Up” (from The Smoking Book)
Tod Marshall, “Why Do You Write Poetry? (Four answers I wish that I'd given.)” (from Because You Asked)
Wim Wenders, “Like flying blind without instruments: On the turning point in Paris, Texas” (May 1984)
Wim Wenders, “Reverse angle: New York City, March 1982”
Yo La Tengo, “Our Way to Fall”

Ekphrastic speculations: Stephen Goss.

”We used to live in a cloud of unawareness, in delicious complicity.”

— Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt

”Poi piovve dentro all’alta fantasia . . .”

— Dante, Purgatario XVII.25

1

“CINEMA PARADISO”

Commissioned for Zoran Dukić on solo guitar, Stephen Goss’ Cinema Paradiso is a 14-minute piece of “music about film.” Each of the six movements pays homage to an aspect of cinema that has stayed with Goss. Dukić premiered it at the Koblenz International Guitar Festival on June 3, 2017.

I think Goss’s work often lingers at the borders of the temporal, where nostalgia dialogues with form and discontinuity. His profligate use of quotations and stylistic references calls to mind the intellectual self-portraiture buried beneath the heaps of artistic and literary references in Jean-Luc Godard’s films . . .

2

A FUTURE ANTERIOR FEEL.

“Mandalay” opens a conversation with Lars von Trier’s Dogville, which disgusted my peers when it came out in 2003 — and still disgusts many who watch it in 2025. As usual, von Trier’s emotional brutality is unsparing, unbuffered by luscious scenography, aesthetic solace, or spectacle. The world falls apart in variations, as von Trier depicts them, and Dogville’s world calls upon the self-annihilating community in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. In this Weimar-echolucting movement, Goss quotes Weill’s screwy accordions and then distorts them as if through a double mirror, situating von Trier’s nihilistic sparsity alongside the vague cabaret of glasses past, darkly.

3

“YOU’RE WRONG, SHERIFF.”

Halo this moment in Godard’s Breathless, where the dialogue comes from voices offscreen, and Man’s Voice recites a poem by Louis Aragon that fascinated Godard, who also quoted it in a written review of Max Ophuls’s La Ronde in 1950 and again – nine years later — in a written review of Jacques Rozier’s Blue Jeans. Then Woman’s Voice quotes a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire. A duet after my own heart, this. A mode I still love dearly: the (off) (off) like a pair of monosyllables that may be moon-shoes.

4

LIGHT AND NOIR: CONTRASTS.

The “Paris, Texas” movement draws on the unforgettable atmospherics of Wim Wenders's film. According to Goss, this movement explores “the similitude between the vast open spaces of the Texan desert and the internal emptiness of solitude through loss” and “alludes to Ry Cooder's haunting soundtrack.”

The “Noir” movement, on the other hand, pays homage to the film genre known as Film Noir. The mood is Miles Davis’s score for Asenseur pour l’échafaud (1958) and Duke Ellington’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). “A sleazy, seedy, smoke-filled room music of dark corners,” Goss calls it.

5

THE PRODUCTION OF TIME.

The movement titled “Modern Times” plays with a scene from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, where Chaplin's character is working on a factory production line and the music shifts gear as the camera switches attention from one machine to another. Soon, or “before long,” Chaplin “can't keep up” with the conveyor belt and “ends up being swallowed by a large machine.” After “racing out of control,” the “machine” “grinds” to “a halt.” Then, as “it starts up again” Chaplin is “gently regurgitated” and “production” “can” “continue.”

6

BIRDSONG AS SCOPE AND HOPE.

The “451” movement converses with François Truffaut’s dystopian Fahrenheit 451 (1966), set in a world where reading is banned and all books are burned. The auto da fe is continuous. Truffaut’s film follows the “the book people” who live on the fringes of this society learning books by heart and teaching them to one another to keep the books alive. To keep with this idea of absented texts, guitarists who wish to perform the 451 movement must be taught how to play it from someone who knows it, or else learn it from a recording or video. Goss burned the original score.

7

DANCING TO DEATH.

Form is the fire here. For the “Tarantino” movement, Goss wrote a tarantella, an Italian musical folk dance form based on a couple’s dance linked to the belief that dancing could cure the bite of the tarantula spider. For the condition known as “tarantism,” the cure is a “dance to death.” Yes, Goss is shadowing the spider bite and the prick of the heroin needle in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

*

“The imagination is a place where it rains inside.”

— Italo Calvino, 1988

Compass and gauge.

Art can be understood in a masked way, but at the same time it cannot be so idiosyncratic that it becomes impossible for someone to see what you have at stake.

— Kiki Smith said, reflecting on a quote from Lauren Berlant’s “Intimacy”

2

This past weekend, I spent a lot of time trying to locate the transactional self of late capitalism, as given in contemporary literature and art, only to find myself distracted by shadows on the mantle, a sidereal provoked by Svetlana Boym’s formulation of the “off modern” as a method of inquiry that engages Walter Benjamin’s reading of history against the grain. Against the grain we are given. Against the ways “into” the popular and significant. Against the speedy realm of accelerationism and profuse verbiage. Against every part of me that is tempted to fake it in order to “make it” — which is to accede to being the very thing I hate.

2.1

Having pledged my troth to self-division and diversions, I could not very well erase the sort of train passing through Peter Schjeldahl’s “Gauge,” and “the romance of the verb” in the ache of his stanzas, a disaster I bring to this screen where it may apprehend others in their relationship to trains or music or poetry or the revival of “bespeaking” amid the unforgivable beauty of hems and hemmings.

2.3

Marcel Proust’s search for lost time shapes the form of his novel. The Proustian character is estranged from the memory that re-creates him. The mind wakes up from sleep disoriented, having "lost the plan of the place where it finds itself," as Proust writes in the preface to Contre Sainte-beuve. 

But being lost always occurs in relation to place. 

One must be somewhere to know one is lost. 

One must have something to lose.

2.4

By giving evocation a claim on our imaginations, Proust asks us to inhabit our own estrangements. strangeness. Familiar places disappear; they abandon their geographic location only to visit as a fragment we notice in the late afternoon light burnishing an empty bleacher at the high school. Like Proust in the "unknown country" of music being played at Madame Verdurin, we wonder who created this place. Who invited us inside it?

“In the work of what composer did I find myself?” wonders the Proustian narrator.

The moment of recognition relies on the first place, or the moment it recognizes: “Thus, suddenly, I recognized myself in the midst of this music that was new to me. I was in the middle of Vinteul’s Sonata.”

The lost place has been named; the name has been secured within duration through the act of localization.

Recollecting Elstir's paintings provides access to “the places where I found myself so far from the real world,” Proust tells us; he wouldn’t be startled if he bumped into a myth as he walked to the courtyard. (Does art make us more ‘receptive’ to ghosts?) The artist brings the flower into himself as Elstir's transplant, the flower “into the interior garden, where we are forced to live always.” Each person has his secret garden, but also the garden he unknowingly inhabits in the interior of others. Gilberte exists to him as the thought which appears when he imagines her “before the porch of a godly cathedral, explaining to me, the significance of the statues, and with a smile that spoke kindly of me, introducing me as her friend to Bergotte.” The first impression acquires that statuesque significance.

