Denis Donoghue's "Orality, Literacy, and Their Discontents".

I am dumping this essay here from my own notes, in case anyone is interested in Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue’s reading—which has, I think, some very compelling, or well-complicating, parts. Like many Eliot acolytes, Donoghue misses some things and avoids reckoning with others, but his frolic with de Certeau’s tactics and ruses feels keyed to this cold winter’s night.

Near the end of Plato's Phaedrus Socrates raises the question of writing as distinct from speaking, and he quotes the Egyptian god Thamus as saying that the invention of script damages the power of memory in those who write. Socrates goes on to attack script on the grounds that, like a painting, it has nothing to say for itself, it can't take part in a dialogue: a crucial disability. Writing may be useful to remind oneself of something, he concedes, but it shouldn't be taken seriously otherwise: the only true writing is what is written in one's soul.

But the Phaedrus had little or no impact. Brian Stock has noted that "most of Plato's writings disappeared at the end of antiquity; they were not known again in the West until the Renaissance." During those centuries, script established itself as a worthy sign of speech and was used accordingly. Therefore the reading of a manuscript was for long a slow and noisy affair as the reader tried to convert written words into sounds.

The skill of silent reading was a late achievement. I speculate that one of the reasons why, in reading Yeats's poem, I try to divine the speaker's voice is that for many centuries reading entailed the conversion of script to audible sounds; the reader's voice tried to be in unison with the original voice designated, however inadequately, by marks on clay, bone, parchment, vellum, or cloth.

Historians of orality are in apparent agreement that orality is the sign of lives social and convivial rather than individual. In an oral society people are members of a "collective assemblage" - to use a phrase explicated by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus—before they are isolated individuals (if they are ever such). The dialect of the tribe is not only the context in which people engage in social life: it provides the means by which an individual may speak. It follows that reality in an oral society is construed as mainly temporal: hence its appropriate paradigm is the in-and-out of one's breathing. Temporal, dependent on memory: reality is interpreted as historical, it assumes a narrative form of understanding, as in the epic. Memory is the enabling capacity, repetition is its convention, formulaic narration a practice of its genre. The speech of the place is not soliloquy but conversation.

It follows, too, that politics has been directly associated with conversation and oratory. Hannah Arendt, thinking of the involvement of scientists in the development and use of the atomic bomb, said that the "reason why it may be wise to distrust the political judgment of scientists qua scientists is not primarily their lack of 'character” —that they did not refuse to develop atomic weapons—or their naivete—that they did not understand that once these weapons were developed they would be the last to be consulted about their use—but precisely the fact that they move in a world where speech has lost its power."

These conditions of orality were radically, though only gradually, changed by literacy and especially by the development of alphabetic movable type in Europe in the middle of the fifteenth century.

Writing and reading are for the most part solitary activities conducted in a world of mainly spatial relations.

Historians of orality and literacy —I'm thinking mainly of Albert Lord, Milman Parry, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Walter Ong, Jack Goody, Michel de Certeau, and of other scholars who are building on their work—generally agree that after the achievement of silent reading, the act of seeing words on a page entered into the constitution of knowledge. [….] Knowledge entails what Havelock calls the "recognition of the known as objects." 

Orality suffered a severe blow when people started believing that our primary relation to the world is one of knowing, and that knowledge should be substituted for other ways of being active in the world. It follows from that change of mind that reality was assumed to be fully described by knowledge, the distinction between subject and object was used as the chief device of knowing, and knowledge was supposed to be fully achieved by science. We reach the stage, which Brian Stock has described in relation to the early Middle Ages, in which "objectivity was identified with a text." Those beliefs were consequences of writing. Further consequences included the move from custom and tradition to law, from an oral promise to a written contract, and the designation of a noble family by genealogy rather than by the scale of its local affiliations. Reality was now deemed to be separate from the mind that engaged it: its qualities were supposedly those of script-relative stability, objectivity, an enduring existence out there, waiting to be observed and interpreted. Observation was the official form of attention. Method became the habit of observation amounting to a conviction. God was believed to have given mankind two books—the Bible and the book of Nature—gifts that could be appreciated only by people who lived in a world of readable script and the opposition between them appears more severe than it is. 

[....] Many societies have practiced orality and literacy together. Orality is never merely displaced by writing; if in a particular society it is, it is changed by the pathos of that displacement. 

De Certeau has pointed out that "Orality becomes something else from the moment when writing is no longer a symbol but rather . .. the instrument of a production of history in the hands of a particular social category." He mentions the confidence that intellectuals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution felt about the power of the printed word: "writing was to refashion society in the same way that it had indicated the power that the enlightened bourgeois was ascribing to itself." To the degree that writing becomes the communication of works through which a society constructs its progress, orality is changed, displaced, as if excluded from the official record. "It is isolated, according to de Certeau, "lost, and found again in a 'voice which is that of nature, of the woman, of childhood, of the people." It becomes pronunciation, apart from the technical logic of print and its ideology. It becomes music, song, opera, a "space where the organizing power of reason is effaced" and the singing voice stretches or leaps toward a sublime beyond reason. What orality speaks of is whatever reason designates as superstition, passion, stirrings of an indeterminate self, the sublime: "it is voice separated from contents. "

But the transition from one technology of expression to another is never abrupt. De Certeau has noted that "epistemological configurations are never replaced by the appearance of new orders; they compose strata that form the particular values of print imposed themselves and established a new decorum.

This entailed a revised sermo humilis, a plain style supposedly correlated to the quiet act of observation and the morality of speaking truths deemed most convincing when they were plainly delivered. Stability was enforced by grammars and dictionaries. Meaning was declared to issue, as in the rhetoric of the Royal Society, from the correspondence of word to thing rather than from an intentional relation between words and their speaker. Indeed, the ease with which words in a culture of print could be separated from their speaker and from a natural world accounts for the development of new forms of writing and new styles, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

These arose from the first consequence of writing, that words can reach people to whom they are not directly addressed. In conversation, what I say to you and you to me and what we make of the exchanged words are nearly simultaneous, active in the shared context. But if I write the same words, they may be read by people I have never met. What I say and the decorum of my speech are governed by the local situation as I construe it. But what I write must observe a different decorum, since I can't know who may read my words.

My sense of readership is not the same as my sense of a particular audience.

These equivocal conditions, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth century purveyors of the Marprelate Tracts, and to those high-toned writers who wanted to avoid the stigma of being professional authors, scribblers, ink-stained and low class. The separation of print from an identifiable voice was a necessary device, too, for writers who had to disguise themselves at a time of Licensing Acts and the paper wars between political disputants, some of them Whig and Tory. The printing press also made it possible, for writers so dis-posed, to thwart the common desire to hear particular voices even through the mediation of print. Think of Jonathan Swift's breakages in the text of A Tale of a Tub, Laurence Sterne's blank page and the squiggle of print in Tristram Shandy, or—moving forward a century—think of Mallarmé's refusal of acoustic eloquence in Un Coup de Dés. In our own time Concrete Poetry deploys words as objects from which every trace of a singular authoritative voice has been removed. Print also makes possible omniscient narration, the indirect free style, various forms of impersonation, and styles of willed neutrality, as if the story were being told, but told by no one. It may also incite writers to devise rhetorical stratagems precisely to recover the flourishes of speech and gesture that a culture of print supposedly suppresses. Thomas Sheridan's Lectures on Elocution (1762) and Lectures on the Art of Reading (1775) were evidently designed for that purpose. Yeats's "A Deep-Sworn Vow" was composed to intuit a voice. An entity that is still predicated on the oral persuasion of person to person, preaches to congregation.

But what about the electronic media, computers and information technology? If the technology of print enforced its values but still allowed voices to be heard, surely the electronic media will be even more hospitable to voices? Isn't TV almost entirely voice and body? Aren't e-mail and the internet a constant exchange of implied voices? Surely orality must come into its own again?

The prudent answer is: not necessarily. What orality had to fear from script and print was the fate of being silenced, its values displaced. What it has to fear from the electronic media is the abjection of being teased and mocked. Walter Ong is helpful on this question. He calls the present age, so far as it is governed bv electronic developments, an age of "secondary orality. He means that the conditions provided by electronic technology are similar to those of primary orality- the orality of an oral society - in superficial respects, but different in profound respects. They are similar, in that the events we witness are oral and are suffused by oral elucidation; but they are different in that TV merely mimes orality, displays simulations of spontaneity, and pretends to show social formations as open and permeable. According to the pattern of consequence he has already indicated, Ong expects to see the institutions of this secondary orality causing the production, at least in the short term, of more books than ever; but these books will more and more clearly submit to the values of the new media. I suppose he means that most of the books on the bestseller list will be parasitic upon TV programs. That is already and dismally the case. Perhaps Ong means that increasingly writers will write as if for TV, or to reach a readership of people accustomed to the situations and the dialogue we see and hear on TV. And presumably readers will gradually come to insist on the styles and the conventions they see on TV.

This seems probable to me. Every new technique, from the printing press to photography, film, audiotape, video, and computer games, has had some impact on the common understanding of the world. Those of us who grew up into a literature still open to voices are likely to be bewildered, perhaps dismayed, by further developments. But all is not lost. I have been much encouraged by one of the arguments in de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life. He acknowledges that at any given moment a particular system of power is in place, a syntax of social and political practice. But he claims that people nevertheless engage in local ruses and tactics "that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop." That is to say: local and individual practices do not fully yield to the system of power that for the most part controls them. Instead, they feature constant sleights of hand, bouts of opportunism, inventive trickery. De Certeau speaks of these tactics as constituting an art of powerless people, those who live under an alien god whom, in small ways, they can disable or circumvent.

I end with these few speculations. In the electronic age we are all powerless: power is in other hands. But we can still practice what de Certeau calls tactics, diversionary exercises, ruses. Perhaps these are what we should be teaching our students: tactics of evasion, the skill of detecting simulacra presented to us as real. We might teach our students the art of irony and train them to note discrepancies between one image and another, or between an image and its official discourse. In such an undertaking we might practice what Stanley Cavell calls "aversive thinking" following Emerson, who in "Self-Reliance says, "The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion."

Aversive thinking about the age of the TV screen proposes a critical relation to the world we live in and the instruments by which power is exerted. If we want a motto for this, apart from Emerson's phrase, I offer Kenneth Burke's account, in Counter-Statement and other books, of the aim of literature and criticism alike, aesthetically considered: to prevent a society from becoming too completely, too hopelessly, itself.

Is fiction necessary, etc . . .

The first page of Epstein’s “Is Fiction Necessary?”

|||

"Is Fiction Necessary?" asked critic Joseph Epstein in an essay devoted to lamenting "the strains of literary puerilism" infecting American literature. Epstein hated the fragments, the roman-a-clef is "just an autobiography trying to escape libel laws." He hated how Iowa "ruined" Vance Bourjoily. He detested the absence of point of view, novels that run on stories without "the weight of destiny" and all the modernisms written for the "permanently ageless… who will go to their graves in denim and sideburns, eternally youthful in mind if desiccated in body." 

