Notes on Antoine Volodine's Minor Angels: Part 1

The surrounding arches of the domes located in the Hagi Sophia include mosaics of hexapterygons, the six-winged seraphs said to surround God’s eternal throne. To be so utterly wing-limbed in all directions seems fantastic, and there is this space in contemporary liteature where the fantastic supernatural meets science fiction. . .

“Backfictions”

Antoine Volodine is the primary heteronym used by a Russian-French writer and translator who won the French Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, a prize usually awarded to science-fiction writers. Like Fernando Pessoa, Volodine makes use of multiple heteronyms (see Lutz Bassmann, Manuela Draeger, Elli Kronauer, etc.) to author his books. Like Guido Morselli, Volodine's books are often classified as speculative fiction or sci-fi. But, according to the writer himself in 1991, his writing could be called "Anarcho-fantastic post-exoticism." They—Volodine and his heteronyms— have published over 40 texts of what he later narrowed to "post-exoticism," the genre invented to publicly break the boxes literary critics tried to fit them inside.

“We are several authors, we are writing from an elsewhere that is in a prison, we are composing a foreign structure entirely out of texts, we all share the same egalitarian and revolutionary ideology, we are reclaiming a poetry rooted in equal measure within shamanism, bolshevism, magical realism, and oneiricism,” Volodine told Jeffrey Zuckerman and JT Mahany in a 2015 inteview, which also happens to be one of the most abundant resources I’ve found on Volodine, as conducted by Zuckerman, who is likely his most astute contemporary reader.

So Volodine tells Zuckerman and Mahany:

Most of our narrators have a shamanic way of telling stories. They speak to evoke history, but they also create characters to go with them, or instead of them, down the difficult path of fiction, their painful path toward memories, toward the present, or toward black space. Narrators assume this somewhat priestly function, and in this way, they don’t just tell stories, they also live them. Entering a post-exotic anecdote or image is often accompanied by a trance. The reader doesn’t simply watch a story—passively, objectively—he or she is invited to plunge into the image, into a cinematic succession of images, to psychically and maybe physically accompany the shamans who speak, repeat, and sing the story.

For these notes, I limit my digressive sally to Volodine’s novel, Minor Angels, as translated by Jordan Stump (University of Nebraska Press, 2008).

The Problem of Angels

I did not expect to fact-check angelology while reading this novel. Nor did I anticipate returning to the energetic relationship between constructions of free will and the pedagogies of neoliberalism. Yet there is a sense in which the difference between angels and demons hinges on this construction of loyalty to something larger, something divine that subsumes the self while eventually fulfilling it, or giving life meaning. There is this mystery in the fullness of time etc. * And there is the social significance of loyalty, a word that simulatenously defines and monitors our affiliations and creates notions of worthiness. We track loyalty’s tempo and meter the measurement.

In return for affiliative self-knowledge, the loyal pledge their allegiance, or fides, through the performance of declarative displays. As a ceremonial action, the rituals of fealty provide the believer with a community, a sense of belonging, and the possibility of t-shirt or branding device that announces this allegiance. Our loyalties simultaneously mark us and demarcate us from others. Contemporary brands have expanded these sources of community to include corporations (the war between Pepsi and Coke, etc). Experts on affiliative properity emerge to decode the affects and gestures. Markets provide expertise in everything from pore-size to perfect parenting. Late capitalism has made this so normative that we hardly notice—unless we are seeking kinship. *

As for the angels, muddled loyalty was their undoing. Unclear allegiance got them expelled from the kingdom of heaven and, later, the ecclesiastical canon. Early religious leaders knew that angels and demons were kinned, as reflected in monastic writings and illuminated manuscripts. The growth and expansion of religious institutions (i.e.bureaucracies, armies, institutions) made taking sides imperative (one can't very well ride both sides in a war). To serve heaven or hell is the final question. To question is the final question is to deny Christ. The “you’re either for us or you’re against us” binary complicates the the Pascalian wager of playing the field.

Set in post-apocalytic end-times, Minor Angels locates itself outside linear time. The last humans (and there are many) seek to keep the dying world through "revivification or revolution or simply through acts of memory," in Jordan Stump's description.

The pseudoapocryphal aura emerges from references to original book or revelation, a sort of subtextual dialogue with the idea of the “one true story”. Volodine’s fictional spirit-worlds blur the distance between embodiment and living. He is emphatically not a Christian. His theories of time and embodiment borrow from Tibetan Buddhism. His references to Bardo Thödol are accompanied by the claim that the Tibetan Book of the Dead is the putative Bible among prisoners, the single non-post-exotic text shared between the writers incarcercated in his stories. His interest in shamanism tiptoes round the rims of Mircea Eliade’s shamanic neo-paganism.

Do I parse Volodine’s beliefs because I sense the stirrings of a belief system in the novel? Am I curious about how paganism plays out with multiple creators dressed up as authors? The is a disconnect reminiscent of my failed efforts to see the magic in the autostereogram, or the hours I spent failing to spot the shapes in those psychadelic mall posters —- and that feeling of abandoning the promised epiphany, which may be another way of wondering if the disconnect is in my vision rather than the object it attempts to understand?

One creature on my shoulder says apocalypse is not possible without the presumption of linear chronology, the belief that all things are moving towards an end; a similar creature on my other shoulder says a world in which apocalypse is insignificant must also be a world in which historical Progress, itself, is challenged by post-exoticism's commitment to narrative polyphony and non-linearity. From where I stand, doubly-creatured, there is no mirror, no revelation. I don’t know which one is the angel and which is the demon. I suspect both are both, and distraction is immanent.

The Problem of Time as Encountered in Form: Anecdote v. Narract

Volodine (and the others) would abhor my attempt at synopsis. He would urge me, instead, to focus on how our understanding of time reflects what we want from it. And what we want matters: the skin between desire and temporality is central to Volodine's project. 

Time, desire, etc . . . the forms language gives us for wanting. The words my child just used to express a desire for food located in the near future where it is the idea of nearness, itself, that remains in dispute. My near-enough is her far-away, just Volodine's angels are present and simultaneously past. Apocalypse has happened, is happening.

Volodine’s time-sprawling narrative occurs in a Bardo-tempo, where a group of immortal crones consigned to a nursing home plot their revenge on society which forgot them. These crones were once revolutionists, and their hunger for revolution leads them to create a son, Will Scheidenmann, from discarded fabric and dust mites. Because a life patched from the refuse of poverty, fury and resentment will be vulnerable to pleasure, power, immediate gratification, Scheidemann is seduced by capitalism, entrepreneurship, and consumerism. The crone-mothers are furious—they brought capitalism back to life by concocting a son—and so they reclaim him, dragging him back to the yurt of his birth, where, like Scheherazade, Scheidenmann delays his punishment by reciting one narract a day.

One narract a day makes a collection. Scheidenmann’s "narracts" present themselves as narrative acts of resistance. Each one is named after the angel who narrates it. And each angel communicates in the post-epiphanic narract form, creating an iconography of unstable characters, each of whom is listed in an index of 49 minor angels at the end, after having "passed through our memory, one per narract."

The formal anti-modernism built into these divine sequences distinguishes them from anecdotes, a form which has moral ballast, or weight, built into it. Volodine himself, has made this comparison, saying the narracts are "something other than limpid, artless little anecdotes." This other than includes images intentionally constructed and informed by dreams, received images. (Yes, Mark Fisher’s theorizing comes to mind.)

If Rene Char’s description of the anecdote as a tale with moral ballast, or expectation, built into it, then Volodine asserts the narract's focus on aesthetic longing against that moral ballast. In Volodine's words, these are  "something other than limpid, artless little anecdotes;" a narract is a vignette which "captures a sitation's conflict...between recollection and imagination" by leaning on "poetic sequence" for its structure and organization, informed by dreams and received images. Informed by dreams and received images, the narract is delivered in shamanstic fashion, enabling its speaker to embody the past rather than return to it. Conceptually, the narract neologizes narration to the act of narrating, so that the narract becomes the story's embodiment.

Traces Between Translations

Each of the forty-nine "prose moments" is marked with "the trace left by an angel"— not as a savior but as a witness to each "place of exile” where those whom Volodine remembers and cherishes "go on existing as best they can".

We see this in the first narract, where the narrator speaks from inside a ruined time. Although this speaker is sad (thus seeking a "tear-fixer") his words are addressed to a Thou-like You, someone he thinks about often, and it is this thinking, itself, which seems worthwhile. The first speaker extols longing as a worthwhile form of action, a radical act at a time when we are measured by resumes, numbers, and achievements.

Longing achieves nothing, and yet, it acts on the mind in ways that leave traces. Narraction challenges the angels’ relation to endings.

Fred Zanfl is a writer who depicted the end of the species, a man who survived the coups and who refused to accept his own ending or death. Zanfl rejects extinction as "a fictive thing because it had never been described from within the mind of the one experiencing it. "I will stand on the railway of my death," Zanfl writes, in a narract which ends: 

I have carefully written these words. No matter what happens, let no one be blamed for my life.

Having used Marguerite Yourcenar's line "Let no one be accused of my life” as an epigraph, this last line (“let no one be blamed for my life”) struck me as an example of what Volodine has called the "anonymous intertextuality" in the post-exotic process. It is as if he allows Zanfl to overnarrate Yourcenar, with a slight modification.

Whereas Yourcenar asks that no one be accused of, or indicted for, her life, Zanfl asks that no one be blamed for it. If Zanfl is infected with Yourcenar’s traces, it is because Volodine wants a dialogue with the absent. The declarative "I" stands fully accountable; it disrupts the fatalism implied in Yourcenar's comment.

For contex, the line being translated from Marguerite Yourcenar's Fires, is: "Qu'on n'accuse personne de ma vie." To some degree, the semantic distance between blame and accusation is smaller in French, and one can't help wondering if these two lines resemble each other in their untranslated form. Tant pis, I lack a copy of Volodine in French, though I wouldn't be surprised if he plays in the present indicative tense.

The Part Where the Clock Struck Twelve

At 12:15 am on a Monday, one could read Volodine’s narracts as ruined revelations.

"Every finished work is the result of a collective creating," Volodine has said, and this multiplicity blurs a single authorial meaning.* Minor Angels doesn't intend to generate meaning within the reading experience itself (meaning arrives in the dreams which result from the reading), and much of the action takes place outside the frame. This way of looking at reading resembles a scripture, or an apprenticeship to revelation. It also indicts my present attempt to interpret it. All the more reason for me to continue it, tomorrow.

Unpursued Traces of Interest; a.k.a. end-notes

“In the fullness of time, etc.”: The thicker and more foundational our conception of free will,” the more cosmological and eternally-serious our conception of loyalty?

“Markets provide expertise in everything from pore-size to perfect parenting. Late capitalism has made this so normative we hardly notice—unless we are seeking kinship.”: I wear my declarative feminist t-shirt to flash a virtue-signal towards the like-minded (i.e. to find my people) and to assess the responses of others (i.e. which I interet as friendly or threatening).

Translators J. T. Mahany and Jeffrey Zuckerman described the uncanny similarities of their introductions to Volodine: “We both discovered Antoine Volodine, appropriately enough, in winter. One of us was sitting in a classroom overlooking bare trees, translating the first pages of Des anges mineurs. The other one of us had just read the same novel in English and was sleepwalking through the dark, snowy streets of Rochester recalling Volodine’s declaration that the novel’s meaning was “not in the book’s pages but in the dreams people will have after reading it.” See also Antoine Volodine in conversation with Jeffrey Zuckerman, Paris Review (July 8, 2015), where J. T. Mahany and Jeffrey Zuckerman call Volodine’s books “almost as dreamlike as their author himself”:

He writes under four (or perhaps five) heteronyms, including Antoine Volodine, and only the most basic facts of his biography are known: he was born in 1950, came of age during the 1968 student protests in Paris, and taught Russian in France for some fifteen years before devoting himself entirely to writing. His debut, Comparative Biography of Jorian Murgrave, appeared in France in 1985. It is the story, told by way of fragmented microbiographies, of an alien hunted down on Earth whose dreams are invaded by psychobiologists intent on making him talk. “There is no way I could call Biographie comparée a novel,” one befuddled critic wrote; others were swift to express their shock and delight at such an innovative author appearing in the frequently monotonous ranks of science fiction. In a matter of years, Volodine had became famous for his (and his heteronyms’) singular brand of writing.

“…blurs a single authorial meaning”:  I thought of scriptures, sacred books, the texts against which heresy is defined and punished—-and how the multiple authors of scriptures are taken as one speaker — and how this single meaning is also disrupted at the level of interpretation and embodied retelling.

An eternity against closure.

The last kite you flew.

The last kite you saw being flown.

These statements are notions of time in a poem, or how the poem tracks its relation to living.

Poems create their own time. Returning to—or revealing—the time of the poem at the ending offers the reader a sense of completeness that isn’t finite. The infinite is more complete than the finite. The infinite is the temporality of poetry. In some ways, we anticipate this infinite-facing direction in the poem, perhaps less so in prose, (although, when someone celebrates an essay that strolls this infinitude, they often describe it as poetic or lyrical).

One can take leave in a descriptive poem with an abstraction—with a numbing ray of sunlight that radiates around what came before—the cruelty of childhood, for instance.

Sometimes, the relationship between the title of the poem should be weighed against the final line, And I think that something is lacking in the poem's energy when the poem ends with the title line.

The voluminous reverb of the homophone. The slight of hand finds it easier to hide the sleight of hand, easier to slight the off-hand remark a squirrel huffs to its acorn. Alternately: getting up and walking around the poem, rather than sitting, expectantly, inside it.

Not punishing the poem for its stride – its way of moving – when it limps quietly towards the door rather than throwing a plate and stopping out.

Each book blows the mind a bit differently. Each text exists as a result of how the writer’s mind has been blown. This is a statement about socialization and experience and one’s relation to it on the page.

