On the intelligibility of images.

[ ]

I don’t know how to sleep anymore. Ruined buildings and bodies reach across screens. When closing my eyes, I hear women screaming, mothers wailing, the word precision.

As if trapped in a film reel, sentenced to repetition, the mind keeps whirring back to the period immediately after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. In public spaces, paranoia spilled from grief, suspicion was fueled by fury; loyalty (as constructed by shifting notions of "patriotism") became the defining point of attack. 

The birth of the Department of Homeland Security.

The word homeland.

The word security.

The chorus of flags. The desire for revenge. The sheer horror of the building debris. The images of humans searching for bodies in the rubble.

What does it mean to be intelligible to another in such contexts? What is the purpose of art?

[ ]

Brief recollections from my life in DC return:  the official Islamophobia turning heads on the sidewalk; the sudden salience of "looking Muslim"; the language of threat; the abstract "homeland security"; the shape of the Pentagon. 

It is 2:13 am and I have given up on falling asleep. It is impossible to avoid meeting memories on the terrain they carved in the brain. My dog snores as I watch documentaries.

In the documentary video narrating the "story of Flight 77," the camera follows an FBI agent with cropped brown hair as she describes walking through the scorched and blackened part of the West Wing. Pieces of airplane metal curled into ribbons and scattered between building materials. In the disaster, the agent is "struck" by the presence of a simple, white sailors hat, a singular object that managed to remain completely white in all the dirt.

The camera flashes to a staged reconstruction of what the agent is describing; the stark contrast between the color white and the gray dust, charred metal, and building parts, is emphasized. 

The agent speaks slowly, says it was almost as if "the hat had been dropped from the sky"— or had come after— even though nothing could have come after, since the agent is the first human permitted to walk through this area. 

The uncanny white hat becomes a memorial image, a strange memorialization. The memorial form implicates us in its mental construction rather than its physical staging. The mind is summoned to preserve the ruinscape with the white hat.  

It was strange, the agent adds. It was one of "those things that sort of stand out because they don’t make sense."

[ ]

In cinematography, "directing the eye" refers to using frame composition, camera movement, or lighting to make clear what is most important in the frame. 

The light settles on a man in a suit sitting at a large desk. The completely white hair on the man's head argues with the dark wood walls behind him. He is talking about a red shoe.

"Such a stark color, the red in that gray scene, that it stood with me," he tells the camera. A tiny white mustache sits above his upper lip, motionless. There are no extraneous gestures. 

"What stood out for me was a single, red, high-heeled shoe."

The man says the shoe was in the middle of one of the Pentagon's completely demolished corridors. 

The shoe was very red, unpaired, totally alone. Its partner was never found. 

The man wonders if the shoe was left by a woman trying to escape. He uses the word "running": was she running out of the building?  

The shoe is the thing which is left behind. Alternately, the shoe is the thing that was blown off. The shoe has a story about what happened in the last minutes of a life, but the shoe will not speak.

[ ]

Near the end of Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates ponders the difference between writing and speaking. He quotes an Egyptian god as saying that the invention of script damages the power of memory in those who write. Then he criticizes writing for its failure to take part in conversation, or to dialogue.

A text is like a painting, Socrates suggests, and it can bring images and ideas but it shouldn't be taken seriously, since the "true" writing is written upon the heart.

[ ]

Walter Benjamin recounts a story from the third book of Herodotus's Histories. For Benjamin, this story shows us the "nature of true storytelling" as distinguished from information or data:

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

A story does not expend itself. 

[ ]

In 2021, a giant red stiletto appeared in Santa Barbara. It was visible from the northbound lanes of the 101 just above Ventura. Local news media tried to solve the “mystery of the red stiletto.”

[ ]

[ ]

“A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.”

And there are so many red shoes now.

There are so many white hats.

There is violence upon violence: “things that sort of stand out because they don’t make sense."

There are shoes, hats, hostages, mass murder, bombs, men in uniform, state officials, retirees increasing their investment portfolios to focus on bombs and weapons—and behind this, behind the atrocities and events, behind the social trauma, behind the families grieving alone, there is that lie called homeland security.

[ ]

Dear friends, fellow humans, friends and strangers, I beg you to imagine a future that risks being radically different from the failures of the present.

I encourage you to continue writing, creating, thinking, protesting, hugging, honoring, memorializing, and bearing “with-ness” to the human condition.

Each morning
I wake
in the shape
of an ancient
song: weapon
desperate
to betray its
design.

I implore you to read Mosab Abu Toha’s “Ceasefire Cento” —

The uses and abuses of allegory.

Hypothetical

Your name is Artemisia Gentileschi. Your oil portraits are coveted by 17th century collectors across the European continent; you are well-versed in the patronizing egotism of Italian patrons. Your “Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting La Pittura” is currently housed in the Buckingham Palace At night, you sketch your naked silhouette is illumined by candlelight licking the mirror. You've been given a new commission intended to honor a nobleman, but you wonder what would happen if you accepted the commission and then honored the artist instead. You are the artist: the one who renders others immortal. Tonight, as you sit down to write a journal entry about this latest commission to paint a tribute to a Florentine nobleman, you think about what it means to be born into talent in a female body. You will explain how "Allegory of Inclination" comes about, including the secret decision to depict your own flesh, that it may rest above the heads of those in the Galleria in the Casa Buonarroti. You may say allegorical things about your secret decision while also exploring the larger allegory of the painting. Think about self-portraiture in the context of allegory, and how Artemisia leaned into titular abstraction or vagueness while personalizing the content.

Examples of allegories in fiction

There are allegories within stories (i.e. small allegories used to illustrate things) and then are stories that are allegories. What distinguishes the two is how an allegory works its large metaphor throughout the duration of the story. 

"A Mother's Tale" by James Agee, for example, has been read as an allegory of mental complicity in crimes against humanity. Agee sets up an allegorical family and reveals what leads ordinary humans to refuse to acknowledge the Shoah.

"Seven Floors" by Dino Buzatti relies on allegory to reckon with the inevitability of death. It is a haunting story, and Buzzati is unique and under-read in my opinion.

"On Hope" by Spencer Holst is a short piece that leans heavily into abstraction and into thinking. As in Lydia Davis' short stories, the piece is driven by a thought trying to think itself, or by the mind grappling with abstractions.

More allegories as crowdsourced by wonderful humans on twitter:

• "A Soft Taxonomy of Rocks" by Rachael de Moravia

• The Silk Road by Kathryn Davis (a novella)

• "Twilight" by Wladyslaw Reymont (allegory situated with Eastern European peasant life)

• "We Are Not Cat Island" by Theresa J. Beckhusen

• The Wave by Todd Strasser

• "On Discovery" by Maxine Hong Kingston

• "The Story of the Lizard Who Made a Habit of Having His Wives for Dinner" by Eduardo Galeano

• "The Swimmer" by John Cheever

• "The Stones" by Richard Shelton

[Pictured: a page from Vaughn Bode's 1972 pulp-novel style allegory of the Vietnam War titled "The Junkwaffel Papers.]

The use of allegory in contemporary propaganda

Effective political propaganda often introduces allegorical narratives that become the dominant worldview, establishing the frame for future conversation, demarcating the boundaries of "logical" explanation. 

Before his oil portraits were hung on the walls of American art museums, former U.S. President George W. Bush (the son of a son of Bush) leaned into allegory when he coined "Axis of Evil" to refer to three countries that his administration considered as global security threats. Developing this axiology, Bush used the term "Allies" to inscribe the countries that were "on our side." 

The Bush administration framed war as an inevitability—an event that could not be avoided. In this official discourse, the framing benefited from consistent thematic reinforcement: countries could only be "with us or against us". The binary with/against created a benchmark for judgment and determination. The binary’s extraordinary abstraction increased its political use: since it designated a condition based on feeling as if, it could be constantly reinterpreted and amped by emotional resonances.

This idea— the sense in which X can be with us or against us— is a matter of opinion. Power is the story about whose ideas matter in a culture or society at any given time. Power is a portrait of an “Us” created, administered, and reinforced by definition.

Power makes us feel things—

Isn't a threat, itself, defined by the determining assumptions of the one who feels threatened? 

How is the feeling of threat implicated in our constructions of "national security"?

Is national insecurity an excuse for preemptive aggression, which is to say, the insecure kid on the playground whose sense of safety can only be assuaged by bullying those who are most vulnerable to being bullied? 

Bush's binary naming-regimes also drew on nostalgia for World War I, where a sense of clarity characterized the mission. The "Allies" were the good guys; they were the states who would wage war against the enemy "Axis." The language games of agitprop absolved pro-war Americans from thinking about the Islamophobia and racial animosity underlying that threatening feeling. The three countries selected by the Bush administration facilitated a Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" mentality, which, in turn, created platforms and publishing opportunities for academics and scholars whose research invested the presentation of decadent, foreign threats to "Western civilization." 

But that was decades ago. Bush is a famous artist now. And American kids don’t spend time studying the war they waged against Iraq.

The urgent has changed. When you woke up this morning, you realized it must have rained. The blue chair near the window was soaked. You barely remember leaving the window open last night. The calendar near the fridge reminds you that today is a red-letter deadline. You are the speechwriter for a mediocre politician that wants to do something reprehensible in order to edge ahead in a close election. The usual platitudes will not rouse crowds. The politician specifically requested an unforgettable, thunderous speech; his left eyelid twitched when he said this to you. And so you decide to devise an allegory that will enable the politician's audience to surmount their personal consciences in the name of something greater. You will create a condition that echoes outside the unthinkable speech. The allegory is what you will use to persuade those who are looking for a reason to get off the fence. Write it. 

The prose poem as allegory for a failed relationship

Read Catherine Bird's "The Factory Floor" (below) which she described as an allegory for a failed relationship.