Epstein wanted solubility— a novel with a strong arc and resolution, arousing foreplay that resulted in climax. Like many, Epstein wanted the experience of heteronormative sex from a novel.

Certainly, sexual frustration isn’t the critic’s whole story. Part of Epstein's “unnecessary fiction” fury can be traced to the blurring of genre distinctions. It is easier to critique a novel on the merits you were taught, and the merits you are teaching seem floppy when presented with literature that isn’t interested in them.

|||

Eugenio Montale compared the practice of literature to carving a secret amulet in order to placate the world and the gods of darkness. John Gardner (who died in a motorcycle accident) lamented the US literary scene's immaturity, and added that it was useless to keep on pretending the game wasn't a "killer's baseball." Harold Brodkey said anyone who "spent his life working to become eligible for literary immortality is a fool." — And yet, that's precisely what Brodkey did.

|||

"You never know if you will survive a piece of fiction," Harold Brodkey said, of the danger of writing and touching unbearable, sordid things. Perhaps we read poetry openly, defenses down, because poets are baring themselves on the page, in line with cultural expectations that the poet is one who over-feels things. Perhaps we enter their over-feeling in order to feel relief from our own. On this view, fiction’s difference is related to the reader’s expectations; we come to it with a suspiciousness, a need to be convinced. The fiction writer has to overcome this reticence on the part of the reader (less so in popular, mass-market fiction).

|||

Across the board, whether in fiction, poetry, or talk-shows, we demand miracles from “empathy.” The buy-in is tempting. Certainly, I wanted to believe friends would relinquish their commitment to judging mothers when they, too, became mothers. But more than half those friends greeted new motherhood with an upgraded, uber-muscular judgment. The mommy wars raged through recipes, extracurriculars, and wine clubs. The mommy wars chased outrage through the hi-drama of their own stupidity.

Yes, I used the word stupidity (utter stupidity, I should have hissed).

Yes, I’m talking about your ‘women.’

|||

Verisimilitude is touted as the secret ingredient to the magical power of literature to “create empathy” in the reader. But US crime shows have not made Americans more spiritually or emotionally generous—we are more paranoid, more exhausted, more afraid, more conversant with violence and weapons, more invested in intellectual crime solving as salvation and for our protection. To believe one could predict and therefore avoid one’s rape is a statement of control, not a fact about the world. In this case, a delusion is a belief that grabs the past by its balls and pretends it was otherwise.  

[Lo and behold, there I am on a screen: telling audiences, students, friends, strangers, that literature teaches us how to feel for others by imagining them. There I am, lying like my dog Radu in late capitalism.]

|||

How many times has the functional definition of empathy applied to what I believe my writing should be doing? At what point did I begin to believe I had the power to do this? In which instant did I anoint myself with this ‘mission’? How did doing good come to be conflated with the creation of products intended to stimulate empathy in others, as buttressed by the expectation that others would apply what they had learned from art-products in order to make the world a better place?

Elvia Wilk has written about how neoliberal philanthropy instrumentalizes compassion as "a lever to pull for spare change.” When individuals are emotionally taxed for systemic change, capitalist realism laughs.

"The system of empathy-incentivized giving perpetuates itself by creating the world in which it is necessary,” Wilks writes. And she is not lying.

Neoliberal discourse continuously invokes the power of "empathy transplant" as a solution to social problems. Those who labor as writers, artists, or designers are expected to “trigger” empathy. If we have done a good job of "triggering empathy," consumers will say the book changed their lives.

|||

Like other Gen X’ers, I watched Sally Jesse Raphael's “Save the Children” ad featuring the famished bodies of Ethiopian children alongside her sad, Hollywood-tweaked countenance. I remember top pop musicians linking arms to sing "we are the world” across the screens of my teens. My generation was raised on the images of distant suffering experienced by “others.” These images did not prevent the rise of committed xenophobia and racist political platforms eager to keep “others” out.

One might even argue that Americans cannot stand seeing suffering—they feel it as a personal violation of their Thanksgiving turkey-massacres. One might argue, for example, that we pay therapists to help us create “boundaries” against the suffering of others, and these boundaries are instrumental in fashioning new markets for exclusion, new weapons for protection, new lists of ‘trauma-prevention’ strategies that double as superstitions.

Every image of suffering is deployed doubly, and thrown back against those depicted as a form of “weakness” or failure. Antiabortion activists assail communities with the images of terminated fetuses. They call it ‘murde’r and then put the photo of murder on a T-shirt in order to demonstrate their sensitivity, or their heart for, unborn life. But it is gruesome really, this “heart for unborn life.” It is as gruesome as the countless boundaries we’ve erected in order to protect the lies from which we fashion our own victimhood.

|||

“Suspicion” is the belief that one is being lied to or secretly manipulated. The suspicious demand physical evidence and photographs of the gang rape. The demand to see in order to believe is generated, nourished, and developed daily by media.

"The empathy machine…works insofar as it is a trauma machine," Wilk writes. Virtual reality aims to cure trauma through exposure and desensitization. Rather than integrating trauma into life, virtual reality sets it apart and focuses on its eradication. 

|||

My friend told me the hardest part of the Iraq war was the video games he had to play back in the US, as part of his training, prior to being sent abroad. The desensitization to shooting, and the continuous game of it. "Something in me broke,” he said. "I can't talk about killing or what it means—all of that feels so surreal to me."

The words surreal comes up again and I am thinking about tripping.

“It’s comforting for me to play those games,” my friend adds. “It’s the closet I can come to feeling innocent again, or remembering a self before any of it was real.”

|||

Not everyone who drinks will become an alcoholic. Not everyone who plays intense first person shooter games will lose the connection between reality and fantasy and become desensitized to human lives. But some will. Some will become alcoholics. Some will become addicted to violence and endorphins. Some will become mass shooters. Some will become better soldiers. Perhaps we waffle on acknowledging this because we want to protect our own access to pleasurable diversion. One suspects we already know the blatantly obvious, namely, the alcoholic abuse and video game abuse are stories of relationships, stories about time, frequency, duration, and investment. Someone who drinks on Saturdays (like someone who games on Saturdays) doesn't have the time to develop an unhealthy relationship with their entertainment. Even if Saturdays are desensitized, six other days of the week draw them back into life among feeling persons, among the suffering and reality.

Yes, I suggested that playing video games is not comparable to the difficult banality of caring for living, breathing humans with complicated needs in a culture that monetizes demands. No, I did not make an argument capable of proving this.

|||

I’m drawn to how Elvia Wilk outlines the grotesque "relationship between individual suffering and the systems that create it – between the personal story and the statistic." Empathy isn't a crowd behavior, it is an internal feeling that varies across minds, cultures, genders and languages. The “identifiable victim effect” demonstrates that people are more likely to help others when they have a face and a name, but the face and the name also matter. People are more likely to donate money to someone who looks like them or meets their aesthetic standards of attractiveness.

When people use the phrase “Pain Olympics”, I think of the word pageant, that noun for the competition of peacockery in which the most charismatic and beautiful human “wins”. Neoliberalism assumes people will do good if they see the light, get wild, or have a transformational event. There are multiple industries, workshops, retreats, consultants, modules which can lead to those transformational events if one has enough money to afford the transaction. But how much pixelated suffering does it take to create a feeling that leads to action?

Once again, we return to the trauma machine, the goal of causing hurt in order to make others feel ethically. Susan Sontag wrote about this, her writings on pain flatten talk about how pain flattens and ruins humans. I'll abstracted pain create a sort of attic aesthetic of misery in which the view were takes all the experiences of child abuse to be mirrored in that one iconic celebrity image. "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle," Sontag writes, "universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, when use has been converted into entertainment."

Granted, she wrote this before it major news venues like Fox and CNN officially became infotainment.

"There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television,” Sontag snaps, “They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality.”

On Nigerian English.

This beautiful poem by Hussain Ahmed.

1

“I speak Nigerian English,” Romeo said nonchalantly, on the first cold day of this year.

We were on a college campus in Kansas. The door to our left had a sign reading no guns or smoking on campus. We stood next to it and smoked cigarettes in the rain.

Although I heard Romeo’s comment, I’m not sure I understood it until several months later, when Romeo, Hussain, and I stood on a college campus in Mississippi and prepared to enter a building for a panel. The reading series was titled “Othered”, and I wasn’t sure how my own experiences as a white, Eastern European immigrant fit into the conversation.

At one point, Romeo and Hussain switched from American into Nigerian English, their voices softening. The language passed like a jazz brush warmly between them.

I didn’t understand a single word of it. But it sounded like home.

2

Inside the building, we read poems — Saddiq introduced a conversation with Nietzsche that remains in my head; Hussain invoked the sacred and the poetics of speaking into ancestry; both provoked interiority and thoughtfulness— I don’t remember what I read. Then we sat on the stage for a conversation led by the brilliant Olufunke Ogundimu, and I struggled to balance the self who writes with the self who would rather disappear. Public conversations always involve this tension, this struggle between the ebullient Alina and the Alina who feels most herself in a notebook, thinking about what others are saying while disappearing into text.

At one point, Saddiq spoke about Islam and his own relationship to Arabic, which he acknowledged as a “colonial language.” He spoke about the Nigerian self that exists between histories of colonization and erasures of distinction. He gestured towards hybridity as it means of remaining whole, or fashioning a livable self that can link the experience of being a Muslim Nigerian immigrant and a Black American professor.

Smiling, shaking his head, Saddiq recounted having been in Walmart when he learned that a niece had been born back home in Nigeria. He was walking between aisles and congratulating his family on the new baby. “Allahu Akbar!”, he exclaimed. “God is the greatest.” “What a blessing.” “God is good.” These are the phrases that people of faith often use when something tremendous is granted. And a baby is something tremendous anywhere in the world.

Suddenly, the space in Wal-Mart grew quieter. Saddiq noticed a white man staring at him, a gun strapped to his hip.

This moment—the moment when one looks up from the world of one’s first language and family to perceives the self as written by American scripts, as read by their limited stereotypes, as displaced by their wary eyes—is resonant. I mean: the world rumbles a bit around you.

The poet steps back to survey the self and make it friendly to the man with a gun.

The writer straddles the space between selves.

The immigrant begins the long process of translation that marks the apology for the homeland self, the “other” one is to beloveds.

The fear of being misunderstood exists in relation to the knowledge of violence; the quickness with which misunderstanding escalates into a threat for the American who loves to order his favorite Mexican food in Spanish but cannot stand a language that does not exist to him.

I don’t have words for how the shape of a room collapses when you realize that you are the danger. And how frightening it is— how terrifying— to discover that you are most threatening when you exist as yourself, in that mouth between languages, in the faith and culture that formed you.

