Anatomy of the passions.

Wherein all the bolded sentences below come from a single paragraph in Francois Delaporte’s Anatomy of the Passions—

From “Living with Ghosts” in e-flux index, vol. 1


“By the frank laugh, a person expresses, without wanting to, something that he or she could never say.”

The “frank laugh” pins its star to the possibility of recognition—- the belief that one can identity “frankness” when it appears. The frank laugh, on this reading, is haunted by the unsayable thing.

Henrik Ibsen disliked the way his play’s title was translated to “Ghosts” in English.

The original title, Gengangere, can be translated as "again walkers", "ones who return", or "revenants". It has a double meaning of both "ghosts" and "events that repeat themselves.”

[Could never say. . . as in; every inhibition has its proscription.]


“A joyous behavior without any joy the case arising precisely from electrical simulation is doubly impossible, because the person does not command the contraction of the inferior palpebral orbicular, and because he cannot say what is, by its very essence, unsayable.”

Could never precisely or doubly ‘command the contraction.’

Could not say which smile is being performed without electric shock to LIGHT IT UP.

A lightbulb.

Henry David Thoreau and the Aeolian mode:

“At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. . . . The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.”

Speaking of Thoreau, as Charles Ives does in his essay on the fourth movement of Concord Sonata: "Throughout Walden, a text that he is always pounding out is ‘Time’." 

“A joyous behavior without any joy the case arising precisely from electrical simulation is doubly impossible . . . because he cannot say what is, by its very essence, unsayable.”

Esse es percepi: the baby blanket that doesn’t cover the legs of a fully-grown human.

Find a way to make the binkie amenable to the present body.

Or find another word for the contagious electric, the thing Danielle Dutton evokes in Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (Coffeehouse Press):

“There is always a silence at the center of this kiss, a peculiar moment when the paintings turn us back to the writing or the writing to the paintings with something left unsaid.”

The essence of the thing left unsaid is the unsayability. And Derrida is loving this.

“The springing forth of expressive force and its constraining character carry no symbolic determination.”

Shapelessness is so important to Duchenne’s theory of the smile and the expression. The unshaped is unsayable because it has no edges.

Charles Ives brings an apple to the circular gesture of aesthetics wherein preference is hitched to the beautiful, the terrific, the significant: “But personally, we prefer to go around in a circle than around in a parallelepipedon, for it seems cleaner and perhaps freer from mathematics; or for the same reason we prefer . . . a healthy to a rotten apple—probably not so much because it is more nutritious, but because we like its taste better.”

But what if we climb inside the parallelepipedon? Maybe it is “healthier.”

— Ives grows quite dear to me at this point in his rant:

We like the beautiful and don't like the ugly; therefore, what we like is beautiful, and what we don't like is ugly—and hence we are glad the beautiful is not ugly, for if it were we would like something we don't like. So having unsettled what beauty is, let us go on.

We like what we like and isn’t it lovely to circle ourselves liking it?

“Only reflex actions realize the mechanism of the expressive act.”

Mechanism is a form of familiarity: the machine of the body responds within given parameters as determined by normalcy. The regime of the normal includes an affective register that is part of the regimen.

In 1921, in an “Epilogue,” Charles Ives considered the future of American music in relation to the urge for definitiveness.

In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones-when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now°— perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man.

Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be a transcendental language in the most extravagant sense. Possibly the power of literally distinguishing these "shades of abstraction" — these attributes paralleled by "artistic intuitions" (call them what you will) — is ever to be denied man for the same reason that the beginning and end of a circle are to be denied.

For Ives, the question of sincerity was complicated by what we could not know. And he follows Emerson in this view that the limits of sincerity are set by language. The insincere is a manner of speaking rather than a condition of being.

In Emerson’s words:

How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the same words!

My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation until all is said which words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption.

We don’t know much of each other—despite speech. Despite talking. Despite the increasingly-taut boundaries established by the social scripts of therapeutic discourse. We are just trying to fit in. To fit into it.

“Physiognomy presents an authentic expression when, and only when, the organism gives birth to the image of an emotion that it is impossible to mime.”

Giving birth.

A new time.

A new man.

Anew-ing . . . the newness.

“Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.” ― Nathaniel Hawthorne

The organism gives (which is to say, “gifts” or “offers”) birth to the image of an emotion that is impossible to mime.

The labor of “giving birth” is a gift; the assumption is gifted.

M asks why the mother of a friend is “getting paid to carry a baby”.

“She is carrying the baby for someone else,” I tell her. “She is carrying the fetus inside her body and the labor, in this case, is considered valuable enough to involve renumeration.”

M: “Is that natural?”

ME: “What is Nature?”

IVES: “The study of Nature may tend to make one dogmatic but the love of Nature surely does not.”





Filters, faces, the expressivity of not saying.

“Total resistance to the grasp”

Faces are illegible to me now.

Re-reading Emmanuel Levinas’ “Ethics of the Face,” but feeling only chimera and failure.

The face resists possession, resists my powers. In its epiphany, in expression, the sensible still graspable, turns into total resistance to the grasp. This mutation can occur only by opening of a new dimension. ... (Levinas)

When ... it began to be forced upon men's unwilling belief that the style of the Pre-Raphaelites was true and was according to nature, the last forgery invented respecting them is, that they copy photographs. (John Ruskin)

Alleged “scene of flirtation,” per Duchenne:

“Sideways for ecstasy and sensual delirium”

Photographic art picked up from the expressive portrait painting and applied painterly precepts to composition.

This meant sketching an expression taken on the fly, drawing or painting a living model, and, by skillful composition, aiming for beauty without losing any of the truth of the subject. (Francois Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions)

Delaporte on the “downward gaze for humility and sadness”:

Modifications of the gaze depend on the remnants of what surrounds it: the eye takes on the color of passion under the effect of muscular actions. The gaze becomes interrogative with the elevation of the frontals, menacing with the action of the pyramidals, and smiling with the contraction of the zygomatics major and the inferior palpebral orbiculars. Moreover, Duchenne had not omitted to indicate the direction of the eyeball axis in certain passions: for example, an oblique gaze upward and sideways for ecstasy and sensual delirium, a downward gaze for humility and sadness. But the most serious error of his opponents was to not have understood that the photographs are inscribed only within the scientific register.

The feminine bobs from oblique to downward and back, a pendulum that creates its own time and gives rise to expectation. Duchenne’s view that the eye takes on the color of passion under the effect of muscular actions…

Delaporte on what Duchenne saw and caricature: “In photos that fix the acme of a passion, he was seeing prototypes close to caricature. He did not understand that these images escape the genres of both portrait and caricature. Duchenne did not want to either attenuate or correct facial features, on the one hand, or to deform or emphasize one feature or another.”

Back to Arthur Rimbaud "Nocturne Vulgaire" . . .

— Ici, va-t-on siffler pour l'orage, et les Sodomes, — et les Solymes, — et les bêtes féroces et les armées, 

— (Postillon et bêtes de songe reprendront-ils sous les plus suffocantes futaies, pour m'enfoncer jusqu'aux yeux dans la source de soie).

The clinical alters the nature of palpation. To touch to is to be determined, defined, existing in relation to comparison.

Levinas again— with the facial ethics, the beholding he ultimately located in a political state, a theology: The face, still a thing among things, breaks through the form that nevertheless delimits it. This means concretely: the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoyment or knowledge.

In photography, the exhibition value starts to suppress the value of the ritual involved in creation, Walter Benjamin said. But the ritual value resists and “retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance,” to quote B: It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face.

“The expression the face introduces into the world doe not defy the feebleness of my powers, but my ability for power (mon pouvoir de pouvoir)?” (Levinas)

“By the frank laugh, a person expresses, without wanting to, something that he or she could never say. A joyous behavior without any joy the case arising precisely from electrical simulation is doubly impossible, because the person does not command the contraction of the inferior palpebral orbicular, and because he cannot say what is, by its very essence, unsayable. The springing forth of expressive force and its constraining character carry no symbolic determination Only reflex actions realize the mechanism of the expressive act. Physiognomy presents an authentic expression when, and only when, the organism gives birth to the image of an emotion that it is impossible to mime.” (Francois Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions)

  A breath opens operatic breaches in the partitions, — blurs the pivot of crumbling roofs, — disperses the limits of the thresholds, — eclipses the casements. — Along the vine, I pressed my against a gargoyle, — and descended into this carriage, whose epoch is marked by convex windows (Rimbaud, vulgar nocturne)

(mon pouvoir de pouvoir)

I was drawn to these images shared by Maaike Dirkx (who maintains an excellent art history blog titled Rembrandt’s Room) as types of portraits, a formal possibility for portraits with exchangeable “filters” that existed in the 17th century. Dirkx describes them as “exchangeable overlays showing a variety of costumes and hairstyles became popular in the mid 17th century,” thus offering a glimpse at aspirational norms in Amsterdam then.

Selfie—- and the filter as expressive borrowing, creating a shared context.

Rembrandt’s Room / Maaike Dirkx: “This one has 20 surviving overlays in different design (there may or may not have been more originally) all worn from frequent use, yet still good fun!”

“While the paint layer is usually oil on copper,” Dirkx adds, “the overlays are cut from very brittle naturally forming transparent silicate minerals. Oil on metal and mica, c. 5 x 4 cm.”

See also Maike Dirkx’s “Sassetta: the quest for an altarpiece”

Reading Rilke's First Elegy with Bianca Stone.

A gust inside the god. A wind.

—-Rainer Maria Rilke, “Gesang ist Dasein”

They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.

—-Czeslaw Milosz, “Artificer”


1 How it began


Rilke began the first Duino Elegy in 1912 while walking along the cliffs near Duino Castle in Trieste (the castle would be largely destroyed during WWI). Two years later, the poet would be separated from his family and from his home to which he would never return. He would be conscripted into military service, and would suffer from illness and depression; it took him ten more years to complete the cycle of ten poems.

—- Mark Wunderlich

Bianca Stone narrates a rich, evocative description of this moment.

We know it took Rilke ten years to complete the cycle of ten poems. A chronos in elegies. A cycle of selves and selvings. I am intrigued by the temporal rupture within his elegies—a rupture forced by circumstance, by life, by lived experience. The Rilke who wrote the first elegy is not the same body or mind that wrote the 7th. In between these elegies, Orpheus intervened. I think the role played by time is worth considering here. For time had changed. This creates interesting questions about how we consider the poet-self, and how we read the world in relation to language.



2 “First Elegy

The poem in its entirety: “First Elegy” as translated by Stephen Mitchell (PDF).

Here is Rilke’s first stanza as translated by Stephen Mitchell:

And now, for the sake of hearing and tasting the poem across its possibilities, I want to add more translation next to this one.

Here is Rilke’s “First Elegy” as translated by Edward Snow— and the first stanza replicated below:

A few immediate observations:

1. Mitchell and Snow occupy the field differently: where Mitchell’s translation stretches horizontally across the page, in relation to the horizon, Snow’s translation tumbles down the page and leaves an empty white margin. Absence and space is felt and perceived differently as a result.

2. Mitchell tears the first line away from the stanza and uses it as a frame above the poem’s threshold. The question is set apart from the poem visually. This set-apartness is emphasized and expanded by Mitchell.

3. Translations of the first line also reveal other differences in emphasis. Mitchell leaves the noun as abstract as possible. But something wants a proper noun, or an identified subject, in Snow’s translation.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? (Mitchell)
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’ Orders? (Edward Snow)

Notice the difference between "hierarchies" and "Orders.” Notice the shift in the specificity of the subject: angels v. Angels.