Use it as a model or jumping-point for your own prose poem that uses allegory to rub a relationship, whether past or present. Think about how subtext can be presented in actions of chosen characters; also consider ruffling up the sentence (i.e. making it choppier, more brisk) as a technique to indicate conflict or tension without "telling" too much.

Klossowski.

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Paris, 1963.

Roland Barthes introduces his friends to each other: Michel Foucault, meet Pierre Klossowski . . . both of you have a thing for Nietszche's eternal return.

The friendship between Barthes and Klossowski dates back to the late 1940s, when Barthes would visit K’s apartment on the rue Canivet to play four-handed piano duets with Denise, the muse of Klossowski’s life.

By 1947, his muse was his wife. Denise Marie Roberte Morin Sinclaire, a war widow who had been deported to Ravensbrück for working in the French Resistance, became Mrs. Klossowski. Abandoning his dreams of becoming an ascetic holy fool, Klossowski discovered a new vocation, both figuratively and literally, in art and literature—a fidelity to Denise’s beauty and body that would consume him until death.

One wouldn’t be wrong to say Denise dominated her husband, if one takes domination to include a certain seductive levity and recklessness, a lack of concern for bourgeois norms; a way of being at home in one’s body can diminish the need to be at home in the cosmos. Denise had a certainty that Pierre lacked. She wasn’t a seeker: she didn’t need as much from meaning as Pierre.

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Paris, 1905.

Pierre Klossowski is born into an an aristocratic family of Polish émigrés. Even then, in the German-French bilingualism of his birth, the story of his life depends on the angle on the exposure and the role its shadows are given. Is the shadow or a speaker or a reflection of the body it follows?

was raised in an aristocratic family of Polish émigrés. His younger brother, Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, is more commonly known as the painter Balthus. Raised in France and Germany, thoroughly bilingual, good fortune lubricated Klossowski’s path by facilitating his social connections to influentials artists, including Gertrude Stein, Bataille, Masson, Walter Benjamin, Claude Mauriac, Roland Barthes, Rilke, Andre Gide, among others. He was, so to speak, in the right place (or class status) at the right time.

After his parents separated, Klossowski’s mother began an extended, intimate relationship with poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who became a sort of mentor to the young Klossowski. According to Benjamin Ivry:

Klossowski was still a teenager in 1923 when his mother Baladine's lover, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, introduced him to Andre Gide, a celebrated pedophile. Gide quickly persuaded Klossowski to send him pornographic stories and drawings about gay sexual adventures, to the point where the promiscuous Pierre found himself running out of true accounts and had to invent material to please the insatiable older man. In exchange, Gide introduced him to literary personalities of the day, including Jean Paulhan. An especially important friendship was established with Bataille, whose own works allied transgression, eros, and death in a highly Sadeian way.

Later, Klossowski worked as a private secretary for Andre Gide, a position that enabled him to read early drafts of The Counterfeiters as copyeditor. Gide had used the novel to chronicle his own journey into subjectivity, his discovery of the “I” through sexual experimentation and pleasure-seeking. The young Klossowski sketched a portrait of his mentor, Gide, in graphite pencil— an elder, bifocaled man sits at a desk with a small pile of papers crumpled beneath his hands as an androgynous nude youth plays a flute to his left. Narrowed into slits, Gide’s eyes seem to simultaneously see and imagine the naked youth with the flute.

He never settled on a medium or a path—-though he sampled many and sought spiritual reprieve or salvation from religion and art. “The redemptive theological potential of sexually transgressive art”—- this is how he phrased it to himself, in theorizing what he borrowed from Gide’s struggles. (Notably, Gide’s effort to make queerness spiritually palatable would lead him locate tragressive sexuality in the plan of a God he didn’t want to relinquish. It was an awkward, unqueering fit.)

In the years immediately preceding World War II, Klossowski wandered between monastic communities for three months before abandoning the habit for literature. His first novel, La Vocation suspendue ("The Suspended Vocation"), was published in 1949. Titled after the little-known book at the heart of Klossowski's novel, the “suspended vocation” is a story of lost faith, or the distance between a faith that has been lost and a faith that does not exist.

Denise is the Roberte of Klossowski's drawings and novels. Denise is one who led his hand to the large-scale drawing graphite and color-pencil sketches executed painstakingly on paper.

Marquis de Sade’s horrific universe, to Klossowski, was a paradox which evidenced the presence of a divine goodness. Klossowki, Foucault, and Blanchot bonded over their mutual fascination with Sade.

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Roberte ce soire (1954) was haunted by its own desires from the outset. Rumors that Klossowki had portraited his wife for a porno-novel began circulating.

Jérôme Lindon, Klossowski’s publisher, tried to get ahead of the censors by packaging it as an art book with illustrations by Balthus in a deluxe limited edition. But Klossowski was dissatisfied with Balthus’ drawings—they missed the point of the book, they didn’t represent Roberte, they inserted his brother’s style into a book which challenged it, etc. Finally, a weary Balthus told his brother he should illustrate it himself.

And so Klossowski picked up his colored pencils and sketched the novel’s iconic moments, creating an iconography of carnality that can be observed from the edge of sanctity, as a Catholic might pause before each station of the cross when meditating on the Passion.

“The long-suffering, though apparently serene Roberte, her skirt unaccountably ablaze, is swiftly undressed by a mysterious male figure. Octave encourages the subsequent attacks on his wife, somehow convinced that these dramatic interludes will reveal to him her spiritual essence.”

- Brian Dillon, “In the Realm of the Senses”

Klossowski’s novel aimed toward establishing an erotic theatre of the heart through repetitions and Sadean ritualism. In some ways, the book wears blinders that protect it from its own idiosyncrasies. Extraordinary emotional sadism guised as generosity is one such blinding.

The book’s patriarch, an elderly cleric named Octave, emerges as a paterfamilias. Unable to fix the world, Octave is determined to rule by generosity in his own household. The “rule of hospitality” gives any visitor or guest the opportunity to make sexual use of Roberte, his wife.

Antoine, the nephew, is simultaneously disgusted and entertained by the strange sexual arrangements and conversations generated by the rule of hospitality in his uncle’s house.

The word “rule” creates meaningful tension in the novel. As a noun, “rule” refers to:

1. one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere. (i.e. "the rules of the game were understood")

2. control of, or dominion over, an area or people (i.e. “the revolt ended Russian imperialist rule”)

In its verb form, “rule” projects power and establishes hierarchy; it designates whose word makes the law, and what this law covers. To rule is to:

1. exercise ultimate power or authority over an area and its people (i.e. “the legislative process of American democracy is ruled by corporations”)

2. prounounce authoritatively and legally to be the case. (i.e. “Octave ruled that the rule of generosity would govern his home.”)

The rule of hospitality is simply the rule of Octave’s property in his wife—-for only someone who owns a body can lend it. And only someone who is owned by another can be lended or shared or made available as an act of graciousness or virtue.

Roberte’s uncanny physical resemblance to Klossowski’s wife is not a coincidence—Denise is Roberte — and the name, or the act of naming, is critical to Klossowski’s view of fiction and language, to quote:

Fascinated by the name Roberte as a sign, while I was in the garden seeing nothing more of the sunny greenery around me having no other vision than the unstable penumbra in which the glow of her ungloved hand played – I resolved to describe what might happen in the penumbra, which was illusory. In the name Roberte I referred all that I saw, which I would not have been able to see without this name.

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In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey spares no ink in outlining Klossowski’s influence on his subject. “Klossowski's novels and drawings make up an imaginary world in which erotic, religious and philosophical themes merge, and, being a self-confessed monomaniac, he has little interest in anything outside that world,” Macey writes, using monomania as the tiny trampoline which bounces him into a defense of Klossowski’s esoterica:

Although his work — and especially the trilogy known as Les Lois de l'hospitalité — is sometimes dismissed as misogynist and even pornographic, he insists that it has a mystical content and belongs to a gnostic tradition. Maurice Blanchot endorsed Klossowski's claims when he described his writings as "a mixture of erotic austerity and theological debauchery".

Both the novels and the drawings are sequences of scenes, understood in the theatrical sense of that term, and of humiliating encounters between Roberte and characters from a threatening commedia dell'arte. Roberte becomes an object of exchange, circulating endlessly in an erotic economy. She is raped and assaulted, is seduced and seduces, and takes on many different identities but remains unpossessed, inviolable, it being the author's conviction that the deepest level of individuality is a core which is both non-communicable and non-exchangeable. Like the tableaux vivants imagined and staged by de Sade's libertines, Klossowski's words and images betray an obsession with representation itself: representations of plays, of drawings, of drawings of scenes from plays, books about books. They are a theater of simulacra in which everything is represented, and nothing is real. The theatrical scenes that make up the trilogy, in particular, originated in planned drawings that were not actually executed.

In “In the Realm of the Senses,” Brian Dillon looked closely at the various poses in Klossowski’s work:

Klossowski once finished a series of drawings with the signature Pierre, le maladroit (Pierre the clumsy). In an artistic career that spanned half a century he could not really be said to have honed his technique. Rather, he worked tirelessly on the elaboration of certain obsessions, notably the insertion of the face and body of his wife, Denise - the model for the extravagantly ravished Roberte - into an apparently unending succession of erotic tableaux. The drawings are resolutely awkward. Their solecisms of scale and proportion are not so much evidence of formal naivety as invitations to address something that is, for Klossowski, far more pressing: the realm of gesture.