As for Albertine, she is “the young girl” fluttering in a group of girls at the sea resort called Balbec. She wears a beret, “her eyes intent and laughing, mysterious still, slim, like a silhouette profiled upon the wave.” This first image comes to replace the last image, or the image of the leave-taking. Humans are apprehended in the gaze which moves from exterior to hidden interiority, like a secret. 

. . . .

“Proustian persons never let themselves be invoked without being accompanied by the image of sites that they have successively occupied,” wrote Georges Poulet in Proustian Space.  And the sites we occupy are not limited to the sites in which we were encountered; the sites also include places where you dreamed of seeing us. These places are alive in new narrative forms. In this way, a place participates in the knowing of a person.

2.5

In baseball, “home base” refers to the home plate consisting of a rubber slab where the batter stands; it must be touched by a base runner in order to score.

In popular slang, reaching “home base” (or fourth base) refers to”'consummating the relationship by having sex, making love or fucking.”

To “finish in home base” refers to the act of “ejaculating inside your girlfriend.”

2.6

TEXT 1

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

2.7

HE: When you say that you don't remember fainting and losing consciousness, which part of the memory can't you recall? 

ME: That memory is so overloaded that it requires a self, or acquires a selfhood, by virtue of its continued existence. 

HE: Does the memory exist if you can't remember it?

ME: How could I answer that? Certainly, the expectation that such a memory exists shapes my relationship to knowability, and makes me less confident in claiming to know things about myself. If that memory exists, you are just as likely to be able to access it as I am. So it isn't my memory . . .

HE: You don't like talking about dizziness.

ME: It's not very interesting to me. 

HE: Why?

ME: If I had blue eyes, they wouldn't be interesting to me either. The lack of blue eyes is what makes them intriguing. People who haven't experienced serious unrelenting vertigo bring it to the page as metaphor for a fantastic sensation they can't quite imagine. Or can't imagine entirely. We 'try on' those blue eyes. But trying on blue eyes doesn't require as much imagination when you google for affect and details. One risks less than not even bothering to imagine it.

HE: So vertigo is 'interesting'?

ME: Anything is interesting when one can choose the nature of our relation to it.

HE: What do you want the vertigo-borrower to do?

ME: I want them to be destroyed by vertigo. I want them to feel it.

HE: That is very mean.

ME: And yet, it fails to be ‘meaningful’ somehow. Much of artistic preference is interiority that projects itself onto a screen.

2.8

Walter Benjamin recounts a story from the third book of Herodotus's Histories in order to show us the “nature of true storytelling,” as distinguished from the mere recounting of information or data:

“The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.”

ME: See? A story does not expend itself. 

HE: How is this related to Proust?

ME: Well, the Proustian world is obviously unstable; its topography is mapped by the mind wherein each place partakes of the same space between remembering and imagining. And each border is that of a fragment, a piece in the blurred puzzle of proximity and relationships, like that “electrical projection"“on the wall in his childhood, the magic lamp that reveals only the illuminated patch. —- So the Albertine of the past seeps continuously from the gestures of the Albertine of the present. There is the tension between her personhood and her value to the author.

2.9

Perhaps this is just a species of metaphor, as when Vladimir Nabokov fashioned himself as “the shuttlecock above the Atlantic” admiring the blues of his “private sky”— a playful figuration that resists naming the game that is being played. Badminton gave us the shuttlecock. It was popular among the leisured upper classes who made use of dachas. In this metaphor transplanted from Russian soil, Nabokov provided a means for the exile to remain “at home” in the space between homes. Diplomacy, too, is a game. And N’s diplomacy often involved to scoring points through what Adam Thirlwell called the “militant literalism” he applied to translation.

3.0

HE. But you take words too seriously.

ME. Only by taking them seriously, and with a certain melancholy, do I discover the laughter in them. Seriousness can be funny.

HE. Not funny to me.

ME: Very funny to Me, actually. Maybe not funny to He. Literature has many ways of getting around its Alberts.

Art gives you an experience that you didnʼt have before. You get to discover and experience something, even though you do the same things over and over again. Time presents itself as new at each moment, as long as we are here. It does continue, with or without us, but it has the opportunity inherent in it that our perceptions can change. We canʼt change timeʼs trajectory, but we can change our relationship to time and to everything else. We can change our minds about time and love. Time is always the same, but it can move. There is a lot of space in time.

— Kiki Smith

*

Amy Millan, “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” (cover of Death Cab for Cuties song)
Amy Millan, “Lost Compass”
Lavinia Meijer and Phillip Glass, “Night on the Balcony”
Peter Schjeldahl, “Gauge” (The Paris Review)

Nominations in Christian Lehnert's poetic forms.

Paul Celan to Gisèle Lestrange Celan
Paris, 28 March, 1966

My Darling,

Here I am again, with two poems that have ripened 'between the day before yesterday and today. Take them as a hello thrown by a heart. I love You.

Paul

*

Swung high over the heads
the sign, ignited with the strength of dreams 
at the place that it named.

Now:

Give a signal with the sand leaf, 
until the sky is smoking.

The name and “the memory plant”

The butterbur (Petasites hybridus) or The memory plant

This the enigma: Of all the dogged / lilac names
Of the dead / this blossom tells / their escape.

— Christian Lehnert translated by Richard Sieburth

*

Petasides hybridus, or butterbur, is a perennial shrub that grows throughout Europe as well as parts of Asia and North America. It was used to treat plague and fever during the Middle Ages— and now is mainly used for prophylactic treatment of migraines. Often found in wet, marshy ground, damp forests, and the shorelines of rivers or streams, butterbur plants can rise to a height of three feet with its downy, fur-covered leaves extending to a (unusually large) diameter of three feet as well.

The genus name, petasites, comes from the Greek word “petasos,” referring to the felt hat worn by shepherds, while “butterbur,” the common name, comes from how the plant’s large leaves were often used to wrap butter during warm weather. Other common names include pestwurz, blatterdock, bog rhubarb, and butter-dock.

Naming conventions

For composers, there is a certain significance in the 8th opus. And Christian Lehnert gestures towards this significance in the titling of his eighth poetry collection, Opus 8: Wickerwork.

Designating itself “a nature book,” Wickerwork is now (partly) available in Richard Sieburth’s English-language translation, and in his tantalizing prefatory essay that supplies context and enriches Lehnert’s wickers. The book is divided into seven linked chapters or movements, overseen by a unique epigraph.

And each of the seven movements is composed of seven contrapuntal poems that face one another across the page’s seam. On the left: the solo voicings of a couplet in alexandrine meter. On the right: the chorales of an octave in iambic tetrameter. Sieburth likens Lehnert’s distichs to the “phanopaeia” that Ezra Pound defined as “a casting of images on the visual imagination.”

Names

The name is an herb / a seedling and a shaft /
Risen from the sound / of wood and oil and sap.

In these poem, Lehnert uses a virgule to indicate a pause or breath within the line, thus connecting the poem’s way of being — and breathing— to a convention in German baroque verse, namely, the use of a separatrix to serve as a guide for oral reading and performance.

Naming by posthumous cherubs

Lehnert’s earlier poetry collection, Cherub Dust, also made use of the distich.

Drawing on a 1674 collection of devotional epigrams written by Angelus Silesius — and then attributed to the posthumous authorship of Johann Scheffler in the persona of a “cherubinic wanderer” — Lehnert fondles with the form’s atemporal perspective. A posthumous author has the advantage of looking back-and-forth upon a life once lived, and relived without the pressure of time at his back.