Against closure: Although overdetermined from a materialist standpoint, death remains to haunt its inheritance in humans, places, and events.

^

Closure is often defined as a satisfying end to an event, where narrative or experience. But an ending, like a beginning, is culturally contingent; beginnings and ends vary across cultures, languages, grammars, and time. Even eternity changes, depending on the place in which one stands to discuss it.

"An ending is something we construct, not something that occurs in nature," Nancy Bern writes. Similarly, closure is something we construct in order to give an event discrete edges (an edgeless thing is difficult to discuss). The "satisfying end" is how closure is culturally constructed, and the construct offers a social script for how humans should respond to loss. "Closure talk frames grief as bad and therefore something that needs to end,” Bern continues. And this closure-talk “rhetoric implies that closure exists, and assumes it is possible, good, desired, and necessary."

“Chasing Closure” by Nancy Berns (PDF)

^

Birthwort vase (1909) by Henri Husson and Adrien-Aurélien Hébrard

In a garden just outside London, John Berger listens as his friend speaks about an odd flower, a flower "like the breast of a tiny thrush in full song."

The flower, a birthwort, comes from Brazil. Its Latin name is Aristolochia elegans, which Berger’s friend says sounds like "a person, unique and singular. If you had this flower in your garden and it happened to die, you could mourn for it with its Latin name.”

"Which you wouldn't do, if you knew it as birthwort” —his friend adds.

Archaic language is singular and eeriely nostalgic – it jostles, demands attention, insists on being seen and tasted in its particularity, which may (or may not) evoke an unfamiliar time and place.  

The particular wants new words—it wants, like the lover seeking a nickname, the intimacy of diminutives. I take the use of neologisms and anachronstic language as ways of refusing closure in a poem. Anything that fumbles with the familiar unfamiliar (a.k. a. that multifaceted, irreedemanle demon named nostalgia) brings longing to the affective palette and texture of the poem.

"Farewell, she cried, and wept a twig of tears," wrote Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov in his strange poem, "The I-Singer of the Universong."

Hail to the images that estrange us from our grieving gestures. To weep a twig feels more permanent than a puddle.
A twig of tears is an anachronism. Anachronisms are the spice of bread and butter life. An anachronism is a word, object, or event “mistakenly placed in a time where it does not belong.” Feeling as if one does not belong anywhere sets some moments apart from the others.

“On Longing” by Susan Stewart (PDF)

^

It is no secret that American culture industry stalks closure obsessively. The presence of shame when remembering the dead— to remember is to make present, to live with undecidability. We must live with our selves (or with the idea of our self as constructed, nurtured, sold, and self-caringly tended) in the face of uncertain duration. To the question of how the living live with the dead, John Berger replied:

Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egoism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as eliminated.

Shame appears as the lubricating silence that prevents us from losing face or social status by invoking the dead. Our eliminationist policy in relation to the planned obsolescence of contemporary technology. Eliminated. A word that has the sound of limb and limn buried inside its pit.

“A Reverse Alphabet for Finishing” by Lee Upton (PDF)

^

Richard Avedon, Allen Ginsberg, poet, New York, December 30, 1963. (New Yorker)

James Baldwin wrote “For Nothing Is Fixed” as part of a collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon. In it, Baldwin plays on the two meanings of fixed throughout the poem, where fixed means “repaired” or “set in place, immovable.” The lines are simple: lacking complex phrasing and ostentatious vocabulary. The lexicon is intimate, proximate, and deeply indebted to religious language and ritual.

It feels like a litany that cannot stop moving —- “the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing” — and nothing is fixed. Nothing stops moving long enough to be repaired. This is not redemptive in the religious sense, yet it holds the breaking, the brokenness, sacred; it hallows the faith between humans as a space of communion. Something in this pitch can never be “over”.

“Coin of the Realm” by Carl Phillips (PDF)

^

HILTON ALS: “Nothing Personal” is riddled with these questions of identity—what makes a self?—a question that gave a certain thirteen-year-old ideas about the questions he might ask in this world: Who are we? To each other? And why?

NICK WARR: “The interruption of reading performed by the images confirms the irregular chronological dynamic of Sebald’s work. Constantly hindered, sent back into countless eddies and still backwaters, time, like the mineral water that is sieved through the salt frames of Bad Kissingen, percolates as much as it flows.

“Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s Joint Examination of American Identity” by Hilton Als

”Six Photos from Sebald’s Albums” by Nick Warr

^

"May my silences become more accurate," poet Theodore Roethke wrote in one of the 277 notebooks left behind after his death. Each notebook collected lines and images for poems, observations, quotations, craft notes to himself, etc. He didn't use all the lines and images in his poems — but he wrote them. And saved them. Here is an excerpt from one of his notebooks, a pep-talk if you will . . .

“A fake compassion covers many a sore . . . “ Roethke elected to end the line in an ellipsis, which is punctuation mark for dropping a trail of crumbs that continues thinking beyond the text. One dot is a period—-the symbol of closure. Two dots is a no man’s land or a typo. Three dots is an ellipsis—the whisper towards more.

And maybe “fake compassion” is part of closure’s affect, part of “covering” the sore in order to make others feel comfortable. The labor of pain is linked to the social responsibility of hiding the wound, or performing an aesthetic closure so that one’s pain doesn’t infect or contaminate others. Late capitalist regimes for managing pain hygiene are so rigorous; I’m intrigued by the way they command a sort of devotion resembling the religious.

^

Jerzy Andrzejewsky wrote a novel in one sentence. Italo Calvino decided to write a novel with ten beginnings.  Raymond Queneau decided to write a set of ten sonnets whose corresponding lines could be replaced with one another. Jacques Roubaud decided to write a series of poems corresponding to the pieces of a game of ‘go’. Georges Perec vowed to write a novel in the amount of time Stendhal had spent writing one of his—and broke this vow, insofar as we know. “How can I possibly make myself understood?” Witggeinstein wonders across notebooks and papers. Who is this unified self that betrays us in infamous gardens at night on the eve before the event which will be taken to define us?

“The Rejection of Closure” by Lyn Heijinian

"Continuing Against Closure” by Lyn Hejinian

^

2 pages from Steve McCaffrey’s 110-page binder containing “Carnival” originals, notes on panels, and other “early related typestracts,” ca. 1970s.

“Steve McCaffery kept 3-ring binders with originals of his concrete and visual poetry. Most of the poems are unique with an assortment of collage elements, colored and black pen drawings, and assorted typewriter (typestract) and type treatments.” (Granary Books)

K. IVER:  I like to start with getting my brain in a meditative state and asking myself, “What are you most unwilling to feel?” The Hua TouBuddhist meditation, meant to focus the mind, is often delivered from masters to students in the form of a question. An old one, for example: “Who is dragging this corpse around?” That one sparks a lot more curiosity and bewilderment for me than the egoism of “Who am I?” that Western Enlightenment offered. 

Interview with K. Iver on Poetic Closure by Mentor and Muse

“Discontinued Meditations” by Steve McCaffrey (PDF)

^

MARY RUEFLE: I was reading the notebooks of the poet George Seferis (1900-1971) and had copied into the journal by hand my favorite passage, which was identical with the passage I had copied earlier in the day, believing completely that I had never encountered it before: “But to say what you want to say you must create another language and nourish it for years & years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, and with what you will never find again.”

”Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World” by Mary Ruefle
(with gratitude to Anthony Garrett for reminding me of this essay)

^

Closure is attractive: it knows how to dress for the funeral. Formally, it presents itself as polish, smoothness, poise, competence. A line. A simple equation. Linearity leaves no dark corners, no secret crannies, no quiet nooks in which a child can disappear with a book. Where linearity lends itself to prediction, diagnosis, and marketing, Gaston Bachelard's "poetics of space" requires bends, triangles, shapes, spirals, and curls. There are polynomials and bad formulas. Every loss shapes itself differently without quite resembling a line.

In the culture industry, closure presents itself as a solution to the alienations of late capitalist community. The village is dead; the city needs more policing; the therapist is the new best friend; and a closure is a thing one can "accomplish" by paying money and following the correct plan or guru.

Because closure is subtly framed as an accomplishment, it gives rise to a scale, a metric of determination enabling  others (including strangers) to judge how far along in the process of closure their peers have come. "I'm on the third stage of grief." "Don’t get trapped in the fourth stage of grief!" "When are you going to get over it?" The language of closure infects the discourse of human relations with new hierarchies. What does it mean to "graduate" from the final stage of grief? What does it mean to "overcome" loss?

No one caters to the ideology of happiness like closure, the noun used to signify a timely end to grief. And it seems increasingly difficult to discuss the possibility that grief and happiness are not antithetical. Grief and happiness have coexisted in human bodies and cultures and languages throughout history. 

Closure satisfies the narrative propensity as developed by self-help and testimonial literature. It redeems and restores the troubled speaker. But it also limits the experience of grief or loss to a predetermined horizon with sign posts and names. It timelines the intimately unspeakable.

^

“The skull of Mary Magdalene can be found in the South of France in the once Gallo Roman town of Villa Latta or Tégulata, which after the death of Maximin (one of Jesus’ seventy-two disciples), became St. Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume.” Sourced from the publishing house named after the Magdalene.

Marguerite Yourcenar's 'Mary Magdalene; or Salvation' came to her while studying St. John the Evangelist's fiancee, as depicted in The Golden Legend (a.k.a. Legenda sanctorum: Readings of the Saints), an illuminated hagiographical manuscript authored by Jacobus de Varagine around 1260 C.E. The story is collected in Fires, a series of dramatic monologues retelling ancient Greek stories or myths. In this collection, Yourcenar rides narrative temporality like the last horse of the apocalypse. She filled Fires (translated by Dori Katz) with voice-portraits that spoke on her behalf, from inside familiar archetypes and mythologies. Perhaps mythopoesis is always a speculative nonfiction. Focusing on its fragmented shapes and episodic displacements, a New York Times critic called Fires an "unwritten novel".  But Yourcenar made the "I" of nonfiction usable without assuming an autobiographical I. Her I is an unreliable narrator, as is every I, every eye, every eye-witnessed event. She believed everything in a person's life affected their art.

“Narrative Finality” by Armine Kotin Mortimer (PDF)

Resources on Poetic Closure from Mentor & Muse

In Proustland.

Come to discover that Proust’s seaside resort, Balbec, was inspired by Cabourg, a city in northern France.

I learned the details from Proust Ink, which divulges images and secrets from the Grand-Hôtel where Proust spent every summer from from 1907 to 1914:

This seaside resort on the Normandy coast is the model for the hotel in the novel that Proust locates in the fictional coastal town of Balbec. During his long vacations at the hotel, Proust wrote many of the passages for his book. The building, its dining room, and the esplanade (now the Promenade Marcel Proust) that runs in front of the hotel along the beach are the models for the Grand-Hôtel at Balbec in the novel. Proust’s stays at the hotel ended due to the outbreak of World War I, during which time the hotel served as a hospital for wounded soldiers. The Grand-Hôtel remains virtually unchanged from Proust’s era and continues to operate as a luxury hotel. Proust’s room, no. 414, was recreated with period furnishing and décor.

The Promenade Marcel Proust in Cabourg. And the source of this image.

"A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory.”

Balbec is soaked by the memories of his grandmother.

Proust doesn’t allow us to forget this. When the parties get fiery, he drags us back to the presence of his grandmother’s absence.

Languishing between reverie and resurrection, the speaker positions her photo as an aide-memoire that enables him to fondle memories of her. He fondles prodigiously. A plethora of fondling occurs.

Even puns and literary misunderstandings are infused with grief’s resonance, as in this passage from Sodom and Gomorrah where the narrator expands to inhabit multiple temporalities in order to play with a misheard word:

Syncope.

Sincup.

Utter brilliance, this comedy of textual errors that reveals class through diction.

The absence of a grandmother. The misunderstandings among humans of various classes.

And that "strange tonal novelty" that Proust says arouses "the most painful sensations."

Even laughter is harnessed to carry the data of intonation, as when Proust later gives us Charlus' "inherited" ancestral laugh, and adds a note about "phonetic imitation" to layer the textures of characterization:

It is 11:11 pm and my head wants to wander more closely through Proust’s textual richness—-

Or to consider it in relation to Helen Vendler’s definition of aesthetic criticism, as formulated on the first two pages of The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics—-

“The aim of a properly aesthetic criticism, then, is not primarily to reveal the meaning of an art work or disclose (or argue for or against) the ideological values of an art work. The aim of an aesthetic criticism is to describe the artwork in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other artwork (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration. (Ideological criticism is not interested in the uniqueness of the work of art, wishing always to conflate it with other works sharing its values.) Aesthetic criticism begins with the effort to understand the individual work (aided by whatever historical, philosophical, or psychological competence is necessary for that understanding); it is deeply inductive, and goes from the single work to the decade of work, from the decade of work to the lifetime of work, from the lifetime of work to the interrelation with the work of other artists.”

Or to split one more beer with the night and watch my silhouette degenerate into a shape easily mistaken for the pompadour of a pimp and cover my face with my hands and beg the book I’m writing to meet me somewhere I can finish —

Translations of Chekhov's lady with the dog.

And as he spoke and walked, he kept thinking that not a soul knew or would ever know about these secret meetings. What puzzled him was that all the false part of his life, his bank, his club, his conversations, his social obligations—all this happened openly, while the real and interesting part was hidden.

- Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog”

Known for his wariness of marriage and his fear of commitment, Anton Chekhov avoided entangling relationships. He had taste for brothels and more than 30 love affairs to his name. But he also knew that he would die young due to tuberculosis. He had no way of knowing that positive thinking or prayer would one become cure-all’s under late capitalism.

"The Lady with the Dog" is a standard reading for many short fiction courses. Chekhov wrote it shortly after meeting the actress, Olga Knipper, whom he would marry —despite the consternate horror of friends and family—two years later, in a clandestine wedding on 25 May 1901.