The opening question is immense. This immenseness made Mitchell feel that it demanded spacing outside the rest of the poem. But the answer to this question (as Robert Hass noticed elsewhere) can only be :"No one." 



3 “No One” in Correspondence

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?

Rilke doesn’t answer this question directly in the elegy, but he also works tirelessly to convince the reader that ‘No one’ matters.

‘No one ‘is another way of figuring the statement: there is no single thing known as one. There are many Ones. (As there are many interlocutors.)

Perhaps there is something else as well, a None.

I believe that "No one" was central to Rilke's poetics as well as the relationship between eros, imagination, and writing for him. Just as Muzot became central to this poetic imaginary, he was buried there. He picked the churchyard site at Raron. He requested a small, plain gravestone like his father's.

And he composed the poem intended to rest above him forever: 

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep under so many
lids. 

When Rilke died on December 26, 1926, he was buried in this location. Beneath the words. He exists for eternity in relation to them.

For several years, I have (albeit carelessly) read the first elegy in relation to a poem by Paul Celan. There is, to me, a correspondence with Paul Celan's "Psalm”? Here is John Felstiner's translation:

No one kneads us again… —- this wrecks me still. I cannot read this first line without already having lost the rug that ties the artifice of my selfhood together.

No one. The echo of that hollow O. And the way the echo gestures towards “none” in English. The strange sonic energy between no one and none.

And here is how Hamburger and Joris translate the first three stanzas of the elegy:

No one molds us again. NoOne kneads us again. No one conjures our dust. Praised be your name, no one. Praised be thou, NoOne.

Where Hamburger leaves the abstract ‘no one’ open, Joris closes it somehow: a proper noun must be divine. It must be the “NoOne” God has become when he does not answer. And Joris’ use of “thou” plays further into this holy name. This pattern continues:

A nothing we were… A Nothing we were…. the nothing, the Nothing…the no one’s rose, the NoOnesRose. And this NoOnesRose is central to Joris’ Celan. I just wanted to note these differences, while acknowledging that I am less inclined to adjudicate between them and more inclined to learn from them as a dialogue. Since (again) there are many Ones. (As there are many interlocutors.)


4 Rilke as poet of desire

Bianca gave me a beautiful introduction on Rilke authored by Robert Hass. Reading it allowed me to reexamine my feeling that Rilke is a poet of desire, or a poet of desire in relation to the way desire exists to me. Hass makes a brief reference to Marina Tsvetaeva. Again—-to me—Tsvetaeva is Rilke’s kindred spirit. I think his intensity was hers, and vice versa. They understood desire similarly. Irrespective of other relationships in their lives, both poets felt most alive on the page, most lit in correspondence fueled by the velocity of mutually imagining each other. This particular correspondence between their personalities is erotic, as their epistolary correspondence is also erotic. Their letters are mutually uncommitted to the material facticity of the moment. The material is almost a profanation of the erotic energy in the letter. 

Rilke loved the absent more devotedly than he loved the present. Whether his wife, Clara, or Lou Andreas, the child Vera, or Paula—Rilke's women are cherished and tended on the page.

Hass quotes one of Rilke’s lovers as saying of him:

And so the question opens about how careless Rilke was—-and whether this carelessness was a form of “narcissism”. Given that this word is often defined differently, and given my own uncertainty as to whether I can sustain such a claim, I’d rather consider what can be said with what is given.

Rilke wasn't a womanizer. He couldn't really be Rodin. Much as he tried, he couldn’t objectify women in the flesh—-couldn’t impose that aura of mastery over them. Even if Rilke wanted to imitate Rodin, he was too cerebral, too haunted by his own fear of death, too touched by the pain and suffering of others as with the screams from the hospital in Paris.

And those who are beautiful, oh who can retain them? (Second Elegy)


5. Translations and interlocutory frisson

John Felstiner wrote about the relationship between Celan’s translation practice and his poetics in an essay for World Literature Today:

A gift to spend time with Bianca’s brilliant mind and spirit thinking through poetry. An absolute gift. Always.

For our own heart always exceeds us, as theirs did.
And we can no longer follow it,
gazing into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies where,
measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.

—- Rainer Maria Rilke, “Second Elegy” (t. by Mitchell)

Yellows on the cutting floor.

Wherein she attempts to dump a bit of her recent obsession with yellow onto a screen—-for you, whoever you are.

To begin with gratitude for other writers, particularly peers in poetry and music, who drew me deeper into this poem last night.

To begin with the shape of it—

The figure of the poem on the field; the way it occupies space.

Four stanzas of different length.

Or: three stanzas and an addendum; a trinity with a scrap left on the cutting floor of creation.

Or: a quintet, a sestet, a septet, and a monostich.

The decision to “grow” each stanza with an additional line is deliberate, and accumulative. I imagine Ruefle tarried a bit in the second stanza, trying to decide where to break for the last line. “For me” settles it, but not cleanly. It draws attention to the “me” in a way I’m not sure the poet intended, which is to say, I can’t know if she meant this. It makes a snapping sound, that break.

The title addresses an unknown interlocutor indirectly, speaking to the “tenor” of (his?) yes. The structure of the sentence tells us that “You” has affirmed something. If the poem is a painting, the title is the caption scribbled beneath it.

The leave-taking of the poem with that final line, that slim thread: “Much like god at the end.”

To stare at that “tenor” for a minute—

The titular word, tenor, is a noun that refers to:

a singing voice between baritone and alto or countertenor, the highest of the ordinary adult male range. A singer with a tenor voice. A part written for a tenor voice.

the course of thought or meaning that runs through something written or spoken; purport; drift. continuous course, progress, or movement.

These are the general uses of tenor, and Ruefle could be said to be playing into both of these meanings, rubbing the duplicity and uncertainty for valences.

But there is another definition of tenor that comes from finance, where tenor refers to “the length of time remaining before a financial contract expires.” This “tenor” is sometimes used interchangeably with “maturity.”

To return and discover two gestures—-

But first, something else: something that is not the figure but the saturation, the poem’s tonal qualities.

What is at stake for the poem? What the poem desires from existence?

Like us, the poem knows itself as an articulation of specific desires in relation to constraints. This tension drives the poem, or shapes its movement and tempo.

The first two stanzas begin in the conditional form. The acquire momentum through a matched construction of syntax:

If you were lonely
and you saw the earth
you’d think here is
the end of loneliness
and

If you were sad
and you saw the kitchen
you’d think here is
the end of sadness
and

The third line in both stanzas is identical, a repetition that isn’t quite a refrain, but does some of the formal work a refrain accomplishes. There is a mirroring motion, a play on possibility, an interest in what could-be the case.

And there are two gestures at play, gestures that may speak to the desiring.

In the third stanza, the poem’s speaker refers to a painting by Joseph William Turner, but she does so in a gesture that refuses proper naming. She gives us a shortened version of the name along with a referent: “Turner painted his own / sea monsters.”

We are given enough to find the painting, but not enough to define it. It is one thing to find and another to define and the order of operations may fall under the purview of epistemology.

First gesture: there is a painting . . .

Second gesture: there is something else . . .

Something else is the classic Ruefle ingredient, the elliptical metaphysical. She does not give us the title of the painting because giving us the title would denude the metaphysical gesture of the poem.

And yet the painting is central to the poem. I’m not certain this poem could exist without the painting.

The look at the painting—-

Turner’s Sunrise with Sea-Monsters (1845) was left unfinished.

Joseph William Turner, "Sunrise with Sea Monsters" (1845)

It is so yellow. How strange that Ruefle’s poem doesn’t feel yellow. How odd that the dominant note of the Turner’s dawn isn’t elicited in the poem at all.

And we are speaking of sunrise— but the yellow is wan. The feeble yellow lacks a certain robustness. There is no fire in it. There is no orange warming the undertones. And I want to risk calling it weak, to risk expressing the absence of a forge-orange in this hue of yellow. It is not worthy of a Prometheus or a Promethean labor.

The effect is softening, like the whisper of pastel paint on a wall; it quiets and soothes me. If this yellow were a song, it would be soporific. A yellow lull. A hum. A lullaby is the song intended to settle the mind that has witnessed the chaos of creation.

The lullaby yellowing the melody—-and the song distinguished by diminishing, its fading out into slow diminuendo.

Diminishment is not dissimilar from incompleteness.

And the monstrosity—

According to the current description offered by Tate Museum:

This is one of Turner’s most mysterious unfinished paintings. The shapes of two or more giant fish can be seen against a yellow sunrise. Dark brown hatched lines to the left of the fish may suggest netting or fish scales. Turner would have read of sightings and stories of mysterious marine creatures by sailors engaged in Britain’s multiplying naval business interests. Despite its bright tonality, this work may relate to Turner’s frequent depictions of the sea as dark place.

Tate reads this painting in relation to the expansion of the British maritime empire, and the absence of the word “colonialism” hovers in the silences of the soft-pedaled historicist description. From this, we can assume that Turner’s painting draws on the thriving community of sailors and fishermen who hung out told stories (or "shanty tales"). Maybe the artist heard lore about sightings of mysterious marine creatures by the men who went out in the water. Tate’s description aligns with the spirit (if not the exact content) of Turner-expert James Hamilton’s reading. Hamilton wanders deeper into the mist and speculates that a paddleboat is being consumed by giant fish or whales inside it. The “steamboat theory” follows the interpretation of Turner's later work as a reflection on the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution.

Although this is a very specific, economic take, it is also conspicuously genteel in its elisions: no one mentions the exploitative nature of maritime economy. The absence of this mention makes it difficult to read Turner as critiquing the change. One wonders why bother with Big Steamboat energy at all—-and one wonders this because the role played by light, the lull of that yellow yellow yellow, feels significant. One might even say that the Sea Monsters of 2023 are unapologetically British in their affect?

The singular monster v. the many—-

What do I see? What can I be certain about in Turner’s painting?

There is the shape of a thing which seems to be fish, or which have fish-like heads. Maybe there is a red and white striped buoy present among the fish. Certainly, there are traces of interesting shapes in the lower right corner. One critic discerned a dog's head to the left of the monster. “A paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine draws a connection between these figures and Turner's possession of acetate of morphia (a drug related to morphine), possibly used for the treatment of a toothache” (Wikipedia).

In thinking of text and descriptions of art as translation, I am thinking with an idea shared on twitter yesterday:

Translation is a form of literature, a literary art. It does not (and *cannot*) replicate the original. It *creates* the poem in a different language. I treasure the sonic voluptuary in these five translations of Rimbaud by Christian Bok.

What is the difference between Turner’s painting and the museum’s textual narration of it? What is the distance?

In a similar vein, I tried to think about what Ruefle’s poem desires from the world, a question that inevitably touches on how one conceives existence? What does the poem risk in relation to that desire?

“If you were lonely / and you saw the earth / you’d think here is / the end of loneliness…”

The final monster—

The language-freak in me reads gallery/museum descriptions as textual relics that reflect the interests and concerns of their time. While the painting remains the same, the words used by humans to describe the painting flutter, bustle, shift. The temptation to take these descriptions as definitive is common to museum-goers.

But a poem that gestures towards metaphysical incompleteness cannot be pinned to a definitive reading. And an unfinished painting exists —-always—in relation to its unfinishedness.