“Locodescriptive calendar poems,” Sieburth calls them . . .

Each distich is composed from two 12-syllable lines: the first line describes the subject in verbs, while the second line abandons the world of verbs for nouns, tucking a nomination into the first 6 syllables (i.e. “thus the name of” or “thus X is called”) qualified with a colon, followed by 6 syllables of metaphoric or metynomyic predicates referring to the thing being christened. In this way, each distich names the subject, turning it into a proper noun, a thing worthy of remembrance.

February thirteenth 2016, Breitenau

Something buzzing in the tree, syllables for sure.
Thus the name for embers: matter feeding words.

Early September 2016, in the lamplight, Breitenau

Whoosh— a call? A bang or whimper in fact?
Thus the name of the bat: the afterthought of that.

October 2016, Gottleuba Valley, Eastern Ore Mountains

Lost, like the leaves, those names by which we went.
Thus red beech is called: shadow of a summer spent.

Second advent 2016, Breitenau

The words hold still, there’s nowhere they want in.
Thus the name of fatigue: in silence it begins.

Several distichs from Cherub Dust lack the date and proper noun of place-name in the titling, as, for example, “Mother Tongue”:

Mother tongue

The room in which you write gets torn away at night
and burned up in the fire, out of words, out of sight.

A constellation

A different name and date, namely, the 2oth of March 1966, when Paul Celan wrote to Gisèle from Paris, thanking her for a book she had brought to the hospital for him.

My Darling

Thanks for Ulysses — I hope that all is well, that all will go well. […] I wrote another poem— here it is.

Rather than include the poem, I’m narrowing in on the end-notes concerning Celan’s copy of Ulysses, “the authorized translation (in two volumes) by Georg Goyert, 5th edition (Zurich: Rhein, 1952),” as noted by Bertand Badiou who also notes that “the two volumes have numerous reading marks and underlinings, and, at the end of the second part (volume 2, p. 196), the date ‘12 April 1966’” is visible in Paul’s handwriting.

Among the plenty of marked passages in Celan’s copy of Joyce’s Ulysses:

A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth. It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over Delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars. His eyes watched it, low-lying on the horizon, eastward of the Bear, as he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight, returning from Shottery and from her arms.

Speaking with Gisèle led Badiou to wrap this passage into a relational ontology wherein Gisèle helped Paul “deepen his knowledge of ‘things of the sky,’ to identity certain constellations, and in particular Cassiopeia,” while Paul helped Gisèle “learn about ‘things of the earth,’ to observe plants and stones, and to call them by their names.”

The personal note

A stranger awoke, saying the same sorry things
as me, in the hope I’d lend him my wings.

Christian Lehnert t. by Sieburth

“Navi” and a ‘Nick’ in a Name

In the middle of the Cassiopeia constellation sits its brightest being, a bling of a thing, a blue star named Gamma Cassiopeiae (a.k.a. Navi). Its nickname comes from the American astronaut Virgil Ivan Grissom, and does one of my favorite things to a name, which is simply to make a Semordnilap by spelling it backwards. So Ivan becomes Navi, and Navi is the star used as a navigational reference point by astronauts, including the star’s namesake.

At a distance of 610 light-years from our planet, Navi’s nature is fascinating and unpredictable. Its luminosity is 40,000 times greater than that of our Sun. Known for exhibiting irregular variations in brightness, Navi is what astronomers call an “eruptive variable star.” It can emit 10 times higher the amounts of X-ray radiation than that of other B class stars. In China, this star is known as Tsih, or “the whip.”

“Upon Cassiopeia’s death, Poseidon placed her in the stars, where she was chained to her throne and must spend half of the year upside-down as further punishment.”

*

Cassiopeia as depicted by Johannes Hevelius in his Firmamentum Sobiescianum sive Uranographia (1687)
Cassiopeia in Astrobackyard
Christian Lehnert, Wickerwork, translated by Richard Sieburth (Archipelago Books)
Devendra Banhart, “Fistful of Love” (Antony and The Johnsons cover)
Devendra Barnhart, “Won’t You Come Home”
Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat”
Lizzie Harper, illustration of Petasites hybridus
Paul Celan, Letters to Gisèle (NYRB Imprints)
Petasites hybridus (Plants for a Future database)
Petasites hybridus (Alternative Medicine Review)

Walla Walla and a book about writing.

Flyin' like a fast train, I don't feel a thing
'Til when I pull into my station
I just crash and burn

— Kurt Vile

Back in the land of magnolias after a breathtaking weekend in Walla Walla, Washington, where I had the opportunity to yammer on and on about apostrophes and poetry and My Heresies for the Visiting Writers Reading Series at Whitman College, as curated by the marvelous Katrina Roberts for 25 years now. A decade ago, Katrina culled an anthology of anecdotes, craft notes, confessions, and conversations in dialogue with the many writers who have participated in the Whitman Reading Series — and it rustles through my brain like maple leaves and autumn fires.

Mark Strand responded to Katrina’s questions with a poem, and I love that she published it in its original, epistolary form, as an apostrophe to the poet’s diary. . . a few additional notes— and some music — and of course photos from the descent of color and cloudscapes.

ANTHONY DOERR on writing what you “know”

On many levels, ‘write what you know’ is limiting, inhibiting, stunting advice. Does that imply that as a forty-year-old bald male Idahoan, I should only write about forty-year-old bald male Idahoans? What do most forty-year-old bald male Idahoans really know about themselves anyway? I believe we should be urged to write toward what we don't know; we should fumble toward the mysteries, the things we can't articulate but believe are there, intuit are there. Maybe we start with what we know, if what we know is how it feels to rob a convenience store, or how to brew beer, or how to cross a frozen lake behind ten sled dogs, but then we start working in the opposite direction, away from things that are comfortable, familiar, known. We should use our sentences as engines to drive us towards the infinite universe of things we don't know. Otherwise we're not learning, and if we're not learning, why bother? […] Ultimately what I think we have to do is investigate. We have to try to skate away from the familiar and known, and push toward those shadows which are by their very nature unknowable: death, love, cruelty, the other. We should move away from familiar structures of language, of paragraph, of narrative, even as we stand upon them; we should write what we hope to know, and write it using structures we did not fully know when we began. In that way, I think, writing is an education, a kind of ‘knowing’ that never ends. At least I think it is. I don't really know.

JOANN BEARD on nonfiction, memory, and the boundaries between truth and fiction:

Because so much of my writing is based on memory— even the stuff about other people—- I have trained myself to remember. It isn't that hard, but it's time consuming and takes dedication; one memory fragment will lead to another and to another. For your previous question I spent a lot of time remembering what it was like to play dolls with my cousins, even though none of it made it into my answer. Those particular childhood memories feel very true and I trust them, but I'm no fool. (Or, no fool about this, anyway.) Memory will lie as often as it will tell the truth. I once included in a short story an anecdote that was based on a harrowing experience I had in my early 20s. When my friend, who was there for the harrowing experience, read my account of it, she said: Yeah, that's exactly what happened, all except you weren't there. I wasn't? I thought it was me, simply because her storytelling skills were such that I saw it and felt it so vividly that it became part of my own database of scary things you don't know can happen until they are happening.