Eight years his junior, Knipper first caught his eye with her stage presence. He also wrote the parts of Masha in Three Sisters and Ranevskeya in The Cherry Orchard for Knipper, who became known as “Masha” to Russians of her generation, and who went by this name in their correspondence.

Among Chekhov’s other affectionate nicknames for her: doggie, baboon, granny, cricket, sperm whale, and little German (her parents were Germans who became Russian citizens). Their vast correspondence has been published and translated.

The plot of The Lady with the Dog” is simple: the married protagonists, Gurov and Anna, have a seaside dalliance in Yalta. The pacing is unremarkable. Initially, one is struck by Gurov’s expressions of misogyny, and his disdain for women— a disdain which eventually excludes Anna.

To Chekhov’s credit, Anna doesn’t rescue Gurov from his misogyny. Nor does she redeem him by making him a more virtuous person; they continue their secret tryst while remaining married to their spouses. Here is how Vladimir Nabokov translates and quotes the expository passage:

He had two lives: an open one, seen and known by all who needed to know it, full of conventional truth and conventional falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life that went on in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, combination of circumstances, everything that was of interest and importance to him, everything that was essential to him, everything about which he felt sincerely and did not deceive himself, everything that constituted the core of his life, was going on concealed from others; while all that was false, the shell in which he hid to cover the truth his work at the bank for instance, his discussions at the club, his references to the 'inferior race,' his appearances at anniversary celebrations with his wife-all that went on in the open. Judging others by himself, he did not believe what he saw, and always fancied that every man led his real, most interesting life under cover of secrecy as under cover of night. The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

Variations in Translation

A few variations on the way different translators have given us Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” focusing on a specific passage, or the moment when Anna begins to worry about sin.

In the original story, there are no italics, so I added italics to highlight the differences in phrasing that stood out in the same passage from “The Lady with the Dog,” as translated by Ivy Litvinov.

But here the timidity and awkwardness of youth and inexperience were still apparent; and there was a feeling of embarrassment in the atmosphere, as if someone had just knocked at the door. Anna Sergeyevna, “the lady with the dog,” seemed to regard the affair as something very special, very serious, as if she had become a fallen woman, an attitude he found odd and disconcerting. Her features lengthened and drooped, and her long hair hung mournfully on either side of her face. She assumed a pose of dismal meditation, like a repentant sinner in some classical painting.

“It isn’t right,” she said. “You will never respect me any more.”

On the table was a water-melon. Gurov cut himself a slice from it and began slowly eating it. At least half an hour passed in silence.

Anna Sergeyevna was very touching, revealing the purity of a decent, naive woman who had seen very little of life. The solitary candle burning on the table scarcely lit up her face, but it was obvious that her heart was heavy.

The same passage of “The Lady with the Dog” as translated by Constance Garnet.

But in this case there was still the diffidence, the angularity of inexperienced youth, an awkward feeling; and there was a sense of consternation as though some one had suddenly knocked at the door. The attitude of Anna Sergeyevna—"the lady with the dog"—to what had happened was somehow peculiar, very grave, as though it were her fall—so it seemed, and it was strange and inappropriate. Her face dropped and faded, and on both sides of it her long hair hung down mournfully; she mused in a dejected attitude like "the woman who was a sinner" in an old-fashioned picture.

"It's wrong," she said. "You will be the first to despise me now."

There was a water-melon on the table. Gurov cut himself a slice and began eating it without haste. There followed at least half an hour of silence.

Anna Sergeyevna was touching; there was about her the purity of a good, simple woman who had seen little of life. The solitary candle burning on the table threw a faint light on her face, yet it was clear that she was very unhappy.

Of Garnet’s translation, one might note that Nabokov uses and modifies Garnet’s translation (which he finds deplorable) in his lecture on Chekhov.

And here is the same passage of “The Lady with the Little Dog” in an excerpt for which the translator is unnamed:

But here was all the timorousness and angularity of inexperienced youth, a feeling of awkwardness, and an impression of bewilderment, as if someone had suddenly knocked at the door. Anna Sergeevna, the “lady with the little dog,” somehow took a special, very serious attitude towards what had happened, as if it were her fall—so it seemed, and that was strange and inopportune. Her features drooped and faded, and her long hair hung down sadly on both sides of her face, she sat pondering in a dejected pose, like the sinful woman in an old painting.

“It ’s not good,” she said. “You’ll be the first not to respect me now.”

There was a watermelon on the table in the hotel room. Gurov cut himself a slice and unhurriedly began to eat it. At least half an hour passed in silence.

Anna Sergeevna was touching, she had about her a breath of the purity of a proper, naïve, little-experienced woman; the solitary candle burning on the table barely lit up her face, but it was clear that her heart was uneasy.

Each translation has its own shining instances. Heretically, I’m going to cobble together a collage excerpted from the three referenced translation, a translated take of sorts:

But the angularity of inexperience was apparent in the awkwardness; there was a sense of embarrassment, as if someone had just knocked at the door. Anna Sergeyevna, “the lady with the dog,” seemed to view their tryst as something grave and serious which suddenly rendered her a fallen woman, an attitude he found inconvenient. Her features lengthened and drooped; her long hair hung grievously down both sides of her face; she assumed a pose of dismal meditation, like a repentant sinner in some classical painting.

“It’s not right,” she said. “You won’t respect me.”

A watermelon sat on the table in the hotel room. Gurov cut himself a slice from it and began eating it slowly. At least half an hour passed in silence.

In this moving position, Anna Sergeyevna evoked the innocence of a woman who’d experienced very little in life. The single candle burning on the table threw a faint light on her face, yet it was clear that her heart was heavy.

Ode to a Melon Slice

Ultimately, Chekhov’s watermelon slice is the shrug that ties the scene together: it speaks for the man who lacks an self-reflexivity or insight into his emotional palette. “In his attempt to stay and convince Anna that he respects her, Gurov satiates his physical appetites—because he doesn’t know how to do anything else,” Patrick Thomas Henry writes:

He doesn’t offer any immediate consolation, nor does he offer a slice of watermelon. Nor is he the confident, authoritative figure that he’s projected to Anna: that awkward half hour of silence signals that Gurov, actually, gets easily rattled. Chekhov needn’t inform his reader about any of this—about Gurov’s selfishness, his frail performance of authority, or his single-minded sexual desire for Anna.

By slicing and eating the watermelon, Gurov proves Anna right. In that moment, he only respects his desires and not her—not her, her needs, her inner life.

There is a bit of Yalta in the secrets between Knipper and Chekhov as well, or the implication of a possible pregnancy by another man (as detailed by William Boyd). Rumors aside, it was Knipper’s idea to seek a bath cure in Germany as her husband’s tuberculosis worsened. Despite the long-distance nature of their relationship, this time she traveled with him, and committed the moments to memory on paper. In Knipper’s memoirs, she describes the increasing breathlessness of his final moments, and the doctor’s decision to inject Chekhov with camphor and then order champagne:

Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: ‘It’s a long time since I drank champagne.’ He drained it, lay quietly on his left side and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed, and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child…

The writer admires how Chehkov leveraged external details to convey a character’s emotional interior— to thicken and texturize the walls of that interior, as distinct from the floorboards and the ceiling. In a letter to his brother, Anton, dated May 10, 1886, Chehkov walked him through the room of writing details. I leave you in correspondences:

When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you’ll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared.

You will bring life to nature only if you don’t shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential.

God save us from vague generalizations!

Be sure not to discuss your hero’s state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.

Nor is it necessary to portray many main characters. Let two people be the center of gravity in your story: he and she.

"Sentimental" v. "sensitive".

It was Vladimir Nabokov who deposited me near this particular trough tonight, at the rim of this slop-bucket where the degradations of sentimentalism meet the elisions of the sensitivity. Specifically, it was Nabokov’s lecture on Dostoevsky, published in his Lectures on Russian Literature (which I read recently and which one can find partially excerpted in 1981 by the New York Times) that led me to this uncomfortable mess that continues to ravage poetics and prosody and discussions about craft.

After rigorously dragging Dostoevsky across the literary landscape and then proceeding to smear his own rancorous excrement on what remains of Dostoevsky’s disembodied soul, Nabokov scowls himself into theorizing that we must distinguish between the sentimental and the sensitive. This is quite sensible. Thus do I quote:

Nabokov begins by making a claim which he then substantiates with series of examples. Unfortunately, the only thing we learn about the sensitive is that “a sensitive person is never a cruel person”— which is as bald lie as any, since countless sensitive people are also viciously cruel, depending on their socialization, worldview, and personal ethics. Many bullies are just hypersensitive kids who prefer to feel powerful rather than vulnerable. Many sensitive people lack a capacity to feel for others. As everyone who has dated a born-in-the-US human knows, narcissists can be incredibly sensitive.

Since Nabokov doesn’t define the sensitive, or posit any correlation between sensitivity and empathy, I’m not sure why Lenin’s opera tears are sentimental rather than evidence of Lenin’s sensitivity. Nor do I understand why the politician’s evocation of Mother’s Day is taken for sentimentalism rather than political strategy. Nabokov’s fictional characters rarely weep. Is this because they are sensitive but not sentimental?

“Bullies are afraid of looking weak or sensitive,” my youngest informs me.

Trump won a political election by campaigning as a Bully; the American Christian Right went so far as to suggest that their God created him to be a bully, as part of His Plan to increase profits for gun makers. Trump, like Stalin, performed the politics of loving babies.

As for Dostoevsky, he is in big, big trouble with Nabokov, whose defines a “sentimentalist” as a writer who is guilty of “the non-artistic exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional compassion in the reader.”

Sentimentalism (noun): the excessive expression of feelings of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia in behavior, writing, or speech.

“Automatic traditional compassion”! A tragedy that Vera permitted her beloved to past a first reading with this turgid phrasing. Personal sentiments aside, the word “sentiment” comes from the Latin for feeling, which is to say, sensing or experiencing. And sentiment, in every sense, has decreased in usage, where it is associated with maudlin sentimentalism, Romanticism, and amatory manipulation.

I feel close to you: this is how an expression of sentiment may sound in the 21st century, where the “I” speaks for itself, accepting responsibility for its “feelings,” and declaring those feelings in a relational context that implies individualistic agency and self-determination.

After determining that D. is vaguely and absolutely one of those sentimental saps, Nabokov detours into the lamentable influence of the “European mystery novel” on Dostoevsky’s novels:

Certainly, Dostoevsky’s obsession with staying Slav—-and cultivating the dark suffering of the Russian soul—was dreadfully essentialist, but one could argue that this particular relationship to suffering also became the lever applied by Stalinism. Dostoevsky didn’t invent it: he fictionalized it. One could argue that Solzhenitsyn also represents this school of Russian imperialist tenderness alongside the theme of Russian imperial carceral systems.

One could argue that a certain imperial tenderness inflects the descriptions of how conventions are altered in carceral spaces, as seen in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Notes from A Dead House, the fictionalized narration of Dostoevsky’s time in a prison camp:

It is now quite understandable why, as I already said earlier, my first question on entering prison was how to behave, on what footing to put myself wit these people. I sensed beforehand that I would often have such clashes with them as now, at work. But, despite any such clashes, I decided not to change my plan of action, which I had already partly thought out at the time; I knew it was right. Namely; I decided that I must behave as simply and independently as possible, by no means to betray any any effort to get closer with them; but not to reject them if they themselves wished to get closer. By no means to fear their threats and hatred and, as far as possible, to pretend I did not notice it. By no means to side with them on certain points, and not to cater to some of their habits and customs—in short, not to invite myself into their full friendship. I realized at first glance that they would be the first to despise me for it. However, by their way of thinking (and I later learned this for certain), I still had to maintain and even show respect for my noble origin before them, that is, to pamper myself, put on airs, disdain them, turn up my nose at everything, and keep my hands clean. That was precisely how they understood a nobleman to be. Naturally, they would abuse me for it, but deep down they would still respect me. Such a role was not for me; I had never been a nobleman according to their notions but instead I promised myself never to belittle my education or my way of thinking before them by any concession. If, to please them, I were to start fawning on them, agreeing with them, being familiar with them, entering into their various “qualities” in order to gain their sympathy—they would at once assume I was doing it out of fear and cowardice, and would treat me with contempt.

One could even imagine a theoretical relationship between the contempt experienced by the incarcerated Russian and the affect of man-shame that characterizes Putin’s recent imperialist ventures. One could, of course, argue, imagine, and saddle many irresponsible yet interesting things, given time and a stable income. Since I cannot argue them all, I will comfort myself by gesturing towards continuation of metaphysical discussion on the stairwell after midnight.

Nabokov made no secret of his contempt for Dostoevsky. In his 1964 interview in Playboy (as reprinted in Strong Opinions), Nabokov insisted:

Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway.

A few years later, “this reader” told James Mossman:

I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigmarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search.

At this point, I am prepared to suggest the following: Nabokov reserves his most viperous critique for the writers whose influence is most detectable in his own work. N0 one would suggest Anton Chekhov influenced Nabokov’s writing style; this is why Nabokov considers Chekhov to be the greatest Russian writer who ever lived.

My favorite butterfly-king takes Dostoevsky for a simpleton who pens mystery novels because he cannot imagine the human condition. Additionally, he misuses the word “farce” and refuses to define it; he leaves that “farce” there like a tapeworm in the middle of the paragraph, where what Dostoevsky positions against “drama” is the “absurdity” that will define the coming century.

Is Nabokov envious of Dostoevsky’s insight? Only Vera knows.

Only a frog would populate his books with characters that suffer from epilepsy or mental illness, Nabokov tells us. The “raving lunatic” characters, on this view, have little relation to the world, and offer nothing sublime, nothing as viscerally fantastic as, for example, a man in an elegant coat at the opera who is trying to diddle a child.