Time and again, whatever the prodigiously imagined scenario into which the artist has thrust her, Roberte adopts the same pose. Everything in these drawings, which expose her to grips and gazes, either malign or merely curious (as in the many images where she is seized by small boys), is actually in the arrangement of her hands. Whether beset by the sinister guardsman in Roberte ce soir, pawed and pored over by adolescents or cast in further fictionalized settings (the classical rape of Lucretia by Tarquin, the strange arrival of Jonathan Swift's diminutive Gulliver at the end of her bed), Roberte holds one hand close and closed, the other raised and open. Often her raised hand shields the eyes of her attacker while the other is thrust between her legs (the cue for questionable conjectures by Klossowski's narrators as to whether she is protecting herself or guiding her assailant). But the pose is not always a response to violence; it is to be seen too in the drawings of Roberte (or Denise) alone. One hand curled, the other splayed, Roberte, as the title of one drawing has it, is 'mad about her body'.

This pose has venerable antecedents. It is there, for example, in Raphael's The School of Athens (1510-11), in which Aristotle appears with one hand open to the world and the other on his Ethics. In the 'pantomime of spirits' performed across the ceaselessly replicated stage of Klossowski's art these twin gestures denote nothing less than the theatricalization of thought. Roberte, it turns out, is the true philosopher, not the desiccated Octave. Her limbs mime the attitude of a body and mind suspended between the spiritual and the carnal: 'the gesture of a silent physiognomy frozen in its expression: of denial? Confession? Or both at the same time?' Consistently, too, her face seems utterly detached from the fate of her body, casting slyly amused and sidelong glances out of the frame. In the end, says Klossowski, Roberte triumphs: in contrast to the Sadean extremes of torture visited on the adolescent female form, Roberte's body is transformed into a kind of pure spiritual drama whose final act is the assertion of her philosophical, moral and physical maturity.

“The penumbra, the glow of her epidermis, the glove, these are so many designations not of things existing here within my reach, but forming a set in conformity with the unreal penumbra …”

- Pierre Klossowski, Roberte ce soire

The speaker troubles the line between representation and imagination, or publicity and private fantasy, by interrogating his own intentions. Is it malicious? Is it epiphanic? Octave reads himself into the helplessness of the prophet who has been called by something greater outside himself to do the unthinkable:

“Will I still claim that it is not “representation” and that thought belongs to itself alone, not as my faculty, but as an intensity that found me here, in the middle of the greenery?… Will I say it is not I who designate what I understand by penumbra but thought, outside of me, which sees itself in the terms penumbra, epidermis, glove, etc.?

But haven’t I said that the sign’s malice consisted in answering, as name, to a physiognomy exterior to the sign?

Is it unthinkable if he takes pleasure from thinking it? I find myself thinking about close reading in these circumstances. I find the unthinkable as an aesthetic direction which rides the fabric shared by the sacred and the profane.

Klossowski’s sign projects a shadow onto “the reality of the world,” and this shadow covers the physical features and body “exterior to the sign that it dissumulated under this name.” The problem is that perfect overlap doesn’t explain the shadow, the part of Roberte he can’t know without imagining. He is, in his own words:

. . . unable to limit myself to the simple coincidence of the name with this physiognomy seeking instead an equivalent to this coincidence, under the constraint the sign exercised over me, yet seeking the sort of equivalent as much to escape my madness as its constraint, though not being able to keep myself to the shadow of the sign…

From the moment I set myself to describing this very physiognomy in the notation of the utterances flowing, outside of time, from the name Roberte, and from the moment that, in these discontinuous facts, it figured, no longer by its mere coincidence with the name, but as physiognomy, which until then was exterior to the sign that had covered it over with its shadow, the description of the shadow itself came to establish the contours of the physiognomy as its participation in external reality, and this physiognomy emerged as if from itself from the shadow spread over reality by the sign….

The “laws of hospitality” that fascinated the Foucault of later years appears in Klossowski’s early portraits of Roberte, particularly in the relationship between the name and the sign (in a passage that reminds me of the passage on naming in Kate Briggs’ latest):

What did the silence of this physiognomy opposed to its name as sign amount to? Was the sign to be taken as a portrait? Wasn’t it the model, since it had become this sign?… Instead of the equivalent to the madness I had avoided, I found between the silence of the physiognomy and the silence of the appreciation of the outside, a portrait. But since it was still a question of juggling the unique sign, I wanted to exploit this silence of the portrait to make a painting… Then, this portrait, suddenly peopled with other figures, became a painting destined to teach through its image. But the lesson taught by the image is only the institution of a custom: the laws of hospitality.

Foucault was particularly interested in Klossowski's Le Bain de Diane (1956), a series of drawings that pivot around the myth of Diana and Actaeon. He described it as a "text dedicated to the interpretation of a far-away legend and a myth of distance (a man punished for having to approach the naked divinity)... Diana reduplicated her own desire, Actaeon metamorphosed both by his desire and by that of Diana."

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Paris, 1935.

Klossowski meets Walter Benjamin. More than three decades later, Klossowski will describe this encounter retrospectively, in a 1969 essay for Le Monde titled “Entre Marx et Fourier”:

I met Walter Benjamin during one of the meetings of Contre-Attaque—the name of the ephemeral fusion of groups headed by Andre Breton and Georges Bataille, in 1935. Later he assiduously attended the College of Sociology, an emanation intended to make “exoteric” the closed and secret group Acephale (crystallized around Bataille, following his rupture with Breton). From this point on he was sometimes present at our secret meetings.

Disconcerted by the ambiguity of “acephalean” a-theology, Walter Benjamin disagreed with us, arguing that the conclusions he then was drawing from his analysis of German bourgeois intellectual evolution, namely, that the “increasing metaphysical and political buildup of what was incommunicable” (according to the antinomies of capitalist industrial society) was what prepared the favorable ground for nazism. For the time being he was trying to apply his analysis to our own situation. He wanted to keep us from slipping; despite an appearance of ab­solute incompatibility we were taking the risk of playing into the hands of a “prefascist aestheticism .” He clung to this interpretative scheme, thoroughly colored by Lukacs’s theories, in order to surmount his own confusion and sought to enclose us in this kind of dilemma.

There was no possible agreement about this point of his analysis, whose pre­ suppositions did not coincide at all with the basic ideas and past history of the groups formed successively by Breton and Bataille, especially Acephale. On the other hand, we questioned him even more insistently about what we sensed was his most authentic basis, namely, his personal version of a “phalansterian” re­vival. Sometimes he talked about it to us as if it were something “esoteric”, si­multaneously “erotic and artisanal”, underlying his explicit Marxist concep­tions . Having the means of production in common would permit substituting for the abolished social classes a redistribution of society into affective classes. A freed industrial production, instead of mastering affectivity, would expand its forms and organize its exchanges, in the sense that work would be in collusion with lust, and cease to be the other, punitive, side of the coin.

Paris, 1937.

Walter Benjamin follows the Moscow trials in shock. Dennis Hollier describes Benjamin’s silence as a sort of “political aphasia”. In a letter dated 9 July 1937, Benjamin tells Fritz Lieb that “the destructive effect of the events in Russia, […] will necessarily continue to spread”:

What is sobering about this is not the hasty indignation, of unshakeable combatants for ‘freedom of thought’ what seems to me far sadder, and at the same time far more necessary, is the silence of those who think, who, precisely because they think, have a hard time considering themselves as people who know. That is my case.

Paris, 1938.

In the days prior to the Munich Crisis, Georges Bataille sat in Paris and penned a letter to Michel and Zette Leiris:

 “I only have this to add: whatever one could say about any other subject wouldn’t be any more cheerful. I like to hope that you don’t read the newspapers (this exercise has never been more futile): the only serious and informed people that I have seen say that all the reasoning and all the interpretation are absurd, that we have absolutely no way of knowing what may happen. I hope you are enjoying this bad September without a care.”

Bataille’s gesturing towards silence will match that of Blanchot. Once the German occupation of France begins, Bataille will maintain this silence throughout, with the “we have absolutely no way of knowing what may happen” becoming a thread in the writing of the disaster. Or the silences of Edmond Jabes’ deserts.

In the early 1970's, Foucault's politics led to the icing-over of his friendship with Klossowski. Although the friendship crumbled, David Macey insists that "it has its monuments”. Among them, this specular coincidence:

In the late 1980s, Klossowski found a moldering piece of canvas in Balthus's château and interpreted the patches of damp on it to create two versions of a drawing entitled “The Great Confinement II” (1988). Both include a portrait of Foucault; in the second version he is surrounded by portraits of Strindberg, Nietzsche, Bataille and an anonymous pope, while Freud, to Foucault's right, contemplates a sketch of Leonardo's “Madonna and Child with St. Anne”.

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Birmingham, 2023.

Au fin: there is gratitude to saladofpearls for the quotations and thoroughly-sourced citations, and to Rainer J. Hanshe for his bibliography, and to Daniel W. Smith, for his decades of prodiguous scholarship and engagement of Klossowski’s work—for his diligent monomania.

As I was typing my notes earlier this week, goosebumps met me halfway between the shame of deadlines and the glee of discovering that Dennis Cooper blogged (extenstively) about Klossowski on August 23, 2003. Cooper mentions a special issue of Diacritics, edited by Ian James and Russell Ford, will be (or maybe was) dedicated to Klossowski. Lest monomania prove contagious, I will leave this vessel in order to board a more fashionable one and receive a paycheck (while apoologizing in advance for the gloss that leaves the K disconnected).

Modiano and his critic: A dialogue between texts.

A collaged dialogue between Anka Muhlstein’s essay on Modiano (translated by Anthony Shugaar) and Patrick Modiano’s 2014 Nobel Prize Speech (translated by James Hardiker)

*

MU: He was born in 1945 (for nearly twenty years, he claimed he was born in 1947, the birth year of his younger brother, who died at the age of ten) in Boulogne-Billancourt, just outside of Paris.

MO: Like everyone else born in 1945, I was a child of the war and more precisely, because I was born in Paris, a child who owed his birth to the Paris of the occupation.