CHRISTIAN WIMAN on prose, heresy, and (heart throbbing) one of my favorite thinkers

Once after a reading a woman stood up amid a very large crowd, read a passage out of some prose I had written, and said, “How do you feel about being a heretic?” What I should have said is that there are no heretics, or that there are only heretics; that humans-mere and mirrored creatures that we are— move toward god in language, and to speak language is to profane him. I should have said that I grew up in a land god held in the very palm of his hand, lifting us all up lovingly to the light, breathing over us his tender winds, and then, almost as an afterthought, periodically crushing it all to dust. I should have said how does one praise a god in whom one does not believe, and how does one believe in a god whose only evidence of existence is one's insatiable and perhaps insane desire to praise. I should have said that “no human being possesses sureness of self: this can only mean being bounded and unbounded, selved and unselved, sure' only of this untiring exercise. Then, this sureness of self, which is ready to be unsure, makes the laughter at the mismatch between aim and achievement comic, not cynical; holy, not demonic. This is not love of suffering, but the work, the power of love, which may curse, but abides. It is power to be able to attend, powerful or powerless; it is love to laugh bitterly, purgatively, purgatorially, and then to be quiet.” The quote is from the English philosopher Gillian Rose. The book is Love's Work.

ROBERT OLEN BUTLER answering the question: “What is a short short story and how is it different from a prose poem?”

To be brief, it is a short short story and not a prose poem because it has at its center a character who yearns.

Fiction is a temporal art form. Poetry can choose to ignore the passage of time, for there is a clear sense of a poem being an object, composed densely of words, existing in space. This is true even when the length of the line is not an objectifying part of the form, as in a prose poem. And a poem need not overtly concern itself with a human subject. But when you have a human being centrally present in a literary work and you let the line length run on and you turn the page, you are, as they say in a long storytelling tradition, "upon a time'" And as any Buddhist will tell you, a human being (of a "character") cannot exist for even a few seconds of time on planet Earth without desiring something. Yearning for something, a word I prefer because it suggests the deepest level of desire, where literature strives to go. Fiction is the art form of human yearning, no matter how long of short that work of fiction is.

James Joyce spoke of a crucial characteristic of the literary art form, something he called the epipbany, a term he appropriated from the Catholic Church meaning, literally, "a shining forth." The Church uses it to describe the shining forth of the divinity of the baby Jesus. The word made flesh. In literary art, the flesh is made word. And Joyce suggests that a work of fiction moves to a moment at the end where' something about the human condition shines forth in its essence.

I agree. But I also believe that all good fiction has two epiphanies. There is the one Joyce describes, and there is an earlier epiphany, very near the beginning of a story (or a novel), when the yearning of the character shines forth. This does not happen in explanatory terms but rather is a result of the presence of that yearning in all the tiny, sense-driven, organically resonant moments in the fiction, the accumulation of which reaches a critical mass which then produces that shining forth.

And because of the extreme brevity of the short short story, these two epiphanies often even typically— occur at the same moment. The final epiphany of a literary short short is also the shining forth of the character's yearning. It has been traditional to think that a story has to have a "plot" while a poem does not. Plot, in fact, is yearning challenged and thwarted. A short short story, in its brevity, may not have a fully developed plot, but it must have the essence of a plot, yearning.

MAT JOHNSON answering the question “What do you dislike about writing?”

One thing: the time. The time it takes to create something worth anyone but yourself reading it. Every book you see lined up on the shelf is an artifact of a beautiful day that was not enjoyed, a conversation that was never conducted, a moment in the world not experienced. And it's not just the time I sit at my computer puttering away; it probably takes me less than a year of workdays to actually write a novel. The typing time is just the more final, literal part of a process which consumes my life. When I wake up and lie in bed, as I shower, as I dress, eat breakfast, and go through almost every task of the day until I lay down again, I'm thinking about my novel. My wife has learned to recognize the signs on my face when a random thought sets me off into literary land, and I become distant from the world while one of the tiny pieces clicks into place. Because that's what the novel is, in my head: a puzzle. A giant multidimensional swirl of puzzle pieces that I have to slowly decipher . . .

KATIE FORD answering the question “How do you know when to break a line?”

Recently, a Russian friend of mine, also a poet, said to me, “I think you have a different sense of the line than I do.” Line breaks are, to some degree, determined by the language and culture and the conventions of both. If you were to study eastern European poets, for example, you'd find that the line break of Czeslaw Milosz is far different from the line break of the American poet Allen Ginsberg (although that's an extreme example), the line break of a Korean writer utterly more spare than that of the wonderful emerging poet, Natalie Diaz, whose long, full lines nearly overwhelm a reader with their painful realities of living as one of America's native people, on and off of an impoverished, but vibrant, Mohave reservation. So, there are boundless choices. My line breaks are largely intuitive now. Sometimes a line can only bear so much. Then you must break. Sometimes pressure put on a last word will double or triple the meaning. Then you must break. Sometimes the break creates a hovering, spooky enjambment. Then you must break. Sometimes the breath can go no further. Then you can break, unless you want to break the voice, which is often necessary. Sometimes the line, when broken in a particular place, makes a meaning otherwise absent from the poem. Then you can break, unless the meaning is absolutely ridiculous.

Second verse same as the reverse . . . standing on top of the world when it started to burn

- Kurt Vile

*

Katrina Roberts, ed. Because You Asked (Lost Horse Press, 2015)
Kurt Vile, “flyin (like a fast train)”
Kurt Vile, “Like Exploding Stones”
Kurt Vile, “Palace of OKV in Reverse”
Kurt Vile, “Say the Word”

Rumor has it.

“I didnʼt think it would turn out this way” is the secret epitaph of intimacy. To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity. But intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way. 

— Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy”

Rumor has it.

Rumor has it that Donald Barthelme was obsessed with the letter that Soren Kierkegaard wrote to his ex-fiance’s husband whose family name was Schlegel. As evidence would have it, the private letter that has never been made public inspired a short story by Barthelme titled “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel.” It’s difficult to overstate how central this story remains to understanding what Barthelme was doing in literature.

Gossip and hearsay: these are the details that condemn humans in the court of public opinion. Every public has its own rumor mill, just as every intimate relationship has its hearsay.

But rumor has it that the writer Tyrtamus of Eressos only had sex intercourse once in his entire life, at the age of 47, with Aristotle's son. Trytamus (also known as the philosopher named Theophrastus) was Aristotle's favorite pupil, and the one-off lover of his son. But this character from Eressos remained unimaginable to me until Plutarch dropped the sort of lubricious detail that brings a dead man to life: “The offensive man is the kind who exposes himself when he passes married women on the street. At the theater he goes on clapping long after everyone else has stopped.”

What else — apart from rumor — does the work of fleshing-out small details in fiction and prose?

Those small things not speaking. 

Plutarch believed that “small things” – an offhand remark, an aside, a quick dialogue, a joke, a ritual gesture – illuminated the subject of an essay more effectively than explanation and description. His essay “On the Failure of Oracles” rants and raves like a tell-all, offering a view behind the curtain into the secret practices of his job at the Delphi Oracle. Plutarch tells us how he unscrambled puzzles from the underground chamber where answers were received. He gives vent to his suspicion that the chamber was filled with hallucinogenic gas. The reader is given an intimate foretaste of how the genre of the “tell-all” creates buzz around a subject. Even the deconstruction of its secret parts seems to add to the mystery and marvel.