“Art is a divine game,” and Nabokov wants the game to feel as if a god set it up rather than a fool who got himself imprisoned in Siberia for several years and dined with various riff-raff and criminals.

“A shudder with a strong element of delight in it” could describe a sadist’s response to the suicides of Othello, Kirilov or Svidrigailov? I’m not sure a strong element of delight is the necessary intellectual or aesthetic response to tragedy. It’s not a wrong response, but it is a personal one, namely, the response of Vladimir Nabokov.

And there are ways in which Nabokov’s own novels fail by the standard he sets for Dostoevsky?

“A genius of spiritual morbidity”: Nabokov grants Dostoevsky this much—which is a bit more than he grants “Pasternak’s vilely-written Zhivago.”

Alas, Dostoevsky fails the Nabokovian test of “harmony and economy which the most irrational masterpiece is bound to comply with”:

Dostoevsky’s “rational” “crude methods” make “his characters mere ideas in the likeness of people”; his “mechanical methods” are soiled by their “earthbound” attention to “conventional novels” published in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; his European style betrays Russia; his Slavophilism is anti-European; his “verbal overflow” is epileptic; his “unreal” fictional world fails to transfix the reader.

Truly, Nabokov’s personal embodiment of dialectical energy is exemplary. Only Joseph Brodsky could match so much badminton with his shadow. Alas, despite the tenuousness of some of their critical writings, both Nabs and Joe were incredible writers whose words continue to ravish my brain. So, to be fair, I leave you with a particularly lovely Nabokovian passage from his attack on Dostoevsky’s dead corpus:

Speaking of blood donations, soul-stomachs, and inspiration, here is Paul Auster’s Ferguson (in the novel, 4 3 2 1) describing Dostoevsky’s impact on him:

If the sentimentalism of Auster’s troth bothers the rigorously-sensitive, I would argue they need to make space for the blasting winds of the universe and all related flailings.

Alternately, one can take the route Thomas Bernhard took in Extinctions— and nail the Bovarisms to a chair of national self-implication.

“According to the exhibition description, Dostoevsky’s notes to himself “represent that key moment when the accumulated proto-novel crystallized into a text. Like many of us, Dostoevsky doodled hardest when the words came slowest.” Some of Dostoevsky’s character descriptions, argues scholar Konstantin Barsht, “are actually the descriptions of doodled portraits he kept reworking until they were right.” [Source: Open Culture]

On virtue signals.

1

Around mid-morning, the sun begins to warm the shuttered yellow petals, thus increasing the pressure of liquid inside cells that pad the base of each petal. As the cells expand and grow rigid, they cause the flower to unfold. The result is a yellow burst of an open dandelion, or dentes de lion, which means "lion teeth" in French. 

The front yard is a blanket of yellow lions soaking up sun, producing pollen to continue their golden reign across American lawns.

The plants make signals.

The bees respond.

There is no moral system at stake in their communication.

This summer, I did something that is not in my vocabulary. I did something so foreign to the way I know the world that I can speak best about it through the life of green things, particularly, the dandelions in the front yard. 

2

Dandelions close their flowers at night. Staying open has a price, and those flowers who close do to preserve what is possible, what is potential—the protection of pollen from early dew. 

Nyctinasty is the movement of leaves or petals in response to light, this closing of flowers at night. Plants that close include the poppy, the daisy, the tulip, the crocus, and the dandelion. 

3

Different flowers respond to different types of stimuli. Some flowers respond to daylength. They open and close at different times of day depending on the hours of available sunlight. Some open and close in response to weather. This includes humidity, temperature, sunniness/cloudiness. Some open and close at the same time each day. For example, the four o'clock closes in late afternoon while the morning glory.

I turn away to protect myself. I tell my partner to plant a shade tree sapling so we won’t end up like a character in Henry James who finds himself retired without a proper retiring place. A shady tree would grow and grow and give us a look forward into quieter possible days.  The reference goes all the way back to Tolstoy.

4

In a 1980 essay titled “The Jabbering of Social Life,” Michel de Certeau wrote:

“Never has history talked so much or shown so much. Never, indeed, have the gods' ministers made them speak so continuously, in such detail and so inductively as the producers of revelations and rules do today in the name of topicality.... From morning till evening, unceasingly, streets and buildings are haunted by narratives. They articulate our existences by teaching us what they should be. They 'cover the event,' i.e., they make our legends....Our society has become a narrated society in a threefold sense: it is defined by narratives (the fables of our advertising and information), by quotations of them, and by their interminable recitation.”

The dandelions quote themselves in relation to time, which is to say—-the space their motion signifies in the human mind. I can feel my brain seeking stone in this, or craving a way to tie it to lasting significance. There is this statue-like shape that an idea wants to inhabit as I think about signals (their superfluous changeability) and meaning (that abstraction everyone interprets differently).

It seems as if the statue and the virtue signal share aspirational intellectual terrain – both arise from the need to monumentalize one's virtue commitments, both aspire to a sort of static heroism in time, a gesture. Humans believe it is courageous to remain firm in their convictions. Like the evangelical believer, they are not convinced so much as convicted in the verity of their beliefs but they also become petrified (or rock-like), in those beliefs.

Shame emerges in the gap between lived experience an expressed convictions, or the performance of said conviction. 

5

“Once your mind is made up, you have lost your right to grow, you must remain a stock, a statue, the qualities and defects of which are known to everybody." To be knowable is to be predictable, which is to say reliable, assimilated.”

- Lev Shestov in Fragment 100

What can be we be convicted in?

Do we know for certain which signal or brand value will matter in the end?

What is the end - is it the ascension up the ladder of relevance? What has the dream taught you to give to the ambition, and is that dream authorized by the consumption of others? 

For Shestov, morality is not ethics. Instead, morality is stagnant water, the ossified internal sensor, the norm which depends on drawing lines against others, the metric of judgment in a land where we are all consumed by the mortgage, the kitchen remodel, the totality of things we should want.

The norm has always been a bully and one remembers this from the school playground, where your unshaved legs and donated clothes made you laughable - made you something so grotesque the girls could only whisper it to one another in secret.

As an early skeptic of redemptive consumption, Shestov disdained bourgeois commercialism, and expressed mistrust of the things we do to belong or be like or be loved. "Every woodcock praises its own fen," he wrote. Every sanctimony praises the rules which allow it to exclude others.

— But I began with dandelions. And there is a scene I want to describe, a world I walk into with my mom behind my eyes and her meal in my belly. When the slender white sedan slows to a blur, I confront the question I've carried away from the house . . .

6

Bartholemew, James (October 10, 2015). "I invented 'virtue signalling'. Now it's taking over the world". The Spectator. Retrieved 2019-02-23. Wherein James Bartholew credits himself with inventing the term.

7

8

Virtue signals serve the purpose of communicating changed social norms. At their best, they make us aware of prejudice like racism, homophobia, bigotry, etc.— how these things are embodied in everyday language.

The problem with prejudice is that a change of law does not equal a change of heart. Affirmative action policies seek to redress persistent lies by normalizing more equal outcomes (as they should). Such policies institutionalize equality of opportunity, but they cannot “fix” or “correct” racist mentalities and worldviews. A more just outcome, in this sense, does not provide justice (if one takes justice to mean something deeper than outcomes).

[Much of this could, and should, be taken as an argument for reparations, in my opinion.]

[Much of this could also be taken as an attempt to reckon with my grief over the recent Supreme Court decision that undoes decades of college admissions policies without touching the legacy admissions.]

If society is built around the beliefs and worldviews of its most powerful, high-stakes members, then places where racism is deemed abhorrent will strongly discourage racist speech. They will also enforce that discouragement.

Though the percentage of strongly self-identifying racists may be small, there are large groups of polite, latent racists that bring a man like Trump to power.

The first trick to a witch hunt is inventing a witch.

9

One way to tell you’re in the presence of ideology is when an entire industry of opinion exists to bolster and substantiate beliefs that people do not know how to justify on their own. Its nature is to confuse the question of who is thinking for whom and where thought or belief began. Ideology flatters people that their beliefs are their own precisely when they are not, and thus the sort of opinions and analyses that present themselves as ideology’s correctives are in fact its enablers. The consumer of opinion does not ask himself “Why do I believe this?” but “Who can remind me why I believe this?”

- Greg Jackson, “Vicious Cycles: Theses on a Philosophy of News”

Paronomasia is "a kind of verbal plague, a contagious sickness in the world of words…” which shows up in totalitarian countries like Vladimir Nabokov’s Padukgrad “where everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else.” 

In Romanian, paduche means flea.

To stay near the p-sounds, peripeteia is the poet’s final plea, a last request in a vatic voice which borrows the hollowing echo of reeds.

Notes on contemporary memoir.

1

“Speak to your dead. Write to your dead. Tell them a story,” Alexander Chee urges.

I nod—-this is what I believe writing should do. It is how writing calls me. Yet when I situate myself in a chair to meet the dead on the page, I am silenced, rendered speechless before the white noise of my own anxiety.

“To stop and respond to anxiety’s challenge is to accept dialogue with ourselves,” Samir Chopra wrote in an essay on the usefulness of dread. “There is a Nietzschean note here: we must display amor fati, a love of fate,” Chopra continues. To love our life, our fate, this thing we have been given to live, the modern human must accept their anxiety as constituitive to personhood. In Chopra’s words, “we must ‘own’ our anxiety as part of us, to be integrated and deployed to make our lives what we wish them to be.”

Among the uncertainties on the anxiety-treadmill, identity looms large. If identity is the loom which constructs us in recognizable forms, identity is also the thing we are continuously looming. The rise of applied anti-othering pedagogies and student-centered classrooms hasn’t reduced the pressure between identifying the speaker and contextualizing the reason for their speaking. The reader expects the writer to be honest about themselves, a process currently inscribed by the inventorying of various metrics, labels, ethnicities, allegiances, memberships, religions, and lived experiences that render one identifiable. How risible, really, that this expectation of identifiability should gain prominence in a country known for resistance to learning anything about others.

2

Writing between languages and articulations of selfhood, Nicholas Samaras describes “an odd sense of a ‘double-exposure’ photograph in countries of exile: one exposure is of normality, the tourist scenes of a village or city; the other exposure is visibly hidden, almost like a transparent overlay, glimpsed more when you stay with people who are trying to help the citizens of nowhere.”

“I’m so fucking tired of having to write a cultural treatise on customs in my homeland every time I want to tell a story about it,” my friend says in an email.

“Are those your expectations or the reader’s expectations?” I reply, forgetting the possibility that the backstory demands often come directly from editors.

My friend says she has no idea which part of over-explaining is rooted in fear of failure, or disappointing the expectations of others. “I think I’m just tired of realizing most of me is national backstory,” she writes, before segueing into a praise of contemporary autotheory, and dropping a link to “Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory” by Arianne Zwartjes.

When reality feels fake or overdetermined by emptiness, autotheory offers opportunities for conceptual abstraction and formalizations of memoir that attend to embodied experience. And it is true that many recent books I love occupy an autotheoretic inclination that refuses to obscure the speaker while simultaneously refusing to speak the latest discourse.

3

Is it too perfect that, where I’m from, when we become women, they plant you a tree?

- Terese Mailhot, “I Used to Give Men Mercy”

I was in my late twenties then, and I remember my male friends all coming to me with visions of violence, scripts about what should be done to the rapist, what they would do to him, how these instances should be handled.

- Charles Bowden, “Torch Song”

4

“Some objects felt less like relics from the past and more like artifacts from unlived futures,” Leslie Jamison wrote of the curated materials in “The Breakup Museum”.

“Terribly sentimental” in the most radical way, Rachel Zucker said her Museum of Accidents was “only about finding a way to say, sincerely, that I love my husband.” Staring at the cliche of sentimentality, Zucker refused to obscure what she felt needed saying.

“To speak that most banal of heterosexist clichés and make it really mean something . . . to make me feel it,” Zucker expanded.

“I want a poetry that can say such things," she continues.

I want the saying of such things to read for the seriousness of their commitments. This is not the same thing as wanting the seriousness of their commitments to be judged on the basis of various standards including but not limited to happiness, self-esteem, and duration.

Alas, nothing vibes schadenfreude as efficiently as mounting the platform of moral hygiene to judge other people’s romantic relationships or marriages on the basis of the limited knowledge gleaned from a conversation, a book, a moment, a poem, a sitcom. And perhaps I want a literature that can follow the expanding profits of the self-help industry in the saying of such unsightly things. *

5

I’m fascinated by the way Rolf Potts’ leverages the depiction of selfhood into a memoir that occupies the simultaneous incoherence and determinism of the found text. The found text is also the founding text here. One begins in the story of origins.

Speaking of origins, here is “Begin” from Potts’ “Age, Formative: Found Texts”:

6

In “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story,” Philip Lopate underscores the importance of creating “a double perspective” that enables the writer to move back and forth through time between the various narrative selves:

In writing memoir, the trick, it seems to me, is to establish a double perspective, that will allow the reader to participate vicariously in the experience as it was lived (the confusions and misapprehensions of the child one was, say), while conveying the sophisticated wisdom of one’s current self. This second perspective, the author’s retrospective employment of a more mature intelligence to interpret the past, is not merely an obligation but a privilege, an opportunity. In any autobiographical narrative, whether memoir or personal essay, the heart of the matter often shines through those passages where the writer analyzes the meaning of his or her experience.

The quality of thinking, the depth of insight and the willingness to wrest as much understanding as the writer is humanly capable of arriving at—these are guarantees to the reader that a particular author’s sensibility is trustworthy and simpatico. With me, it goes further: I have always been deeply attracted to just those passages where the writing takes an analytical, interpretative turn, and which seem to me the dessert, the reward of prose.

Assuming one lives in the United States, it is fair to say that the world survives by the dicta of our lifestyle tastes, our economic preferences, and our deeply internalized sense of exceptionalism. For me, what Lopate calls “the dessert” is the space where the feast, itself, is interrogated, or revealed in a light that alters the reader’s gaze.