MU: His mother managed to leave her native Flanders in June 1942 through the protection of a German officer; she had landed minor film roles back home, and in Paris she worked for a German-run film production company. 

MO:  I do not think I had ever been more acutely aware of how blind a novelist is when it comes to his own books, and how much more the readers know about what he has written than he does.

MU: Modiano’s father was born in France. He never declared his Jewish identity during the war, surviving under a false name and making a living through shady means, all of them connected to the black market.

MO: It was all a bad dream, with vague remorse for having been in some sense survivors. Later on, when their children asked them questions about that period and that Paris, their answers were evasive. 

MU: He is a journalist’s nightmare [...] he gets tangled up in his own sentences in which the word occurring most frequently is bizarre . . . 

MO: Calling to mind the way school lessons distinguish between the written and the oral, a novelist . . . is accustomed to keeping quiet, and if he wants to imbibe an atmosphere, he must blend in with the crowd. 

MU: . . . he seems to be lost in a dense fog.

MO: He listens to conversations without appearing to, and if he steps in it is always in order to ask some discreet questions so as to improve his understanding of the women and men around him. 

MU: . . . he gestures wildly with his long arms as if they were the sails of a windmill; and by the time he has finished he hasn’t explained much. 

MO: His speech is hesitant because he is used to crossing out his words [...] when he takes the floor, he no longer has any means at his disposal to correct his stumbling speech.

MU: Modiano is no talker, he is a writer.

MO: The reader knows more about a book than the author himself.

MU: When he was fifteen, he became close to Raymond Queneau, a friend of his mother’s. 

MO: A novelist can never be his own reader … he has only has a partial and confused impression of his books, like a painter creating a fresco on the ceiling, lying flat on a scaffold and working on the details, too close up, with no vision of the work as a whole.

MU: He enrolled at the university basically to avoid military service. 

MO: You hope that the adults will read what you write. That way, they will have to listen to you without interrupting and they will jolly well know what it is you have on your chest.

MU: His father showed no interest in him and once Modiano reached legal age he broke off all relations with him.

MO: Faced with the silence of our parents we worked it all out as if we had lived it ourselves.

MU: Without a word to anyone, he wrote a novel and sent the manuscript to Queneau, who recommended it to Gallimard. In June 1967, Modiano learned that his book was accepted.

MO: The Paris of the occupation was always a kind of primordial darkness. Without it I would never have been born.

MU: Is it possible to be at once a Jew and an anti-Semite? 

MO:  A novelist is often a sleepwalker, so steeped is he in what he must write, and it is natural to worry when he crosses the road in case he is run over. Do not forget, though, the extreme precision of sleepwalkers who walk over roofs without ever falling off.

MU: His characters develop in a society where the most sordid arrangements bring together Jews on the run, secret collaborators, crooks, Gestapo agents, impostors, and victims.

MO: Ultimately, how far away exactly does a novelist remain? At the margins of life in order to describe it, because if you are immersed in it – in the action – the image you have of it is mixed up. 

MU: This fog that envelops people and places explains a lack of depth and individuality in Modiano’s characters. 

MO: Swans often appear in 19th century poetry – in Baudelaire or Mallarmé. 

MU: The author, and therefore the reader, are left on the outside, giving rise to the feeling that one is always rereading the same book. 

MO: And here is proof that a writer is indelibly marked with the date of his birth and by his time, even if he was not directly involved in political action, even if he gives the impression of being a recluse shut away in what people call his ‘ivory tower’. 

MU: A thousand contradictory identities coexist inside him . . .

MO: It is only by actually reading his books that we gain intimacy with a writer.

MU: Proust is not only quoted at length and caricatured as a snobbish, high-society Jew, but more importantly shares a dual identity with Modiano, that of a half-Jew, both Jew and non-Jew, an identity that torments him.

MO: And also the lives of the thousands upon thousands of other, unknown, people passing by on the street or in the Métro passageways at rush hour.

Serge Gainsbourg's "Histoire de Melody Nelson" (1971)

THE ALBUM

Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) is twenty-eight minutes of seamlessness stitched from shared riffs and melodies that return in swirled variants and disjunctions. Gainsbourg collaborated with composer Jean-Claude Vannier for this concept album dominated by what Tom Ewing has so aptly called “Herbie Flowers’ treacly bass” with its slow, sweved funk.

Again, Tom Ewing puts it so well:

That bass is the first sound you hear on Melody Nelson, quietly tracking up and down in a windscreen-wiper rhythm: Gainsbourg starts talking in French 30 seconds later, describing a night drive in a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. The album is routinely described as "cinematic," but the music is more of a mindtrack than a soundtrack—-a tar pit of introspection when Gainsbourg's brooding narrator is alone at the record's beginning and end, then giddy and savage by turns as he conducts his affair with the 15-year-old Melody across the short tracks in the album's middle.

Although Gainsbourg abandons his archetypal vocals in it, replacing them with a fuzzed breathiness, accomplished by drawing the mic close to the mouth, there is an intersection between myth and modern in it, a supple paean to Baudelairean decadence.

I think of line-breaks often when listening to this album because of the way it uses space and breaks to create a series. The music veers from freewheeling guitar, funk style bass guitar, spoken-word vocalizations, and lush, deep orchestrated string and choral arrangements by Jean-Claude Vannier who composed almost the entire music in collaboration with Gainsbourg for the album.

There are seven songs total, and the first and last songs are the longest, both running close to seven minutes and forty seconds a piece, built around the same bass lines (though Gainsbourg brings in a Greek chorus to round out the final song). It’s ethereal, funktastic, buzz-pocked, and trip-hopped.

Melody 7:37
Ballade de Melody Nelson 2:01
Valse De Melody (Version Instrumentale) 1:32
Ah! Melody 1:50
L'Hotel particulier 4:06
En melody 3:27
Cargo culte 7:41

Serge Gainsbourg does vocals and composition, while Jane Birkin enters as the persona of Melody, and carries those vocals. Alan Parker plays the electric guitar. Dave Richmond and Herbie Flowers play the bass guitar. Dougie Wright does the drums. Jean-Claude Vannier plays the piano, organ, harmonium, and cymbals. A French youth choir provides the choral voices at the end. Jean-Luc Ponty plays haunting violin parts.

As for influence, the album has “officially” touched musicians and songwriters from Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, Beck, Tricky, Air, Faith No More, Broadcast, Massive Attack, David Holmes, Cibo Matto, Portishead, Stereolab, Michael Stipe, and Neil Hannon.

*

Backstory. Gainsbourg had been writing chansons for a decade, and a feted affair with Brigitte Bardot prompted his most successful song-writing period. But Gainsbourg’s work was still classified as pop, still pop enough to win Eurovision.

For someone who considered himself an artist — and who studied painting before destroying most of his work in a moment of frustration— Gainsbourg did not rest comfortably with popular culture, or the forms of fame it promised. He still considered himself an artist, a mind of multiple mediums, so he vowed to make weighty, dark, novelistic art through the disposable medium of pop culture. He would subvert the sweetness of the chanson by bringing it into dialogue with other instruments and a story. A plot. Enter Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a book Gainsbourg admired for its relentless darkness. Darran Anderson says what fascinated Gainsbourg about Lolita was how it revolved around “the narrator, the male ego and all the obsessive, destructive decadence and delusion therein”:

Like the book, it is an album about the Beast, masquerading as a study of the Beauty.

*

Three years before this album, Gainsbourg met Jane Birkin on the set of Slogan, in which he played a rather louche Frenchman who falls in love with the attractive English lead, played by Birkin. The May ‘68 riots changed the air in Paris. Gainsbourg and Birkin fell in love. And so it began — a romantic and creative partnership whose duet, “Je T’aime…Moi Non Plus”, was quickly banned in both France and England. In 1970, Gainsbourg imagined the form he thought could carry his obsession for Birkin, and this form leaned into a cinematic score, an album which alternated between words, music, songs, images, and metafictional traces.

Jane Birkin, who had become Gainsbourg’s wife, served as both image, sound, and inspiration: she is on the cover art of the album; she provides the voice of Melody Nelson. The metafictional plot begins with the middle-aged male narrator driving his Rolls Royce Silver Ghost along a road at night, until he accidentally knows a teenaged girl off her bike. This is Melody Nelson, a young British girl, whom the narrator rescues and then takes to a hotel, where they have sex. The music carries us through this strange, sudden love affair with short asides and conversations between the couple. When Melody catches a plane back to her family in England, the male narrator is heartbroken, devastated. He performs an African Cargo Cult ritual in the hopes that it will cause his love to return. But magic doesn’t always do what we want— the threshold it crosses alters everything— and we are given to understand that the ritual causes a plane crash, presumably the plane carrying Melody home.

Gainsbourg had recently read of the African cargo cults that prayed for Western-built planes to crash on their land, believing these technological wonders to be gifts from the gods unfairly bestowed upon the wrong people. In order to keep his and Birkin/ Melody’s love pure, he decided, she had no choice but to die by his hands (fictionally-speaking). As an ode, bonkers; as an honest outpouring of one man’s obsessive love, timelessly fascinating.

Why does the cargo cult ritual cause the plane crash? Is it because the male narrator appropriated a ritual whose mastery he couldn’t claim? Does it reflect his subconscious longing that the beloved should die rather than be permitted to leave? Does the plane actually crash or is this part of the story the narrator offers to end his feelings for the beloved —to close the narrative?

Aside on Benjamin Biolay’s “Dans Le Merco Benz”

Before laying out Gainsbourg’s album, I want to note something that has always struck me, and yet elides most commentary on Benjamin Biolay’s early work, namely, Melody Nelson’s influence. Biolay definitely borrows a little in his video for “Dans Le Merco Benz”, which stars Chiara Mastorianni, his then-wife, whose voice also provides background choral vocals. Unlike Gainsbourg, Biolay focuses on the vehicle itself, the Mercedes Benz that has replaced the Rolls Royce as the car of European luxury.