3

That night, we went out to dinner at a lovely Italian restaurant. The writers moved between American and Nigerian English, or Nigerian Pidgin. Saddiq’s young daughter moved between laps and doodled on paper as the adults spoke. She smiled to herself and named her drawings. I was enchanted by her sweetness. Again, there was this strange sensation of feeling at home in a foreign language, or feeling safe in this space where the voices rose and fell in Pidgin, and the faces loosened as their bodies took on the intonation and gestures.

Were they recognizing themselves in it?

It felt as if I was being permitted to recognize them more completely, more fully, aware of what belonged to them—-what existed that remained unknowable—but grateful to see them in this fullness.

There was also a sense in which a homeland was being negotiated and created over pasta, salad, wine, and water. A communion. An encounter in being present as diasporas meet one another within the syntax of their native language.

In my experience, when I (rarely) begin to speak Romanian in the same room as an American, the American immediately takes offense. Perhaps we of the US are predisposed to expect our neocolonial colonial language gets over every border, into every room, and grants us access to any conversation on the planet. Perhaps there is something of the ugly American in this expectation . . .

4

At the restaurant table, the Nigerians took up controversial issues about publication and patronage in their diaspora. They did not chit-chat. They did not practice “active listening” or engage therapeutic modalities in order to communicate. They simply argued, debated, threw up their hands, laughed, and returned to underline earlier points relentlessly. I adored them. The restaurant felt passionately intellectual and Nigerian, and the intensity less fake or performative than the plastic version of American conversational intimacy where nothing is said and everything is expected.

In 1994, Edward Said told a British audience that “the intellectual is beset and remorselessly challenged by the problem of loyalty.” Loyalty provides access to status in diasporas. “An insider” must promote national interests in public, Said continued, but the intellectuals “should be the ones to question patriotic nationalism” and challenge “corporate thinking.” By corporate thinking, Said was referring to the political We, the rhetorical We that presumes to speak for others by nature of its status and expertise.

The diasporic We is complicated. (At present, I am obsessed with Momtaza Mehri’s Bad Diaspora, a poetry collection that pushes against what we owe the We, and how loyalty is constructed across borders.) But the facility of the “me” is also complicated by the expectations of meritocracy and respectability.

I mean: Shame tiptoes into rooms wearing respectable slippers. My diaspora is very conscious of not offending Americanism. Even in Romanian groups and meetings, I’ve been admonished for leaping into Romanian to express something intimate in the language it wants to speak.

"Let’s not do that,” the woman from my diaspora said. “Speaking Romanian is rude to our guests.” Even when the room is limited to Romanians, we are performing for the absent West.

Romanian is rude. Or Romanians are ashamed to be seen wearing it out in public. Romanian stays in the closet between shoes like our dirty little secret.

Romeo Oriogun, Hussain Ahmed, and Saddiq Dzukogi.

5

To return for a moment to the intellectual part, the shameless, Said-inflected part: the commitment at the dinner table was to thinking aloud and to questioning the terms of existence as they have been given. The Nigerian writers were not attempting to prove their loyalty or fidelity to a flag. Nor were they rationalizing a government policy to soothe the ruffled feathers of American exceptionalism. No one used dinner as a staging ground for proving one’s worth to the US meritocracy.

Unlike the worry in diasporic silence, the sagacity of investigation set the tone for the table talk. The discussion occurred as if thinking through ideas came first, as if thinking, itself, was the endeavor worthy of loyalty.

These days, the US is hardly exceptional to anyone except the refugees and immigrants. We are the constituents of earning one’s place, whether visa or citizenship. Our sense of self is implicated in the “land of opportunity.” Our notions of success and value are indebted to it.

To quote Said again:

The intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, ar­ticulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose rai­ son d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously.

Let me put this in personal terms: as an intellectual I present my concerns before an audience or constituency, but this is not just a matter of how I articulate them, but also of what I myself, as someone who is trying to advance the cause of freedom and justice, also represent. I say or write these things because after much reflection they are what I believe; and I also want to persuade others of this view. There is therefore this quite complicated mix be­tween the private and the public worlds, my own history, values, writings and positions as they derive from my ex­periences, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how these enter into the social world where people debate and make decisions about war and freedom and justice. There is no such thing as a private intellectual, since the moment you set down words and then publish them you have entered the public world. Nor is there only a public intellectual, someone who exists just as a figurehead or spokesperson or symbol of a cause, movement, or position. There is always the personal inflection and the private sensibility, and those give meaning to what is being said or written. Least of all should an intellectual be there to make his/her audiences feel good: the whole point is to be embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant.

[…] the intellectual, in my sense of the word, is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made cliches, or the smooth, ever-so-accommo­dating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public.

With a poem from Momtaza Mehri’s Bad Diaspora—- Romeo, me, Hussain, Saddiq,

Olufunke Ogundimu

6

“God bless you,” the grocery store clerk said while ringing up my groceries at Piggly Wiggly today.

In Alabama, “God bless you” is like the quarter one drops in a parking meter to follow the rules of appropriate behavior. No one reaches for a gun when God comes up. Presumably, American Jesus, himself, armed the South with guns in order to prepare for his second coming.

“God bless you” is part of a language that crosses races, including Black persons as well as white ones, and makes itself known in public spaces. But to say “God bless you” in another language is to risk being seen or made visible. To be visible as a person of color speaking a foreign language is to risk being determined unintelligible.

To say God is the greatest in Arabic is to be deemed a security threat by the richest, most powerful country in the world.

7

Representations of the Intellectual by Edward Said (PDF)

“There is always the personal inflection and the private sensibility, and those give meaning to what is being said or written. Least of all should an intellectual be there to make his/her audiences feel good: the whole point is to be embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant.”

Edward Said stayed with me on the drive home from Mississippi, and I am sharing copy of his book that celebrates the “amateur” over the expert at a time when foreign policy “experts” continue to sell us violence and war rather than visions for the future. I share it out of gratitude for the minds that met in Mississippi, as well as a relentless hope for a future that includes thinking.

And I keep the joy of that restaurant table at hand. I cherish it as a souvenir, a testament to being alive and at-home in the opening world of othered languages and the resistance to a simple, assimilated self.

“The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional, but to the audacity of daring, and representing change, to moving on, not standing still,” Said wrote. In different ways, each of the Nigerian writers embodied this dedication to the audacity of daring as writers and humans. I leave the scene in my mind with one final toast, a toast to the Nigerian voices, and to not selling one’s complicated self for that feeble, “exemplary” standing.

One Jesus sign, among the 7 encountered, on the drive towards Mississippi State University.

The radically-other language is the imagined one.

The child in an imaginary language.

An imaginary language critiques the adult world by refusing its grammar, lexicon, and syntax. In borrowing from the language of children, an invented mother-tongue supplies a fantastic rejection of the insolubility posed by “mature” framing and discourse.

I’ve been thinking about  Janice Eidus' short story, "Robin's Nest," and the percussive intonations of "innocence" in the language of a childhood narrator attempting to deal with the legacy borne by words. When her father's language and explanations fail to describe the mystery of her mother, she formulates new words to explain her mother's silence. The invented language of Ooola offers hope against the authoritarian father, whose authority is maintained by manipulating language. 

Oola, the alternative language, presents inventing and imagining as a form of resistance. During the day, the father makes money as a plastic surgeon. The daughter fears being "sculpted" by him. He makes no secret of his will. 

"Instead of a nose job, I would give your mother a mind job," he tells her. The  man's purpose is to fix the female, the ailing anti war hippie he thinks he saved. 

"A mind job hurts," the narrator thinks. "It pushes words down into your brain." She seeks a text she can read, a language in which she can find herself outside her father's violence. Male violence is the story of creation that the narrator needs to refuse in order to create herself, another story. She envisions her mother's silence as a vessel holding back magic. Envisioning this carves a space within her lineage, within her inheritance, where the daughter can speak outside the words owned by men. Feminism as a means of giving voice, passing mike. 

The harm done by language is both social and personal. The valence is an echolocation, as one sees in the consideration of pretty words, as the narrator wonders if they should add "amnesty" to their private language? Will they keep its meaning or use it to describe something else?

How do we define relational responsibility to our children when we represent their narratives and identities in poems? 

Who narrates the story of the “foreign” orphan?

How is power demonstrated, communicated, and solidified in the narrative choices made by magazines, journals, and academic publishers?

What do "autonomy and consent mean in the context of lived relationships and memorial tributes?

Who, historically, has been more impacted by the privatization and erasure of parenting labor and experience?

*

In For Your Own Good, Alice Miller examines the pedagogical assumptions of corporal punishment (a.k.a. spanking). The final paragraph reads:

Turning away from the truth will never help us preserve love, and the love we have for our parents is no exception. The act of forgiveness will not help as long as it serves to disguise the facts. For love and self-delusion are mutually exclusive. The disavowal of truth, the denial of the sufferings we have been through, is the breeding ground for the kind of hatred that gets deflected onto innocent victims. It is an act of self-deception and an impasse from which there is no way out. Genuine love can face up to the truth.

Implicit in this, the claim that “genuine love” does not face the truth from the safe, protected (arguably cowardly) space of defensiveness.

If Miller has spent a lifetime moving into, around, and through Womanism, the child has been central to her concerns. Paths of Life, for example, explores how confronting our experiences of childhood enable to us to live more richly into the future. How the home environment and emotional relationships we experience prime us for the way we live out our own lives. The neural pathways are thickened with us, programming us to experience the same lives as our parents unless we engage in self-reflection.

Anika tries to talk to her mother about the way in which she felt forced to keep her feelings a secret as a child. She says it is difficult to love yourself when a mother “finds your longing for contact, truth, understanding to be annoying, personally offensive, or even actively dangerous”. I think of the televisions blaring in all the rooms of the American home, offering pretexts to discuss things further from our hearts, further from the thick of things.

For Anika, this disdain for emotions is not something easily shaken off. She explains: “...gradually you arrive at the unconscious conviction that you have to suppress these cravings for any kind of connection if you want to get along with people”. When others suffered, Anika tried to find ways in which it might be her fault. This gave her a means of alleviating the lack of control without giving in to the taboo empathy.

Still proper in her older years, Anika’s mother is disturbed by this encounter. Her response is mainly one of fear- “fear of genuinely understanding the connections Anika was trying to show existed between their two lives”. Anika’s mother can’t break free from the lies she has lived by in order to draw close to her daughter. For her, the price is too high.

Margo and Lilka fear recognizing one another because, to do so, they will need to recognize the part of themselves back when they were friends in prewar Warsaw. The sounds of names breaks down the barrier to memory. Margo admits she married her first husband without loving him because her father told her “love and real life were two different things”. After he died in the Shoah, she took his mantra of love being an illusion without question. Later, while active in the Polish resistance movement, Margo met a man named Janek and fell in love. She felt this “as a return to my own self, to my first love, a love that I had been unfaithful to”. 