Tate’s 1907 catalogue lists the title as Sunrise, with a Sea Monster. In 1907, there was one “sea monster with a head like a magnified red gurnet” and this sea monster was “floating on the misty waters” which reflected “a yellow sunrise.” In the “distance",” there were “forms suggesting huge icebergs.”

Drawing on Turner’s sketchbook, the Sea Monster of 1907 is related less to maritime trade than to the particular whaling expeditions Turner sketched. It is “as thought Turner was occupied at the time with the wonders of the deep waters related by Arctic voyagers.” The Sea Monster of 1907 resembles a “similar drawing” that hangs with his “exhibited watercolors.”

So much has changed in the interim. So much like god at the end.

Jean-Paul Clébert's Paris.

“A personal investigation”

Jean-Paul Clebert's Paris Vagabond, first published in 1952, has been reissued by NYRB Classics in a translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith, accompanied by Patrice Molinard's  photographs. Positioning itself as a text of notebooks, the book presents Paris as seen from the perspective of a privileged, middle-class Frenchman who dropped out of his bourgeois family life in order to live off the pavement. 

At 17, Clébert ran away from his Jesuit boarding school and joined the French Resistance. The end of World War II is what led him to opt-out of conventional bourgeois life and live on the streets. During his tramp years, he took observational notes and set them aside, just in case he should elect to write them. Preserving these notes is not a small feat when living hand-to-mouth and without a stable residence.

Unsurprisingly, in 1951, Clébert decided to write about it, and his notes happened to survive his tramping. This, too, is part of the book's mise-en-scene, since Clébert apparently drew the notes scraps from his bag, randomly, and wrote in relation to their chance appearance. The method is dada, but the costume is documentary, forming what he called "a personal investigation" into the underground Paris he discovered during the 1940s. 

What emerged is this quasi-anthropological travelog in the key of picaresque following what seems to be a quest-less quest.

Photograph of Paris street life by Patrice Molinard, first included in the 1954 edition of Paris Vagabond.

“I was living, eating, sleeping and dreaming on a heap of sacks of potatoes…”

The narrative leaps from places, moments, encounters, and streets, pulling fragments and odd materials into its spontaneous vortex. Although Clébert reports that he initially hits the streets in search of sex, the city, with its "apartment buildings fit for troglodytes" and "unlikely skyscrapers silhouetted against the void,” seems the greater lure.

In this anti-postcard Paris of abandoned parking lots and occupied, half-gutted buildings, power lines and other city entrails are on full display. Flea markets teem with life and opportunity. Sociality occurs on stoops and sidewalks and cigarette exchanges, and living is the thing that remains a surprise when one finds a safe place to rest at night.

Clebert narrates this from a self-aware “I” that occasionally pauses to form a “We” among other transients that vanishes as quickly as it took shape:

Like all fellows of my calling, which is that of having no trade, that of the good-for-nothing and the ready-for-anything, I once worked in Les Halles: hands freezing cold and eyes stinging, at an hour when ordinary cafés were closing and turfing out their customers, I used to cross the Pont des Arts footbridge or the Pont Neuf (I was living at the time in Rue des Canettes, in a tiny room with a cot for a bed, no window except for a murky transom above the door and not so much as a pitcher for water to wash with), reach the toiling Right Bank, go and drink endless black coffees at the counter of the Pied de Cochon and watch the well-heeled coming in, after parking their cars outside, and climbing the stairs to the second floor with good-time girls in tow to eat steaming crusty onion soup that cost three times as much as it did at sidewalk level where I was, playing the night’s first game of 421 with head washers in stained smocks and aprons who came in to clean off coagulated blood and savor dry white wine before going back to turn powerful jets of water on the bones, still covered with flesh, of animals whose fate it was to become delectable charcuterie.

There is this constant sense of motion, crossing streets, finding places to pause, discovering an opportunity for food or small labor or drink. The reader accompanies Clebert on these circuitous voyages.

He is our guide to Paris' less touristed vistas.

He takes us for stroll along the Seine, with scenic stops at the makeshift places where the bodies of suicides are fished from the river and brought to dry land.

There are moments expressing the stark physicality of poverty:

As for me, I was living, eating, sleeping and dreaming on a heap of sacks of potatoes, having spent my entire fortune on illumination, venturing out only to scavenge and take the air, each time passing the employees and proprietor of the shop, who gave me vegetables or oranges but clapped palm to forehead behind me as I left. It was here too that my friends, who had digs just like mine or were the proud owners of shadowy corners of this providential quarter, came to visit me, slithering like worms through the gaping holes and cracks that rent all the façades of the block.

There are anecdotes and inherited street wisdoms, as well as exhilarating cityspaces consumed by loneliness, moonlight, and the soft orange of a lit cigarette:

Paris by night is a labyrinth where every street opens onto another or onto one of the boulevards so aptly described as arteries – a labyrinth through which I make my way in fits and starts, like a blood clot, jolting down the steepest inclines, emerging from bottlenecks into empty space. And so I go, walking, plunging, flowing – a river hoping somehow to debouch into the sea, haven of peace and freedom from care.

Photo by Patrice Molinard. Source.

Clébert narrates the origins of various topographical features, including the story of  Philippe Lebon, inventor of the gas burner in Paris, the ancestor of the street lamp. He mixes street-lore with gossip and description:

(It was here some time later that a tender-hearted soul named Fradin, most likely a retired shit-sniffer living off his rents, set up a sort of “hotel,” according to the old books, where guests slept all in a row with their backsides on old sacks and their feet sticking out onto the cobblestones and the napes of their necks resting on a cord stretched taut a few inches above the ground, which at the crack of dawn the wily hostel-keeper undid, thus causing a general collapse of heads and putting an abrupt if not too painful end to the dreams of his guests. . . .)

The effect is so rich that one could almost miss the "old books" that sourced this tale.

The affect is smooth, congruous—-all daub with no signs of wattle.

Jean-Paul Clébert in his writing office.

“Like all fellows of my calling, which is that of having no trade, that of the good-for-nothing and the ready-for-anything…”

As Clebert steps into his persona, in accordance with his "calling," I began to wonder how much of our "inherited sin" (i.e. wealth and class privilege) can be abandoned. If reality attends to what is the case, then the case cannot ignore the reality that most transient persons lack an opportunity to publish their notebooks (let alone imagine this publication will be translated and distributed after their death). 

It seems that those most likely to publish their experiences are those who have chosen poverty and opting-out as a way of life for the purpose of making a statement or understanding the world. And there is a world that Clebert navigates, a topography of the secret Paris occupied by those whom the ordinary Parisian prefers not to see or notice.

There is the jouissance of farting as a friend plays the harmonica: "One autumn evening we indulged in an orgy that was quite fabulous, albeit peaceful and indeed devoid of the sensuous pleasures of fornication, for we were all men, with only rats and bats for company."

"Those were the days," Clerbert writes, before slipping back into his tourist guide costume and qualifying his nostalgia with a warning: 

But memories butter no parsnips, and now that I was a citified tramp in quest of the two things essential to the welfare of any honest man, namely food and lodging, it was time to bestir myself.

Nicholson-Smith's translation is fantastic and filled with archaic weirdness; surely no word could suit that last sentence the way "bestir" suits it up, the way "bestir" gestures towards a business suit in the past of the speaker. 

Would I recommend this book? Absolutely. It wears its era well—and wears this era in a way that converses with the present. It anticipates the critiques that will follow, including those of Orientalism, trauma tourism, and neocolonial cosplay. Lucy Sante's introduction provides splendid context for Clerbert's project. She tracks the bop-style prose reminiscent of Jack Kerouac, and intimates that the book was inspired by Henry Miller and Blaise ­Cendrars.

The terrain covered in Paris Vagabond sparkles, trembles, vomits, and raises its opting-out fist against the world of the fathers, with qualification. This qualification is Clebert, himself, or a strange discord between narrative tone and the embodied challenges of transient life. A certain braggadocio saunters forth at the outset, in his claims of having "infiltrated" the dark heart of Paris for 300 days and nights just to deliver a story with style, like a "stuntman." 

Perhaps it should not be surprising that a man who wrote these words in 1951 would also be the reporter in Asia for Paris Match and France Soir before going on to live among various underprivileged groups, authoring studies of these groups, adding novels about the alchemist of King-Sun (L'Alchimiste du Roi-Soleil) and a hermit (L'hermite) to the mix of a legacy that includes publishing a total of 33 books during his long life, among them, biographies of notable families (Les Daudet, une famille bien française), guidebooks to "mysterious" Provence (Guide de la Provence mystérieuse); tour guides to thermal France (Guide de la France thermale); histories of Provence during the time of the first Christians (Provence antique, 3: Aux temps des premiers chrétiens); geological uplift (La Durance. Rivières et vallées de France); even  Dictionnaire du Surréalisme in 1996. 

Searches on Clebert reveal nothing.

“Little is known about his genealogy as he preferred to keep his personal life private.”

Privacy is quite costly for authors, and I wonder how he could afford it.

“There are no public records or information regarding his family background, ancestors, or descendants.”

How did he secure a publisher for so many books while living in legendary precarity?

“Clébert's legacy lies in his written works, which continue to inspire readers and urban explorers around the world.”

Legends are made of so much less.

“And so I go, walking, plunging, flowing – a river hoping somehow to debouch into the sea….”

It is a glamorous life, this guidebooking of the undiscovered other. If Clerbet's legacy is complicated by the gap between his lived experience and his reportage, it is not because he sought the public eye. In many ways, he wrote, traveled, and kept a low profile, retreating to a mountainous region of Provence in 1956, and living among the "abandoned stone villages, and took up residence there without running water or electricity, before moving in 1968 to Oppède-le-Vieux," according to Wikipedia. 

During the war, Oppède-le-Vieux had served as a gathering place and refuge for artists. Clerbert moved there in 1968—and spent the rest of life with Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, the aviator's widow, as a neighbor, whose husband, Saint Exupéry, authored a fictionalized account of the failed artist's commune titled Kingdom of the Rocks (1946).

The quiet terror of the middle class has always been its support of bad government, its conservative tendency to vote for whatever maintains their status. Like the German 1968ers, Clebert's critique of the war – and his role in the resistance — required a severance from one's family and future plans. He wanted to be un-identified by privilege. 

11 thoughts after reading a nocturne by Elizabeth Willis.

1

To begin with the poem I cannot forget, in the shape of this single long stanza given to the reader in Elizabeth Willis’ Alive: New and Selected Poems from NYRB Imprints:


NOCTURNE

I'm thinking of
the heat in the reins
a gear in love with itself
two parts that fit
I'm thinking about your face:
there's nothing to invent
Driven to distraction
or just walking there
The edge of my mind
against the edge of yours
An astrolabe isn't thinking
of a concrete lane
or unconquerable interior
Abiding by its class
and country church, a kitsch picture
is not "sincerity"
though I am native to it
A nation has this sound
of being born      The human
is not its ill-begotten ad
A hemisphere is not your hair
in its Parisian rooms
An astrolabe is not 
a metaphor for love
though love contain the mortal roots
of congress, like a peasant
inside the name you give its ruins


2

O, here we go ‘tis the serrated edge of my mind against the edge of yours who is the edgelord anyway we dice it.


3

An astrolabe may not be a metaphor for love if Dean Young was right and love is the metaphor flexed against itself while it keeps changing the terms of the dance so “all prepositions are hopeful but opaque is the afterlife” of our edging.