Melody 7:37

The video for “Melody” was created by Jean-Christophe Averty, and it ran as a TV film in France produced several years after the album’s release.

Jane Birkin plays Melody both vocally and visually in this album. You can watch this “Melody Nelson,” where Jane Birkin joins as a background voice and the character. The background is critical. Melody is Serge’s invention.

Ballade de Melody Nelson 2:01

The ballade form here begins with a conversation between Gainsbourg and Melody in spoken word, which then shifts into melodic chanson form, with Melody’s voice serving as a soft instrumentation rather than a vocal. Here’s a translation:

HE: This is the story of
SHE: Melody Nelson
HE: Apart from me, no one ever held her
in his arms
Does this surprise you?
So be it.
She had love, poor
SHE: Melody Nelson
HE: Yes, she had tons
Though her days were numbered
14 autumns
15 summers

And it continues a bit more, to end with the speaker asserting the possessive form — “My Melody”— which he finishes by describing:

Precious little fool
You were the condition
Sine qua non

Valse De Melody (Version Instrumentale) 1:32

Gainsbourg borrows the waltz form to bring in music. And he subverts the stipulation of the title, namely, that this is an “instrumental version,” by singing softly through it— or insisting the voice is an instrument.

Ah! Melody 1:50

A sickness, I don’t know what I offer you.

L'Hotel particulier 4:06

This is where the love affair takes place, in the hotel. The setting. The drums soften the entry but also add layers which feel ominous. (Tom Ewing: “Gainsbourg's voice shudders with lust and dread, and the music responds, flares of piano and string breaking into the song over an impatient bassline.”)

En melody 3:27

Melody voulut revoir le ciel de Sunderland
Elle prit le 707
L'avion cargo de nuit
Mais le pilote automatique aux commandes de l'appareil
Fit une erreur fatale à Melody

Melody wanted to see Sunderland’s sky again
She took the 707
The cargo plane’s night flight
But the autopilot in control of the device
Made an error fatal to Melody

Cargo culte 7:41

In “Cargo Culte,” the final song, the speaker is looking for Melody — and he asks the Sirens where she is — and a chorus of Greek Sirens fills in the space between his spoken word chanson-style monologue. And repetition structures the mythos of the album: “Cargo Culte” returns to the melodies and motion of the first track, “Melody,” adding only those wordless chorales to dampen the return.

The montage of antiquated objects, the peripatetic searching, the drive to find Melody among curiosities form part Gainsbourg’s aesthetic in this album.

Jason Draper described its tonal energy best: “The closing Cargo Culte alone rises to such intensity, it’s virtually impossible to hear it without picturing Gainsbourg plunging the knife into his own heart before stabbing a Gitane out in the wound.”

The Making of Melody Nelson

Turning Jane Birkin into Melody Nelson was its own art. Belle Hutton explains how Melody’s red hair was prompted by a bad mood:

Gainsbourg was late to set, and when he arrived could see that Birkin had grown impatient. “He opens his briefcase, where he always carries his wads of ‘Pascal’ bank notes and packets of Gitanes, and pulls out an auburn wig – red, really – that he puts on his head to play the clown and make her laugh,” recalls Frank. “Suddenly the atmosphere relaxes. Then Jane tries on the wig, looks in the mirror, and becomes Melody.”

Tony Frank, the photographer who took the iconic cover photos, released a recent “booklet”, Bleu Melody, which includes contact sheets, proofs, behind-the-scenes imagery and slides from the shoot, a series of “Melody mementoes.”

The toy monkey which covers Birkin’s breasts in the cover photo was a personal treasure, a toy given to her as a child after her uncle won it at a carnival.

Tony Frank says that Birkin carried this monkey —her “Monkey”— everywhere in a large wicker basket that she used as a purse. Legend has it that Monkey wound up in Gainsbourg’s coffin after his death. It was Jane’s final gift to him.

Realizing that he’d created a memorable monster, Gainsbourg named his publishing company Melody Nelson in honor of his fictional muse—- but then got distracted, producing a new album of unremarkable acoustic songs that feel uncomfortably safe in comparison.

Tom Ewing notes that “Herbie Flowers, whose bass is the undertow pulling the album together, surfaced a year later playing on Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side", whose bassline is the first ripple of Melody Nelson's wider pop culture influence.”

“Since then it's been left to others—- Jarvis Cocker, Beck, Tricky, Air, Broadcast—- to pick up this record's breadcrumb trail,” Ewing adds. “But Gainsbourg's dark focus, and Vannier's responsiveness, aren't easily equalled.

Vannier on working with Serge: “It was really a collaboration: I wrote what I wanted, he wrote what he wanted.”

Here’s the video for “Melody Nelson,” where Jane Birkin joins as a background voice and the character.

Live performances & More on Jean-Claude Vannier

Gainsbourg’s partner in composition, Jean-Claude Vannier, also composed for Air, David Holmes, Stereolab, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, Portishead, and Beck, whose 2002 track "Paper Tiger" from Sea Change is extremely close to the distinctive Histoire de Melody Nelson sound. Vannier has spoken more recently about his experiences with the making of Melody Nelson in an interview.

Vannier performed the album live at London's Barbican on October 21, 2006 with guest vocalists Jarvis Cocker, Badly Drawn Boy, Brigitte Fontaine, The Bad Seeds' Mick Harvey and lead singer from Super Furry Animals, Gruff Rhys. Vannier performed the album in its entirety alongside his own solo album L'Enfant assassin des mouches. Publicity for the Barbican concert revealed that the musicians used for the album were Dougie Wright, Big Jim Sullivan, Herbie Flowers and Vic Flick who all joined Vannier for the concert. The BBC Concert Orchestra, the Crouch End Festival Chorus and a children's string quintet were part of the show.

In October 2008 22nd & 23rd Jean-Claude Vannier performed the album live at the Cité de la Musique with guest vocalists Mathieu Amalric, Brigitte Fontaine, Brian Molko (Placebo), Martina Topley Bird, Daniel Darc, Clotilde Hesme, Seaming To. Also performing were Herbie Flowers (bass), Claude Engel (guitar), Pierre-Alain Dahan (drums). Jean Claude Vannier also performed the L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches. The Lamoureux Orchestra, the Yound Choir of Paris and a children's string quintet were also part of the show.

On August 28, 2011, Jean-Claude Vannier participated in A Tribute to Serge Gainsbourg at the Hollywood Bowl. The artists that performed Gainsbourg's songs that evening included Beck, Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl, Mike Patton, Zola Jesus, Victoria Legrand (singer of indie band Beach House), Ed Droste (singer of indie band Grizzly Bear) and Serge's son Lulu Gainsbourg. The second half of the evening included a performance of the album with Vannier conducting. Each of the album's songs were performed by different combinations of the evening's artists, backed by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and the Cal State Fullerton chorale. American actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt also participated in the album's performance.

On an interesting side-note, Lulu Gainsbourg now lives in NYC, and swears never to move back to France. But he has covered a number of his father’s songs, including Melody.

"Ecrire" by Marguerite Duras, an unofficial translation.

Marguerite Duras published this brief sketch, “Ecrire,” in French in the spring of 1990, the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’m leaving it here in my unofficial translation for those who might be interested.

*

There is the scandal . . . that of literature. I think literature is scandalous, because it is scarce and it drives people crazy.

In other times, I believed— I repeated this for decades—that anyone could write. I hymned this across every tonality.

I don’t believe it anymore.

I don’t know what it means to write, at all, but I know that everyone cannot do it.

I can have a written page, there. We can read it. The page is tangible. But I don’t know at all what will be on the next page before tackling it.

It’s very aleatory. Sometimes, we fear dying before the page is full, because we know, regardless. . . we know the benchmarks, we know the event we are aiming towards, but we must bring the text to that. One must make it happen, venture the entire voyage.

Writing, I think, is essentially an activity that requires one to think about death every day.

They have said I write about writing.

But I think everyone who writes, writes about writing . . .

Which is to say that this species of the word’s infinite indefiniteness, of the image, of the theme, of the memory, of love, these things must obstruct those people, those people who do not write.

There is a choice that operates, an organic choice that operates

When we don’t write, I don’t know what we do, I can’t even imagine, but we must continue in a forest that never closes, on you; because there, when we write, it is the forest that closes; you are trapped inside it.

I believe that by dint of writing, by living there, in the writing, I have arrived in a sort of monoculture, a mono-life, a life near monotone, the accidents being nothing but the books.

Notes on Antoine Volodine's "Minor Angels": Part 2

Homage, homage (homage, homage)
Is coming back around (is coming back around)
Coming back through you (coming back through you)
Is something I can't understand (something I can't understand)

”HOMAGE”

To pick up from where I dropped the ball, namely, somewhere between the angels and the archaoelogy, and proceed into Volodine’s novel, Minor Angels (translated by Jordan Stump) with carpool at my throat—

Names change; they designate nothing more than a moment in time. Volodine continues vexing identity by having the angels play double roles, living under different names, acting out different parts of themselves.

Identity is ‘fragmented’, and the names toggle between persons and cover stories. So we meet "Sofia" in the nursing home, where she sorts and delivers mail to the crones, and the role of letters is salvific, as letters carry the words of other worlds into the prisons of this one. But the experiments conducted on the crones to study their immortality are finished: scientific interest has moved on. What remains are the scent memories of apparatuses, rubber sheets, and dental prostheses. The smell of the future is rich in plastic apparatus!

Every angel does the grunt-work speaking for ghosts. There is no single voice that remains singular.

"Unknown martyrs and anonymous mostly red peoples spoke through the voice of the old women, and now they speak through the voice of Will Scheideman."