The chapter “Gurus and Cult Leaders” points to the importance of finding suppressed memories opening a void of interpretation. Gurus and cult leaders open these doors and insinuate themselves as the answer. Children who have been raised in families where obedience was “enforced” and the father’s authority was never predicated on whether he deserved to wield it or not are prey to cultish religious groups. Miller rejects the Freudian concept of infantile sexuality, which she thinks masks the consequences of sexual abuse in children. Rather than acknowledge their victimhood as children, Freudians and Reichians insist it is natural, a part of growing up- what every child needs to become an adult. 

The open, unquestioning psyche of the child enables them to accept sexual abuse as a kind of “surrogate emotional nourishment”. Miller says “that first, unquestioning love of our parents is so deeply rooted that hardly anything can destroy it, and certainly not insight into the truth.” Since kids can’t understand why someone they love would injure them, they reinterpret that behavior as right. In this way, “cruelty is given a positive valuation in the child’s cognitive system, and that valuation will be retained for life.”

One way in which adults deny the violence done to them as children and continuing the cycle of abuse burned so deep in their brains is through “sophisticated ideological justifications” which “allow them to pass it off as a good thing”. Miller notes that “the less inclination they show to recognize and revise this ingenious self-delusion, the more likely it is that others will be made to suffer the consequences.”

Miller came to this view after studying the childhoods of mass murderers and dictators, in her words:

All of them without exception were exposed to the horrors born of hypocrisy, and all of them ignored or denied the fact in later life. […] The atmosphere of hypocrisy they grew up in taught them to see cruelty as something good and useful.

…

A child battered and humiliated in the name of parental ‘care’ will quickly internalize the language of violence and canting insincerity and come to see it as the only effective medium of communication.

The “knowing witness” is defined as a person who actively helps them to recognize the wrong done to them for what it is and to articulate their sorrow for what has happened. Miller’s view resorts to the Freudian subconscious in order to explain why cycles of violence continue, namely, parents abuse their own kids in ways that repeat their own childhood abuse because feelings are stored in the “form of unconscious memories”. In turn, the unconscious memories “drive them to reproduce those repressed scenes over and over in the vain attempt to liberate themselves from the fears that cruelty and abuse have left with them.”

This is a ‘false’ liberation because “the effects of the past don’t change as long as they remain unnoticed”. The perpetrator goes in search of new victims, projects fear and hatred onto new scapegoats, and thus keeps himself from coming to term with the memories and feelings.

Notably, “liberation” is still at stake in Miller’s metaphysics. Although “liberation” feels limpid to me, Miller’s insights on avowing one’s anger are salient:

As long as the anger directed at a parent or other first caregiver remains unconscious or disavowed, it cannot be dissipated. It can be taken out only on oneself or stand-ins, on scapegoats such as one’s own children or alleged enemies. The variety of hatred that masquerades as religious ideological zeal is particularly dangerous because it’s imperviousness to moral categories makes it unassailable.

When personal hatred is attributed to a divinity, it cannot be discussed except as a means of refusing to be accountable for the feeling itself. The scapegoating of a god occurs in tandem with scapegoating of minorities and vulnerable persons.

*

How can poets address issues of social justice like ableism and economic privilege without speaking to the evidence garnered from their lived experience as parents? 

Henri Lefebvre thought habit memory was a key to how children assumed the identity of a social group. "Dressage" includes the combat boots of the 1990's as well as other historically-specific socializations in fashion and self-presentation. There is the sense that we knew who we were then—or that knowing the self was easier.

*

What does it mean to designate an entire portion of one's life (i.e. parenting) as unacceptable in writing? Or to designate, for example, the neurodivergence of one's child, as an "unacceptable" topic in literature?

Dr. Harlow’s experiments in the 1950’s showed that animals raised by artificial "robot" mothers later turned aggressive and showed no interest in their own offspring. They were primed for limited interaction.

Studies suggest that obedience training established in early infancy "stunts the development of such human capacities as compassion and pity for the sufferings of others". The learned behavior involves ignoring suffering and assessing the self in relation to rule-following ability. It has been suggested that children raised to perform obedience develop into adults that find it difficult to express, inhabit, or permit emotion when confronted with misfortune or tragedy.

*

A few questions for writers thinking through the currency of violence, the sheer cash of it, the money money money and power and glory violence promises . . . and the notebooks in which we can permit ourselves to ask difficult questions about our own roles in the transactions of liberation:

1. List the lies you remember living in order to make a childhood “safe.” Or list the lies you saw friends living. Note how the lie was understood differently by the child and the adult. Which verbs made things actionable? Which verbs were deemed “appropriate”?

2. How did “Freudian” notions of sexuality impact the childhood in question? What is relationship between trust and sexual self in your mind, in the self-narrations that sustain your concept of selfhood?

3. Are there any correlations between having been physically abused or spanked and believing war to be a just and reasonable means of resolving difficult problems? Are there any anecdotes that challenge this association?

4. Which ideas and/or systems of belief were involved in your socialization? For example, "might makes right"; pledge of Allegiance; flag worship; anti-Muslim xenophobia; highly gendered household roles; Christian misogynies, neoliberal meritocracy; bootstrap exceptionalism, etc.

*

Finally, loosely, to puncture the balloon a bit more, how do neoliberal notions of property, privacy, and ownership inflect our notions of "propriety" in writing?

What happens if one tries to write about the vapidity that is contemporary mothering?

Rachel Cusk on writing A Life’s Work about the strange silences of motherhood

How (if at all) do these questions implicate the failures of feminism and intersectionality in American poetics historically and at present? And to whom does it matter?

Flying with M this time.

This is a book. 
This is a film. 
This is night.

- Marguerite Duras, The North China Lover

This is a commuter flight with M, who is fifteen and old enough to declare that she hates flying.

We taxi down the runway and stop at the end.

When the engines rev up, M flinches. I remind her what my mother used to tell me, namely, that the pilots have checked almost every single part of the plane and we are ready to rotate.

Reluctantly seated across the airplane aisle from me, M's eyes widen with concern. Her lips have blanched like that wicked asparagus served at fine restaurants. Her mouth is whiter than the froth rimming an ocean wave.

"Mom, I just can't do this," she whispers. 

I start to explain how her grandmother (my mother, my mother, where the hell is my mother) got her pilot’s license at night without telling us, and this was how she dealt with her fear of flying— by learning how to fly— but M is trembling now. Her knees are shaking as the plane begins racing down the runway for take-off. Reaching towards a space outside myself, I lean over and rub M's hand and explain how the layers of air resemble the layers of water. (Do I smile? I hate flying—) I smile brightly at M while repositioning my legs (which now occupy a portion of the aisle) so as to rub her shoulders and coax her mind from the plane's preposterous bucking-motion. The cadaverously-loud engines dialogue with the quivering chairs. (Do I make a joke about a horse?) There is that foolish woman again (me) with bite marks on her eye-glasses, (God, I miss Radu) talking at 100 mph about oceans, water, boats the way sound is altered by pressure, the way it takes time to find a cruising altitude – that woman never stops smiling, just as the child in me never stops watching her — this mother I have become, this human who knows she will die in an airplane, and yet flies as much as she can, as if knowledge is a thing which can be shattered.

If the foolish woman with the crazy glasses is correct, she is simply assuming the name of her death is written. But the name is not the date. It is not an excuse to die. — So we fly. M's eyes scrunched shut, her hands clammy, her lips whispering no no no as if she knows what it’s about to happen— and me, becoming the mother I had, the mother I needed, the mother whose own fear of flying led her to night school for a pilot's license, the mother who held my hand during takeoff and landing while extolling the brilliance of Pascal's wager.

When cruising altitude is achieved, M seems calmer.

“I’m okay,” she whispers, checking to make sure no one notices.

I turn to my attention to Megan O'Gieblyn's "The Life of the Mind,” an intriguing review of Martin Riker's book, The Guest Lecture, “a novel of ideas” which I ordered immediately.

Riker was an associate Director at Dalkey archives, and he co-founded the Dorothy Project with his wife, Daniel Dutton. But he writes the female protagonist, Abby, without maudlin or hysteria. Abby suffers from a "spiraling self-pity. . .  continually dialogue with an ambient guilt," which O'Gieblyn links to a possible dread of the "Twitter mob." I wonder if the The Guest Lecture's descriptions of utopia will align with Mark Fisher's resistance to capitalist realism in focusing on the importance of envisioning and imagining a capacious Rather than a definitive Otherwise. I savor the wondering feeling in relation to a book I haven’t read yet.

And then the seatbelt signs turn on.

The pilot says “moderate turbulence.”

The small commuter airplane bounces until all the faces go gray.

The eyes of others resemble corner-sharpening comets scouring the tunnel for a stable spot to land. 

“I’d rather take in this sunlight like a dog,” wrote Ana Božičević in the poem titled “War on a Lunchbreak.”

I hold M’s hand and talk about the whether (the whether, the and-if, the then-again) again. I embroider bracelets of conditionals to distract her from the cloud-rodeo. I use language to lure her elsewhere. I pour verbs into shiny decanters and present them as solid talismans. I do my best with the mouth I’ve been given.

Eventually—between twitter-dread, M's terror, and various Sapphic fragments—our winged metal tube descends into the horse-haunted airport of Denver, Colorado, and rumbles down the long, asphalt belt. The zombie in me picks up the slack and thanks the pilot as we deplane.

Once M and I reach the airport, a teen in a green jacket, flanked by a coalition that is likely a kin group, runs up and delivers a phone to me: "You left this," he mutters, kindly, contingently.

And so I did. I left my plane on the phone. Chagrin and gratitude: my usual emotional palette upon landing and, once again, realizing I exited the plane in that bubble of distracted giddiness that guises the effort one expends in holding it all together, or the performance of wholeness. 

“You need to thank him,” M nudges.

And so I do, did, etc.

And then, while M smiles at the teen in green, I reconsider our flight from the safe distance provided by five minutes and realize it is not the sort of scene one might find in a novel or short story. Our flight must be filed in the column of things-for-which-friends-prescribe-therapy, and this conflation between therapy and novels recalls the texture of being written into a book by Miguel de Unamuno, or included in his view that the novel comes to be alone in a room, in the aloneness of a room . . . with a xeroxed print of the Angel of History on the all and the image of Walter Benjamin sitting near a broken wing, dragging his pen over paper to remind us:  "The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed."