4

I’m thinking of the last time I saw your face and how it was altered by the fact of my wearing sunglasses which led you to ask if I had been crying or whether I had a migraine which meant that my final glimpse of you included my lie with that shading.


5

Who is Hans and who is Gretel in the story who is the gear in love with itself when a Sunday is the morning after.


6

As someone else thinks about your face, I am savoring how much I love the word “sloth” and thinking that I will rise from from the floor in a minute or so and do whatever it is that the mammals wants from me, wherein ‘wanting’ is closer to consumption than desiring and ‘whatever’ isn’t a still-life from seven deadly sins in the mouths of french women.


7

“When she was asleep, I no longer had to talk, I knew that I was no longer observed by her, I no longer needed to live on the surface of myself,” Proust wrote. He was driven to distraction by the fact that his characters kept trying to read him.


8

There is the heat in the reins and the horse of the moment who is driven by the idea of the driver but I’m thinking of the metaphor as the wah pedal being pressed to distort in order to make a thing like me sound a lick clearer.


9

And that day after I flew to Chicago when the man to my left told me that he was the King of Lineation and I thought about how it would feel to be a shoe of no expectation, a strange leather thing with a sole from whom no one expects an answer.


10

A kitten does not learn to purr for days but a nation has this sound of being born whenever I read Beckett and find “certain questions of a theological nature” in Molloy, including: “What value is to be attached to the theory that Eve sprang, not from Adam's rib, but from a tumor in the fat of his leg (arse)? Did the serpent crawl or, as Comestor affirms, walk upright? Did Mary conceive through the ear, as Augustine and Adobard assert? What is one to think of the Irish oath sworn by the natives with the right hand on the relics of the saints and the left on the virile member? Does nature observe the sabbath? Is it true that the devils do not feel the pains of hell? The algebraic theology of Craig—what is one to think of this? Is it true that the infant Saint-Roch refused suck on Wednesdays and Fridays? What is one to think of the excommunication of vermin in the sixteenth century? Is one to approve of the Italian cobbler Lovat who, having cut off his testicles, crucified himself? What was God doing with himself before the creation? Might not the beatific vision become a source of boredom, in the long run? Is it true that Judas' torments are suspended on Saturdays? What if the mass for the dead were read over the living?”


11

The best part of that book is what it promises in the ending: “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.” I have so much to say about yellow yet. Have I mentioned how much pleasure Beckett gives me very personally by putzing about with Pythagoreans? The worst part being that time will not tell the name you give its ruins.

Forbidden music; in variations.

1

It always begins foolishly.

Today, it began with a poem someone posted on twitter. A title taunting me with that old gauntlet, forbidden. A prose poem by Louise Gluck. A brief narration with parabolic energy and the shadow of a riddle inside it.

I read it twice and closed my eyes. Nothing happened.

Then I googled the riddle of Gluck’s “Forbidden Music” yet failed to find any writing that deciphered the riddle. Zero. Obviously, I had imagined this riddle in order to titillate myself on a day of streptococcal-tinged parenting. I accepted my imagining as well as its failure.



2

An hour later, while cursing the rain and arguing over playlists with my daughter, the music came back to me in spheres.

“Plato,” I whispered.

“No,” the daughter added, for the satisfaction of exercising a veto.

I ceded the playlist and set off on the hunt.

“Fucking Plato,” I confirmed to my dog Radu when passing the green chair on my way to the shelf where the ancient Greeks lived. I congratulated myself on having made a bro-cave for them.

"Beware of changing to a new form of music, since it threatens the whole system," Plato wrote in that Republic of thinking men where he set out the distinction between music that produces social order (and contributes to social health) versus music that foments disorder (and must be handled cautiously, limited to a certain audience, prohibited from arousing the masses). For Plato, music shapes character and socializes citizens. Music is political—- it is “of the polis”; of the polis’ business. Being human means (among other things) that our relationship to music precedes our relationship to words, or to language as a way of knowing. The human infant deploys sound in order to intervene upon its environment; the baby develops a vast collection of evolving noises, babbles, coos, wails, and gurgles, and it does so more than other animal infants. Apart from its sound-making capacity, the human infant also recognizes its caregivers through sound. It turns its head and body towards the sound of the mother’s voice. Plato acknowledges how the lullaby, a particular form of music, can soothe an unsettled infant. Where the baby’s tumultuous wail disorders, the mother’s lullaby restores order. And order, in this definition, is the condition of social calm. Harmony reigns.


Remedios Varo, The Flautist (1948)

3

“What’s wrong with harmony?” the man asks.

A painting by Remedios Varos that calls to mind the first musician whose name history records, Enheduanna, standing near the stone disk that celebrated her importance, a disk shattered into pieces by those in power who came later. A poem that reminds me of Plato. A sense in which the forbidden must be the voice one craves most. An instant in which the andante, the scherzo, the poco adagio signify the unsayable. And the voice in my head, complicit in the imagining of this constellation.

There came a passage that was called the forbidden music because it could not, the composer specified, be played.



4

Flutes, then…for the sons of Thebes; they know not how to converse. But we Athenians, as our fathers say, have Athena for foundress and Apollo for patron, one of whom cast the flute away in disgust, and the other flayed the presumptuous flute-player.

- Plutarch, Alcibiades 2.6

In an early warning against the perils of multi-tasking, Plutarch’s Alcibiades forbids symposium participants from playing the flute. One cannot play the flute and speak at the same time because the flute “closed and barricaded the mouth, robbing its master both of voice and speech.” The flute simply wants too much—- and wanting too much, it finds itself capable of the least.

The flute’s relationship to the mouth places it in competition with language. The aulos—- a double-reed instrument usually translated as “flute” although the sound it makes is closer to an oboe-bagpipe— has the capacity to carry on a competing conversation. This language of the aulos amounts to a dialogue in musical notes that threatens to diminish the dialogue of words. This is what Plato is thinking about when he has Socrates banish the flute-girls from the symposium. It is not girls’ physical being that threatens disorder— it is their music. It is the sound that girls make with their mouths, a sound that is not ordered language.

Only when the music made by the girls is gone can the male symposiasts offer their complete attention to thought and conversation.

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates insinuates that aulos music is only suitable for women—-it is a gendered noise.

But it is also a music for drunkards! The aulos intoxicates without alcohol. Those who listen to it become “quick-tempered, prone to anger, and filled with discontent."

5

 The flute is not an instrument which is expressive of moral character. It is too exciting.

- Aristotle, Politics

Thus do the philosophers stack various arguments to evidence the anti-intellectualism of the flute. Aristotle prohibits the flute from entering classrooms. Auloi “produce a passionate rather than an ethical experience in their auditors and so should be used on those occasions that call for catharsis rather than learning.” (Politics 8.6 1341 17–24) The educated soul does not need the distraction of passion.




6

After listening to the aulos, I text my son with a question.

“You’re not even talking about music here,” my son texts back. “The Greek word for music is not the same thing as ‘music’. Or not the same thing as music as we know it.”

He is referring to the fact that mousiké designated the arts more generally— music, poetry, literature, epics, drama, dancing—-anything that fell under the domain of the Muses.

“The aulos is wild,” I text back. It reminds me of an instrument I heard played in Transylvania, although the name escapes me.

And still it must exist and be passed over, an interval at the discretion of the conductor. 


7

Plato’s concerns about unmanliness led him to the law, or to the erection of legal fences that would protect the male gender from contamination. He described the sort of music most fitting for men in The Laws. The boundary between genders was theorized (and maintained) in relation to music.

8

 In the cultivation of music the ancients respected its dignity, as they did in all other pursuits, while the moderns have rejected its graver parts, and instead of the music of former days, strong, inspired and dear to the gods, introduce into the theaters an effeminate twittering. 

- De Musica, of uncertain authorship but often attributed to Plutarch (bolding mine)

Pseudo-Plutarch attempts to reclaim Roman masculinity from the clutches of the flute-girls. He blames them for the high-strung pitch and lament-like sound of the Lydian mode. The lament, itself, is dangerous because it attaches itself to the mouths of women and makes the mind vulnerable to intense emotions. Lamenting is for weaklings. Grief must conduct itself with poise and dignity. Speaking of poise and dignity, the Dorian mode is "proper for warlike and temperate men.” The Dorian mode doesn’t grovel; it maintains its "grandeur and dignity."

Something has happened to his ears, something he has never felt before. His sleep is over.  The fall of Rome was blamed on the effeminate tastes of its leaders. Nero’s curls were too girly.

Anne Carson said it: civilization is based on the walling-out of women and their noises, their wails, their ecstasy and sirens.

Pythagoras gave us harmony, the silencing of desire, by the well-tuned soul. The unconstrained sounds of the infant, the yowling of the women— we wall ourselves against them. But this ordered world has never been enough for us. Desire, like death, eventually wins.

Walter Benjamin was the fool who chased them across borders for another glimpse and one more inch of conversation. Gershom Scholem cringed at Asja Lacis and diaried his disgust for Benjamin’s unmanly weakness. Nothing is less manly than being unable to sustain devotion to imagined community of a nation.

Where am I now, he thinks. 

A nation is the only woman who loves you as you are. A nation is the only woman who can make you a hero. As every married man knows, all the manliness in the world amounts to nothing, for no man can be a hero to a woman while living inside her. 

The flute player is a male Louise Gluck’s poem. But the player is also the man at the end who no longer knows where he is.

The flautist is my head is eternally femme.

The man at the end is Plato on his deathbed, asking for the forbidden music.

Recollecting his life, the dying Plato refused the well-ordered tradition of asking for time with friends and family. Instead, in these final moments, the philosopher asked for music. He did not want the well-tuned lyre of the poet. What Plato requested was Thracian girl playing the aulos. The forbidden flute called him in this moment where truth could be told: there was nothing he desired more than the allure of disorder. And then he repeated it, like an old man lying on the floor instead of in his bed. 

When my daughter puts Ariana Grande on the playlist, it is as if I have imagined all of this. The distance between imagination and fabrication isn’t slight.

Where am I now?



[Postlude wherein speaker resolves to libate Xanthippe later]

I am thinking of drinking—good drinking, bad drinking, drinking music and how sonic softness distracts the mind. Woe to the enfeebled listener who “gives music an opportunity to charm his soul with the flute and pour those sweet, soft, and plaintive tunes we mentioned through his ear. … if he keeps at it unrelentingly and is beguiled by the music, after a time his spirit is melted and dissolved until it vanishes, and the very sinews of his soul are cut out,” Plato warned (Republic 411a–b).

Radu lounges and licks his wounded paw as I return to the second chapter in Plato’s Symposium.

The libation has been poured; the dead ancestors and gods got the first shot of wine; the continuance of the drinking has been blessed by the offering:

When the tables had been removed and the guests had poured a libation and sung a hymn, there entered a man from Syracuse, to give them an evening's merriment. He had with him a fine flute-girl, a dancing-girl—one of those skilled in acrobatic tricks,—and a very handsome boy, who was expert at playing the cither and at dancing; the Syracusan made money by exhibiting their performances as a spectacle. They now played for the assemblage, the flute-girl on the flute, the boy on the cither; and it was agreed that both furnished capital amusement. Thereupon Socrates remarked: “On my word, Callias, you are giving us a perfect dinner; for not only have you set before us a feast that is above criticism, but you are also offering us very delightful sights and sounds.”