Here, Volodine applies what he has called "the practice of homage," allowing the voices of the missing to be taken up by others who refuse their disappearance, who reject the feel of ending, itself.

“I’ve never done something where the sound alone is already an entire film…
where there’s so much to hear simultaneously, because so much is being told.”

- Wim Wenders on Wings of Desire, with its overhearing angels

CRONES, EPIC CORRECTIVES, AND FAILED REVOLUTIONISTS

The post-cataclysmic landscape of Minor Angels includes the "battered facades" of big avenues, the "gaping wounds" where buildings once stood, the ruins of consumerist temples and shopping malls; this field of debris continues expanding, swallowing, enveloping the world. The "barbarism" of the present is laid, loosely, against the lustrousness of remembered revolutionary ideals. The background noise is the "roar of the marketplace," but the real sound, the anchor, is the "clapping of little waves, the clapping made by loving bodies in an embrace." There are prisoners and those who demand their own execution for betraying the cause – for allowing the mafias and capitalists to take over.

The 12th narract belongs to Varvalia Lodanka, one of the formative revolutionists, a “crone” who invokes the choral repetitions of Greek tragedy, retracing the litany "before us, we see," layering memories, names, and places from motion which resembles the percussive effects of  a jazz brush circling a top-hat drum. Lodanka names the offenders: "the multi-national mafia", the "duplicitous language" that erases the poor, the present, the folk wisdom. 

Will Scheidenmann slumps on the bed in Varvalia Lodanka's yurt, a place he never felt at home, imagining the sixteen years since he had left, and the time before his birth: "the time of the dormitory, where his grandmother's manipulated his embryonic form and growled over his body to fill him with their vision of the world." 

Annoyed by the disruptive voices of memory, Will, who "hates being interrupted when ... reciting a strange narract," realizes the crones know him so well that they recognize him in any costume, any voice, any uniform. 

After a crone calls him out on the narract, Will admits:

"I gave him that name so I wouldn't seem to be forever speaking of myself and never of anyone else. But it was me." 

It is always me or us in the post-exotic oneirism; the one includes the countless. The we invokes the silenced. Does this conflict with the speakers’ refusals to be indicted for the past, as one sees in the monologue on “what matters” written "in the language of today and no other”?

The past is not something he can be responsible for, the speaker assures the reader.

"To build new ruins without shame, or, at least, to live without shame in the endless ruins before them:" this is what Volodine's characters were free to do after "the corrective epic of our Varvalia Lodenko, her appeals for a massacre of the powerful, her nostalgia for a total abolition of every sort of privilege" had taken place. The question isn't whether Varvalia's daydream was "right-minded". To interrogate it in this way would be to re-enact its massacres in reaction, to answer by affirming the importance of the end. Varvalia's goal was "to rip out the human roots of unhappiness"; another angel admits to assisting her with assassinations on an as-needed basis. The matter-of-fact narrative tone isn’t quite confessional, nor is it penitent.

“Mao Zedong said that the revolution “is not a dinner party,” Volodine has said:

Post-exoticism stages stories and projects images that have nothing to do with elegant descriptions of “dinner parties.” The stories often take place in the ruins of war, after the disasters of ethnic cleansings, after failed revolutions, atrocious counterrevolutions, in societies where violence, social injustice, and capricious masters hold sway.

Books and stories preserve the past but they also defy it completely, and forge new fantasies that may become actionable as a future. “What we had called post-exoticism,” Volodine writes in J. T. Mahany’s translation of Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven:

“ . . . was a construction connected to revolutionary shamanism and literature, literature that was either written by hand or learned by heart and recited, as the administration through the years would sometimes forbid us any paper material; it was an interior construction, a withdrawal, a secret welcoming land, but also something offensive that participated in the plot of certain unarmed individuals against the capitalist world and its countless ignominies.”

Volodine has said a “backfiction” lies behind post-exotic narratives. Again, one senses an unarticulated loyalty on the author’s part—-something he wishes to say without being responsible for having said it. In that sense, he is a time-bound as the rest of us.

ASIDE WHEREIN MY TIME DIFFERS FROM THAT OF THE ANGELS

If I were a better person, I’d excerpt the long quotes on advantages and hypocrisy found on page 32. But no one has the proper time to fulfill the duties of imagining to be the person they determined as better. My time differs from that of the angels, in the fullness of its etc.

THE PORT OF THE “WE” WE MUST BE UNTO OTHERS

In narract 34, Malecka Bayarlag describes life on a ship in a port plagued by power outages, physical fights among sailors in hard-bitten poses. As a self-described “subhuman” with some knowledge of shamanism, Malika locates a town in Peru from the dreams of a woman he slept with, and the dreams pass through the bodies of lovers like settings. This is the setting Volodine and gives us, namely, the place as trumped by others who passed through prior. The perspective tangoes through multiple minds remembering lovers, beds, ports. These "interior worlds" impinge continuously on conversations between characters, as when a ship captain remembers "his most absurd convictions," namely the love a man has for a son back when sons existed, when fatherhood was a locus of identity.

Safe harbor vs. the Untermenge one must be to others. But safe harbor is simply the act of narrating —- or “narracting”— the story. Hannah Arendt’s ghost tips her cigarette holder over narract 41, in which Constanzo Cossu describes the mass displacements of the End-Times, and the significance of the refugee's legal status. The refugee tries to buy his way to safety with gold, but the ship will not accept him. He begs the watchman to let him on as a company baggage, or to be in the untermenge category, or even to be added as a "a cadaver . . . As miscellaneous merchandise" or a "found object."  Finally, he begs the watchman to accept him as "an extraterrestrial covered with ants,"  but the watchman does not reply. It's business as usual for borders.

“THIS CONFUSION OF ONE WORD FOR ANOTHER”

In a month without rain or magnetic storms, a narract shifts from Witold Yanschog to the second person address. The epistolary nature of the narract glimmers after claims of "shamanically-assisted copulation," which the speaker asserts as "this confusion of one word for another." 

"I wouldn't like to be penetrated by an admirer of the capitalist system,” one lover says to another in quotation.

A character quotes his love interest back to her across memory, and then overnarrates Witold Yanschog, who might "dream of her and her naked body as he lay on top of you."  The next line goes on to explain or qualify: “I say you, I used the second person singular to avoid continually saying Bella Mardirassian, and so it won't seem that I only talk about myself and my own experiences.”

This is how the son speaks to the crones who want to know what happened to their friends that were imprisoned. The fate of the disappeared is the hearth and hedge of this novel. At one point, Scheidemann does locate himself in time, saying he has been in the yurts for sixteen years since being pardoned. In the apocalypse, as in the beginning, "the distances were not on a the human scale.

Antoine Volodine in conversation with Jeffrey Zuckerman, Paris Review (July 8, 2015)

NEVER TRUST A NARRATOR OR A NARRACT

Hierarchy doesn’t vanish in Volodine’s post-apocalypse. Status-seeking behavior characterizes life in the camps. Loyalty to the nouveau-riche is frowned upon – better to identify as a "rubble-clearer." The questions posed by class-related identification are not elided.

And how effective, really, identity becomes when it buffs itself into a proper elite. Sex aside (for there is not enough of it), our species’ polymorphous perversity peaks at rationalizing massacres, genocide, and holy wars. Give us a gun and we’ll find something to shoot. Better still, send a cloud-carrying revelation across the green or the screen, a revelation that makes some of us part of a chosen, secret elect anointed to usher in the Future. *

Whether one calls it the Vanguard, the 144,000, the Saved, the Miraculous, the Remnant, the Q-Cave, Strauss’ Exoteric Readers, Bohemian Grovers, or the Billionaire League, the self-anointed Elect have everything to gain from disdaining the average and ordinary humans who deliver their groceries and struggle to budget healthcare deductibles. * Volodine's angels don't belong to a creed or nation; postexoticism, according to Volodine, remains a "foreign literature written in French."

Although there are many mothers, children are mostly absent from Volodine's scenes.

The world is old or middle-aged: it has lost its youth like a teen in an early fiction by Mircea Eliade.

Is this sort of lost youth consistent with the sort of Neo-Buddhism Voldodine has described? Is the absence of gender accomplished?

“The writer is a male-identifying human,” I said to my partner while reading Minor Angels on the small portion of sofa left to me by our dog.

“How can you tell?” he asked.

“I can just smell it,” I replied. “He thinks blood is tremendous and unusual. He fears like a man.”

To be clear, women play ‘leading’ roles in the novel— they drive the vehicles, they turn off the lights over their designer license plates at night. Yashreene Kagen, Linda Siew, each name too crowded by cultural resonances to provide a stable cultural referent. I think there are many ways to read this, and one of them is obvious: Volodine refuses to be read through conventional gender or genre commitments. The question of whether he earns this right is, I think, a different one. This confusion of one word for another makes interpretation shaky.

Never trust a narrator—- including yours truly.

OTHER “INFRASTRUCTURES OF THE APOCALYPSE”

Back on my bullshit, namely the last horse of the apocalypse, staring at the burning skyline and wondering if the end of teleology can lead us backwards-forward into a hopeful post-catastrophism.

Apocalypse trends in hard times, Dan Sinykin noted in “The End of the World As We Know It,” an essay surveying  literary apocalypso, or what he calls "a form concerned with the possibility of redemption through destruction." The Book of Revelation abandoned the prophetic tradition of warning against apocalypse, focusing instead on how the world would look when God brought it to an end. Prophecy assumes that humans can change their ways, or that one's actions have a relationship to outcome. Not so with the apocalypse's dead end: the warnings don't matter when it's over. Sinykin interrogates the doom-note created by the abundance of "Christian apocalyptic narratives that find a self-fulfilling prophecy in the devastation around us." 