The executioner and the victim change places constantly in the scarcity-constructions of late capitalism; the money we make often removes, narrows, or devalues opportunities for others. Given the circumstances, writing from a position of ontological innocence isn’t really possible or desirable—— and this is something to consider as the first-person speaker develops. What do they notice? What do they ignore? How are you rationalizing it?

Lopate reserves a place for "the voice of adult judgement" in memoir: "To reflect deeply on the wounds inflicted on oneself in the past might lead to an admission of complicity in that suffering."

Embodied narration sparkles when reaching the cognitive place beyond simple blame. We know, for example, that survivors of sexual abuse are more likely to become abusers themselves, but we can't reckon with the complexity of this without studying the binaries of guilt/innocence that hide beneath our beliefs and assumptions. “You must side with the world” against yourself, Kafka wrote. That is the gauntlet.

Asterisk

* For example, tell me how you left a lifetime of religious fundamentalism in order to become a secularized version of Happy, Fulfilling Marriage-police based on your extensive counseling and personal therapy sessions now extrapolated into a system of rules that applies to all of humanity. This would be an excellent memoir. It would do something that no one dares to do, namely, reveal the ways in which a judgement-driven socialization can satisfy itself under various epistemic schemes.

Show me how we destroy and dehumanize others in the name of goodness, wisdom, and privilege. Make me uncomfortable. We deserve a bit of discomfort, I suspect.

Migraines in Catalonia.

I sit with The Gray Notebook by Josep Pla, in a new translation from the Catalan by Peter Bus, in my lap—-and the fetid heat of the beach in lower Alabama. Not even a breeze lifts the sweat from my neck.

Although two of Pla’s brothers were anarchists, Pla watches most of the social conflicts from the sidelines, electing to write and observe rather than act. Eventually, after maligning his own bourgeois origins, Pla becomes the defender of bourgeois individualism and order, a shift that makes him ideal for understanding the mental landscape of early neoliberalism.

Puig, who introduces Pla’s notebooks, has sketched the author in an “interview in imaginary time but with textual answers” from Pla’s Coses vistes (Things Seen) and Coses dites (Things Said). “Achieving respectability is the ideal of the bourgeoisie,” Pla said, acknowledging the relationship between capitalism and middle-class status-hunger. “Capitalism is anarchic, as I believe, but humanly speaking it is effective and productive,” he added, because “socialism is adequate but inefficient.”

An excerpt from Puig’s interview with Pla on Catalonia:

In The Gray Notebook, one is offered the adolescent and youthful Pla, the student and surly teenager who complains constantly about his parents’ stifled behavior and derides his mother’s obsession with cleaning the house. This young Pla watches the first world war in Europe simmer along the sidelines of the tiny Catalan village of his birth, where superstition reigns and bravado is the order of cafe conversation.

Much as Pla derides these superstitions, he eventually comes to adopt the view of the local fishermen, namely, that weather determines character, illness, behavior, and disposition. One can see this view edging into his notebooks as he studied in Barcelona, on January 25, 1919, when he links the wind to a migraine:

His description of the migraine and its relation to teeth sets my own on edge, and I can feel the cusp of yesterday’s migraine trying to find its way back into head.

Pla postulates that meterology might be the “theology of the future.” And he lays out various opinions on literary style—-he loves realism, condescends to romanticism, finds inspiration in Nietzsche, and laments the emotional pageantry of Spanish literati. I love Valerie Miles’ description of Pla’s persnicketty “stylistic bylaws”:

Use natural words to describe the object. Unearth the adjectif juste like the pig who smells a truffle.

And Pla had a peculiar way of hunting these elusive adjectives. He literally smoked them out. As he worked on a sentence, he would take out his pouch of local tobacco, or “caldo,” as he called it, and begin the ritual of rolling a cigarette as he wrote and thought. With each movement of his fingers, the touch of the rice paper and the tobacco, the rhythm of the rolling and licking and finally puffing, he would draw the adjective out of its hiding place and capture the natural cadence of a sentence. “The only place you’ll find an adjective is in the pauses that result from the elaboration of a cigarette and its intermittent combustion,” he said.

“The family is an institution that exists,” Pla wrote. “It is a mysterious, sacred, run down accoutrement”—-an auspicious treasure of decadence and social obscenity. He mines it as it climbs back inside it, looking for seams.

Pla returns to his roots, in a sense, by celebrating the very traits he deplored in the Catalonia village, including the Catalonian causiticity. “Causticity is used above all against any form of facility —of execution,” he wrote later:

It annoys, it aggravates. What exasperates him most about others is what they do. Others are always imbeciles, but the most imbecilic are those who do things.

Like many sentimentophobes, Pla spends an extraordinary amount of time describing the landscape, the weather, the snails along a cobblestone path:

Sometimes, at night, especially in the very early morn, I wake up in bed, fascinated by the darkness, and I approach the fireplace, with its dying embers. I start writing. Nothing. In absolute silence. Sometimes I hear, in the distance, far off, a dog’s broken bark. I like to look though the window, at the darkness that remains and the very first light, so pale, pinks and yellows enjoin the day.

And what could be more romantic, really, than the pinkening light rupturing over “a dog’s broken bark”?

Notes on Urania.

Urania had at least one son, but his existence varies by myth. In one variant, she is the mother of Linus, an ancient Greek musician, and son of Apollo.

"Sons of Apollo . . . Linus by the Musa Urania."

- Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 161 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.)

"Ourania (Urania) bare Linos, a very lovely son : and him all men who are singers and harpers do bewail at feats and dances, and as they begin and as they end they call on Linos (Linus)."

- Homerica, Fragments of Unkown Position 1 (from Diogenes Laertius 8. 1. 26) (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic B.C.)

Another myth says she gave birth to Hymenaeus, the Greek god of marriage ceremonies:

"Hymenaios (Hymenaeus) [in a game of cottabus against Eros] . . . put up as a prize for the victor something clever made by his haughty mother Ourania (Urania), who knew all the courses of the stars, a revolving globe like the speckled form of Argos."

- Nonnus, Dionysiaca 33. 55 ff

Other ancient texts name Linus and Hymenaeus as the children of other muses rather than Urania, or sow uncertainty about the precise lineage of the muses:

"Oh Linos (Linus), honoured by the gods—-for you were the first to whom the immortals gave a song for men to sing with clear voice; Phoibos (Phoebus) [Apollon] killed you in anger, but the Mousai (Muses) mourn for you."

- Greek Lyric V, Folk Songs Frag 880 (from Scholiast B on Homer's Iliad) (trans. Campbell) (Greek lyric B.C.)

"Linos: Of Khalkis (Chalcis), [son] of Apollon and Terpsikhore (Terpsichore), but others [say] of Amphimaros (Amphimarus) and Ourania (Urania), others of Hermes and Ourania."

- Suidas s.v. Linos (trans. Suda On Line) (Byzantine Greek lexicon C10th A.D.)

"But in another song did three goddesses [Mousai (Muses)] lull to rest the bodies of their sons. The first of these [Terpsikhore (Terpsichore)] sang a dirge over the clear-voiced Linos (Linus) [personification of the lamentation song]; and the second [Ourania (Urania)] lamented with her latest strains Hymenaios (Hymenaeus) [personification of the wedding song], who was seized by Moira (Fate), when first he lay with another in wedlock."

- Pindar, Dirges Fragment 139 (trans. Sandys) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.)

Nonnus suggests that Hymenaeus shared a name with Urania’s son, but insists that they were not the same person:

"[During the war of Dionysos against the Indians, the Indian River Hydaspes tried to drown the god's army :] Ourania (Urania) saved Hymenaios (Hymenaeus) from destruction, because he had the same name as her own creative son, and scored the airy paths like a moving star, to please Dionysos, her brother of the grapes."

- Nonnus, Dionysiaca 24. 77 ff (trans. Rouse) (Greek epic C5th A.D.)

Urania

Urania, pine, sister, thus I name
you, since your finger-trunk points up above;
the wind that strains at your black mane grows calm
beneath. I summon you as, in their grove,

druids once did in crowns of mistletoe,
that at my house's threshold you endure,
watch over flower, fruit and bee below,
and hearts that secretly extinguish here.

Urania, Muse of the final day,
goddess of endings and endurance, bless!
Idol of ruins and all evils, stay
in vigil over house and nothingness.

O wild one, take me in your tangled mane,
tear off my hands, which will no longer twine;
enter me, save me and grant me your crown,
make me Urania, nothingness and pine.

- Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (translated by Jakob Ziguras)

*

URA′NIA (Ourania).

One of the Twelve Muses in Greek mythology, a daughter of Zeus by Mnemosyne. (Hes. Theog. 78 ; Ov. Fast.v. 55.) The ancient bard Linus is called her son by Apollo (Hygin. Fab. 161), and Hymenaeus also is said to have been a son of Urania. (Catull. lxi. 2.)

She was regarded as the Muse of Astronomy, and represented with a celestial globe to which she points with a little staff. Also often pictured with the compass, since her organizaton of the stars helps sailors find their way in the dark.

"As you go along the straight road to the grove [of the Mousai (Muses) on Mount Helikon (Helicon) in Boiotia] is a portrait of Eupheme carved in relief on a stone. She was, they say, the nurse of the Mousai (Muses). So her portrait is here, and after it is Linos (Linus) on a small rock worked into the shape of a cave. To Linos every year they sacrifice as to a hero before they sacrifice to the Mousai. It is said that this Linos was a son of Ourania (Urania) and Amphimaros (Amphimarus), a son of Poseidon."

- Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 29. 5 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.)

Cioran's "Letter to a Faraway Friend" with annotation.

“When I think of those moments of enthusiasm and frenzy, of the wild speculations that raddled and ravaged my mind, I attribute them now not to dreams of philanthropy and destruction, to the obsession with some unascertainable purity, but to an animal melancholy which, concealed beneath the mask of fervor, functioned at my expense though I was it's willing accomplice, enchanted not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the atrocious. The atrocious falling to my portion, what more could I ask? I had a wolf's soul, and my ferocity, feeding on itself, satiated, flattered me: I was, in other words, the happiest of lycanthropes.”

The above is excerpted from Emil Cioran’s “Letter to a Faraway Friend,” addressed to Constantin Noica (as translated by Richard Howard). It was not the first letter between Noica and Cioran after the latter relocated to Paris and sought French citizenship.

In 1978, for example, Cioran wrote a short letter to Noica that ended with comments about his newly published book, The Romanian Sentiment of Being. “Your last book is excellent; the only thing is that it could have been called just as well The Paraguayan Sentiment of Being,” Cioran wrote. “In your place, I would return to Logic: where, if not there, can one rave better?”

The book referenced—Constantin Noica’s The Romanian Sentiment of Being— was published by Punctum Books just last year, as translated by Octavian and Elena Gabor. It is available as free PDF from publisher, which also offers the following biography:

Constantin Noica (1909–1987) described his life as the autobiography of an idea and planned to write a book with the same title. The plan did not come to fruition; perhaps it was already fulfilled, since Noica’s life seems to have been absorbed in an idea, the love of wisdom, in which he and his disciples would partake. Noica published his first book, Mathesis sau bucuriile simple (Mathesis or the Simple Joys) when he was 25. Before World War II, he published three more books, in which we can see his preoccupation with the history of philosophy. The changes brought by the end of the war in his native Romania transformed the life of Constantin Noica as well. Considered an “anti-revolutionary” thinker, Noica was placed under house arrest in Câmpulung-Muscel between 1949 and 1958. In 1958, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and he was released after 6 years. Pray for Brother Alexander* covers his experiences during this time. He continued to publish after 1964 and was followed by the Securitate, the secret police of the communist regime, until the end of his life in 1987.

In their translator’s note, the Gabors contextualize Noica’s writing as well as Cioran’s letter, which asks “what would make the Romanian sentiment of being, even if it gave some insight about being itself, be more special than the Paraguayan, French, Vietnamese, Nigerian, or American ones?”

According to Noica, “every language is, after all, the wisdom of the world in one of its versions. This wisdom of the world needs the particular wisdom of language in order to explore reality in all the ways and to transfer its knowledge into words.”

For the Gabors, the fact that the Romanian sentiment is not “more special” doesn’t mean that it lacks “uniqueness.” And “revealing” the uniqueness “may increase the understanding of being” that humanity shares.

If this posited uniqueness seems at odds with the alleged “understanding of being” shared by the species, it may be due to my own incoherence, or the way in which my predeliction for pessimistic-optimism is at odds with itself.

If you’d like to read Cioran’s “Letter to a Faraway Friend” in its entirety, you can. The words, italics, and punctuation are Cioran’s, but the annotations are mine. The PDF file can be downloaded by clicking on the image below.

Au fin, Cioran in History and Utopia:

Foreseeable miseries do not excite men's imaginations, and there is no example of a revolution breaking out in the name of a dark future, a grim prophecy. Who could have guessed, in the last century, that the new society would, by its vices and its iniquities, permit the old one to preserve, even to consolidate itself; that the possible, having become reality, would fly to the rescue of the past?

Au fin redouble, Maurice Blanchot:

 The writer sees himself in the Revolution. It attracts him because it is the time during which literature becomes history. It is his truth. Any writer who is not induced by the very fact of writing to think, "I am the revolution, only freedom allows me to write," is not really writing.

* *

[* Punctum published a translation of Pray for Brother Alexander in 2018.]

Blanchot, Maurice. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction & Literary Essays. Edited by George Quasha. Translated by Lydia Davis, Paul Auster, and Robert Lamberton. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill/Barrytown, Ltd, 1999.

———. The Writing of the Disaster = L’écriture Du Désastre. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University Of Nebraska Press, 1995.

Cioran, E M. History and Utopia. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2015.

13 moments where speech left me completely.

1

Drought hardened the soil but softened the sand that summer.

The virtual horizon was covered in fires.