“Suppose we go further,” said Callias, “and have some one bring us some perfume, so that we may dine in the midst of pleasant odours, also.”

“No, indeed!” replied Socrates. “For just as one kind of dress looks well on a woman and another kind on a man, so the odours appropriate to men and to women are diverse. No man, surely, ever uses perfume for a man's sake. And as for the women, particularly if they chance to be young brides, like the wives of Niceratus here and Critobulus, how can they want any additional perfume? For that is what they are redolent of, themselves. The odour of the olive oil, on the other hand, that is used in the gymnasium is more delightful when you have it on your flesh than perfume is to women, and when you lack it, the want of it is more keenly felt. Indeed, so far as perfume is concerned, when once a man has anointed himself with it, the scent forthwith is all one whether he be slave or free; but the odours that result from the exertions of freemen demand primarily noble pursuits engaged in for many years if they are to be sweet and suggestive of freedom.”

“That may do for young fellows,” observed Lycon; “but what of us who no longer exercise in the gymnasia? What should be our distinguishing scent?”

“Nobility of soul, surely!” replied Socrates.

“And where may a person get this ointment?”

“Certainly not from the perfumers,” said Socrates.

The men move from discussing their “distinguishing scent” to where one could find an instructor to ennoble the soul.

Socrates intervenes to quash the discussion: “Since this is a debatable matter, let us reserve it for another time; for the present let us finish what we have on hand. For I see that the dancing girl here is standing ready, and that some one is bringing her some hoops.” The dancing girl throws hoops in the air “observing the proper height to throw them so as to catch them in a regular rhythm” while the flute girl accompanies her on the aulos.

Pleased by the dancer’s well-ordered motions, Socrates addresses his friends: “This girl's feat, gentlemen, is only one of many proofs that woman's nature is really not a whit inferior to man's, except in its lack of judgment and physical strength. So if any one of you has a wife, let him confidently set about teaching her whatever he would like to have her know.”

“If that is your view, Socrates,” asked Antisthenes, “how does it come that you don't practise what you preach by yourself educating Xanthippe, but live with a wife who is the hardest to get along with of all the women there are—yes, or all that ever were, I suspect, or ever will be?”

“Because,” he replied, “I observe that men who wish to become expert horsemen do not get the most docile horses but rather those that are high-mettled, believing that if they can manage this kind, they will easily handle any other. My course is similar. Mankind at large is what I wish to deal and associate with; and so I have got her, well assured that if I can endure her, I shall have no difficulty in my relations with all the rest of human kind.”

It is too early in the day for me to take a shot of tuica for Xanthippe, but I resolve to libate her later.

The men express concern for the dancer who has now incorporated swords into her routine. She risks injury. The dancer will hurt herself!

Thus do the men worry, think, and drink.

“Witnesses of this feat, surely, will never again deny . . . that courage, like other things, admits of being taught, when this girl, in spite of her sex, leaps so boldly in among the swords!” Socrates exclaims.

Antisthenes takes this a step further, arguing that the dancer needs to be shown to the Athenians to give them an example of courage.

Philip agrees and says he would “like to see Peisander the politician5 learning to turn somersaults among the knives.”

At this point the boy performs a dance, eliciting from Socrates the remark, “Did you notice that, handsome as the boy is, he appears even handsomer in the poses of the dance than when he is at rest?”

A conversation on dancing follows.

In jest, Philip stands up and says “let me have some flute music, so that I may dance too” as he mimics the girl and boy, making “a burlesque out of the performance by rendering every part of his body that was in motion more grotesque than it naturally was.”

Naturally, after the labor of destroying a dance’s harmony by performing it mockingly, Philip is quite tired and thirsty. “Let the servant fill me up the big goblet,” he says.

Socrates intercedes:

“Well, gentlemen . . . so far as drinking is concerned, you have my hearty approval; for wine does of a truth ‘moisten the soul’ and lull our griefs to sleep just as the mandragora does with men, at the same time awakening kindly feelings as oil quickens a flame. However, I suspect that men's bodies fare the same as those of plants that grow in the ground. When God gives the plants water in floods to drink, they cannot stand up straight or let the breezes blow through them; but when they drink only as much as they enjoy, they grow up very straight and tall and come to full and abundant fruitage. So it is with us. If we pour ourselves immense draughts, it will be no long time before both our bodies and our minds reel, and we shall not be able even to draw breath, much less to speak sensibly; but if the servants frequently ‘besprinkle’ us—if I too may use a Gorgian expression—with small cups, we shall thus not be driven on by the wine to a state of intoxication, but instead shall be brought by its gentle persuasion to a more sportive mood.”

The “small cups” resolution is unanimously approved “with an amendment added by Philip to the effect that the wine-pourers should emulate skillful charioteers by driving the cups around with ever increasing speed.”

And “this the wine-pourers proceeded to do.”

Cheers indeed! In the hope that the very sinews of mens’ flute-ravished souls continue their “gentle persuasion” with small cups.

Celan again.

1

I am watching the wind and wondering if we’ll lose power on this wild weather day in Alabama. Schools are closed. The house is filled with music and the energy of my restless teenagers whose disgruntlement has its own wind—- a wind I fear and respect and know well. A wind that wants something from the mountain.

Distracted by a tweet that drew me back into the vortex of Celan, the mountain is present. I learned yesterday, on twitter, that John Keene had played with translating “Todtnauberg” on his blog, and I quote Keene’s thinking-into that process below:

The entire poem feels this way, almost a bit dizzying, a record of—-what?—-a visit, but also a revisiting, a trip to the Death Mountain ("Todtnauberg") which leaves its grief-mark like the burst of the beautiful and haunting healing flowers'' names, "Arnika, Augentrost," or those ominous "star-dice" on the well's head—-in part, as this poem.

A wind gust just knocked a small stone statue off a table on the porch. The sound of it shattering vacates a brightness, a sonic star-shape that represents an absence. Irresistible: the shiny music glass makes when we break it.

“The wind is not to be underestimated,” I tell the teens who are making weird sandwiches in an effort to outdo one another in weirdness. The point at which the weird morphs into the grotesque is the narrative suspense-engine of weird-making. The point differs with each medium, each material, each subject. The weirding-game must be played for effect repeatedly.

2

I’m thinking about Anne Carson’s poem, “Todtnauberg”, featured in the current issue of Poetry Review.

Despite the absence of Celanian language and its collaged form, I’m tempted to read it as a translation of Celan’s own “Todtnauberg”. After all, Carson has used translation to rewrite and destabilize various classical texts.

3

I’m going to leave the failed encounter between Heidegger and Celan to the poem. Come with me, as it rains, to a different mountain. A different encounter that failed to transpire.

In July 1959, Celan went with Gisele (his wife) and Eric (his son) to Sils-Maria in the Swiss Alps. Theodor Adorno was supposed to be visiting at the same time, and Celan hoped to meet him and speak with him.

For reasons that remain unclear, Celan returned to Paris early and missed encountering Adorno.

One month later, in 1958, he wrote his only (?) German prose fiction, "Conversation in the Mountains," addressing Adorno's refusal of poetry after Auschwitz. It also drew on Kafka's story, "Excursion into the mountains," written in 1904, which Celan had translated into Romanian after the war.

John Felstiner thinks the story owes most to Martin Buber's "Conversation in the Mountains", with its focus on the I-Thou encounter and relationship. A prototype was the novella, Lenz, by George Buchner, which Celan also referenced in his Meridian speech for the Buchner prize in the following year:

On the 20th of January Lenz went walking through the mountains, where he wanders in search of something, wrestles with lightning like Jacob, and hears a voice in the mountains until madness overcomes him.

Lenz declares himself the "Wandering Jew, and asks if people don't hear "the horrible voice" that we "customarily call silence". Celan remembers Len and his story with "its roundabout paths from thou to thou... paths on which language gets a voice, these are encounters." Ultimately, these encounters with Others, these conversations with ghosts in the mountains, provoke self-encounters for Celan. Much as he encounters himself in Mandelstam's poems and the act of translation, inspired by Mandelstam's essay "On the Interlocutor."

Few have ventured to go to the mountains and translate the burning bush. Not to receive the burning bush but to translate it on its terrain, into a presence that risks blasphemy, as Celan does after the Shoah in his relentless questions, revisitings, interrupings, on the way to the self that arises in the encounter itself. And here is how it begins:

One evening the Sun, and not only that, had gone down, then their went walking, stepping out of his Cottage went the Jew, the Jew and Son of a Jew, and him  went his name, unspeakable, went and came, came shuffling along, made himself heard, came with his stick, came over the stone, do you hear me, you hear me, I'm the one, I, I and the one that you hear, that you think you here, I and the other one – so he walked, you could hear it.....

With the symbols of stone and the crypt—-the way the cryptic actually refers to crypts in Celan:

So the stone was silent too, and it was quiet in the mountains where they walked, himself and that one. 

Celan wrote another poem after the trip to the mountains that prompted his prose piece. It is one of his first untitled poems, and it begins what would later be his next collection. It is titled "There Was Earth Inside Them" —- and I will return to it elsewhere, or it will return to me perhaps.

4

In a letter to Celan on August 5, 1959, Ingeborg Bachmann wrote:

I really only see a danger in the ‘hearable’ Frankfurt, for it is in such cases, where the suspicious elements are not so obvious that one becomes entangled with them.

She is referring, among other things, to her dissertation, Heidegger’s festschrift. Martin Heidegger, who was turning 70 that year, had requested that a few of Celan’s poems be included in his honorary festschrift. Celan’s response to Bachmann came 5 days later: he said that his work had been anthology honoring Heidegger without his consent, therefore he did not want to be a part of it.

Out of loyalty (and perhaps love), Bachmann would eventually follow suit. Heidegger’s failure to condemn Nazism— his refusal to denounce the mass killings of the state apparatus which paid his salary—was untenable. Writers were divided on this: Rene Char, for example, allowed his own writing to appear in Heidegger’s honor.

An increasingly embittered and harrowed Celan indicted his disloyal friends. The Goll affair had alienated him from community. More than ever, friendship meant loyalty, and loyalty demanded refusing to associate with persons who maintained the edifice of silent anti-Semitism. Heidegger’s “Hutte” maintained itself in relation to the silence of not-saying.

Excerpt from Pierre Joris’ translation notes on the poem.

5

On January 26, 1949, Paul Celan sent a letter to Ingeborg Bachmann apologizing for his silence, asking her to write "to him who always thinks of you and who locked in your medallion the leaf you have now lost." Celan refers to his "brother," a second "him," the one she knows, an underlined "him" he hopes she will not keep waiting.

It calls to mind a lover’s discourse — i.e. if I were a different man, if I were my brother, I would ask you to move here and be close, but I am this man and not the other. There is a splitting, a division within the speaker, that Celan acknowledges. Bachmann picks up this thread in her response to him on April 12, 1949:

I am not speaking only to your brother; today I am speaking almost entirely to you, or through your brother I am fond of you, and you must not think that I have passed over you........  I am trying not to think of myself, to close my eyes and cross over to what is really meant. We are surely all under the greatest suspense, cannot break free and take many indirect paths. But it sometimes makes me so ill that I fear it might one day be impossible to go on. Let me end by telling you - the leaf that you placed in my Medallion is not lost, even if it has long ceased to be inside it; I think of you, and I am still listening to you.

(Italics mine.)