By looking for signs of end-times, we commit to a sort of fatalism, an irrevocable despair that, to me, cannot be separated from the popularity of teleological takes. For it is teleology that abandons ontology for a reading of runes and signs, for a predicative direction that characterizes our ideas of Progress, apocalypse, salvation, exceptionalism. Sinkykin is right to notice salvationist dreamwork is tied to messianism—or, "the arrival of some transcendent rapture" that causes us to lean into fatalism (though I suspect this depends on one's position as a consumer or creator of time, as a spectator or maker of revolution). The idea of an ending foregrounds the marketplace of afterlives; it draws significance to belief; we choose which god, deity or lifestyle is preferable to rule the end-times. 

Enter Sinykin's discussion of Jessica Harley's Infrastructures of the Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex, which looks at writers working inside "colonial tradition" to imagine "forms of escape without salvation." Harley rejects what others take as Walter Benjamin's "redeemed time," aiming instead for a "non-utopian reorientation", a "narrative embrace of futurelessness," or what she calls "transfiguration."

If my lasso seems rodeos away from Volodine's minor angels, it may be due to our difficulty in imagining other ways of being, living, surviving, and thriving. Capitalist realism, which Mark Fisher defined as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it," is as critical to Volodine's angels as it is to Harley's transfiguration. 

The most compelling hitch in Volodine's hierophany is it’s refusal to divest from hope. Instead, his characters invest in the look of longing, in memory, in places treasured by intimacy. The traces of angels sacralize the gaze. Volodine's postexoticism privileges the unseen and invisible: it is the immaterial that signifies. 

In a prior conversation, Volodine suggested that postexoticism de-fangs the apocryphal, normalizing the apocalypse as a condition rather than a party fetish, an aberrance, or a religious revenge-fantasy. This sounds like a way of welcoming Fisher’s encouragement to imagine the impossible, and to question the possibilities inherent in the construction of the definition. We leftists are terrible at this part—- the imagining, I mean; the labor of visioning a scene without staging the shoot-out and congratulating ourselves on how we have used the master’s tools to temporarily take over the master’s house. I am paraphrasing Audre Lorde because her voice is significant, and her theory remains critical.

There is money to be made from the problem-solving, self-helping passion of the neoliberal subject. Thinking outside the given formulations requires facing the terror of the unpredictable and losing old labels, nations, names, all the ways we know ourselves, all the ways we are known by others, all the assumptions that keep us from knowing how to live in the present. Or what the present involves.

What comes after the death of prescriptions for personal and collective self-actualization? Perhaps something collaborative, non-redemptive, anterior to eschatology. If apocalypse is insignificant, then Progress, itself, is challenged by the Volodine's commitment to narrative polyphony and non-linearity. 

Volodine as photographed in 2014 by Samuel Kirszenbaum.

AU FIN, NON-FIN!

I like Volodine’s eyebrows. And his Minor Angels.

The book jacket refers to Volodine as a "Slavic writer," which begs the old question of how much a group can “describe” us. Or what we hope to achieve by affiliating ourselves with such a description. And whether an affiliative description is an inscription, a thing that makes us, an identifier that flirts with the possibility of self-definition while absconding the labor of meaning anything.

Volodine drills holes in time and refuses to resolve the disorienting effects of such temporal fracking. I like that about him. Perforations in time won't kill us. Volodine's minor angels, like those demoted from the church canon, give us incisions in time which aren't incisive, cuts which aren't decisive in the way we have come to expect a progress of time, of the history that is part of a process requiring expert explanation. 

Conventionally, historians produce meaning by explaining the event (why a war begins, what ends it), and perhaps the momentum of directionality overdetermines the present in relation to the past or future. In the ambiguous terrain between imagination and reality, Volodine proffers no Hegelian climax, no proper end of history—there is a "journey towards nothingness" which layers narracts of tender, witnessed connection. But there is also a longing that feels radical in context. Where Guido Morselli's final fiction builds post-catastrophe from the loneliness of last-man syndrome, Volodine evokes a more sentimental post-disaster phase, where humans seek to preserve connections among themselves and their stories. 

I’m not arguing for pastoralia. There is no golden age worth huffing. A sentimental affection for stories doesn’t imply a longing for Edenic innocence. * Does innocence exist in story unmortified by sin and expiation? My daughter has stopped asking me to tell her a story at night.

Look, one comes to the post-catastrophic novel imperfectly, lugging the culture’s apocalyptic assumptions. Teleological ordering points towards finality, that dot of an end point in which time is fulfilled. I’m not sure it’s fair to say Volodine entertains teleology as much as he attempts to reveal a space beyond it. The dreams of the reader are the text. Dreams are precise because they aren't infected by capitalist realism—-they are as real as the inaudible pain of unwatered porch plants, and “listening” to the lamentations of plants widene our perception of the possible. 

There is an illicit metaphysicalism, a supranatural voyeurism, involved in perusing the dream-states of others.* Overhearing a dream is like reading a stranger's intimate letter.

As a communicative form, the dream is private, expressible, fragmented. In recalling our own dreams aloud, we become voyeurs of the self, voyeurs of the sleeping self whom we can never meet in real life, since to wake is to become a different self. There are so many selves in time, Volodine suggests. 

If the dialectical oomph of the American consumerist fetish for self-actualization mirrors our former commitment to historical progress, Volodine offers fiction against the self's final product. There is no ideal human, no final perfection. By expanding time to make space for the expunged angels, Volodine avoids overdetermined good vs. evil binaries. We read him to overhear the future, or enter the realm of anti-capitalist realism. "It's memories that I'm stealing," whispers Tom Waits. We're innocent when we dream.

Alternative Ways of Reading; i.e. the asterisks

“…once they’ve received the revelation that makes them part of a chosen, secret elect anointed to usher in the future.”: For the elitism of the vanguard, the hierarchy of status based on access to Party politics, see Henri Lefevbre's life-long effort to create a Marxist sociology that would dethrone the idea of labor as a solution to alienation.

“… and struggle to budget healthcare deductibles.”: Monks are interesting in that they withdraw from the world in order to save the world, and their vows to community are metaphysical commitments that balance between collective embodiment, devotion, and solitude, usually on the basis of their own vision or revelatory event. Unlike the monk who belongs to an order, the mystic heads for the desert and drafts maps from found signs. The mystics relationship to revelation is thicker, which is to say, their commitment to God is sustained by revelation more than ritual.

“A sentimental affection for stories doesn’t imply a longing for Edenic innocence.”: Does innocence exist in story unmortified by sin and expiation? My daughter has stopped asking me to tell her a story at night. “Things don’t happen in life the way they do in your stories,” she tells me when I offer an unsolicited one. The value of stories depends on the expectations we bring to our ontologies at any given moment in time.

“There is a sense of metaphysical illicitness, a supranatural voyeurism, in perusing the dream-states of others.”: For variations of the relationship between dreams and voyeurism, see Hugh Fulham-McQuillan's fabulous essay in a recent issue of Firmament (Sublunary Editions).

13 ways of looking at an allegro.

1

The son and I spent the better part of a phone conversation arguing about the meaning of allegro. The argument itself proceeded at a pace one might score as “allegro” in that it was lovely, angular, and filled with sharp edges that neither of us wished to soften. It is a pleasure to argue about language with my son, as it is a pleasure to argue about meaning with anyone who is genuinely interested in thinking— who finds thinking to be incredibly pleasureable, and that pleasurable to be incommensurable.

Despite our disagreements, the son and I concluded something unrelated to either of our contentions, namely, that allegro is a word used to describe a relationship between an object and its surroundings— it exists in relation to others. An atom alone in the universe cannot be allegro; there is no way to measure the movement of an atom without the presence of others atoms.

2

In music, allegro is a tempo marking used to indicate that the performer should play faster, more quickly, brightly. In ballet, it indicates brisk and lively movement. The definition is the denotation—the cold, hard bone of the word laid out before us on the table. Connotation is what clings to it, what hides inside the word; the sticky opportunities to add dimension and volume to a word—to make it shine differently after being modified by the addition of new objects.

Simply, connotation is a commonly understood cultural or emotional association that any given word or phrase carries, in addition to its explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation. Playing the denoted meaning against the connoted meaning creates tension in poems. Poets can rely on connotations in order to inflect the way a poem touches or ruffles us, or defamiliarizing the world as we know it. When leveraged and played in relation to other words, a powerful connotation can infect a poem without explicitly declaring itself.

3

The simple stricture of "Vivaldi" by Stuart Dybek can tempt the reader into overlooking its elegance. The simple part is the motion: it begins by making a promise, then adding a qualification, then shifting into interrogative meditation before finishing with a rephrasing.

Dybek opens with the promise that he is going to tell us about meeting Vivaldi. He begins by describing a scene from a 19th century novel before breaking into a new stanza with a "no" —  an uncapitalized qualification, an amendment that returns to the promise. (But it returns to the promise without starting a new sentence, and this insistence on expanding duration is notable; there is something he decided here, something that meant to distinguish between a "No" and a "no").

In the second stanza, immediately after the “no,” Dybek tells us about a winter night around a city subway, or maybe a train.. More specifically, he lists the sounds of that winter night—the violin, the drunks wassailing, the implied echo of strings meeting metal on tracks. And there is a milk truck, which is a time-piece: it tells what time this is happening, maybe in Dybek's childhood, or the childhood of his parents, maybe in a book he has read in a scene he imagines.

And then Dybek drops an ellipsis to indicate a thought trailing off, a thought wandering alone down the tracks as the speaker turns to the reader and begins asking questions. "Has it never been so…?" The fourth stanza is made entirely from questions. Question after question. Addressed directly to you or me or the one simulataneously overhearing and listening and reading. It is the longest stanza in the poem (5 lines to the 3 and 4 of other stanzas). It wants to know where sound begins.  

I think I mentioned Dybek finishes musically, which is to say, he finishes with a rephrasing and a defamiliarized image.