Death, Is All

by Ana Božičević

I woke up real early to write about death (the lake through the trees) from
the angle of the angel. There’s the kind of angel that when I say
Someone please push me out of the way
Of this bad poem like it was a bus.—well, it comes running &

tackles me and oh, it’s divine football—Or
in the dream when the transparent buses
came barreling towards us:—it was there. Half of all Americans say

they believe in angels. And why shouldn’t they.
If someone swoops in to tell them how death’s a fuzzy star that’s
full of bugles, well it’s a hell of a lot better
than what they see on TV: the surf much too warm for December, and roller coasters
full of the wounded and the subconscious
that keep pulling in—Who wants to believe

death’s just another life inside a box, tale-pale or more vivid?
Not me. Like in Gladiator, when they showed the cypresses
flanking the end-road—O set
Your sandal, your tandem bike, into the land of shadows—of course
I cried. Show me a cypress and I’ll just go off, but
I don’t want that to be it. Or
some kind of poem you can never find your way out of! And sometimes

I think I nod at the true death: when from a moving train
I see a house in the morning sun
and it casts a shadow on the ground, an inquiry
and I think “Crisp inquiry”
& go on to work, perfumed of it—that’s the kind of death
I’m talking about.

An angle of light. Believe in it. I believe in the light and disorder of the word
repeated until quote Meaning unquote leeches out of it. And that’s
what I wanted to do with dame Death, for you:
repeat it until you’re all, What? D-E-A-T-H? ‘Cause Amy
that’s all it is, a word, material in the way the lake through the trees
is material, that is: insofar, not at all.
Because we haven’t yet swam in it. See what I mean?
I see death, I smell death, it moves the hair on my face but

I don’t know where it blows from. And in its sources is my power.
I’m incredibly powerful in my ignorance. I’m incredible, like some kind of fuzzy star.
The nonsense of me is the nonsense of death, and
Oh look! Light through the trees on the lake:

the lake has the kind of calmness
my pupils’ surface believes...and this is just the thing
that the boxed land of shades at the end of the remote
doesn’t program for: the lake is so kind to me, Amy,
and I’ll be so kind to you, Amy, and so we’ll never die:
there’ll be plenty of us around to
keep casting our inquiry
against the crisp light. Light is all like,
what’s up, I’m here I’m an angel! & we’re
all: no you’re not, that doesn’t exist. We all laugh and laugh...

Or cry and cry. The point is, it’s words, and so’s
death. Even in that silence
there’s bird calls or meteors or something hurtling
through space: there’s matter and light. I’ve seen it
through the theater of the trees and it was beautiful

It cut my eyes and I didn’t even care
I already had the seeing taken care of. Even in the months I didn’t have
a single poem in me, I had this death and this love, and how’s
that not enough? I even have a quote:
Love is the angel

Which leads us into the shadow, di Prima.

from War on a Lunchbreak (Belladonna Chaplet)

To continue to think; to think critically.

“The Power of the Powerless” by Vaclav Havel. “To the memory of Jan Patocka,” October 1978 —

To think about how solidarity is expressed as a relationship with others— and a relationship between the mind and its private commitments.

“Solidarity” by Adam Mazur —

To remember that thinking, itself, makes ethics possible.

“Dissidence and Rhetoric” by Slavenka Drakulic —

To acknowledge that thinking is a duty humans must exercise.

“The Inferno of Saviors: Notes in the Margins of Elias Canetti’s Lifework” by Corina Stan —

To refuse the thoughtlessness of Elias Canetti’s crowds. And to accept the loneliness that comes from such refusals.

“Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work” by Kathi Weeks —

To read against the grain. To theorize the impossible possibilities.

“Crip Negativity” by J. Logan Smidges —

To study and learn from heteropessimism, crip negativity, and various forms of skeptical inquiry that reject the affective gestures and hierarchies of late capitalism.

“A Bus Full of Prophets: Adventures of the Eastern-European Intelligentsia” by Adam Zagajewski —

To get off the bus advertising salvific promises. To question the premises of ‘saviors’.

“A prehistory of post-truth, East and West” by Marci Shore —

To speak from within Elias Canetti's "Ovidian ideal of mutual imagination and inhabitation," as imagined by Joshua Cohen.

“Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—

To interrogate the narrative source in relation to power. To ask who benefits from a particular narrative history.

“Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’)” by Hélène Cixous —

To note who determines which part of a social movement or gesture becomes an “event.”

“Lying and History” by Cathy Carruth—

To read every single national border as one would read the sky for weather.

“Mark Fisher and Reimagining Postcapitalist Geographies” by Callum Sutherland—

To engage nostalgia in order to resist its pernicious formulations.

“Resisting Left Melancholy” by Wendy Brown—

To situate the reading among the complex forces that determine human behaviors rather than attempt to “rise above” such determinants.

“Voices From Chernobyl” by Svetlana Alexievch —

“A poet should try, no matter the cost, to preserve a gift that once was inherent but now has atrophied, and he should do so in order to keep open the doors between people—himself and others. He must be capable of becoming everyone: the smallest, the most naive, the most powerless. But this desire to experience others from within can never be determined by the goals that compose what we call our normal or official lives. This desire would have to be completely free from any hope of success or achievement; it would have to constitute its own desire: the desire for metamorphosis.”

— Elias Canetti

Hannah Arendt's warnings.

A few notes and excerpts from Hannah Arendt’s The Jewish Writings.

Hannah Arendt maintained an important distinction between ideology and politics. "An ideology differs from a single [political] opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the 'riddles of the universe,' or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man,” as she wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Ideology’s rigid focus on certainty in relation to itself makes it ideal for setting up moral codes and purity ethics used to determine who is acceptable and who is not. By foregrounding the performance of certain actions to evidence alignment with ideology, ideological thinking lends itself well to religious fundamentalism, cults, secular authoritarian groups, militaristism, etc. For Arendt, a thinking relationship to knowledge is one of continuous learning and discussion and disagreement. Conflict is central to learning. She often refers to the mindset that characterizes a free polity as “common sense,” which she takes to be constituted by opinion, doubt, and cultural belief. Since her terminology is awkward, I added a prefatory note to the following excerpts from her book, The Jewish Writings, which was published posthumously and never intended as book for publication by the author, herself.

“The real goal of the Jews in Palestine is the building up of a Jewish homeland. This goal must never be sacrificed to the pseudo-sovereignty of a Jewish state.”

- Hannah Arendt

March 6, 1942.

In a letter to the editor of Auflau, Arendt attempted to shed light on “who” the Committee for a Jewish Army was representing. Her ongoing concern that Revisionist Zionism was gaining ground due to the formidable ignorance of the American diaspora appealed to reason and invested in exposure as a means of persuading the public to think:

March 27, 1942.

Arendt published her first biweekly column for the "Jewish World" insert included in the Auflau. In it, she remarks upon the strange Americanization of Zionism. There is dread in her voice:

And while all of Christian humanity has appropriated our history for itself, reclaiming our heroes as humanity's heroes, there is paradoxically a growing number of those who believe they must replace Moses and David with Washington or Napoleon. Ultimately this attempt to forget our own past and to find youth again at the expense of strangers will fail—simply because Washington's and Napoleon's heroes were named Moses and David.

The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at ran- dom. Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future. Only then-but from that moment on-will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.

April 24, 1942.

Arendt turned her attention to the promise that “all Israel will take care of Israel” as it was being promoted to smooth over differences between the diaspora and the Revisionist Zionists:

The world in which we live is full of sorcery, magic, and ordinary hocus- pocus. Rising like irregular boulders out of the chaos of ancient and hyper-modern superstitions—-brewed by despair and spread like advertising around the world by machine guns—are yesterday's truths, almost sunk in the mire. And a few of those truths have also been included in sorcery's great book of despair disguised as science. Except that they have been able to convince the masses in direct proportion to their loss of political effectiveness.

May 8, 1942.

Arendt looks closely at Hitler’s rhetoric and how it casts a certain people as the enemy of the state. What she calls “the devil’s rhetoric” is highly effective, and she concludes by noting that one must call a spade a spade, namely, it is not useful to pretend Hitler isn’t seeking a genocide of Jews:

The idea of a fundamental, natural inequality of peoples, which is the form that injustice has taken in our time, can only be defeated by the idea of an original and inalienable equality among all who bear a human countenance. Only a justice that creates just relationships can vie with an injustice that creates unjust relationships. And since—for various reasons, all of which one may indeed deplore—the idea of injustice has been imputed to and exemplified by the Jewish people, those who must fight for equality and justice have no choice but to lay aside their remarkable skittishness and openly speak the name of the Jewish people in order to grant them their share of justice when they justly demand national freedom and to assure them their equality as an equally valued ally. This is the only sort of propaganda for which the "devil's rhetoric" is no match.

Elsewhere, Arendt refers to the ships, Struma and Patria, which were carrying Jewish refugees fleeing toward Palestine in 1940. Both ships were refused entry to ports by the British. On its return, the Struma sunk after being struck by a mine. Meanwhile, the Patria blew up in the harbor before it was able to take its passengers, on British orders, from an internment camp at Atlit (near Haifa) to one on the island of Mauritius. The problem of refugees and stateless persons continued to drive Arendt’s thinking on political forms of belonging and security.

June 19, 1942.

Arendt’s column begins to include a parenthetical address in the upper-left corner. “(This Means You)”: the speaker insisting that the average reader is directly implicated by the facts, the column, and the current events. It’s an interesting formal gesture— a gesture that brought to mind the war propaganda posters of Uncle Sam pointing at the audience and expressing a similar command.

Again, the clarity of the situation: Arendt took Goebbels at his word while American intellectuals argued over semantics.

September 3, 1943.

Arendt wrote a letter to the editors of Aufbau titled “The Real Reasons for Theresienstadt.” The letter begins by disputing the newspaper’s description of Theresienstadt as a ghetto “alibi”. No, Theresienstadt “was among the first camps”, Arendt points out, adding that, since 1940, she has been “been very closely following all deportations and measures taken in the camps and believe that a consistent political agenda lies behind them all, despite occasional local variations.” She then lists several examples of strategies and patterns she has observed in relation to the concentration camps. I quote two of the five below:

December 17, 1943 & December 31, 1943.

Arendt publishes two columns looking at the future of an Israeli-Palestinian state. She expresses concern over how politics is driving the process:

The attempt to solve national conflicts by first creating sovereign states, and then guaranteeing minority rights within state structures made up of various nationalities, has suffered such a spectacular defeat in recent times that one would expect no one would even presume to think of following that path again.

We need only recall postwar history in most of the nations of Eastern and Central Europe, for the failure to grant minorities the justice due them was surpassed only by the fact that these minorities enjoyed, at least theoretically, the most splendid legal protection.

Then Arendt adds a point she will make again repeatedly— a point that follows from her conviction that seeking a Jewish state will come at the cost of creating a Jewish homeland—namely, “There is no reason to hope that the national problem, which is what we are dealing with in Palestine, can be solved in terms of national politics, and it makes no difference whether one seeks that solution in a small sovereign Jewish state or in a huge Arab empire.”