The poet wants to be heard more than seen somehow. There is a certain level of attentiveness that Celan asks of the encounter between the poem and the reader, as well as the poem and its ghosts.

5

Earlier, I quoted from the Meridian speech of 1960. Now we are going back in time by two years. The Celan who is speaking has not attempted to meet Adorno on the mountain. The Celan who is speaking defines attentiveness by quoting Nicolas Malebranche from Walter Benjamin's essay on Kafka, noting that attentiveness is the natural prayer of the Soul. *

In his 1958 Bremen speech (as translated by Rosmarie Waldrop), Celan mentioned Martin Buber by name. He continued referencing authors and texts, continuing his conversations with them. In speaking between quotations,  Celan enacted the intertextual relationship of the 'encounter'. As late as 1964, Celan was still thinking about attention. That year, in a letter to a friend (as translated by Pierre Joris), Celan wrote: “Attention is, according to a phrase by Malebranche that you will also find quoted by W. Benjamin, the natural piety of the soul.”

But, back to Bremen: Celan recalled Buchner, the visionary 18th century poet who wound up going mad, and whose novella, Lenz, begins:

On the 20th of January Lenz walked through the mountains... only it sometimes troubled him that he could not walk on his head....

Celan added, "Whoever walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, has heaven in an abyss beneath him." He said that heaven's abyss accounts for the poem's obscurity.  

In what may be a veiled reference to the Wannsee Conference breakfast of January 20, 1942, where the Nazi leaders decided to implement the Final Solution, Celan also said:

Perhaps one may say that every poem has its 20th of January inscribed? Perhaps what's new for poems written today is just this: that here the attempt is clearest to remain mindful of such dates?

Celan’s Bremen-based definition of poetry is "that which can signify a breath-turn"— a breathrun made visible in the poem, "Psalm," which Celan wrote shortly thereafter. "Psalm" is an anti-psalm, or a benediction, a doxology, a prayer written over an abyss. I wish I had time to write more about it, but life leaves so little between things.

Another interesting thing about Bremen is that Celan, perhaps for the first time, speaks about the way “homelands” enter his poetics:

The region from which I come to you – with what detours! but then, is there such a thing as a detour? - will be unfamiliar to most of you. It is the home of many of the Hasidic stories which Martin Buber has retold in German. It was - if I may flesh out this topographical sketch with a few details which are coming back to me from a great distance - it was a landscape where both people and books lived. There, in this former province of the Habsburg monarchy, now dropped from history, I first encountered the name of Rudolph's Alexander Schroder while reading Rudolf Borchardt's 'Ode With Pomegranate'......Within reach, though far enough, what I could aim to reach, was Vienna. You know what happened, in the years to come, even to this nearness.

The dead are those who have not lived long enough to betray the poet.

Celan’s poetry reconfigures the turbulence of what we call “the retrospective gaze"—- a gaze that pretends one can look back without altering the subject being seen. The before/after of therapy often rides on this saddle, this linguistic apparel that tames the past and makes it “examinable.” One senses that Celan cannot forget the chaos in European Jewish communities as information about the concentration camps seeped to the surface. Each attempted to navigate the crevasse between hope and despair: the horrific new information coexisted with the polite denial and surprise of their friends. (“Germans are civilized: they would never do anything so barbaric.”) This is the story of power and ethno-states: we cannot believe them. We cannot believe that people who look like us and sound like us would do such things. We cannot believe we didn’t see what was happening as it happened.

6

Bernard Welt PARODY: This is a big theme in Wim Wenders’ documentary about Anselm Kiefer, with film of Heidegger and Paul Celan’s voice reading his poetry.

Ewen Cameron: Yeah Arendt's book doesn't apply well to Eichmann, but rather Heidegger, as Tuchman posited. He is the banality of evil. Arendt was enamoured with him and wrote a sideways apologia. Eichmann was many things but not banal.

Christopher Satoor: Reading this made my heart drop ..." Heidegger lacked all civil courage" for me his silence on the horrors of the holocaust attest to his guilt, he may not have killed anyone but he used his prestige as philosopher to allow the NSDAP to poison the students at Frieburg.

Jeffrey Gross: It’s speech acts all the way down

Postdrillardian Infra-Scholar: pierre joris’ ‘translation at the mountain of death’ is invaluable

7

And so I return to 1959, the year of Heidegger’s festschrift, the year of the failed mountain encounter with Adorno, the year of deepening alienation from Gisele and Eric, which also happens to be the year that Celan’s German translations of Mandelstam were published in Frankfurt.

The book was prefaced by a note on Mandelstam’s poetry. I quote it and leave the rest for another space and time (italics mine):

.. for Osip Mandelshtam, born in 1891, a poem is the place where what can be perceived and attained through language gathers around that core from which it gains form and truth: around this individual’s very being, which challenges his own hour and the world’s, his heartbeat and his aeon. All this is to say how much a Mandelshtam poem, a ruined man’s poem now brought to light again out of is ruins, concerns us today.

Necropolitics in the margins.

1

J.-A. Mbembé's "Necropolitcs" in the margins of images and repetitions. Mbembe quotes Fanon extensively when describing how necropower operates:

The town belonging to the colonized people . . . is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees.

2

Sovereignty began with the divine right of kings, in the relationship invoked by the elite to emphasize their privilege of access.

[“I am the one appointed to do God’s will. I am the recipient of the revelation. My body deciphers this will.”]

Loyalty to the sovereign demonstrates loyalty to God.

An imaginary with a Jade Emperor.

Mbembé' on the European legal imaginary:

Under the wikipedia section on names and forms of address for the Emperor of China, there is a subheading which reads: “To see naming conventions in detail, please refer to Chinese sovereign”

Beneath this subheading, one finds:

As the emperor had, by law, an absolute position not to be challenged by anyone else, his or her subjects were to show the utmost respect in his or her presence, whether in direct conversation or otherwise. When approaching the Imperial throne, one was expected to kowtow before the emperor. In a conversation with the emperor, it was considered a crime to compare oneself to the emperor in any way. It was taboo to refer to the emperor by his or her given name, even for the emperor's own mother, who instead was to use Huángdì (皇帝), or simply Ér (儿; 兒, "son", for male emperor). The given names of all the emperor's deceased male ancestors were forbidden from being written, and could be avoided (避諱) by using synonymous characters, homophonous characters, or simply leaving out the final stroke of the tabboo word. This linguistic feature can sometimes be used to date historical texts, by noting which words in parallel texts are altered.

 

Jacob Bryant, “Orphic Egg” (1774)

3

Any serious imaginary grounds itself in a physical claim that is tied to a cosmos. The territorial sanctifies the urge for conquest and ownership esoterically. Here is how wikipedia does cosmology:

Religious or mythological cosmology is a body of beliefs based on mythological, religious, and esoteric literature and traditions of creation and eschatology. Creation myths are found in most religions, and are typically split into five different classifications, based on a system created by Mircea Eliade and his colleague Charles Long.

Types of Creation Myths based on similar motifs:

  • Creation ex nihilo in which the creation is through the thought, word, dream or bodily secretions of a divine being.

  • Earth diver creation in which a diver, usually a bird or amphibian sent by a creator, plunges to the seabed through a primordial ocean to bring up sand or mud which develops into a terrestrial world.

  • Emergence myths in which progenitors pass through a series of worlds and metamorphoses until reaching the present world.

  • Creation by the dismemberment of a primordial being.

  • Creation by the splitting or ordering of a primordial unity such as the cracking of a cosmic egg or a bringing order from chaos.

The preferred cosmology of modern empires is the promise to bring order from chaos—- to tame and civilize; to make productive; to modernize and develop; to de-barbarize.

The preferred costume of 21st century empire is neoliberal democracy.

I mourn the decline of the orphic egg and the sexy, cave-dwelling oracle that refused to do the bidding of kings, empires, and state governments. My imaginary works this out in my own imagi-nation.

4

"In this case, sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not," Mbembe adds. 

Late-modern colonial occupation differs in many ways from early-modern occupation, particularly in its combining of the disciplinary, the biopolitical, and the necropolitical. The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine. Here, the colonial state derives its fundamental claim of sovereignty and legitimacy from the authority of its own particular narrative of history and identity. This narrative is itself underpinned by the idea that the state has a divine right to exist; the narrative competes with another for the same sacred space. Because the two narratives are incompatible and the two populations are inextricably intertwined, any demarcation of the territory on the basis of pure identity is quasi-impossible. Violence and sovereignty, in this case, claim a divine foundation: peoplehood itself is forged by the worship of one deity, and national identity is imagined as an identity against the Other, other deities. 

History, geography, cartography, and archaeology are supposed to back these claims, thereby closely binding identity and topography. As a consequence, colonial violence and occupation are profoundly underwritten by the sacred terror of truth and exclusivity (mass expulsions, resettlement of “stateless” people in refugee camps, settlement of new colonies). Lying beneath the terror of the sacred is the constant excavation of missing bones; the permanent remembrance of a torn body hewn in a thousand pieces and never self-same; the limits, or better, the impossibility of representing for oneself an “original crime,” an unspeakable death: the terror of the Holocaust.


5

Mbembe appends the following foot-note to the paragraph quoted above:

See Lydia Flem, L’Art et la mémoire des camps: Représenter exterminer, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Seuil, 2001).

Thus does Jean-Luc Nancy enter the room through the sidereal. "I don't want to venture into the silence of the outside that surrounds the thing itself as soon as it emerges," Nancy wrote in The Fragile Skin of the World.

The book opens with an “Overture,” a formal gesture that draws on the symphonic mode to introduce his exploration of space-time's fragility, and how this fragility counterposes the possibility of an all-encompassing skin:

“We can no longer count on anything —- this is the situation.”

We can longer count our way through the exclusions of all the elsewheres.

As for the situation, it inscribes the I’s relationship to the site. The situational gaze is sited.


6

What gives the colonial government unlimited power over an occupied territory?

The state of siege is itself a military institution. It allows a modality of killing that does not distinguish between the external and the internal enemy. Entire populations are the target of the sovereign. The besieged villages and towns are sealed off and cut off from the world. Daily life is militarized. Freedom is given to local military commanders to use their discretion as to when and whom to shoot. Movement between the territorial cells requires formal permits. Local civil institutions are systematically destroyed. The besieged population is deprived of their means of income. Invisible killing is added to outright executions.

Even when rendered visible, “invisible killing” remains unseeable at present.

To see is to have a body that may be attached to a hand: to see is to see one’s hand in it.

Small things.

1

The seasonal darkness—-like the narrowing shaft when one descends into a coal mine, and the way claustrophobia surprised me by tightening my shoulders and increasing my heart-rate before I recognized it. (“But I am not scared of small places?”) The way the “I” is modified by the particular. The way darkness surprises when it arrives.

2

A game I play in the dark with a treasure: The Compendium of Lost Words. Treating each word as character, re-inscribing their epitaph, mourning an intangible that has vanished from the world. Looking for its cousins in other languages. Fiddling with words.

Amarulence (n). Born in 1731 and died in 1755. Meaning "bitterness; spite." As in: The airgonaut could not avoid the particular amarulence that arrived when his feet touched the ground. Amarulence has a Romanian cousin in Amar, who is alive and thriving, and means "bitter."

3

Notebook, April.

My father phones from Korea to wish me a happy birthday because he is ahead of me in time. He calls from a future in which I am already 45 years old. In this future present, I am his morning as he is my afternoon. 