Could mention weather.

In his notebooks and writings, Roland Barthes was drawn to mundane everyday details about weather, schedules, clothing, lodging and biography – minutiae that fleshed out the sensorium of incarnation, artefacts of the ordinary. The immediate was relevant. Barthes felt there was more to learn from tactile consciousness than from what he called “insipid moral musings.”

Could mention the hair on his pillow.

The self is often identified with its loyalties and affiliations. The details that evoke such loyalties also tend to be the source of tension in human relations. Lush tidbits in the Sei Sonagon’s “pillow book.”

They say she dreamt the whole thing ten years before it happened.

Dreams are the form that can do absolutely anything. Never forget that. No part of a dream can be disproven. The data of dreams is non-falsifiable as a lived or received experience.

My mom used to remove the marrow from soup bones and put on it bread as a school sandwich.

The margins aren’t really tangents. Margins are the things we would say if we stop skewering language with the pretexts.

In his introduction to Urban Gothic, Bruce Benderson aligns his work with the French genre known as “textes” that offers a more capacious narrativity and blurs ontological boundaries. At several points in different stories, Benderson mentions “tenderness” in surprising contexts: when feeling overcome by an “irresistible reverence” for beauty that isn’t sexual, and just after being strangled by a john in a “contrived situation” that resembled “the feeling of love.” 

Yes, said Anne Carson. “The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.”

*

Anne Carson, “Short Talk on Kafka on Holderlin”
Bruce Benderson, Urban Gothic (2022)
Donald Barthelme, “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel”
Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy”
Magnetic Fields, “It’s Only Time”
Plutarch, “On the Failure of Oracles”
Sei Sonagon, The Pillow Book of Sei Sonagon (translated by Ivan Morris)

Wanting a hit.

Yeah, you wanted the time.
But maybe I can't do time.
Shit, we both know that's an awful line,
but it doesn't make it wrong.

— LCD Soundsystem

DADASCOPE

A

Dadascope was leather. I mean nobody agreed it on its meaning.

HANS RICHTER

Whether or not they understood the content or the meaning of Dadascope, that's a different story. . . What the artist does and what the public takes from what he does is always a different story. Not just in the instant that the story is told, but also in the way the story is read fifty years later.

A

Fifty years. Is that the windspan, the wingspam, the spamwidth?

RICHTER

There is no story, there is no psychological implication except what the spectator puts in the images, but it is not purely accidental but rather a poetry of images built with and on associations (Nothing's ever tough enough. . . until we hit the road) the film takes the liberty of playing on the scale of possibilities of the cinema, freedom for which Dadaism always bet and to which it continues to give medium.

(the reader imagines touching his lovely scalp)

Dadascope is not conceived of at all as chaos, but as freewheeling poetry; and, as such it is in my opinion the best film-making I have done. But the poetry is so free that in several instances the sensations or analogies cannot be established at all. It is just as much chance which directs the flow of images as I do. But the fact remains that it is my chance, that it is my own borderline— the line where chance and conscious or creative direction cross or parallel each other. It's my chance because I realize it as chance. Another might not even realize it, or look at it, or feel or hear it.

LCD

No dirty bus and early flight. No seven days and forty nights.

ORTIZ MORALES

Dadascope is “a multilingual collection of Dada poetry, sound poems, and prose, along with Richter's choice of images and sounds typical of the Dada movement (objects and sculpture, especially by Man Ray; paintings, theater, performances and even chess games)” intended to “generate a new filmic style” that Richter called CINEMATIC POETRY and which he defined as “externalized internal events” for which the essential poetic element is “montage that creates metaphors.”

A

[Note to self, quote Morales on ‘the essential poetic element is montage that creates metaphors.’ See if constellates.]

MINOTAUR

RICHTER

In 1953/54, I wrote a scenario for Minotaur, a film I never made, but it is a major work as far as I am concerned. It is autobio-graphical. When I met Fellini for the first time, he told me, “Everything an artist does is autobiographical.” And that is right, to a greater or lesser degree. And Theseus in my Minotaur is to a greater degree.

The scenario started really from the same desire as the last episode of Dreams: the Labyrinth as an expression of the unforeseen ways in life you had to take, unforeseen obstacles you had to overcome. One goes through life worrying, but not so much that it inhibits action, one just goes forward. This going forward, trying out the right way, a life pattern, that is what I wanted to express in this film. It is the story of a man who is Everyman, but who becomes a hero when he does not suppress the voice of the innocents calling him for help. That's the essence. And in telling the story, I remember as a boy protecting the weak ones in school, and it is, in retrospect, also connected with the Hitler times, this incredible feeling of loneliness but still being forced to do something for one's co-human beings and not being able to do anything. This induced me to write the story.... You can't tell stories without telling stories you have lived through.

I should have made this film. That I couldn't do it is just one of those paradoxical, inhuman things that happen.

Final page of Hans Richter's film script for Minotaur, 1953

RICHTER:

Variations of ∞ the 8:
The infinite line returning to its origins (or returning into its origins?)
The labyrinth of my film script Minotaur
Where entrance and exit meet has kept me fascinated for the last twenty years in films and painting.

. . .

“The original source of this realization was a curious German DVD from the 90's with no information about the editor, publisher or the place of edition…”

OBJECT X

Object X is “a compilation of Dadaist poems and texts declaimed by their own authors and made by Hans Richter in 1957 and premiered in 1961. Participating Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Haussmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes,Walter Mehrig, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters (on a 1932 recording), Tristan Tzara, and Wladimir Vogel. Also included is a posthumous participation by Theo van Doesburg, recited by his widow Nelly.”

“since he held that sleep was simply a succession of fainting-fits brought on by semi-asphyxiation due to (a).”

*

Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan), Chapter VIII, Footnote 1, from The Third Policeman
Hans Richter, Dadascope (1961)
LCD Soundsystem, “You Wanted a Hit” (Live at Austin City Limits)
LCD Soundsystem, “You Wanted a Hit” (This Is Happening, 2010)
Ortiz Morales, “Music for Audiovisuals” (Superior Conservatory of Music of Malaga, 2006-2007)

Eternals return.

The world is all that is the case. […] There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus

In his journals, Georg Simmel stared at Nietzsche's eternal recurrence and then, quietly, refused the implied sameness: 

The world process strikes me as the turning of an enormous wheel, but understood as the premise of the eternal recurrence. But the result, the actual repetition at some point of the identical, is not the same— for the wheel has an infinitely large radius; only once an infinite amount of time has elapsed – that is, never – can it reach the same point again. And yet it is a wheel that turns, which, in its ideal, aims at the exhaustion of qualitative manifoldness without ever exhausting it in reality.

Elsewhere, Paul Valery’s Mon Faust: “Only the ineffable is of any importance!”

Even a Somewhere sounds solid in comparison.

Reviewing notebooks again. Trying to catch up on the things I haven’t finished. Finding old words staring at new ones. Lured by the queer sensibility of metaphors that draw on the mystical via negationis [way of negation], or what Hans Blumbenberg calls “those self-portrayals of the elementary perplexity that riddles every theology: having to speak of God incessantly without presuming to dare say anything about him.”