An American poet pulled me aside to ask me why I had chosen to title my poetry collection Dor “after a poem published by Nathalie Handel without even acknowledging Handel’s poem . . . ”

Handel is an Arab-American poet who liked the idea of a Romanian word and is now immortalized online as the poet who brought it to the US. Marginality doesn’t prevent poets from making money by laying claim to margins on other pages.

I bit my lip and imagined climbing the stairs of god’s head backwards to keep from crying. There was nothing to say. There was no context and no place in which to begin responding.

2

Franz Schubert was arrested with his guy friends by Austrian police who were trying to cleanse the student body of revolutionary impulses. Schubert got off with a reprimand for his insulting and negative language. I thought about this a teen on the bus stared at automated doors and whispered “alienation.” I heard alien nation. The doors whooshed shut.

3

The man put his hands on my shoulders and advised me to stop worrying. “This is just the third act,” he said. “There is so much more to come, and so much for us to look forward to.”

“Nothingness: this is the world-god yet to be born," wrote Georg Buchner in the fourth act of Danton's Death.

4

"Only a man is capable of enduring this loneliness, and only then when it has been given to him to know the simultaneous torture and madness of being a creator," wrote Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt. Also: "Love transforms the need to thank into fidelity to ourselves and in unconditional belief in the other. …. Why, in loving, we transform ourselves into what we love while remaining forever ourselves." 

And somehow, this quote by Augustine that connects to Arendt and the view of love as seeing fully (the view she used to forgive Heidegger): "If you agree with Augustine that memory creates the self, then this is a book that will interest you, meine liebe-- if, when this war is over, there remains a self to be created."

After translating and notating the lines above from a Romanian copy of Arendt and Heidegger’s correspondence published by Humanitas, one is quite quiet.

5

When I hear storms around the cabin, I think of our ‘storm’.

- Heidegger to Hannah (ibid)

6

I’m sick of all this fuss. Go ahead, you dodos, and condemn me for eating fried octopus, cock sucking, animal worship. I touched the mezuzah, when I was menstruating, put that down. I confess to all your charges. I recommend to all Jewish women semen drunk street or mixed with beef blood. Now feed me to the dogs as your custom. (she lies down in the coffin and invokes the gods of the deep) gorgons, my sisters. Place it on, where are you? Homer, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Joyce, comfort me! I am on fire, Apollo, come!

Susan Taubes, Divorcing

7

The way a word like imperial eats shadows for money.

Imperial—- as in to hire an american reporter to do the feature on orphans in a country they’ve studied objectively on Pinterest. On Pinterest, my heart is a recipe for vampire cupcakes that leak blood at your halloween party. At your party, my heartache is locking the bathroom door in order to read it. To read it until someone knocks because their spouse needs to potty, to laugh politely at the wordplay, to make people feel really funny when drunk. 

Imperiousness—- as in the desire to validate one’s exceptionalist liberal friends who say isn't it brutal what those people did to those kids as they sway before the mirror on the wall, the magazine in your hand, the toothbrush your friend carries to remove any trace of sugar from her laser-bleached teeth and what can you say. You say nothing. Nothing barely matters. Her teeth are the whitest you’ve seen.

8

Thinking about how much I love and value Nathalie Handel’s poetry . . . and the shame that swallows me when I unintentionally imagine her long fingernails leaving marks on my cheeks with that poem I can’t read since the summer of drought. That poem I didn’t know about until the American poet interrogated my book’s relation to it.

9

"I will never forgive her… I will never recover from what she did," Susan Sontag told her son, David Rieff, many years after Susan Taubes’ suicide. Sontag was the one called by the coroner to identify the body.

Where does one begin the end of the story?

A few weeks before drowning, Taubes committed the act to text, prophesying in her own journal. The waiting is palpable as she describes sitting at home, going out, returning: "I come in waiting for time to pass. In about two weeks I will drown myself."

How does one live the final two weeks of a book that one has written to end?

For Susan Taubes, posthumousity was the most enduring present.

10

A series of moments threading the nocturnal existence. A diary entry dated from my fifteenth year of life mentions the fear of “cheating on a book” by reading other books at the same time. An early obsession with not hurting others, not even the dead. A reference to the stack of 5 books beneath my bed. The bad habits began early. The midnights of my youthful infidelities opened the possibility of nothing-I-can-say time.

11

In Sibiu, I realized the reason Ceausescu never got a Che Guevara T-shirt because his face was already too effeminate—- lacking Stalin's firm jawline, it was easier to pass him as the Daddy of the Nation than a War Hero. The aesthetics of dictatorship depends on the facial features of the dictator.

When the pen bumbles and jumps the fence into the aesthetics of dickdom, I set it down. Better to pace the porch than theorize this part of the men.

12

Reality is the most effective mask of reality. Our fondest wish, attained, ceases to be our fondest wish. Success is the greatest of disappointments. The spirit is most alive when it is lost. Anxiety was Kafka's composure, as despair was Kierkegaard's happiness. Kafka said impatience is our greatest fault. The man at the gate of the Law waited there all of his life.

Guy Davenport, “A Kind of Paradox”— in its entirety

13

An asterisk in Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor" caught my eye for the way it approached impurity.

Sexual pollution and romantic contamination mix in the social mouth when Kafka tells his diary, on September 1917: "The infection in your lungs is only a symbol" of an emotional "wound whose inflammation is called F." Referring to Felice, Kafka suggests again the cost of his engagement.

After staring at this asterisk, and then seeking the actual passage in Ross Benjamin’s new translation of Kafka’s diaries, I experienced a pleasurable, unproblematic relation to my own speechlessness.

From “Sam cel Roman” or The Romanian Sam.

"Romanian Notes" by Gary Indiana.

[As part of Gary Indiana’s travelogue series with Vice, “Romanian Notes” was published on August 19, 2013. I am excerpting it in full below, just in case the Vice archives vanish.]

Image source

“Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks for a nation of finks.”

—William S. Burroughs, A Thanksgiving Prayer

In Bucharest, the psychological damage inflicted on a society subjected to surveillance terror is apparent everywhere when you scratch the surface, even 24 years after the fall of Ceauşescu—in the suspicion older Romanians show toward one another; in the furtiveness and compulsive cheating rampant among shopkeepers and service providers; in the resigned abjection of young people who can imagine no future options besides A.) colorless, lifelong conformity in a degrading job or B.) membership in a neo-Nazi gang; in the atmosphere of demoralized powerlessness that suffuses daily life in Bucharest as perceptibly as melancholia pervades Istanbul. No problem too small to be insoluble, no conflict unthreatening enough to resolve without trauma. And in the countryside, people say, it's worse.

*

In line at an airport immigration check, the couple ahead of me debated which of their passports to use. They each shuffled at least five, like cards in a poker hand, all issued by different countries. The two sounded postcoitally blowsy, absorbed in their own sleepy dithering. They asked if I'd been around Taksim Square the night before. They had been sprayed, it turned out, with the same wave of tear gas I had walked into three blocks down the street. Like me, they'd spent all night rinsing their eyeballs, and now could easily fall alseep on their feet.

"We just got married," the woman said, making a little snort, as if they shared a few doubts about whether this had been a great idea. She was 40-ish, dubiously blond, pale, strong-chinned, gray-eyed, very pretty, of unguessable nationality, wearing a frazzled old Chanel suit and no makeup. Her partner was a hefty man, possibly Lebanese, with a stippled whitish fringe along the trim line of his thick black hair. Youthfully loose-limbed, but paunchy and quite a bit older. One pale-aubergine shirttail fluttered at his zipper; the other was stuffed into his pants. He was trying to be amusing and, unlike most people in airports, succeeding. "Guess where we're going," the woman quizzed with mock haplessness. "Cairo, jewel of the Nile," her new spouse chimed in, rolling jaded eyes at the predictable ironies of travel. I had a half-conscious flash that these people weren't touring or jetsetting at all, but testing out a much-revised script for incipient flaws, a fiction close enough to reality to go unchallenged in public. The immigration person waved them forward. "And then, what the hell," the woman laughed as she walked away, "Beirut. How's that for a dream honeymoon?"

*

It's possible that people intending to do bad things use the telephone and the internet to plan them, if they are also morons. However, morons are not noted for their planning skills. I suppose it would be nice if some bad things could be prevented before they happen without turning the world into a police state. The "eye in the sky" in casinos nips a lot of card counting and skimming and other scams in the bud. But if you place every human being or even everybody in a single country under invasive surveillance, a police state is what you get, even if the collected data is scattered around unsorted in a mainframe until a particular person becomes "a person of interest."

*

The overriding imperative of any bureaucracy funded by the state is its own self-perpetuation. If its purported reason to exist threatens to disappear, a bureaucracy will create whatever conditions it was supposed to eliminate. A drug-enforcement agency will deal drugs. An antiterrorism agency will breed its own terrorists, attracting weak-minded, potentially volatile people into bogus conspiracy cells. A central intelligence agency or so-called department of homeland security will manufacture threats to security, for example the recent "increased chatter alarm" that closed all the embassies in North Africa for a week.

If these glue traps for federal revenue are allowed to collect unlimited information about everybody, they can also make anybody into a terrorist, a drug mule, or whatever other menace a potential agency or department budget reduction calls for, cutting and pasting together a flimsy but widely believable, totally distorted version of any individual for public consumption, using bits of his or her data that have been parked in a massive hard drive in North Dakota or Utah or one of the other storage states. Last words of Lee Harvey Oswald: "I'm just a patsy."

*

In Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite, a book about the rise and fall of Ceauşescu, Edward Behr quotes a former Securitate official: "Imagine a huge apparatus spreading rumors, fear, and terror, an atmosphere in which common people feel that if they try and do the most insignificant thing identified as an act of opposition… they will disappear. It was psychological terror that paralyzed the Romanian population, and the most outstanding piece of disinformation was the rumor, deliberately spread by Securitate itself, that one out of every four Romanians was a Securitate informer."

*

Local "unrest" distracted me from Egyptian news in Sofia, where comparatively festive marches "turned violent," as the wire services put it, only once, on the 41st consecutive night of demos, when protesters trapped journalists and politicians in the Parliament building, then stoned a police bus sent to extract them. It felt much easier to identify with angry Bulgarians, angry Turks in Taksim Square, than with the factional mix of Islamists in Cairo. The Istanbul demos targeted once-popular Prime Minister Recep Erdoǧan after he proposed razing Gezi Park and replacing it with an Ottoman Disney Mall. (Erdoǧan's biography features the most piquant dependent clause I've come across recently, citing the fecund marriage of the former sesame-bun seller and anti-Semitic playwright to Ermine Güilbaran "despite his homosexual background," about which, there isn't another word.) The Bulgarians, unusually effective street agitators (aside from bringing down the whole government last February, demos recently produced a total ban on shale-oil extraction), were enraged by the government's ongoing collusion with crime syndicates turned corporations that control much of the country's industry and resources. These things made sense. I understood where they came from. It takes no imagination at all to perceive the US since 9/11, notably New York under mayors Guiliani and Bloomberg, as a more elusively layered, distractingly overdecorated version of Bulgaria Today or Istanbul Now, if you throw in an electronic upgrade of the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, the Soviet KGB, and the Albanian SHIK. Egypt, however…

*

To pilfer the title of Ivana Lowell's brilliant memoir, why not say what happened? According to Alan Taylor's The Civil War of 1812, even before the American Revolution scores of colonists in every trade and profession fled the soon-to-be-United States for remote parts of Canada, disgusted by the corruption and unbridled avarice that already permeated life in American towns and cities. By 1871, reporting on the fantastic chicaneries of the Gilded Age robber barons and the rotten judiciary they manipulated to thwart one another, Charles F. Adams, Jr. was able to write of an atypical judge, with no fear of intelligent contradiction: "At this particular juncture Mr. Justice Sutherland, a magistrate of such pure character and unsullied reputation that it is inexplicable how he ever came to be elevated to the bench on which he sits…" How different the US might be, today when the piratical ruthlessness of the Gilded Age amounts to a pimple on Lloyd Blankfein's ass, if every school child were taught the actual history of the country, instead of being stuffed with platitudes glorifying the supreme greatness and goodness of the place where he or she happened to be born.

*

I registered Egypt as a creepy smudge when it appeared on Bulgarian TV, which I only turned on for news of Edward Snowden, marooned at the time in the Moscow airport. Now, in Bucharest, I catch myself doing the same: Egypt seems even more distant, a catastrophe with no solution and no exit. I don't know how to reconcile the contradictions embedded in it. I can't look at it. Among other things, it would force me to consider: Do I honestly 'believe' in democracy?

I'm old enough to know America itself doesn't, since until very recently, any democratically elected head of state or popular leader anywhere whom the US couldn't control swiftly experienced a CIA-sponsored insurgency or coup d'etat—Arbenz, Mossadegh, Allende, Aristide, Sukarno, Lumumba, Trujillo, Diem, Goulart in Brazil, Nkrumah in Ghana, to name just a few, and then there are all the failed coups, against Castro, Chavez—the list covers every continent except Australia, where I think the US mainly just rigs elections. Everybody in this world, except in America, understands exactly what the single mission statement of US policy is: "You do it our way or we'll push your face in."

*

No answer, no exit: asking people to choose between the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood is the same as asking if they'd rather be sent to Auschwitz or Treblinka.

*

Beside the veranda of his carpet emporium, Ahmet's ringlets brushed John-from-Melbourne's ear while they sipped mint tea, slouched on fat embroidered pillows. In the midafternoon heat, they lolled like pashas on a vast Soumak carpet laid out on the ground. Ahmet's piccolo, a cherubic but very pushy 15-year-old, had "teasingly" escorted me the length of the bazaar, from a fabric shop also owned by Ahmet, where I had been on the verge of getting laid by one of his employees. Ahmet had been there earlier, striking Mae West poses and exhausting his supply of sexual innuendoes. Ahmet was what used to be called a camp. Not my thing. Now I had to deal with him again, taking in a tableau of pudgy, effeminate carpet shill nuzzling lanky, louche-looking retiree from Down Under, which strongly suggested that Ahmet and John were carnally familiar old friends. I took John for an expat living in Istanbul since at least the Battle of Gallipoli, if not the Crimean War.