She continues:

The truth is, to speak in sweeping generalities, that Palestine can be saved as the national homeland of Jews only if (like other small countries and nationalities) it is integrated into a federation. Federative arrangements hold out good chances for the future because they promise the greatest chance for success in solving national conflicts and can thus be the basis for a political life that offers peoples the possibility of reorganizing themselves politically. Precisely because of the strong appeal that this new idea exerts on the hopes and wishes of many European nations, it has become rather fashionable to use the term "federation" for almost any combination of nation-states- from the old alliances to the new systems of national blocs that are now being called regional federations. But whether one plans nation-states as isolated structures or in some combination with other states, the conflict between majority and minority, such as we have in Palestine, lives on.

And as with this conflict, so too with the old alternative between minority rights (as in the proposal of the American Jewish Conference) and the slogan of "population transfers" (as suggested by Revisionists), though the latter will never work without fascist organizations.

December 4, 1948.

There is much to gleaned from the open letter to the New York Times drafted by Arendt and co-signed by Albert Einstein, Sidney Hook, and Seymour Melman, among others. In the PDF attached at the link, one can read the alarm over the US government and American Jewish institutions embracing Menachim Begin in 1948.

1950.

In 1948, Judah L. Magnes, the late president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, suggested that Hannah Arendt write this paper, based on their conversations and dicussions. From the end of the First World War to the day of his death in October 1948, Magnes was seen some as most dedicated Jewish spokesman for Arab-Jewish understanding in Palestine.

Arendt dedicated “Peace or Armistice in the Near East?” to Magnes’ memory. It was published in 1950. And it begins with a simple claim:

Peace in the Near East is essential to the state of Israel, to the Arab people, and to the Western world. Peace, as distinguished from an armistice, cannot be imposed from the outside; it can only be the result of negotiations, of mutual compromise and eventual agreement between Jews and Arabs.

It is a lengthy essay that responds to the increased hostilities and militarization of Israel. Magnes’ influence is palpable, and one can hear him nodding, for example, when Arendt questions the Spartan mythos being cultivated by politicians:

A mere armistice would force the new Israeli state to organize the whole people for permanent potential mobilization; the permanent threat of armed intervention would necessarily influence the direction of all economic and social developments and possibly end in a military dictatorship. The cultural and political sterility of small, thoroughly militarized nations has been sufficiently demonstrated in history. The examples of Sparta and similar experiments are not likely to frighten a generation of European Jews who are trying to wipe out the humiliation of Hitler's slaughterhouses with the newly won dignity of battle and the triumph of victory. . .

Excessive expenditures on armaments and mobilization would not only mean the stifling of the young Jewish economy and the end of the country's social experiments, but lead to an increasingdependence of the whole population upon financial and other support from American Jewry.

Her comments on diplomacy are critical and obvious and worthy of repetition, particularly at a time when political leaders have invested so deeply in the myth of redemptive violence that Netanyahu’s attempts to raze Gaza to the ground are being igored by career diplomats, whose interest in their own careers keeps them from asking difficult questions. What is a “good peace”?

More ominously, Arendt surveys the changing political opinion among the diaspora:

The majority of the Jewish people feel that the happenings of the last years have a closer relation to the destruc- tion of the Temple in A.D. 70 and the messianic yearnings of two thousand years of dispersion, than to the United Nations' decision of 1947, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, or even the fifty years of pioneering in Palestine. Jewish victories are not judged in the light of present realities in the Near East but in the light of a very distant past; the present war fills every Jew with "such sat- isfaction as we have not had for centuries, perhaps not since the days of the Maccabees" (Ben-Gurion).

[….]

The Jews went into battle against the British occupation troops and the Arab armies with the "spirit of Masadah," inspired by the slogan "or else we shall go down," determined to refuse all compromise even at the price of national suicide. Today the Israeli govern- ment speaks of accomplished facts, of Might is Right, of military necessities, of the law of conquest, whereas two years ago, the same people in the Jewish Agency spoke of justice and the desperate needs of the Jewish people. Palestinian Jewry bet on one card—and won.

The Jews, with the exception of the Revisionists, for many years refused to talk about their ultimate goals, partly because they knew only too well the uncompromising attitude of the Arabs and partly because they had unlimited confidence in British protection. The Biltmore Program of 1942 for the first time formulated Jewish political aims officially—a unitary Jewish state in Palestine with the provision of certain minority rights for Palestinian Arabs who then still formed the majority of the Palestinian population. At the same time, the transfer of Palestinian Arabs to neighboring countries was contemplated and openly discussed in the Zionist movement.

Arendt turns towards these mutual claims in order to remind readers that political leaders have failed completely in offering livable solutions for the future, and this failure is based on the refusal to heed “the concrete facts” on the ground:

Both want power. And both want power as defined by the imperial. Arendt’s thoughtfulness isn’t so much in her conclusions as in her insistence on explaining “the Jewish and Arab failure to visualize a close neighbor as a concrete human being.” Against the Jewish economic miracle, Arendt poses the questions of Arab labor:

It was, however, no accident that Zionist officials allowed this economic trend to take its course and that none of them ever made, in Judah L. Magnes's words, Jewish-Arab cooperation "the chief objective of major pol- icy." Zionist ideology, which after all is at least thirty years older than the Balfour Declaration, started not from a consideration of the realities in Palestine but from the problem of Jewish homelessness. The thought that "the people without a country needed a country without a people" so occu- pied the minds of the Zionist leaders that they simply overlooked the native population. The Arab problem was always "the veiled issue of Zionist poli- tics" (as Isaac Epstein called it as long ago as 1907), long before economic problems in Palestine forced Zionist leadership into an even more effective neglect.

The temptation to neglect the Arab problem was great indeed. It was no small matter, after all, to settle an urban population in a poor, desertlike country, to educate thousands of young potential tradesmen and intellectuals to the arduous life and ideas of pioneerdom. Arab labor was dangerous because it was cheap; there was the constant temptation for Jewish capital to employ Arabs instead of the more expensive and more rights-conscious Jewish workers. How easily could the whole Zionist venture have degenerated in those crucial years into a white man's colonial enterprise at the expense of, and based upon, the work of natives. Jewish class struggle in Palestine was for the most part a fight against Arab workers. To be anticapitalist in Palestine almost always meant to be practically anti-Arab.

The crude nationalist demand of "a country without a people" seemed so indisputably right in the light of practical experience that even the most idealistic elements in the Jewish labor movements let themselves be tempted first into forgetfulness and neglect, and then into narrow and inconsiderate nationalistic attitudes.

[…]

What they overlooked was that Arabs were human beings like themselves and that it might be dangerous not to expect them to act and react in much the same way as Jews; in other words, that because of the presence of the Jews in the country, the Bedouins were likely to want even more urgently land to settle on (a revival of the "inherent tendency in nomad society to desert the weariness and hopelessness of pastoral occupations for the superior comforts of agriculture"-H. St. J. B. Philby), the fellahin to feel for the first time the need for machines with which one obtained better products with less toil, and the urban population to strive for a standard of living which they had hardly known before the arrival of the Jews.

The contempt with which Israeli media speaks of Palestinians at present, particularly those born in Gaza, exists precisely because this history of demolishing Palestinian labor and traditions has created such a crevasse of exploitation that no Palestinian can work in Israel without living in the divided consciousness.

The dream of a homeland was not unitary—-it was not the singular thing articulated by Netanyahu and extremists. From the beginning, the dream, itself, was contested and varied.

Quietly, Arendt expresses her personal sympathy for Hashomer Haza’ir’s binational entity:

“Only one voice eventually was raised in protest to Israel's handling of the Arab refugee question, the voice of Dr. Magnes, who wrote a letter to the editor of Commentary (October 1948),” Arendt writes, before quoting the letter as follows:

It seems to me that any attempt to meet so vast a human situation ex- cept from the humane, the moral point of view will lead us into a morass.... If the Palestine Arabs left their homesteads "voluntarily" under the impact of Arab propaganda and in a veritable panic, one may not forget that the most potent argument in this propaganda was the fear of a repetition of the Irgun-Stern atrocities at Deir Yassin, where the Jewish authorities were unable or unwilling to prevent the act or punish the guilty. It is unfortunate that the very men who could point to the tragedy of Jewish DP's as the chief argument for mass immigration into Palestine should now be ready, as far as the world knows, to help create an additional category of DP's in the Holy Land.

Of Magnes’ letter to the editor, Arendt writes:

I will add one more thing from this essay, namely, the concluding lines:

National sovereignty, which so long had been the very symbol of free national development, has become the greatest danger to national survival for small nations. In view of the international situation and the geographical location of Palestine, it is not likely that the Jewish and Arab peoples will be exempt from this rule.

1952.

Arendt wrote a eulogy for Judah L. Magnes, whose intellect and ethics she admired. The eulogy closes with a warning about the failure of Jewish leaders and Zionists to heed Magnes’ conciliatory approach:

A people that for two thousand years had made justice the cornerstone of its spiritual and communal existence has become emphatically hostile to all arguments of such a nature, as though these were necessarily the arguments of failure. We all know that this change has come about since Auschwitz, but that is little consolation. The fact is that nobody among the Jewish people could succeed Magnes. This is the measure of his greatness; it is, by the same token, the measure of our failure.

With her review of Leon Poliakoy’s Breviaire de la haine: Le lIIe Reich et les juifs [Breviary of Hate: The Third Reich and the Jews], Arendt made herself unpopular with everyone, really. She extols Poliakoy for “correcting” the record and making important connections:

Mr. Poliakov is the first to understand and stress the close connection between the mass murder of Jews and an earlier experiment of the Nazis, the "mercy" killings during the first year of the war of 7,000 deranged and feebleminded people in Germany. Not only did this precede the mass murder of other peoples; Hitler's order of September I, 1939 (significantly enough, on the very first day of hostilities), to liquidate all "incurably sick persons" in the Third Reich set the stage for everything that followed. It was certainly no accident that this decree was not carried out literally and that none but mental cases were killed; it is also possible that what caused the killings to be suspended after a year and a half was, as Poliakov and others maintain, the protests of the victims' families and of other Germans. Nor is it likely that the fact that the beginning of the mass murder of Jews practically coincided with the termination of the "mercy" killings was due to accident either.

She parries an interesting comparison between Hitler’s view of war as wholesale slaughter and that of pacifists like Randolph Bourne:

Pacifism, under the impact of the new experience of machine-made warfare, became after 1918 the first ideological movement to insist on equating war with sheer slaughter. The Nazi party during the 1920S developed side by side with German pacifism and through conflict with it. In distinction, however, from all purely nationalist propagandists for militarism, the Nazis never questioned the correctness of the pacifist equation; rather, they frankly approved of all forms of murder, and of war as one among them. In their opinion all notions of military honor or chivalry, with their implied respect for certain universal laws of humanity, were so much hypocrisy, and included in that hypocrisy was any conception of war that envisaged the defeat of the enemy without his utter destruction. For the Nazis, as for the pacifists, war was slaughter.