+

How Blumenberg squares Cusa in “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality”:

Nicholas of Cusa made this perplexity a speculative means of representing his coincidentia oppositorum [unity of opposites]. He invented the explosive metaphor of the circle whose radius approaches infinity and thus produces a circumference with an infinitely small curvature so that the circle's arc coincides with its tangent. Here, the intentionality of intuition is over-expanded in order that its futility be expressed in itself, so that the anticipation [Vorgriff] performs the retraction of the trespass [Übergriff].

+

How metaphors offer us access to ways of thinking that are limited by the nature of our relation to a source, or a source text.

+

How translation theory figurates the constellatory potential of language in relation to the absent original, where “original” designates a mythical unitary language demolished with the towel of Babel.

+

How the god of the gaps may occasionally partake in this longing for originary wholeness.

+

And (I want to argue) poetry works against such regressive nostalgia when it employs the conditional.

+

And George Lichtenberg, lamenting something like a deus absconditus in the trunk of the tree. . .

"Like images on photosensitive film projected from memory by the eye..."

“Yes, at one time, I did think that I’d found my niche in my words but then, how shall I put it? Words made their presence felt through their difference. […] It was as though, all of a sudden, I could only express myself through silence in that space left vacant by their difference.”

“What difference?”

“Something fundamentally incompatible between man and his words, something that keeps them at a distance.”

 — Edmond Jabès

“There are many ways of taking notes,” I said to myself in June 2023.

It is said that Francisco de Goya went out at night frequently while Napoleon’s troops ravaged Spain and put flesh on the word, “atrocity.” A gardener named Isidro often accompanied the artist on his nightwalks through Quinta del Sordo. One night, as Goya sketched the stacked corpses along a hillside, Isidro asked why he felt the need to depict such barbarities. Without looking up from the bodies, Goya replied, “In order to acquire the taste for saying for ever and ever to men that they should not be barbarians.”

“If we imagine for a moment that our enemies were to get wind of what we are doing and try to use it as propaganda, it would do them no good at all, for the very good reason that no one would believe them,” wrote the Reichskommissar for the East in a June 1943 letter to his peers in Berlin.

“This transformation of an experience into language, this possibility of a relationship between our sensibility and a world that reduces it to nothing, can today be seen as the most perfect example in French contemporary writing of what literature can be,” Georges Perec wrote in his study of Robert Antelme’s The Human Space, a book which revisited Antelme’s experiences after being deported to Buchenwald, Gandersheim and Dachau.

The commitment to express the inexpressible is central to modern literature.

“There are many ways of trying to say rootless things,” I said to someone else in June 2024.

The words of a given language limit our horizon.

The words are unsuitable to the task of speech.

The writer feels unsuitable to the labor of saying.

The writer has felt this way since lifting the first piece of scorched wood to draw upon the walls of the man-cave.

“In the beginning, men and animals and even stones were gods. Everything happened without a name and without a law,” said Bia to Kratos, as written by Cesar Pavese.

Consider a colony of protozoans leading their obscure lives in a pond.

Consider the “extras” flashing through the car window of a poem by Broda.

The bowl that the deceased used to wash must be placed outside with its mouth to the ground and it cannot be used until the dead is buried.

Consider the mouth of the bowl being washed out with soap like a 1950’s sitcom.

What notes have been taken by the photograph of a child with soap in its mouth and a bowl in the margins?

*

Charles Mingus, “II B.S.”
Edmond Jabès, El, ou le dernier livre (Gallimard, 1973)
Francisco de Goya, The Disasters of War Portfolio
Robert Antelme, Essais et témoignages, introduced by Daniel Dobbels (Gallimard, 1996)

Vulgarizations.

“[An] example (is] that of the application of 'above' and 'below' to the earth. . .. I see well enough that I am on top; the earth is surely beneath me! (And don't smile at this example. We are indeed all taught at school that it is stupid to talk like that. But it is much easier to bury a problem than to solve it.)”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Pierre Bonnard’s The Conversation — a sketch or an unfinished working draft, I think

Language is marked by falls, by stalls between faltering and falling.

Translation theory originates in our irrevocable banishment from Eden.

All literary theory, interpretation, and critique follows from that seminal withdrawal.

What follows a fall is Commentary.

Taking translation theory as the originary for any discussion of language and textual interpretation, one can imagine why New Criticism fares badly when applied to texts that didn’t originate in English. New Criticism touches so little in translation. Imperiousness, in general, makes for limited readings.

Times have changed but those who need God’s language to be an unchanging law, preserved by the elect, continue their war against those who favor open access and multiplicity.

Some have said that the first “mass market translation” involved carrying the Septuagint from Hebrew into Greek at some point in the 3rd century BCE. Eventually, this Greek translation became more authoritative than its Hebrew source. Fast forward to 384 AD, when Eusebius Hieronymus (later Saint Jerome) created a new translation of the scriptures in Latin. Eschewing the official Greek, Hieronymus’ translation relied entirely on the Hebrew and Aramaic source text. The rage of the bishops followed. A furious Augustine of Hippo lambasted Hieronymus for dividing the faithful from within. For Augustine, this creation of an alternate sacred document would gnaw through the intestines of the Church. 

History shuddered. Lava poured from the mouth of Etna. The Vulgate opened the doors to disaster by making the gospels accessible to speakers of Latin languages. More vulgarities were sure to follow. In 1522, Martin Luther published the New Testament in German. William Tyndale followed suit with an English version. Alas, in 1536, Tyndale was convicted of heresy, executed by strangulation, then burned at the stake. Burning his bones assured that Tyndale would not be permitted to rest in eternity. Sir Thomas More had expressed concern over Tyndale's English translation, but he missed Tyndale’s execution due to his own. More was beheaded on charges of treason three months prior. 

The fall is a singular event yet also a season.

In Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifestation, Mark Polizotti takes translated texts as a form of collaboration. Language is not a clear end-point marked by a destination but a route with spaces, evocations, new roads, and rest stops dropped the route which alters what one receives or picks up while reading. For him, this complexity is a liberation: the translator is free to give up on equivalence and focus on encountering the text.

The translator “performs” the translation on paper. 

Polizotti notes that an earlier meaning of translation referred to the act of transferring a holy relic from one place to another, or “else to carry a saintly figure to heaven without the intermediary of death.” 

[At this point, a leaf falls next to my foot, as if to inaugurate the seasons of boots. I begrudge the beauty of all small things that seek to obscure what is true of winter, namely, the light’s early leavetaking.]

Recent Mormon schismatics lean on a concept of “translated bodies” involving the denial of corporeal death repackaged into a product for the cult of eschatology. Unlike Polizotti’s translation theory, these bodies have been “translated” by God across mediums. They are translated for the purpose of the end-times: time’s end is simultaneously a present and a desired destination to them.

This is why Lori and Chad Vallow support contemporary translation theories that obsess over the literal translation. The divinely-translated take themselves literally, and place their faith in the text to render language immaculate in the flesh.

These two have convinced me that I never want to visit Hawaii.

"It is just a short step from this to plastic form."

Paul Klee, Little Castle in the Air (Luftschlösschen)

Thinking of Ann Lauterbach’s “Elegy, or To Begin Again”— with its wonderful serial form, its repetitions, its figurations of dead faces — the soft rendering of Seurat’s Child in White, and the sound of its “absent agitations” . . .

Ann Lauterbach.