After a lot of misfounded conversation, I gleaned that he was nothing of the kind. Depressingly, he was two years younger than I was. He had arrived two days before on a loosely organized package tour, and had met Ahmet for the first time that morning. He wasn't gay, or not much, just comfortable with body contact. This was the six-hour anniversary of Ahmet's campaign to sell him a carpet, subtracting an hour for lunch and another for Ahmet's mosque duty. Merchants in the Old Bazaar not only drip charm and oblige you to drink tea with them for hours, but will happily fuck you in the ass to make a sale. The playfulness involved often looks and feels more personal than it is, though.

*

Democracy, Schmemocracy. It's irrelevant to the people who manage the country, a joke to the people who own it. A local example, of course, is New York's City Council, led by Christine Quinn, abolishing mayoral term limits after they were set by a voter referendum—the most unambiguous expression of the citizens' wishes in a democracy (unless the ballot question is constructed by Californian Jesuits). What I'm not certain about is whether I support, believe in, advocate, adhere to, "democracy," if the outcome is or might be something very evil.

*

Silence was the enemy of Ahmet's trade. He had a Wagnerian opera's worth of rug chat stored in an otherwise fallow brain. At times, weirdly, losing himself in the throes of a marketing aria, he appeared to mutate, like a human CGI effect, into a more urbane, philosophically detached, European personality, even a hereditary duke or viscount, from a country far west of Turkey. Or an actor, perhaps, researching the role of a faggy Levantine rug peddler, who sets off for lunch at the Four Seasons before remembering he's still in greasepaint and a cheap rehearsal costume. These improvised personality touches—ruminative, skeptical, fitfully dismissive, florid, conflicted, judicious, brazenly unctuous by turns—began to suggest that somebody else was trying to sell him the carpet. He made two paltry sales all day, both dismayingly irrelevant to his current business plan. His current business plan was to somehow unload a centuries-old Isfahan consignment item, valued at two hundred thousand euros. Everyone entering the shop wanted a look at it, since Ahmet invoked it as if it were the Holy Grail. Absurdly, I thought, he went as far as to tell people he expected the thing to triple in value on its next appraisal, and prayed some devilish shrewd customer wouldn't wrest it from his inventory before that. However, Ahmet could divine with amazing accuracy the net worth and disposable income of any living human being, and saw that none of the day's marks had remotely enough assets to buy it. He was just fucking with himself. It seemed mildly endearing.

*

The Obama administration scrambles to glue a happy face on its out-of-control spy agencies, while the director of the NSA lies to Congress, not only about the fact of rampant domestic spying, but about the number of terrorist plots the NSA has thwarted by means of any of its surveillance programs. At first it's 50, then it's ten, then it's down to five, finally it's "I don't have the exact figures in front of me." Exactly none, apparently. Even Joe McCarthy was less obviously full of shit. By the time James M. Clapper, if that really is his name, finished testilying under oath, news of the illegal liaison between NSA and the DEA had already leaked from the cache of yet-unpublished Snowden documents. It's brilliant to release the sordid truth one item at a time, right after the Clapper or some other federal sinkhole has been forced to admit the last one and indignantly denied that the logically inevitable next one could even be possible.

*

When Ahmet disappeared to cook tea, John mentioned that Cairo was the next stop on his itinerary. The question of whether to cancel hovered in the muzzy air. "Of course you should go," I said, yawning. "They're not rioting in Luxor or Alexandria, are they?" I had no idea if "they" were or not, but it was just rioting, as far as anyone knew. Maybe it would stop, the way the bazaar stopped when the prayer call, crackling with dense static, bleated like a scary foghorn from the Fatih Cadde mosque across the road. "Not yet," John said. "Unless all hell breaks loose before Tuesday, I'm going. I only get away from Melbourne once a year; anyway, it's already paid for."

I meant not to sound too encouraging, but life really is cheatingly brief. And people who never travel tend to imagine, when trouble erupts in a distant country, that its entire landmass has seized into convulsions. I reminded John that he knew better, though I had scrubbed Egypt from my own vague plans that morning. John wasn't American, I rationalized, he would be less unwelcome than I in a combat zone, or else less attractive as a hostage, if it came to that. "Either things will calm down before you get there," I said, "or you'll have a great story to tell your grandchildren."

"Anyway," John said, "I check the embassy travel advisory every day."

"Sometimes," I said,"even when there's a war, if the Hilton stays open, it means you can travel around and still avoid the whole thing if you're careful."

It really didn't occur to me until 3 AM, when I was feeding cats in the streets near my hotel, to ask myself what is always somehow an untimely question: "Why the fuck did I say that?"

*

Obama—not to be outdone in devising the "least untruthful" excuse for a money-gobbling vortex of warrantless searches and supine FISA court judges who sign off on anything put in front of them—assures us that he had planned some purgative review of the NSA even before Edward Snowden was a drop of cum in his father's balls, so there! How sad that the still-inspiring symbolism of Obama's election has turned out to be the only unqualifiedly positive thing about his presidency—even Obamacare is so deeply compromised by concessions to the insurance industry that its main value is likewise located in the realm of the symbolic. I'm rarely moved by the rhetorical style of Ivy League valedictory addresses, so when people say "the president made a great speech," it's just an unnecessary reminder that actions speak louder than words. And in the matter of Edward Snowden's immeasurably laudable and invaluable public service, and regarding the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA et al., the next shoe to drop will doubtlessly be federal collection of all citizens' medical records—and, since all the acronyms are having a gang bang, why not let the IRS in on the fun, along with the family doctor?

Bruno Schulz's "Republic of Dreams"

An excerpt from Bruno Schulz’s “The Republic of Dreams”:

And here is a PDF of the “The Republic of Dreams” in its entirety— with a bit of annotation.

Bruno Schulz and Józefina Szelińska.

The Henryk Sienkiewicza school in Drohobycz, where Jozefina was working from 1930-1934, when Bruno Schulz met her. The building is currently a private residence.

Spring came early in that year of 1933, when Bruno found himself fascinated by a 28 year old teacher at the local seminary. Her name was Józefina Szelińska—and she was equally fascinated. She agreed to pose for a portrait in pastel, a portrait that became the first in a series.

After spending the morning posing and drawing, the two would stroll through the meadows behind her parents' house, discussing literature, art, and poetry, and wandering into the birch forest to be alone. Józefina later described those meetings as "something miraculous . . .  inimitable experiences, which so rarely occur in life. It was the sheer essence of poetry."

Józefina grew up in Janow, the daughter of  Zygmunt and Helena Schranzel, a Jewish couple  who converted to Catholicism. In 1919, she officially changed her name from Schranzel to the more Polish-sounding Szelińska.

Bruno referred to her as Juno, a nod towards the Roman goddess of marriage and fertility. Every person has an animal resemblance, Bruno explained, and hers was with the antelope. As for himself, he resembled the dog.

"The artist absorbed the human being in him," Józefina said of Bruno, whom she likened  to a kobold, or "a mythological sprite neither boy nor man, alternately virtuous, and mischievous." This mixture of innocence and dangerous jouissance characterizes her thinking of him.

Schulz came to visit her almost every evening of that summer in 1933; they discovered a shared adoration of Rilke, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. She was the first ear to hear many of the stories Schulz read aloud to her.

When she lost her teaching job in 1934, Józefina moved to Warsaw, and the two began a relationship of correspondence, which she described as “passionate letters that saved Bruno from his depressions”, attenuated by short visits in winter and summer holidays.

Maria Kasprowiczowa, the widow of a poet named Jan, invited the couple to her villa near Zakopane. The correspondence between Bruno and Maria was only discovered in 1992, when a scholar was rummaging through Jan Kasprowiczowa’s archives. But this correspondence offers insight into Schulz’s thinking about his beloved during this time.

On 25 January 1934, Bruno wrote to Maria:

The word "human being" in itself is a brilliant fiction, concealing with a beautiful and reassuring lie those abysses and worlds, those undischarged universes, that individuals are. There is no human being there are only sovereign ways of being, infinitely distant from each other, that don't fit into any uniform formula, that cannot be reduced to a common denominator. From one human being to another is a leap greater than from a worm to the highest vertebrate. Moving from one face to another we must rethink and rebuild entirely, we must change all dimensions and postulates. None of the categories that applied when we were talking about one person remain when we stand before another.... When I meet a new person, all of my previous experiences, anticipations, and tactics prepared in advance become useless. Between me and each new person the world begins anew.

In January 1935, Schulz’s brother, Izydor Sculz, died young of a heart attack, leaving behind a daughter, sign, and a mother who relied on him for financial support. A few months later, Bruno and Josefina made their engagement public.

Józefina "enslaves me and obligates me," Shulz wrote to Maria of his betrothed:

My fiancée represents my participation in life; only by her mediation am I a human being and not just a lemur or a gnome. ... With her love, she has redeemed me, already nearly lost and marooned in a remote no-man's-land, a barren underworld of fantasy….Is it not a great thing to mean everything for someone?

When he was granted a six-month paid leave in January 1936, Schulz elected to spend most of it in Warsaw with his fiancée. The two attended a dinner there, in that month, where Józefina raved about living in Paris after the wedding. But Bruno stared at his plate, saying nothing. When asked where he'd like to live after their marriage, Bruno answered: "In Drohobycz." A crack had opened.

Another complication was the rising anti-Semitism in the borderlands. The nomenclature of bureaucracy required Schulz to encounter identity as construed by the state. As mentioned, although Józefina was born to two Jewish parents, she converted to Catholicism (the official Polish religion) along with them, and also Polonized her surname—-a fact which may have saved her life once the Nazis took over.

Neverthless, that February, Schulz published an announcement in local papers that formally acknowledged his “withdrawal from the Jewish community” (in Balint’s words). Rather than register himself as Catholic, the official Schulz declared himself a man “without denomination.”

In spring 1936, Josefina translated the first edition of Kafka’s The Trial into Polish. Although Bruno’s name was also listed on the cover as a translator, the majority of the translation work belonged to her. Bruno’s afterword located Kafka in a sort of universal mysticism whose ideas “are the common heritage of the mysticism of all times, and nations.” For Bruno, Kafka lifts the “realistic surface of existence” and sets it atop “his transcendental world” in a sort of “radically ironic, treacherous, profoundly ill-intentioned” grafting.

One could say that Bruno and Josefina wrote a book together, a book whose author was also Jewish, also an Austro-Hungarian who imagined life in relation to his entrepreneurial father. One can also wonder how Bruno’s reading of Kafka influenced the trajectory of his own relationship with Jozefina.

When Józefina begged him to live with her in Warsaw, Bruno refused, referencing his sister’s illness and the needs of his family. Later, Józefina said that he was haunted by an image of himself "as a beggar, wandering the city, reaching out his hands, and I would turn away from him contemptuously." Bruno often mentioned this image when discussions about money and cohabitation began. 

By January 1937, Józefina despaired of his commitment. His indecision made her "the weaker party in the relationship," she said. For where "he had his creative world, his high regions," Józefina felt that she "had nothing". She celebrated her 32nd birthday quietly. A few days later, she poured a handful of sleeping pills into her mouth and swallowed them. Wavering along the edge of unconsciousness, tasting the nearness of death, Józefina cried out for help and was taken to the hospital. 

After learning of his fiancee's averted suicide, Bruno rushed to Warsaw to be with her. While at the hospital, Bruno caught influenza and spent 10 days in bed, completely enfeebled. With Bruno being treated for influenza, Józefina went to recuperate at her parents' home, near the birch forest where she and Bruno had spent countless memorable afternoons. 

In February, Bruno appeared at her parent’s house, carrying figs, dates, and flowers. He surrounded  Józefina with tenderness and devotion. "He felt guilt," she wrote later, adding that the guilt was "completely unfounded, for he was nothing but goodness."

But a plant can be beautiful and transient; a gift horse can begin a war; a romance can mean everything and go nowhere. And if Bruno was goodness to his betrothed, but he was also indecisive, unreliable, wracked with self-doubt and insecurity.

In the spring of 1937,  Józefina ended their engagement and forced herself to stop answering his correspondence. 

Neither Bruno nor Józefina ever married. After Schulz's murder by a Nazi,  Józefina spent the next 49 years in fidelity to his memory. "To stay with him, for better or worse, forever," she wrote. That is the story she insisted upon.

"Sous les Toits de Paris" and Joseph Roth.

As Esther Allen rightly observes, we have Joseph Roth’s books because of Michael Hofmann’s obsessive diligence as a translator. Or maybe, in his irredeemable complexity, Joseph Roth has us.

To be simultaneously vehement and committed to a neo-Romantic skepticism is not easy—-yet Roth managed it. His journalism and feuilletons on interwar Europe serve as glimpses into a past that could not predict the genocide in its future. Unlike other authors and scholars, Roth was difficult, which is to say, he refused to go along in order to get along with his peers.

Where, for example, Michel Leiris lionized the rituals of violence enacted by bullfights, Roth repeatedly editorialized against the inane cruelty of the sport. In a piece for Frankfurter Zeitung published on October 1, 1925, Roth describes the bullfight's role in placating the people of Nimes. (One can almost hear the Hermann Broch's Virgil groaning as he enters the emperor's festivities, and recognizes his pre-determined role in them.)

A young clownish fellow runs through the ring with a purple parasol, teasing the bull and performing for the audience, as Roth recounts:

Pursued by the bull, and shielded by the umbrella, he scrambles over the fence, and then, from his own cowardly safety, he jabs the umbrella into the bull's testicles. Huge laughter in the arena. The audience split their sides. The ugliest appurtenance invented by man becomes a weapon against the most appurtenance of the beast. The fellow couldn't have found a better expression of human dignity if he'd tried.

