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

Again

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

— Soren Kierkegaard, Journals

IF.1

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

“[In the margin]”

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

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

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

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

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

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

IF.2

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

IF.3

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

if I should ever repeat it
as author

list in volatile sway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11.  O ye fools!

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

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

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

(something inside me, indeed . . . )

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

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

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

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

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

IF. 4

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

IF.5

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

IF. 6

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

IF.7

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

IF.8

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

IF.9

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

IF.10

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

*

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

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

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

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

— Regine again.

Regine, whose favorite hero was Joan of Arc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

K and I go way back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your S.K.

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

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

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

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

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

Morton Feldman on "Coptic Light"

Wilhelm Lehmbruck's "Paolo and Francesca"

Mallarme's Hecate

Gospodinov again.

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

— Teddie Adorno and Max Horkheimer,Dialectic of Enlightenment

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

— Nikolai Gogol, The Nose

The Physics of Sorrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mooomy . . . Moooooommy. . . "

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

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

The final sentence?

“We was.”

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

Adorno jamming.

Time Shelter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Onwards, says Max!

*

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

Canetti's earwitness.

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

— Elias Canetti’s “fun-runner”

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

— Georgi Gospodinov

1

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

And what does Barthes dislike? 

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

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

3

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

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

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

The Earwitness

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

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

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

- Elias Canetti (t. by Joachim Neugroschel)

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

Like Elias Canetti, Georgi Gospodinov was born in Bulgaria.

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

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

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

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

More on Gospodinov soon . . .

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

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

— Elias Canetti

*

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

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