His voice bumps against the grass beneath my notebook. "You were the happiest baby," he says, "You brought so much joy." 

I can feel his mind reaching backward into time, fondling memories, and how strange that this baby is me in a memory I cannot share.

At the gas station, a lady is speaking to another lady while filling her tank. She mentions adoption, and how much she loves her children: how grateful she is to the woman who got pregnant and then "chose another family to raise this baby" for whom she has chosen life. I wonder what it means to choose life. Did that birthmother have what could be called "a choice"? If she lived in a state where abortion was illegal, no one can properly say that the birth mother "chooses" to birth a child for others to raise.

Coerced birth is such an unthinkably vicious punishment. How will we tell children that they were born as a punishment,* as a permanent scar against the mother, whose body was forced to carry them? What illustrated books will descend like gumdrops to cover the image of a woman imprisoned in her growing body?

Note to self: you are an idiot. The theocrats believe that birth is God's way of punishing Eve. It is a Divine Punishment. They are doing "God's work" in the post-Edenic plutocracy.

Chevengur: Waiting for the miracle with Platonov.

Chevengur by Andrei Platonov (NYRB Classics) Translated from the Russian by Elizabeth Chandler and Robert Chandler.


1 — The son

In May 1938, Andrei Platonov’s 15 year-old-son, Platon, was arrested by the Soviet secret police (KGB) as a terrorist and a spy. Sentenced to ten years in the Siberian gulag, Platon contracted tuberculosis. Although released in October 1940, eight years earlier than his sentence, Platon died of tuberculosis in January 1943. His father, Andrei, died of tuberculosis (supposedly contracted from his son) in January 1951, eight years later. There are two eights, two ways of measuring the gape between life and death, and countless intersections between what must die and what living entails in relation to the god named Freedom.

Acronyms change but the carceral content remains the same. The Soviet secret police was called Cheka from 1917 to 1922, GPU from 1922 to 1924, and NKVD from 1934 to 1943. Until 1953 the designation was MGB and from then to the fairly-recent present, KGB.


2 — My obsession

This book has obsessed me for months. It has distracted me from projects and family. It has manhandled my attention like the first reckless months of new love. My lips are raw from reading it. My notebooks and digital space are covered in Chevengur crumbs.

To get Chevengur out of my system—to “move on,” so to speak—demands a certain discipline, a reckoning with what is given as well as how the given situates itself in time, in relation to temporality. Now is not Then; Here is not There. One commences by stripping off the residual neoliberal subjectification; one tries to read in the light of the room the author presents.

Of Here, or the present US, authors often complain that biography gets over-read into their fiction. This complaint befouls itself when applied to novels written from geographic spaces where the novel plays a double-role of saying what cannot be officially “said.” I began with a biographical detail from Platonov’s life because those details perfume the book; they scent the bones and cling to his strange shifts in tense. In a sense, they also explain the decade of labor involved in the Chandlers translation. The “archive” version of Chevengur wasn’t published in Russian until 2022; the translators worked from archives rather than a published text; the presence of Platonov’s manuscript notes reveals the painstaking effort to provide readers with the definitive translation.

If definitive translations exist, then the Chandlers’ Chevengur will be listed among them. There is no way for me to link all the symbols and evocations—the accordion; the mystical moment; the spiritualism; the barracks culture, etc.—-Platonov weaves into the novel. Proceeding with for what gets left out, I self-soothe with the hope that this book inaugurates a flurry of conversations and events, a virtual cavalcade celebrating 2024 as the Year Chevengur Obsessed Us.

"The prelude to organization is always catastrophe," a younger Platonov wrote an essay titled "The New Gospel." The suffering of the "drought" and famine would be rewarded by Communism's arrival. Early Platonov analogizes communism to the Second Coming of a Messiah. Let it be noted that the formal requirement in the genre of Second Comings is how it begins in fantastic, world-destroying apocalypse.

Like all Messiahs and apocalypses, Platonov’s revolutionary scene is hounded by the challenges posed by its unrecognizability. The characters struggle with discerning the arrival of Communism from its betrayal. How does revelation differ from recognition? Who is positioned to recognize? If ‘apocalypse’ existed—-if it took place in time as an event— would there be such a thing as recognition, retrospectively? The narrative of the illuminated moment is created in the backwards glance that acknowledges it. In this sense, the moment gets lit by being written. We illuminate sacred manuscripts differently, and theory’s delight is implicated in our consciousness of doing so. Critically, the Russian Orthodox sectarians and religious schismatics who believed heaven and the kingdom of God would be established on earth were central to the 19th century zeitgeist that fueled anarchism and apocalyptic thinking. Platanov plays the zeitgeist contrapuntally in Chevengur. He links the extraordinary salvation-hunger to the abject misery produced by famine and war in Russia. Reform is no resolution.



3 — The horse the dude is riding into the sunset

"What interested me now was the transformation of thoughts into an event," Platonov wrote in an autobiographical early passage concerning the death of his mother and siblings, a passage he later removed. These deaths are not peripheral to the novel. Platonov’s mother died between 1927 and 1929, as he was writing Chevengur. We know this due to the splendid and prodigIous end-notes assembled by translators Robert and Elizabeth Chandler.

One endnote tells us that Platonov's handwritten manuscript page for chapter 25, when "Chepurny lay down in the straw," includes an unpublished note by the author: "Help me, mother, to remember and to keep living." Invocations to his dead mother's spirit ripple through Platonov's notebooks; he struggles to justify or accept the death of loved ones by imputing their value as ersatz guardian angels who offer counsel to the living. For Platonov, to know one's dead is to remain in conversation with them. "They are important," he whispers to his notebook.

Like their author, Chevengur’s characters also regularly invoke the dead as both partners and lovers. Each of the revolutionists lives alone with the ghosts in his head. The jubilant, man-hunting veteran warrior, Stepan Kopionkin, rides about on the horse named Strength of the Proletariat like a statue looking for a plinth to mount. He is the Vanguard riding the animal labor. I wept at Platonov’s genius upon realizing the symbolism of that horse named after the virtue of the exploited class’, a horse the Vanguard is riding relentlessly, riding and extolling in monologues at sunset, toasting and celebrating, theorizing ad infinitum with such profound and committed thoughtlessness that they are unable to recognize the Other they are riding when encountering it in the flesh, rather than they symbol.

Vanguard machismo aside, most of Kopionkin’s interpersonal conversations are dialogues and monologues directed to his dead love, Rosa— "He loved the dead, since Rosa Luxembourg was among them” — or his dead mother. I will be forced to return to this thread. (And I wish I had time to defend Rosa from Kopionkin’s patriarchal maw.)

4 — Aside on alter egos

According to Robert Chandler’s afterword (which deserves an its own essay), the adoptee, Sasha Dvanov, represents the idealistic Platonov of the past-revolutionary period while Scribinov represents the "somewhat disillusioned Platonov of the 1920’s.”

5 —- Digression involving another obsession whose name is Vera Figner

In 1825, the Decembrists stormed Tsar Alexander II’s winter palace, opening what some have called ‘the age of revolution’. It is indisputable that the Decembrists’ attempted insurrection altered what was considered possible. Revolutionists were born, raised, and complicated by the churn of these events. The revolutions that followed owed their gesture to the Decembrists.

In 1861, the Tsar (who had been ruling since 1818) was forced to finally liberate the serfs. This created a large class of peasantry who found themselves “property-owners” overnight. Serfs were given small plots of land that they worked for centuries. The landowning nobility and feudal class retreated to their salons and smothered themselves in luxury to quiet their alarm. Nevertheless, the salon, itself, drew reading into the spaces of power. Books containing radical ideas circulated among the children of the landowning nobility. One of these children, Vera Figner, became a revolutionist.

Figner’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Northwestern University Press, 1991) interposes itself against the archival imprint of revolutionary journals that foreground the labor and vision of men. Figner was 75 years old when the book was published in 1927. In the introduction, she says that one must write because "the dead do not rise but there is resurrection in books." Figner also recalls a warning from Eleanor Duse, when they met abroad: "Write: you must write; your experience must not be lost." 

What Figner brings to the revolutionary memoir is intentionally gendered. She frames her intellectual journey as a series of relational epiphanies: the knowledge of self in relation to others, the ecologies of affect and signification, etc, where feelings signify. Lived experience socializes us for the roles we’re expected to play. Figner’s resistance to these roles begins early. She was fussy, hot-tempered, and spirited. She fought with her siblings until the nurse pulled her away. Then, Vera would "mop the floor," which is how the nurse described her graphic, physical, floor-writhing rage.

Her first experience of shame as a child— something revolving around a broken lock— led her to adopt her first principle. The experience of shame taught her "to take the blame on yourself." Punishment is preferable to guilt. And guilt may have nothing to do with innocence. 

Class expectations loomed over her future. She loathed her time at the Smolny Institute, an exclusive boarding school for the daughters of the nobility (which would become the Bolshevik headquarters in 1917). At Smolny, she was taught to believe that she had no duty or responsibility for peasants or Russians or the masses: her sole responsibility was to those of her class.a lack of duty or sense of responsibility towards others.

Where school gave her despair, novels gave her the world. Figner insists that she learned more about life and humanity from the idealistic heroes in the literature given to her by her mother. At the same time, her early bildungsromanism included an "an abundance of joy," which Figner believed needed to be shared and rendered in common. Joy connected her to others; it created brothers, sisters, a family. And joy was not indistinct from the revolutionary character Figner acquired from literature.

N. A. Nekrasov's poem, "Saša," taught her "how to live" as a revolutionist: "To make my words coincide with my actions; to demand this consistency from myself and others. And this became the watchword of my life." (It still gives me goosebumps.) The logic of her character, in her own words: "It was incomprehensible for me not to act upon that which I had acknowledged as true.” Her soul “crystallized”, or came into itself in that Byronic key, on the day when she asked her father for advice with a difficult decision and realized he had no fucking clue. "One must make his great decisions for himself," Figner resolved. So she moved to Zurich and pursued a medical degree that would permit her to heal others. While in Zurich, she got married. But her views on healing shifted from individual cases of healthcare to the structural lack of economic conditions. For Vera, the problems of healthcare and social suffering she witnessed were inseparable. Poverty and healthcare went together.  The decision to leave her medical degree behind was, to her, a choice towards life and against status. "I decided to go, in order that my deeds might not disprove my words," she wrote. And so deciding, she acted without looking back. 

Around this time, Alexander Ulyanov, Vladimir Lenin's brother, was executed for being involved in a failed conspiracy to assassinate Alexander III. Theory was being negotiated in the field, on the ground, between barricades where nihilism met communism. Questions about direct action played out in prison sentences. Prison formed new solidarities between revolutionists.

Figner’s arrest introduced her to Vladimir Nabokov's father and Lev Tolstoy, both of whom occupied positions of power in the tsarist prison system. Tolstoy didn't reproach the struggle she fought for the peasants; he only asked why she had to kill the tsar, since a new one would pop up behind him. "The desire to be silent" descended upon Vera. Imprisoned for decades in a tsarist prison, Vera wore a gray prison coat with a yellow diamond patch on the back. Her co-prisoners called her "queen." 

The carceral society has been called kazarmnyy kommunizm ("barracks communism") or Nechaevshchina ("Nechayevism") after Segrey Nechayaev, the Russian revolutionary whose 1869 book, The Catechism of a Revolutionary, is best known for its slogan: "the ends justify the means." Nechayev’s first article of faith is critical reading:

- The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, affairs, feelings, attachments, property, or even a name. Everything in him is consumed by a unique, exclusive interest, a single idea, a single passion: revolution.