Arendt also makes a claim about “radical evil” that she will later contest. I quote it below in full precisely because it will mark a shift in her metaphysics:

And Arendt concludes by likening Stalin’s gulag to Hitler’s camps—-another statement that will increase her unpopularity in various intellectual circles:

Concentration and extermination camps are the most novel and most significant devices of all totalitarian forms of domination. Reports on the Soviet Russian system, whose "forced labor camps" are extermination camps in disguise, are numerous enough and trustworthy enough to permit comparison with the Nazi system. The differences between the two are real, but not radical; both systems result in the destruction of people selected as "superfluous." The development of this notion of "superfluity" is one of the central calamities of our century, and has produced its most horrible "solu- tion." Research into Nazism, therefore, so frequently minimized today as "mere" history, is indispensable for our understanding of the problems of the present and the immediate future.

September 20, 1963.

Hannah Arendt received a letter from Samuel Grafton with questions about her book on Eichmann. He had intended to conduct an interview for Look that later got shelved. Arendt happily answered anyway. I’ve included a few of her written replies below—the first focusing on problems within the assumptions of mainstream Zionism, the second focusing on the banality of evil:

But the trouble is that European Zionism (as distinguished from views held by American Zionists!) has often thought and said that the evil of antisemitism was necessary for the good of the Jewish people. In the words of a well-known Zionist in a letter to me discussing "the original Zionist argumentation: The antisemites want to get rid of the Jews, the Jewish State wants to receive them, a perfect match." The notion that we can use our enemies for our own salvation has always been to me the"original sin" of Zionism. Add to this what an even more prominent Zionist leader once told me in the tone of stating an innermost belief: "Every goy is an anti-semite," the implication being, "and it is good so, for how else could we get Jews to come to Israel?," and you will understand why I believe that certain elements of the Zionist ideology are very dangerous and should be discarded for the sake of Israel.

…

It is of course true that evil was commonplace in Nazi Germany and that "there were many Eichmanns," as the title of a German book about Eichmann reads. But I did not mean this. I meant that evil is not radical, going to the roots (radix), that it has no depth, and that for this very reason it is so terribly difficult to think about, since thinking, by defiinition, wants to reach the roots. Evil is a surface phenomenon, and instead of being radical, it is merely extreme. We resist evil by not being swept away by the surface of things, by stopping ourselves and beginning to think-thatis, by reaching another dimension than the horizon of everyday life. In other words, the more superficial someone is, the more likely he will be to yield to evil. An indication of such superficiality is the use of cliches, and Eichmann, God knows, was a perfect example. Each time he was tempted to think for himself, he said: Who am I to judge if all around me—that is, the atmosphere in which we unthinkingly live—-think it is right to murder innocent people? Or to put it slightly differently: Each time Eichmann tried to think, he thought immediately of his career, which up to the end was the thing uppermost in his mind.

Merwin, impatience, & the "held back" that hounds.

1

At the height of last year’s summer, as screens flashed various diet regimes, workouts, and GOOPisms to prepare the late capitalist physique for the market known as “swuimsuit season,” Matthew Wills’ essay on Eugen Sandow and the buff-cult of American Jesus gave this mind reprieve from the spectacular images of tiny fascia being flexed to demonstrate personal empowerment.

Eugene Sandow, an immigrant to the US, became a buff boy prototype for the “Muscular Christianity” that birthed American Jesus and YMCA masculinity. The “most visual marker of Muscular Christianity” was that “muscled-up Jesus,” as Wills observes, before providing the historical context:

This theological/philosophical movement originated in Britain and was taken up in the US in the late nineteenth century by evangelical Protestants. The movement stressed self-sacrifice, patriotism, masculinity, physical culture, and sports. Especially team sports. Epitomized by the YMCA and ballyhooed in the cult of the outdoors personified by Teddy Roosevelt, the new gospel of health and virility was a reaction against the perceived emasculation of white American men. Anglo-Saxons were said to be growing flabby in office jobs; being replaced in blue color jobs by non-white immigrants; and suffering, as always, under the yoke of emancipated women.

“Not unlike today, when portrayals of Jesus as a Rambo-like figure, sometimes even complete with AR-15, and the seventy-six-year-old Donald Trump as a buff, thirty-something Jesus-like figure, can be found among the iconography of the Right,” Wills concluded in 2022.

Today is complicated by the cross-fertilization of revolutionary soil by the prominence of the myth of redemptive violence on both the right and the left. Increasingly, it feels as if Samuel P. Huntington’s clash of civilizations has returned to ghost radical movements by positioning the “war” between patriarchal religions as the only future worth imagining.

2

Poetry licenses discomfort and permits uncertainty.

In this vein, I find myself returning to W. S. Merwin’s later poems, particularly his ode to impatience, excerpted in full below, as found in Migrations: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press):

What Merwin calls “the secrets of hunger” brings to mind a bench in Paris, sketched by Henri Cole in Orphic Paris (published by NYBB in 2018). In an essay, Cole depicts the writer, himself, on a bench along the River Seine, waiting for words to come. An interior parade of events, facts, and personal histories sits alongside the details of strangers passing at varying paces, carrying bags or difficult faces. Cole says: “I await some strange enchantment to make them interesting.”

I await that strange illumination that draws both worlds together in language— “some strange enchantment to make them interesting.” The secrets of hunger implicate the sensation of waiting, of not having the thing one desires or needs. There are different hungers, different longings, different languages, different secrets.

When one writes, the facts are changed: to quote Cole, the facts get “lost forever in representation of them." And "the inadequacy of language" which Cole describes as the poet's task, reminds us that our tool is failure.

To quote a few lines from Merwin’s final stanza:

and you know it would be
the end of you too only
if it ever arrives
you find something else missing

The "conditional” — the extraordinary “if” of it— means nothing can be finished or completed. So we return to the bench and wait for the thing that was felt to be missing.

3

At its best, poetry “knows” a few things. It knows, for example, that nothing can summarize a human being (least of all in a colonial language like English). And poetry knows it must continue wrestling with its own history, in its urges toward the attention of polemic. The difference between rhetoric and polemic gets skipped, but it matters primarily because rhetorical strategies are part of poetics, part of how we use language expressively.

Polemic gives us the whole thing in a sound-byte. It gives us the glib entirety. A poem that borrows rhetorical strategies from the polemic isn’t a species of rhetoric so much as a poem that cannot keep its promise to the reader.

4

"Ruinous but beautiful," Dan Beachy-Quick wrote of the poem’s speaker, or the events that combine to create the speaking self:

Sometimes I am this series of events that has led up to me. A kind of architecture, ruinous but beautiful (maybe). I mean only I am this self I feel as if I’ve built. Other times, I am this field whose edges I cannot see. Anonymous. No marker that says me.

“No marker that says me”; or, not entirely. No flag that lays claim to more than a language or the country I’d like to be, the homeland that isn’t deeply invested in wars and borders and eviscerations. No single sign is constituitive.

Living in Alabama means being associated with the political decisions and definitions of the MAGA-huffing majority.

There is money in all of this. MAGA scheming and dreaming is tied to market-saturated Christian fundamentalism that rejects scientific expertise for “entrepreneurship” and the art of the sale. The more brutal the sales pitch, the more likely it finds its way to a bumper-sticker or a t-shirt. The children know this.

In Alabama, the children grow up knowing that thinking is less valuable than becoming a sports star or a model— the two gender ideals. I remember internalizing this contempt for my own bookishness. However hurtful this rejection, the poet (as opposed to the mother, citizen, and human in me) acknowledges the fear beneath the guns and big glutes in a culture where the ability to make money or shoot a deer or afford college football tickets depends on networks and communities and access to financial assistance. 

The poet knows that the one carrying a gun is the coward. The poet knows the worst sort of power thrives in self-deceit and myths of strength. I remain “of” the South—raised in its schools, a product of its socializations, a beneficiary of white supremacy—and also “outside” it, which is to say, rejected by the good ole boys and gals who don't much trust immigrants or anti-flag writers. There is no way to bridge these gaps; no easy gloss of the distance between the words I was raised to recite and the actualities hidden beneath them. 

In this sense, the body translated by borders is a space of contact between the pure and impure: it saddles the binary at the point of friction and signification. Eastern Europe immigrants benefit from Alabama’s white supremacism while also being reminded by the locals that you cannot be one of them. That you were not born here. That your opinions are irrelevant to the future. That your flesh is foreign and not freesia. That you are "lucky" to be given a seat at the table. That your seat depends on learning to kneel. 

And maybe I do. Poetry is the pew for me. I kneel to get closer to the thing that elides me.

Again, I quote Beachy-Quick again, to stand, for a moment, in the nimbus of his sincerity:

The poem breaks the poet apart. The basic violence of that which is internal being made external, expressive. What was mine is no longer mine, brought from an inner realm in which doubt is but a temperament into an outer realm where doubt is a fundamental reality. But this violence is generous, even kind. The formal impetus of the poem insists the poem makes of itself a structure of dwelling. What the poem breaks of the self isn’t its nature but its habit, the ease of the limit by which the self is defined. The self awfully liberated from the self, and as in all such births, the first result isn’t wisdom or knowledge or truth, but the basic acts of emerging into a world not wholly known. One gropes. And where one gropes toward is the dwelling the poem has made of itself. To write the poem so as to be within it. Thinking begins in the poem; it cannot begin outside of it.

As for rejection: it is ubiquitous. It is the most basic part of being human. No matter what the culture sells us, there is nothing unique or special in the disappointment. Unlike a pain olympiad, poetry asks us to study rejection closely, to note how it notches our minds and blisters into defenses, to bring the imperfect mess of self to the world as text. It asks less for a representation than an illumination.

5

This close attention to making sense of a single word—here it is “provision”— echoes throughout Merwin’s poetics. His definitions tiptoe away from the definitive and towards the entanglement of meaning, the implication and connotation “in the wall” we cannot see.

The walls we know are not the walls we imagine.

The dead continue building without us.

Provision

All morning with dry instruments
The field repeats the sound
Of rain
From memory
And in the wall
The dead increase their invisible honey
It is August
The flocks are beginning to form
I will take with me the emptiness of my hands
What you do not have you find everywhere

Bresson's Notes on the Cinematograph.

Typing from a notebook dated 2021, I bumped into my ramblings on Robert Bressons' Notes on the Cinematograph (NYRB Classics), introduced by J.M.G Le Clézio and translated by Jonathan Griffin.

1

For Bresson, silence is constituitive to filmmaking, an act which creates text through juxtaposition of images that form relationships, and modify one another by existing and proximity: 

A sigh, a silence, a word, a sentence, a din, a hand, the whole of your model, his face, in repose, in movement, in profile, full face, an immense view, a restricted space....

The ellipsis here belongs to Bresson, who reminds the reader: "Don't run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the joins (ellipses)."

Bresson’s ellipses serve an architectural role as "joins", and architecture signifies since the image is "transformed by contact with other images," a transformation he likens to how color is changed by contact with other colors.