Once the bull is alone in the ring, Roth shifts into a supple act of identification with the tormented creature:

Bewildered, exhausted, foaming at the muzzle, the bull stops and faces the gate behind which, he knows, is the good, warm, protective shed, redolent of home. Oh, but the gate is shut and may never open again! The people are howling and laughing, and it seems that the bull has learned to distinguish between shouts intended to provoke him, and mere derision. A colossal contempt, bigger than the entire arena, fills the soul of the bull. Now he knows he is being laughed at. Now he no longer has the strength to be furious. Now he understands his helplessness. Now he has ceased to be an animal. Now he is the embodiment of all the martyrs of history. Now he looks like a mocked, beaten Jew from the East, now like a victim of the Spanish Inquisition, now like a gladiator torn to pieces, now like a tortured girl facing a medieval witch trial, and in his eyes there is a glimmer of that luminous pain that burned in the eye of Christ. The bull stands where he is and no longer hopes.

There is often this moment in which a vignette tilts towards embodied social critique in Roth’s nonfiction. He lures us in with details before holding a mirror to social behavior. But he doesn’t quite scold the reader. Nor does he moralize from a position of piety. He simply ambles along for another few paragraphs, providing a play-by-play of the bullfight, and then turns his pen to the spectators, the crowd watching the show, noting their impatience, their eagerness for action, the insatiable hunger that relies on its deniability:

The kindhearted, well-bred, polite citizens who take part in the game from a safe distance, by calling out fearlessly and brandishing heroic handkerchiefs, the tailors and hairdressers in their Sunday best—they are getting excited. Foam isn't enough for them anymore. They want to see blood, the good fellows!

Unable to fit into the crowd properly, Roth admits that he, like the “little white dog” belonging to a lady nearby, would prefer “to help” the bull. “But what can two poor pups like us do against five thousand people?” he asks, identifying himself with the dog rather than the humans present.

*

I’ve been thinking about Roth the critic . . . and the chimneys of Paris . . . and an essay Roth wrote about René Clair’s silent film, Sous les Toits de Paris (1930). . . and the way Clair, himself, described the origins of this film:

At the time I was shooting my second or third silent picture, I heard a circle of street singers in Paris, on my way home from the studios. I thought how sad it was that I had no sound with which to make a picture. Four years later, sound came, and I returned to my street-singers idea.

And about a comment Rene Clair made while shooting this film in May 1929—a concern about how the “monster” of sound might ruin cinema:

Can the talking picture be poetic? There is reason to fear that the precision of the verbal expression will drive poetry off the screen just as it drives off the atmosphere of the daydream. The imaginary words we used to put into the mouths of those silent beings in those dialogues of images will always be more beautiful than any actual sentences. The heroes of the screen spoke to the imagination with the complicity of silence. Tomorrow they will talk nonsense into our ears and we will be unable to shut it out.

The film’s original trailer is above—and the film is worth watching. In it, one can observe the techniques Clair developed to communicate those “imaginary words.”

For example, in the bar scene where the two male protagonists argue over Pola, the gramophone recording of Rossini's William Tell Overture starts to skip, creating an aura of sonic discord. Clair also shot the argument through a window, a technique that Sacha Guitry later borrowed to indicate unheard conversations.

“Through a process of mental collage…”

But I wanted to talk about Joseph Roth’s commentary on this comedy, which he ends in a note of wistful uncanniness. “This sound film has all the charm of perdition,” he writes, continuing:

Not one of those playing here will ever leave this world. They will fall further and further into it, sink into the hill of years that come rolling up unstoppably, smiling, to the song of the accordion. Melancholy will always be a sister to their joys. They will always drink, love, throw dice, steal. Their fate is implacable. That's what gives the film its sadness. But the implacableness has a sheen of mildness, which makes it seem, as it were, placable. That's why it's such a joyful film.

The repetition. The absence of words to lay claim to a certain heaviness—- a logistical complexity of interpretation. The further and further of falling into family where melancholy dines with joy. The gorgeous irresolute resolution of a line like: But the implacableness has a sheen of mildness, which makes it seem, as it were, placable.

If you’d like to read Roth’s entire piece, you can download a PDF copy below (which includes annotations for no reason whatsoever, unless one counts my amusement and pleasure).

*

 Joseph Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise : Essays from France, 1925-1939, trans. Michael Hofmann and Katharina Ochse (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2003): 202-205. Roth’s essay was originally published in Frankfurter Zeitung on October 28, 1930.

“Under the Roofs of Paris” (1930) as directed by Rene Clair is available from Criterion as well as Criterion Channel.

Rosmarie Waldrop's Lament for Edmond Jabès.

[From The Nick of Time: Poems, New Directions Books: pp. 113-114.]

Kafka after Kierkegaard.

Riveting books curse this insomniac. Thus did I unintentionally burn my way through three midnights this week absorbed in Ross Benjamin’s translation of Franz Kafka’s diaries. I learned that Kafka’s 1908 included an unhappy love affair with a wine tavern waitress named Julianne Szokoll (Hansi). Max Brod said that there was a photo of her standing next to Kafka, and that Kafka said of Hansi "that whole cavalry regiments had ridden over her body."

There are themes— which I will paginate, due to time constraints.

Reproaches

The reproach is thematic to the diaries as well as Kafka’s fiction. On May 18th or 9th of 1910, as Halley’s comet whirs past, Kafka develops his inflamed inventory of reproaches against parents and family. He reproaches his mother and father for his education, and what they failed to teach him; page 7. Both reproach and refutation do him great harm, Kafka tells us on page 8. Addresses the “group pictures “in a fabulous way. Talks about how he introduces them to each other, these family members, these people who have harmed him.

Strangers allow him to detach his mind from the reproaches. Looking out the window quiets “the urge to reproach.” He looks out the window often when standing in a room with his father. Or he begins a scene near a window. Or he uses the movement towards as a window as a transitional device between interior monologues. Or he returns to an image of his father looking out the window. (“Men looking through windows” could be a song on Kafka’s greatest hits.)

After reproaching his family for their failure, Kafka reproaches them for their love, for those who have done him “harm out of love, makes their guilt even greater." For Kafka, family love is almost more dangerous than hate, or more damaging.

Also: "Parents who expect gratitude from their children (there are even those who demand it) are like usurers, they are happy to risk the capital as long as they get the interest."

Epistles

"I have no time to write letters twice," Kafka confessed on November 27, 1912. No time to preserve a copy of his own words—no time for correspondence. Since Kafka’s relationship to the epistolary genre is part of my work-in-progress, take this quote as a large star or a comet. Letters are not different from literature to Kafka—-in fact, many of his letters (particularly those related to Felice Bauer) wind into his fictional characters.

The letter at the top of this post, which Kafka addressed to Felice Bauer’s parents—-after reading Kierkegaard—-breaking off their engagement; the timing is uncanny. The theory of letter malaise excerpted below ties is also critical. Kafka hated being presented with choices, or making large decisions; each decision was approached as a momentous life-changing event.

Restlessness and indecision = anxiety

(13 Sept. 1915): "I don't have to make myself restless. I'm restless enough, but for what purpose…how can a heart, a not entirely healthy heart bear so much dissatisfaction and so much uninterruptedly tugging desire."

Again and again, Kafka defines anxiety as the dread of making a choice, since the interpretations of others will determine the meaning of that choice. The trial is ongoing, and there is no end to it. Dread is simply the awareness of an impending choice, or the space after a decision has been made in which the choice will be interpreted by others. Society writes the book of one’s self daily. Refusing their misinterpretation is why one writes the novel.

Conscientia scrupulosa (scrupulous conscientiousness)— the expression Max Brod used to describe Kafka’s obsessive relationship to moral dimensions, and his inability to “overlook the slightest shadow of injustice that occurred.” In Brod’s view, Kafka is driven by this belief in “a world of Rightness.”

Diary as self in time

Diary as encounter with self in relation to time:

"In the diary one finds proof that, even in conditions that today seem unbearable, one lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand thus moved as it does today, when the possibility of surveying our condition at that time does make us wiser, but we therefore must recognize all the more the undauntedness of our striving at that time, which in sheer ignorance nonetheless sustained itself."

*

As for Benjamin’s translation, it is the dream of every end-note aficionado to discover the details and traces. Take end-note #577, for example: “The poet, playwright, and composer Abraham Goldfaden founded the first Yiddish theater troupe in Romania in 1876; he is regarded as the founder of the Yiddish theater.” BYOB to the Kafka revival.

Ambient Eno.

“So as not to become meat we must return the jaguar's gaze. But in this encounter we do not remain unchanged. We become something new, a new kind of we perhaps aligned somehow with that predator who regards us as a predator.”

- Clarice Lispector

“Score without Parts (40 Drawings by Thoreau): Twelve Haiku, 1978” by composer John Cage is currently housed in the Princeton Library, which describes the piece as follows:

In this work, Cage, who is among the most influential composers and conceptual artists of the postwar avant-garde, duplicates the score with which he conducted his 1974 composition Score (40 Drawings by Thoreau) and 23 Parts. Inspired by the writings of the American naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the artist replaced conventional musical notation with small drawings of natural elements—seeds, animal tracks, and nests—drawn from Thoreau’s journal, which Cage selected and sequenced at random with the aid of the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text. He then divided each of the twelve bars into three sections of five, seven, and five measures, transforming the score into a visual, sonorous, and experiential haiku.

Brian Eno’s “Three Variations on the Canon in D Major” (on the B side of his album Discreet Music) took a canonical piece, Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D, and “varied” it. Although some musicologists claim Discreet Music the origin of ambient music, the first ‘official’ ambient was Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, which came three years later.

“Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting,” Eno explained. And there is movement from the word discreet, which connotes a quietude and reticence, to the word ambient, which suggests the creation of a certain environment.

The challenge Eno set for ambient music—-being simultaneously ignorable and interesting—reminds me of Proust, laying in bed, writing an entire world from his convalescence. Or maybe it reminds me of convalescence in general, and the way in which confinement, or restriction, or the constraint of the bed shapes the way objects are received and experienced.

In Eno’s telling, he was bedridden and unable to move when the inspiration for Discreet Music occurred. Recovering from a car wreck in 1970, a friend came over to visit him. As she was leaving, she asked him if she should put a record on, since he couldn’t rise to do this himself. This question about whether he wanted music feels tied to the question of what sort of environment he preferred to stew in. After putting on a record, the friend left. But the volume of the music was too low, the melody was “much too quiet,” and Eno couldn’t reach the record player to turn up the volume. “It was raining outside,” Eno recalls. “It was a record of 18th-century harp music, I remember”:

I lay there at first kind of frustrated by this situation, but then I started listening to the rain and listening to these odd notes of the harp that were just loud enough to be heard above the rain.

Colin Marshall explains:

Discreet Music‘s B side performs a reinterpretation of its own with variations on Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D, “Fullness of Wind,” “French Catalogues,” and “Brutal Ardour.” On Eno’s instructions, the Cockpit Ensemble repeated parts of the score while gradually altering it, imbuing this familiar (not least from weddings) 17th-century piece with an otherworldly grandeur. Like their mistranslated-from-the French titles, these variations may in some sense be “mangled,” but they become all the more ambiguously evocative for it.

The liner notes from Eno’s Music for Airports.

And, of course, the opportunity to drop one of my favorite albums of Eno’s, namely, his collaboration with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp on “Evening Star.”

Fripp Eno - Evening Star from León Pedrouzo on Vimeo.

Elegy as "site of struggle".

An elegy is a poem which mourns the end of a life, and lays out the particulars and characteristics of a particular loss.

The traditional elegy resembles the plaza monument in how it sets out a community's grief at the loss of a figure held in common. Elegies invoke the funerary customs and ritual of the society in which this death happens, or in the community's expression of loss. In some ways, the power of the elegy resembles the power of collective memory and community.

I think the elegy, more than any other form, creates the possessive plural pronoun — the Our— in relation to its subject. This is our hero who died; we are now defined as part of his lineage; our lives are interpreted in relation to his actions. 

As Eavan Boland and Mark Strand have written, "the best elegies will always be sites of struggle between custom and decorum on one hand, and private feeling on the other." One sees this in W. H. Auden's elegy, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," where the speaker alternates between intimacy and conventional decorum. You can almost track this shift from section to section.

Section 1, for example, creates a sense of place carved out by loss:

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Auden highlights this last moment of being, the final instance of inhabiting the known selfhood, and the shift which occurs is memorial, which is to say, now his admirers will define him. 

I thought of the poetics of dementia, and the particular loss enacted by Alzheimers; the one who loves the Alzheimer's patient seems to hover at the doorway of this last moment— the last moment in which they are themselves in the slow erosion of selfhood. 

The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

Auden loops back to Yeats, or to the body on bed who became his admirers. And Auden is one of these admirers who carries Yeats into the future. 

Section II changes pace, and performs a sort of reversal. Unlike the other sections, this one exists in a single stanza:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Section III tightens the form, hewing to meticulous rhyme schemes, gesturing towards a song-like structure which resembles decorum, or conventions for mourning a public figure. Even the beginning seems to clear its throat; the first quatrain arranges itself behind the podium:

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

The mournful statement has been made, and this final section resembles a traditional funeral eulogy. What fascinates me in this final section is how Auden puts on his Sunday best (in the first section, he's wearing jeans and golf shirt); he smooths his tie and straightens his cuff-lengths in six tidy, isometric quatrains. 

This tidy sombreness is the marble from which monuments are made.

Here are the final two quatrains in Auden's poem:

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

End-rhymes also add to the monumental texture of Auden’s poem. One of the decisions a poet makes involves the poem’s relation to statues, to shadows, to the monumental tradition invoked by form. And each poem asks something different of the poet. At our best, we are attuned to this. At our worst, we are human.