- In the depths of his being, not only in his words, but also in his deeds, he has severed every link with the civil order, with the whole of the civilized world, with all the laws, propriety, conventions and morals of this world. He is its implacable enemy, and if he continues to live in it, it is only in order that he might destroy it. 

[Nechayev inspired the nihilist revolutionist's character in Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Dostoevsky also based the brutal murder of Shatov, a member of the clandestine cell, on the November 1869 assassination of Ivanov, an apostate from Nechayev's revolutionary band of brothers.]

What Figner brings to history is a first-person account foregrounding women. It is indisputable that the abysmal, relentless suffering of Russian mothers created many women revolutionists, as Figner reveals. Her anarchist chafes against the imposition of teleology, a mode she associates with authoritarian Russian Orthodox leaders. No, things did not have to be this way, Figner insists. Russians did not have to suffer miserably for a god or a tsar or a notion of national greatness. Dissent didn’t have to culminate in purges and the assertion of omnipotent dictatorial power. Figner posits a sort of counterfactual hope, a relentless optimism in progress and social change. Those evil novels can be indicted for wild hopefulness as well as revolutionary character.

I mention Figner because a lot rode on the "one-spark theory" and the activist belief that Russian peasants were ready for revolution: all they needed was an intellectual spark. (Platonov circles this point in Chevyngur)….  Like American Baptist missionaries bumbling through Romania in the early 1990’s, the revolutionists brought books and lessons to their target audience. Unlike Baptist missionaries in Iron Bloc countries, Figner’s comrades actually relocated to the villages, providing medical assistance and education, and made their lives among the peasants.

Refusing the given world, building from the radical re-visioning such refusal permits, missionaries and revolutionists proselytized and sought teachable moments between the poverty, grief, flood, loss. The promised deliverance. They outlined the actions which led to salvation. They guaranteed a world greater than suffering alone, and being abandoned to reckon with it.

6 —- Foundations

While typing just now, my thoughts bumped into Zura’s, who was reading Platonov’s Foundation Pit at 12:29 am today in Turkey. (The Platonovmania is global, as it should be.) Zura’s quote it touches on the exhaustion of the mothers—-and the way Platonov dragged this obsession across various novels.

Where Vera Figner dialogued with her absent mother in the prison cell, Platonov dialogued with his dead mother ("and the “Others”) in Chevengur. One could even venture to say he builds conflict between fathers and mothers into theory, through literature. In Platonov's telling, it is the fatherlessness of "the others" (the mysterious group of displaced refugees wandering through Russia) that makes them malleable and hungry for leadership. The search for a father may lead mankind to god, nation, or political ideal. Their accomplishment consisted in surviving and living despite their orphanhood. 

The mother is missing, friends. The mother is always dead or bent over in the pieta posture. Hers is the body invoked for apology and penance.



7 — Language tasked to order

Platonov plays with the way official language (see also academic lingo, specialized lingos, lexicons rendered salient by their capacity to estrange peasants and workers) intrudes on the mysterious and attempts to establish order, to provide a language in which things can be known: "Red as the circulars!"  "A man’s skin and nails are Soviet power. How come you can’t formulate that for yourself?" "None of this can be formulated in a resolution."

The verbs "expend" and "extract" impinge upon the present moment. I hear climate change as the unimagined horizon that empires, including the US, the Soviet, and the Chinese, would normalize for maximum resource extraction during that industrialist’s wet-dream commonly called the Cold War.

The men attempt to theorize a future ("The sun gets by without any Bolsheviks–and a correct attitude to the sun is part of our consciousness"),  but theory, like god, transcends the plane of life. The men on the field wrangle with their ghosts —-ghosts, by the way, are radically heretical for the Russian revolutionists; one could even take Platonov’s ghosts to be the ‘real’ sabotage indulged by the Vanguard who was waiting for Communism to appear. Forget the dead, for it is the dead who distract us from building the future. In Chevengur, however, the men wait and wait with guns in their arms and death surrounding them. The ornamental nature of their cliff-notes-Marxism lends it a supra-natural feel that remains external to the famines and basic needs of the peasants. It is as if Platonov’s vanguardists read the catechism, take their first Communion, and wait for the unrecognizable miracle.


8 —- The others & their others

Inspired by Don Quixote, Platonov’s novel plays into the epic form. This is immediately visible in the character of the horse named Strength of the Proletariat. But the attempt to spoof chivalric romances is prismatic and multi-faceted. Sure, Platonov wryly and cheekedly condemns the lover to continue romancing his dead revolutionary idol, Rosa, into the corpse and maggots phase of tenderness. But he also condemns himself. He condemns the vanguard, the village, the Russian people, civilization, modernity, religion; only the landscape escapes condemnation.

How to describe the Platonovian mix of playfulness, absurdity, affection, disorientation, and despair? Epically, everything (and it’s mother) is at stake in Chevengur. One might read it as a love letter to the first love, the one whose failure implicates all the “others”. And “others” are tremendous in this book. The unidentified mass of impoverished refugees who may or may not constitute the Proletariat remain a mystery. Characters discuss them and try to find a place for them in Marx’s theory. Platonov’s brilliance extends to the use of capitalization, showing how the masses flip flop between the others and the Others and even “comrade other,” as seen in the dialogue excerpted below.

End-notes attend to idioms. The "Bolshevik foxtrot”, for example, is an oxymoron based on statements by 19s0’s Bolsheviks of the foxtrot as a bourgeois decadence likely to corrupt and rot the proletarian soul.

It seems fair to drag my mother’s ghost into space where the ghosts of the mothers are never quite buried.

“Men who can’t dance are dangerous,” my mom used to say. “Men who can’t dance seek their ecstasy from guns.”

[May she never Rest in Peace. May the mothers continue to rail from beyond the grave at the stupidity involved in our hunger for exemplarity and our desire to be the latest exceptional gumdrop in the pageant of personal branding.']

Once, when I was a boy, I shaved a kitten and buried it in the snow. I didn’t understand whether or not it was human. And then the kitten caught a fever and died. —- Impossible to resist astonishment at what is happening here, inside these conversations, in these words so meticulously and lovingly translated by the Chandlers.

Platonov brings theory to literature; every theme that would preoccupy the Soviets is given to the reader. One finds the tension between urban and rural, the trope of technocracy’s failure to provide for those whom it objectifies, the stereotype of the technocrat as a frivolous, lazy armchair-dweller who commands serfs on paper while pretending to liberate them, the mistrust of ‘outsiders’ that will turn into the mistrust of ‘foreigners’ that will evolve into the fear of free-thinking intellectuals.

9 — The lice in the heart of the heart of the village

The village lacks phones or means to communicate with the outer world.

In lieu of books, the men exchange incoherent interjections among themselves: "We are comrades! Comrades to the oppressed countries of the world!" When alone, they repeat these things to the sky, as if sending missives to the missing proletariat.

History meets us in events on the ground, where the lice make their appearance. After the first world war (and during the Russian civil war), a typhus epidemic carried by lice killed between two and three million people. Vladimir Lenin held a meeting in 1919 to strategize around the epidemic. "All attention to this problem, comrades," Lenin announced. "Either lice will conquer socialism or socialism will conquer lice." (The significance of lice carrying a disease that travels on foreign bodies and is brought into the heart of the nation or village is an image that xenophobes and propagandists will not relinquish.)

When a refugee-cum-proletariat child gets sick with typhus, the vanguardists employ every measure in their power to care for and save this child. But the child dies of typhus anyway. The mother calmly accepts this death, and mourns. The vanguardists, however, cannot process their grief, given what death of an innocent, possibly proletariat child signifies for Communism. Stunned, the men discuss the dead child as an "alienated body" that had been failed by both Tsarism and communism.

Irreality pervades Cepurny’s musings as he lays in tall grass and wonders how suffering can continue under communism. Is this extraordinary present suffering (which seems to resemble the extraordinary prior suffering) evidence that Communism isn’t here?

"And what are we to do about the horses, and the cows, and the sparrows?" he wonders before soothing himself with theory. The Proletariat will be here soon to solve it. The Petty Bourgeoisie is finished, buried, dispossessed—and yet, they must still exist somewhere. The refugees take residence in the village, replacing the small-land owning farmers.

But “somewhere on the outskirts of . . . an accordion began to play.” Kopionkin is “unsettled” by the mystery of this instrument. He is perturbed by its failure to declare its interest, and rankled by the invitation it extends, an invitation that is not resolved when man goes to meet the accordion.

Chepurny remains tormented by "conscience" because "the smallest child Chevengur had died from communism and he was unable to formulate any justification to himself." One could read this as a self-interrogating critique of Marxism’s reliance on structure to explain everything. One could read it as hole in the machinery of Proletkult. One could speculate that Platonov the older is addressing Platonov the younger, who has not yet watched his son be sentenced to prison. One might even worry that over-focus on the abstract enables us to erase the living.

Theory’s power comes from its ideological rigor. The vanguardists left grasping for explanation opens into that mystical space Platonov courts, or makes visible. Perhaps this is where explanation is rejected for mythology and propaganda, for telling a story that will defend the theory and conquer other minds with its narration.

The death of one child from typhus is a blight on the village–it "snatched the whole town from the road of revolution." 



10 — Avowals and disavowals

And so the Vanguard wait for the Proletariat to save them.

The famished, alienated Proletariat is tasked with accomplishing this critical step in the coming of Communism.

The Peasants float in a sort of limbo between the communal ideal of village life and the Petty Bourgeois landowners who have come from the city.

The Proletariat must be imported, since they aren’t indigenous to the village. Or maybe they are being treated like the horse beneath the statue of the self-mythologizing warrior in the plaza. Or maybe the men haven’t read enough literature to distinguish the humans from the legend. Or else a theory must be written that makes for what exists in that There, in that particular Russia . . .

As for the Peasants, no one knows what on earth to do with them. Their theoretical role is missing from the script.

What is significant when everything is a sign and justification?

Beckett’s Godot came to mind as the vanguard waited for the proletariat to emerge from peasants who were waiting for God.

And we wait, too. As American statesmen issue balmy statements that cosplay “red lines,” the Neo-Nice (liberal) intellectuals build a case for ethnic cleansing from their gargantuan silences. The fear of being mis-read continues to define our cowardice. As armchair warriors shift their investment portfolios to reflect an increased demand for weapons and drones, President Biden reassures himself that the US economy will be saved by the war on Palestinians. The Christian Evangelical Zionists titillate themselves publicly with promises of second comings on the horizon and Jesus-rule in our lifetime. Forms, shapes, and intellectual prevarications assemble themselves in the pageant of optics with the expectation of saving something in a war that cannot be justified on the basis of security. It is a dream-war, a scene from a mythological dream being scripted for the eschatological social imaginary. It stains every surface with its bombs. It marks no justice and no peace: simply death of tens of thousands of Palestinians.

Intoxicated by novels, Figner imagined a different world. She lived her life as if this world were possible. Any world is possible. What is impossible is the perversity of accepting a world as loud, deadly, dedicated to economic inequality, vicious (and exultant in its viciousness), and meaningless as the one that has been given to us.

Perhaps Morbid Swither said it best—- the nothing else matters book changes everything. May the curse of its beauty damn your plans, radicalize your tended silences, and vacate the slumber of your nights.