Detail from Paul Klee’s Schützerin (Protectress), (1932)

GARY INDIANA’S PENGUINS

Gary Indiana’s penguins keep wandering through my head, as do the zoo-keepers in “yellow smocks” — which I share, for the pleasure of the “blowy” and the “shirring” and the “way of penguins"“:

Last month I went to the zoo in Edinburgh to visit the penguins. The day was so blowy the treetops thrashed in the wind with a shirring sound like crashing surf. Finally rain thin as needles fell and the zoo closed the park. I only had time to see the giant sloths and pink flamingos and a leathery aquatic mammal I don't know the name of moving swiftly back and forth under the inky water of his pond.

The penguins were diving and feeding, feeding and diving.

The zookeepers, in yellow smocks and blue galoshes, hand-fed them whole, dead fish. They snapped the fish up as if pulling them from a vending machine. We love penguins, but that is one-sided. No penguins will talk to you. No penguins will even look at you unless you are close enough to be a threat. Why should they? Unless you are holding a dead fish, no penguin has any reason to go near you. That is the way of penguins, and it always will be.

PAUL KLEE IN HIS NOTEBOOKS

The story of a “nice walk” and getting drenched in yellow:

Yesterday afternoon I took a nice walk. The scene was drenched in a sulfur yellow, only the water was a turquoise blue—blue to deepest ultramarine. The sap colors the meadows in yellow, carmine, and violet. I walked about in the river bed, and since I was wearing boots, I was able to wade through the water in many places. I found the most beautiful polished stones.

I took along a few washed-out tiles. It is just a short step from this to plastic form.

Suddenly I was surprised by extremely dense fog and I hastened back in the direction of the air base, since I am not well acquainted with this region even in clear daylight. I took a familiar path; and soon got into the vicinity of Langweid and strolled on toward the left, below the highway to Stettenhofen, where the fog grew lighter; the Lech was at some distance. The soil's tender, warm tones came through. I went to the old familiar inn and had two helpings of hors d'oeuvres and immediately felt quite warm again.

*

Ann Lauterbach, “Elegy, or To Begin Again” (Conjunctions, 2008)
Gary Indiana, I Can Give You Anything But Love
Nick Cave, “Helpless”
Paul Klee, Instrument for a New Music (1914)
Paul Klee, Little Castle in the Air (Luftschlösschen)
Paul Klee, Schützerin (1932)

Paul Klee, Instrument for a New Music (1914)

Contempt for poetry.

CRITIQUE AND CRITIQUE

Evergreen on the literary criticism scene: Davenport, Steiner, Canetti, Leiris, and Gass.

Gass, for example, plays for the vastest stakes: the world entire in a sentence. His writing is lit from within by unremitting love for language. The study of affinities is inseparable from the writing which exhibited what it admired without pandering to the usual anxiety of influence. Take, for example, the sharpened little sentences Gass deployed to describe the French author, Colette: “Colette has the cat's gaze. Unhurried contemplation is her forte. Hunger cannot give us such precision.” Note the space he refuses between words. Note how Gass uses syntax to create resonant areas within a sentence. How closely is the nailed to the noun?

Dead on arrival: the sort of review that oozes contempt for language and poetry. “UGH. THE THING IS NOT THE THING” so much as the smugness of its loathing. What does the following paragraph illuminate?

Batter my heart, three-person’d Critic! Personal amusement (or obsession) is more than fine, but is it a book? Surely ‘literary criticism’ has already been substantially ‘defamiliarized’ in this day and age? How many writers have not already drawn our attention to poetry’s ‘participation in the contemporary information economy’? Does poetry even exist? Am I a camera? 

This paragraph is merely a self-portrait, a paean to personal fear of flaccidity. One is struck by how little the self-portrait risks of the self. The author would have us believe that he is speaking about a book. Thus, he directs our attention to its brushstrokes, its focal points, its angles of light— and he hates the artist’s style, despises the artist’s subject, takes personal offense at the artist’s decision to exhibit something that he finds reprehensible. “The stupidity of the pious, whose judgment could never be compared with those of the God they adored with all their heart: This was the second thing that scared me,” wrote Orhan Pamuk.

The Surrealist "Truth" Game.

“It is not to belittle Surrealist activity — as it has unfolded from 1924 to the present day — to consider it as a game, in fact as The Great Game, whose prizes in the eyes of those who played and lived it, can be calculated in promises of freedom, love, revolution, and in anything else that intransigent desire can aspire to.”

– Phillipe Audouin

At its best, Surrealism is played for love of the game. The eye isn’t on the outcome (since no outcome is definitive) so much the process.

Theoretically, the games began with Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, a book that influenced everyone from Michel Leiris to Louis Aragon. Roger Caillois took it further in Man, Play, and Games, where he stipulated the conditions for a game as follows: A game must be free (or not obligatory), separate (circumscribed in time and space), uncertain (the result is not predetermined), unproductive (no goods are produced), governed by rules, and associated with make-believe.

The surrealist “experiments with objects” also fall under this game-like structure. I’m sharing this one from The Book of Surrealist Games because I can’t imagine a more delightful use of a piece of pink velvet—- and maybe we should all be determining the irrational characteristics of objects at a time when realism’s impetus for description misses so many dialectical possibilities.

En fin:

13 things I learned from books this week.

1

According to Javier Marias, when Henry James and Oscar Wilde met, James mentioned that he was missing London, at which point Wilde glanced at him with scorn and disgust. “Really! You care for places?,” Wilde huffed, and then added: “The world is my home!” From then on, James referred to Wilde as "an unclean beast" or "a fatuous fool" or "a tenth-rate cad." On the other hand, James’ “enthusiasm for Maupassant knew no bounds, again thanks to a single visit the French short-story writer had received him for lunch in the society of a lady who was not only naked, but wearing a mask.” It is a fact that Henry James died at the age of seventy-two, after a long illness. Before dying, in a fit of delirium, James dictated two letters to his “brother,” Joseph Bonaparte, urging him to accept the throne of Spain. At one point, James fell to the floor. Convinced that he was dying, James later said he heard a voice which was not his own in the room, and this voice said: “So it has come at last—the Distinguished Thing!”

2

The mythos of nationalism continues to create us. According to the U. S. Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of Happiness” is one of the “inalienable rights” of man. Robert Calasso draws this to our attention in his book,The Unnameable, if only to point out that the exceptional. . . isn’t. This “magical word is also used in another text,” namely, the Catechism of a Revolutionary, drawn up by Sergey Nechayev. Article 22 reads of the Catechism reads: “The Society has no aim other than the complete liberation and happiness of the masses.”

Calasso argues that the secular world is looking for theories to satisfy the hole left by myth and meaning. He quotes Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad: “The Gospel is the last and marvelous expression of Greek genius, just as the Iliad is its first.” If "Greece and the Gospels were two independent and non-discordant revelations,” this recognition was achieved by Weil’s metaphor of looking at a cubic box:

There is no viewpoint from which the box has the appearance of a cube: one always sees only a few sides, the corners do not seem right angles, the sides do not seem equal. No one has ever seen, no one will ever see a cube. For like reasons, no one has ever touched nor will ever touch a cube. If one moves around the box, an infinite variety of apparent forms is generated. None of these is the cubic form. 

At the same time, we know that the cubic form constitutes the unity of all those changeable forms and “also their truth,” added Weil, who considered this to be a divine gift, so that “enclosed in our very sensibility is a revelation.” From this revelation one could move on to understand all the others. But, “for the secular world the cubic box does not exist," Calasso maintains. Bummer.