2

"Cinematography is writing with images in movement and with sounds."

Images have power and value only through "their position and relation," Bresson writes, comparing images in a film to words in a dictionary: one could say each film has its lexicon.

3

Actors as "models"  who sit to be painted, to become part of the canvas.

"Cinema films are historical documents whose places are in the archives," Bresson notes, so that a play or a piece as performed by X on the date of X in X year. 

The role of the "look" for Bresson: "To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks."

We don't see the color of each other's eyes: "two persons, looking each other in the eye, see not their eyes but their looks."

He follows with a note from Vivaldi that any concerto that includes the word solo needs only one violin: "Not to use two violins when one is enough." 

4

One night, Bresson stayed up in a hotel, haunted by Napoleon's saying: "I make my battle plans from the spirit of my sleeping soldiers." He compared the preparation of a film to the preparation of a battle, with an eye to intersections and the point of intersection on the maps.

"Don't let your backgrounds ( avenues, squares, public gardens, subways) absorb the faces you are applying to them."

Don't let the use of a place become dehumanizing, or crowd-faced. But he also quotes Renoir telling Matisse that he often paints bouquets on the side where he hadn't planned them. Emphasizing the power of the "flattened image," Bresson invests in repetition, the mystery of an image being multiple: "The same image brought in by ten different routes will be a different image ten times." 

5

“Images and sounds are like people who make acquaintances on a journey and afterwards cannot separate.”

No background music. No music without visible instruments. "The noises must become music."

It is "the feelings that bring about the events," not the events which cause the feelings.

In all caps, Bresson says: "THE SOUNDTRACK INVENTED SILENCE."

In film, "absolute silence" can be reached through a "pianissimo of noises". Things made "visible" not by rare light but by changing angle which regards them. "Images…like the modulations in music."

Positioning himself against tactics of speed, noise, extravagance, Bresson opts for "tactics of slowness, of silence."

Claude Debussy played piano with the lid down.

Corot said "one must not seek, one must wait." 

Silence, musical by an effect of resonance. The last syllable of the last word, or the last noise, like a held note.

Perhaps the ellipses work like a sustain pedal on a piano: it opens the echo of the held sound towards silence, thus, extending it?

6

Scene and setting are established by the sameness of sound and sonority; "the true is inimitable, the false untransformable."

The model should speak as if speaking to themselves: "monologue instead of dialogue."

Thinking is working one's way through the world, a form of action. In these proximities, "the bonds that beings and things are waiting for, in order to live." 

A locomotive's whistle imprints in us a whole railroad station. 

The subject is altered by juxtaposition of images and sounds—religious subjects receive their dignity and their elevation from the images and sounds, not the other way around.

Reorganize the unorganized noises (what you think you here is not what you hear) of a street, a railroad station, an airport... Play them back one by one in silence and adjust the blend.

Find a kinship between image, sound and silence. To give them an air of being glad to be together, of having chosen their place. Milton: Silence was pleased.

7

Rule for writers from Bresson: "To TRANSLATE the invisible wind by the water it sculpts in passing."  

And: 'Letter of Mozart's, about some of his own concerto's (K. 413, K. 414, K. 415): 

They hold the happy mean between the two difficult and the two easy. They are brilliant...,  but they missed poverty.

"Avoid paroxysms (anger, terror, etc) which one is obliged to simulate, and in which everybody is alike," Bresson continues.

Voice and face are things which have formed together and have grown used to each other.

Your film is not readymade. It makes itself as it goes along under your gaze. Images and sounds in a state of waiting and reserved.

Florence Delay playing Joan of Arc.

8

In an interview about The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), Bresson compares the relationship between the cinematographer and the actor to the relationship of author to character, where "each gives to the other" profoundly:

I believe we communicate by looking at one another. There's a beautiful paragraph about this in Proust. I think he compares glances between people to rubber bands, or threads, that connect us. I think looking is everything. If, in the street, you look at a person passing by, at first glance she might seem like a moving statue. As soon as you exchange a look, then suddenly, something happens: this isn't a statue, it's a living being, a body and a soul. So, the way people look at each other is, for me I was going to say the only important thing in a film. Because, after all, to succeed in making these shadows on a screen come to life, these beings that are not alive but that have a certain kind of life, they must exist in relation to each other, and each of them in relation to objects in the world. This interdependence is, I believe, created by the act of looking. There has to be an interdependence. Not to depend on anything is not to live. For me gaze, the exchange of looks—daily life depends on them. I mean that these exchanges make us realize that we—others and ourselves, ourselves and objects—depend on each other.

The question of Joan's gender-violations comes up, to which Bresson replies: "Joan took up dressing like a man again, after agreeing to stop, in order to protect herself from English soldiers; another, her confessor, insists that it was the English who hid her dress in a bag to force her back into men's clothes."  He continues:

We did our best not to locate the greatness of Joan's life in uncertainties. One thing we do know: She was not the ignorant peasant of legend. At Chinon, she became fast friends and instant equals with the seigneurs of the highest order, whom she went on to command militarily and to instruct in artillery. She rode magnificent horses. She was very elegant, of a royal elegance, which is not to say that she was anything like the kin of Charles VII. He was reproached at the trial for his gowns of gold, his fur coats. Another certain, poignant fact: her abundant tears before dying. I thought of a phrase from Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks. He says that  before death, the soul weeps because it has to separate itself from this marvel that is the body. Joan had a very beautiful body: "I am happy to die. But I don't want to be burned, to be turned to ash.”

During her trial, Joan said that she signed the orders that went against her wishes with an "X". But it was also said she didn't know how to write. Joan’s letters survived as scribed by others, with a signature from her own hand. 

"Nothing indicates that Joan didn't know how to write," Bresson tells Jean Guitton: 

You could say that she was a being more perfect that us, more sensitive. She combined her five senses in a new way. She saw her voices. She convinces us of a world that exists at the limits of our faculties. She penetrates this supernatural world, but she closes the door behind her.

This will to believe isn't only about St. Michael. When she is asked: "How did you know it was St. Michael?," she replies: "Because he had the voice of an angel." -How did you know it was the voice of an angel?-"Because I had the will to believe it." A will that enhanced the apparition. She needed her will in order to accede to the realm. . . . What is most admirable about Joan throughout the trial is the heroism with which she deliberately sacrifices her life for the meaning of her life. After the abjuration, she pulls herself together and then loses herself to save herself. "I did not want to renounce my apparitions. Everything I have done is out of fear of the fire."

9

The conversation moves to Pickpocket (1959). Bresson tells the interviewer: 

I have never wanted to make a moral film, far from it. I do want to give the audience the feelings I experience when faced with certain things, certain events in life, but it isn't the events themselves that count for me. I want to say that the events just provide the opportunity to access a life other than physical life, I mean an inner life, the life of the soul. Of course I'm obliged to use concrete things as a means to get there.

When the interviewer mentions "the guardian angel … the very sweet friend who isn't all that good," Bresson interrupts him sharply. "I was not thinking of a guardian angel," he says: 

It's true that there are some correspondences, there are some coincidences in life for those who wish to see them. Unfortunately, our era is a bit like a school of inattention. I want to say that we are taught-that radio, magazines, television teach us to look without seeing and to listen without hearing. [Applause] But what I want is to teach the opposite: to teach us how to see. When I was young, I was taught only one thing, I was told "pay attention." And now, it seems as if the whole world is being told not to pay attention. It's very serious. It's an extremely serious thing and I am convinced of it (though I could be wrong). I have much more confidence in the real public, the one that feels, than in the small-minded audience that seeks to exercise its intelligence before feeling.

Bresson continues: 

There's a line in Pascal that goes, I believe, "Every thing hides a mystery.* "To get to the mystery... But it isn't by theatrical means that would be impossible. I'll repeat what I was saying just now: A film must not be a play, must not be a spectacle. We are always pushing films in that direction. Spectacles demand presence, presence in flesh A reproduction. What is a reproduction of a painting? It's something dead. What I am trying to do by killing the actors in a way (I'm not at saying that I've succeeded) is to make them live again on screen. I would less like for the audience to attend a birth and not something that is already completed, that has already taken place-a birth that has already taken place, the phenomenon of which has been filmed.

A film is not made of images, it's made of relationships between images. And these relationships must give it life. The same as with colors in painting; a blue is a blue, but if you put it next to a yellow, it's not the same blue. Or next to a red and a yellow, it's no longer the same yellow, nor the same blue, nor the same red. I want to say not only that a film is made of elements that are images, but it's also made of sounds. And not only of relationships, but of rhythms. So you have to figure out how to move the audience with form. You know that Valéry said something similar to this: "Form must have the value of an idea." And you know in poetry, meter is already an idea. Above all, what I'm looking for—I don't claim to have achieved it—but I'm trying to speak cinema in a language all its own, and I refuse to get dragged into making filmed theater.

"The more things resemble each other the more they are different, in the sense that you notice their difference more," Bresson says. "If the two things are almost identical, any difference is explosive. So perhaps when I give this kinship, this and common ancestry to my characters, I make them more personal, more distinct."

Uncertainty is the dramatic foundation of Pickpocket:

All thieves are surrounded by uncertainty. What's terrifying for a thief is not to know whether he has been seen. The police told me that thieves usually die from heart attacks. [Laughter] These are people who live with an addiction to their own kind of drug-it's so much like an addiction that, apparently, they also can't handle prison. The majority of them commit suicide, or attempt suicide, after just a few months behind bars. So there's this drama surrounding them which they create, which is their drug – and which is, perhaps, the drama of uncertainty.

"The watch is very beautiful."

This statement replaces an answer to a question about whether a man loves a woman; and Bresson allows the music to start on that sentence.

An audience member comments that it is "as if nothing has been said, really, because it's such a banal sentence, but everything is suggested."

And Bresson agrees with the audience member; is "very moved" by that statement. He explicates his reticence along the edges:

There may be too much condensation in the film, but in fact what I'm trying to do is to come up to the edge of saying too little, in order to try to express with silence what other films express with words—  the almost imperceptible things that happen on a face, or in a look in someone's eyes. But there is this curious thing: a few years ago people began to say that what makes a film cinema is if it has no dialogue at all.

Dialogue is overdetermined to Bresson; he says he's seen films "that are made entirely of pleonasms, in which the image adds absolutely nothing to what is said, and what is said adds nothing to the image."

Contra the impulse to dispel silence, Bresson aims "to verge on saying too little, on leaving everything mysterious and assigning weight to things through their rhythm." 

There is discussion about how the representative for the French Minister of the Interior in charge of censorship objected to Pickpocket. An audience member speculates that this may be due to the "documentary aspect" that seems to demonstrate "pickpocketing techniques." 

The piece in the film is Lully's "Suite in G Minor" which hadn't been recorded prior to the film. 

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.

|||||

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.

|||||

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.

||||||

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.

||||||||||||

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."

||||||

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”.

||||||

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