[SON: The musical term for this isn’t “rephrasing” mom. You’re referring to the basic structure of harmony, and the way pieces reach toward closure by returning to themes.]

Fine. Let's look at the first line of the first stanza and compare it to the first line of the final stanza:

When I met Vivaldi it was dark,

When I closed my eyes,

Both are written in past tense to describe a moment that was present to the speaker. Both occupy the space that is the promise of meeting Vivaldi.

What do we know about baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi? Although he composed for multiple instruments, the only two instruments we know he was officially trained to play included the violin and the harpsichord. Again, first stanza:

When I met Vivaldi it was dark,
a ragman lashed at his horse's bells

And second stanza:

When I closed my eyes,
less than a ghost,
Vivaldi cupped a mouth harp
like a match against the wind.

What else do we know about Antonio Vivaldi? On September 18, 1693, Vivaldi was tonsured as a monk, and on March 23, 1703, he was consecrated. For his hair color Vivaldi was nicknamed the "red monk". Vivaldi never played a mouth harp. In fact, mouth harp is a word associated with the blues harmonica. Dybek ends on this very specific blues harmonica in the mouth of Vivaldi.

4

SON: Your allegro is not my allegro.

ME: There is no single allegro.

SON: Right. We can speak about a general allegro-like aura but the composer imagines (and scores) an allegro to mean one thing—- a thing that exists in his mind—-- and the pianist then interprets that allegro in relation to other notes and tempo markings. So, for example, I think Shostakovich’s allegro is different from Vivaldi’s, and that difference is only learned by studying the body of their work.

ME: This is true for poetry as well. The implicit associations that poets hold in relation to a certain word—- take “home” for example, or “tenderness” —- often emerge by studying their use of that word across poems, and determining how tightly they hold the word, which is to say, how rigid and fixed it is in their mind.

SON: So we agree that everyone's allegro is different, and this difference is what makes a performance unique. A conductor like Sergiu Celibidache has a very particular way of interpreting the way an allegro relates to what surrounds it in a symphony. My allegro, or the one I use as a composer —-my private allegro, if you will—- starts to change a little when I learn a new piece, and I get close to another allegro, a Beethoven allegro, for example. Even if I don’t realize it, I can’t go back to the private allegro I held before learning to play Beethoven’s.

ME: The anxiety of allegro influence!

SON: No, mom. Not anxiety—it’s just the way music works. Everything you hear and play changes what you can imagine hearing and playing and composing.

ME: Poetry is the same. That’s why reading poetry is how we learn to write poetry, or how the possibilities of our poetics expand. I’m thinking about the subterreanean intertextuality of these influences, these things we have heard or read and thus carry forward. I’m thinking about how it holds the capacity for humor and subversion. Just as defamiliarization (or "making the familiar strange") relies on subverting expectations, parody relies on tradition, on the words and scores of others, in order to refashion meaning. Intertextual references reach into a shared past and attempt to re-vision it in the present; a reference is a nod to influence.

5

“The Allegro” is a flash fiction of a piano piece composed by Erik Satie when he was 18. Dated September 9, 1884, it's his earliest known composition. "The Allegro" is also the first place in which Satie signed his name as "Erik" instead of "Éric". Satie was serving time in what he called the  "penitentiary" of the Paris Conservatoire in 1884, and finding his creative energy sapped. It was on a summer holiday visit to his hometown of Honfleur, on the coast of Normandy, that Satie wrote his first "known" piece, and the only music he'd ever compose in his hometown. The upbeat and earnest optimism of the Allegro won't characterize Satie's later compositions, which are more whimsical, melancholic, and biting. But even from the start, Satie's appetite for quotation shaped his music. Allegro quotes the popular song, Ma Normandie (1836) by Frédéric Bérat. There is even a bit of the refrain—- whose lyrics are "J'irai revoir ma Normandie" ("I long to see my Normandy") — tucked into the middle of the piece.

In a sense, Satie’s Allegro is also the first piece in which he displays his penchant for quotation as part of the composition. The son and I have talked about quotations in music and poetry at length. I leave my quotations of those conversations for another day.

6

SON: Don’t forget that we’re talking about tempo markings here: we’re talking about duration and the space between silence and sound. That’s Cage, right? The tempo-marking tells the performer how to play it. Play it quickly, briskly, brightly.

7

I’ve taught the “Allegro” by Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer many times—-because readers always find something new in it.

Basically, my thinking about this poem focuses lightly on structure, but takes more interest in Tranströmer’s use of language. We can notice the simple couplets, the sparsity of adjectives, the way in which these formal choices create a sort of dark, quiet room for the poem.

The speaker begins by telling us that he is playing Haydn–"I play Haydn after a dark day"–and then he does this wild thing that poets do, namely, he creates an unforgettable word in order to defy the given world. To push that little world to its limits.

"I push the hands deep into my haydnpockets," Tranströmer writes, and thus does he turn away from the emperor's demands. It is an act of private, intimate protest rather than a public gesture. You can't play a song on a piano with your hands in your pockets. By pushing these two words together, the poet gives us an attitude, a way of being, a way of describing how playing Hadyn is an intimate ecstasy. 

Tranströmer titled this poem after a tempo-marking in Haydn. By giving us this marking, we may find ourselves wondering which piano sonata he is playing, which particular allegro.

The allegro has its own history as the first section or part of a sonata. To have an allegro was a must for classical composers. But to have hadynpockets is to be someone who knows Transtomer's personal allegro: it is to know the neologism he created to resist the lure of kings.

8

SON: Composer Erik Satie didn’t use conventional tempo markings in his pieces. In fact, that short “Allegro” may have been his only allegro, and it was as a title.

ME: Why?

SON: He wanted to defy everything that the Conservatory stood upon for its authority. Unlike many of you adults who like to think you’re avant-garde, Satie was the real deal. He delegitimized himself and constantly refused respectability. He was performing his radicalism— he lived it. He lived with his rats and didn’t give a damn. I respect him for that.

ME: You say he didn’t give a damn, but I think he was quite pissed.

SON: I mean he didn’t care enough to try and fit in. He would never have accepted the sorts of things you all do for money. Playing in a Cabaret bar, to him, was part of being free.

ME: I, too, was nineteen once.

9

francine j. harris’ “Sonata in F Major, K.183: Allegro” is a stunning engagement of Scarlatti’s composition as played by Daria van den Bercken. The relationship between the music, the rain, the presence of Scarlatti in the sounds:

the women, who step in the street and yell
to anyone they loved once and it sounds like prelude if
Scarlatti hadn’t moved to Madrid

It’s hard not to get tongue-tied at the beauty of the enjambment here, and harris’ use of the field to drop into the relationship between Scarlatti’s composition and the streets experienced in Madrid. How “it sounds like prelude if”—and the line breaks on the conditional—-where the use of prelude is uncanny, it torques time in the poem, it reverses the motion of the women in the street somehow. The conditional continues:

would he have moved the notes diatonically as the rain falls up

a rood. ascends the scaffolding. It’s impossible to read The Street

The magic of a harris poem is this feeling that the space and the moment is becoming a book or a text, and here the speaker is reading “The Street” and the movement of the notes bears kinship with the strange reversal of the women’s calls of love. Such an arfully crafted composition, this poem.

10

My editor told me straight away I’d shown I had a nose for news. He was getting a bit irritated because all the documentary life-stories were so alike. However hard life might have been for the person in question on the other side, however respectable the reasons for his flight, there had gradually developed a stereotype story—-looked at journalistically—-that did violence to my editor’s professional instincts. And now we had a rather special case: this young man who, without any fuss, simply wanted to get something out of life, who hadn’t found what he wanted on the other side, and had got out. At last we had, not a tragedy, but an intriguing allegro, a fine specimen of the picaresque. We’d simply never come across anything so flatly hedonistic before. What more natural than to invite this young man to join the paper?

- Martin Walser, “A German Mosaic”

This is only time I have seen “allegro” used to designate a mode of the picaresque—-a literary genre rather than a way of playing it.

11

W. H. Auden’s “Words and Music" deserves a read in its entirety. I pass it quietly to you, for the insight on meter and composition.

From the same page in my notebook: Igor Stravinsky said an allegro usually involved several movements "of which one confers upon the whole work its symphonic quality namely, the symphonic allegro, generally placed at the opening of the work and intended to justify its name by fulfilling the requirements of a certain musical dialectic." On this view, the most critical part of the dialectic is in the development, which occurs at the center—and this is what Stravinsky took as "the symphonic allegro" (a.k.a. "the sonata-allegro").

12

In her Charles Haskins Lecture for 2001, titled “A Life of Learning”, Helen Vendler uses John Milton’s “L’Allegro” to make a point about judgement in literature:

From the time I was very young I continually asked myself, as I read through the works of poets, why some texts seemed so much more accomplished and moving than others. Why was Milton's "L'Allegro" more satisfactory than his "On the Death of a fair Infant dying of a Cough?" I believed, and still do, that anyone literate in poetry could see that the one was superior to the other. (Those who suppose there are no criteria for such judgments merely expose their own incapacity.) Still, to clarify to oneself and then to others, in a reasonable and explicit way, the imaginative novelty of a poem and to give evidence of its technical skill isn't an easy task. I've been brought to mute frustration by it when I know intuitively that something is present in the poem that I haven't yet been able to isolate or name or describe or solve. In chapter 12 of Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad remarks on "that mysterious, almost miraculous, power of producing striking effects by means impos- sible ofdetection which is the lastword ofthe highest art." I wanted, hardly knowing how, to detect the means of that power.

13

Finally, there is this qualified allegro used by Susan Sontag in her catalogue description of a similarly titled exhibition “In Memory of Their Feelings”— about the world created by Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and the endless physical dialogue which took shape between them. Allegro vivace.

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.