3

I walked Radu and thought about these two lines by McKenzie Wark, from her letter to Cybele — “Something is absent, offered to you, perchance. A hole made in a poem; a poem made whole by a cut.”

4

Rambling through my K-related notebooks again, where I found a passage from a book by Paul Zweig that I think speaks best for itself, without my clumsy paraphrasing and pithy summations. Zweig, then:

Paul Zweig, excerpted fromThe Heresy of Self-Love

5

Greil Marcus opens What Nails It with an essay titled after the father who died before he was born. “Greil Gerstley,” it reads, the “echo of an absent memory” evokes the man he never met, the soldier lost in a Pacific typhoon when his ship went down. This particular absence calls up the ghosts of all epics and shipwrecks, all odysseys and heroes and adventurers located beneath ad infinitum of “whatever comes” — and opening into the risk of oblivion. The waves and crests of Melville’s Moby Dick fill the background. In a later essay from the same book, Marcus mentions how powerfully that Melville’s novel affected him, and how reading it gives an ocean we cannot imagine, a context so betrothed to the unpredictable power of the natural elements that it can only be taken as an opposite of what we experience in our controlled, highly-commoditized lives.

6

Autumn 1940. Lisbon— according to Roberto Calasso— who quotes Arthur Koestler:

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

I keep staring at the letter “H.” and thinking about Marseilles.

7

Returning to Joanna Walsh’s My Life as a Godard Movie to think about this term she uses as a scaffold— motion parallax, meaning how the world moves with you when seen through the window of a train. The speaker loves riding the rails of her imaginings, running her nimble thoughts over an object and then creating a response. Like many writers, I recognize myself in that particular fissure. 

Walsh quotes Kierkegaard’s Repetition— “Does he love the girl or is she just another thing that moves him?” — but the quote could just as well apply to the speaker as to the Him of her book. And her book is about beauty, about the desiring gaze that defines the Godard's female protagonists. In turn, Godard builds his aesthetic from the appearances of his stunning heroines, Walsh sees "a resistance in Godard's women … in the way they look at Godard's men" so uncomprehendingly. That "moment of resistance" in their gaze is what Walsh takes to be "his study of their hesitation . . . the kind of interest that holds its object at a distance." Walsh appreciates this recognition from Godard. She backtracks, acknowledging that he does use some green in his films: he uses sea-green and eau-de-nil and "a green that is almost black." She uses the color of paint, her medium,  to describe his colors. she refuses in a sense to Grant his frame. "Godard plots are driven by desire.. Love is their by-product; beauty is their currency." But the women do not look as if they desire the men: "they prefer her to be desired without desiring." "Ethics are the aesthetics of the future," Bruno says. Godard showed Walsh the beauty and power of saying “J'hesite.”

8

True to New Narrative’s celebration of gossip, Rob Halpern drops a lovely morsel of blab in his introduction to Robert Gluck’s Jack the Modernist, originally published in 1985 — but with the thrill of a forthcoming NYRB reprint due out this year. As blab would have it, the character named Martin “is the confirmed nomen à clef of Fredric Jameson . . .  whose article ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ was first published in 1984, the year before Jack.” At one point in Jack, Bob (a.k.a. the narrator who goes by “Robert” on the cover page, where he plays author) writes: “If there was a Red Queen, she would have been Martin, a famous art historian and Marxist critic who really wielded some French majesty.” Of course the juiciest blab gets tucked into footnotes, which is why I read them with gusto. And Halpern’s footnote number 5 doesn’t disappoint: he nods to the role played by Fredric Jameson in the San Francisco Bay Area circles where New Narrative emerged during the late 1970’s, and mentions Jameson’s presence in Bruce Boone's Century of Clouds, where he appears undisguised as “Fred . . . the captain of our destinies and true Teddy Roosevelt of our souls.” Coincidentally, Boone's essay “Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O'Hara” appeared beside Jameson's "Reification and Utopia" in the first issue of Social Text in 1979.

In a note appended to the novel, Gluck locates the text in “art of collage” before offering an inventory of sources. Halpern hones in two of these sources to frame the intertextual references, adding that the title of the book comes from the “art criticism” of Denis Diderot and “the novelesque dialogue” deployed in Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, where gossip and rumor create possibility. Gluck’s Jack, of course, is the modernist—his cool distance repulsed by intimacy and sentimentalism, eager to prove itself in abstraction. And Bob represents himself, which is to say: the postmodernist impulse of play, experimentation, and self-abnegation.

9

“Power of absence,” — as noted by Paul Valery in his Cahiers from 1929.

 “We have to be in a desert. For he whom we must love is absent.” — replies Simone Weil.

10

Autumn 1940, according to Roberto Calasso— who notes that “Bertolt Brecht was writing The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, where Hitler is presented as a gangster trying to take control of the cauliflower racket.” Calasso continues:

Young Viereck couldn't know it, but in the introduction to Metapolitics he was already perfectly reiterating Brecht and many who would follow him: “The common question is: are the men on top, Hitler particularly, as sincere as the masses below or only cynical gangsters laughing at their own stolen ideas? But the very question is too heavy-footed, too lacking in psychological awareness, to answer either positively or negatively. Here the real question is not either-or. Both the 'either' and the 'or' combine; that combination is a logical impossibility but a psychological fact. In other words, most successful frauds are sincere; most demagogues are honestly intoxicated by their own dishonest and cynical appeals.”

11

Samuel Beckett: “Molloy and the others came to me the day I realized my stupidity. Only then did I start to write what I felt.”

12

McKenzie Wark to Cybele again . . . “There’s so many of their myths where the cut balls give rise to monsters. As if that could only be a bad thing. You and girls like me, Cybele, we love monsters. They’re modern. They demonstrate the ways the world could become otherwise. They’re the sign of fresh things. This is your world in all the ways it comes and cums.” — and my heart in the cumberbund.

13

Ah well. . . C’est comme ca, la vie. “Realism is a corruption of reality,” wrote Wallace Stevens in Opus Posthumous.

*

Anne Carson, Plainwater
Bruce Boone, Century of Clouds
Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist
Greil Marcus, What Nails It (Yale University Press)
Jeff Noh, “Harold Brodkey’s Paper Attachments”
Joanna Walsh, My Life as a Godard Movie (Transit Books)
McKenzie Wark, Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir (Verso)
Nadine Shaw, “Ville morose”
Paul Valery, Cahiers
Paul Zweig, The Heresy of Self-Love (Basic Books)
Robert Gluck, Jack the Modernist (NYRB Classics)
Roberto Calasso, The Unnameable Present (translated by Richard Dixon)

Egon Schiele’s 1911 painting of a “poet” — and it goes without saying that Schiele is the model for his imaginings and self-objectifications

O camera.

---

“camera”

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

1 /

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

2 /

3 /

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

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

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

4 /

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

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

5 /

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

“cameră”

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

November 1794.

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

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

Summer 1798.

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

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

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

Midnight (the time of metaphor)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 2025

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

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

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

lens 1

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

lens 2

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

lens 3

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

lens 4

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

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

lens 5

HE: What drew you to K?

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

HE: Oh? But he is deeply committed!

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

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

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

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

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

HE: A writer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HE: And that coin is what?

ME: Respectability. Same game, different costumes.

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

— Hans Blumenberg, The Readability of the World