On the 100th anniversary of Kafka's cosmos.

— This is an original detail.

“‘This is an original detail,’ he said, indicating what I saw to be an iron ladder descending into the gloom,” Elif Batuman writes in a wildly Kafkaesque short fiction titled “The Board Will Decide If I’m Qualified to Live in the Basement,” featured as Recommended Reading on Electric Literature today, and collected in a new anthology of Kafka-inspired prose, The Cage Went in Search of the Bird (Catapult). It goes without saying that I recommend it, despite my having said it.

Little Franz, mid-ruin.

— I should have been the little ruin dweller.

Against the chaos of his world, Franz Kafka poses a cosmology of fragments. I’m thinking of May 18-19 of 1910, the official "comet night," an event that reproached the patriarchs across time and space. For those 48 hours in May, the arrival of Halley's comet intersected with Kafka’s big bang, his big blame: the official reproaching of his parents for the failed education they gave him.

Both reproach and refutation have done him great harm, as Kafka sees it while staring at family photos. This great harm emerges ekphrastically, in relation to the poise of the "group pictures.” The son responds to the harm in fabulist way: he introduces them to each other in his imagination, which is to say, in a story.

An image from a photo: "The dress worn too beautifully floating over American boots."

The family members, these people who have harmed him, are unforgivable. "I should have been the little ruin dweller…" – This is Kafka’s refrain, and it appears here, in the rubble of that foundational bourgeois event known as the family portrait.

But how does a reproach address those "persons past," who are frozen in sepia ice by the photo and onerously present as in an endlessly-interpretable tableau? Who is the author of past mistakes in education?  

Of the persons past, Kafka writes: "They cannot remember! They stand there like tired dogs, because they use up all their strength to remain upright in one’s memory." The reproaches attach themselves to each image the way fondness attaches itself to a familiar binkie. "And now show me the reproach that in such a situation wouldn’t turn into a sigh," writes Kafka, drawing on the reproach’s capacity as a communicative mode, "is always on the verge of becoming a sigh…" 

Like the characters in the photo, the reproaches stand side by side, forming relationships with each other: "The large reproach to which nothing can happen, takes the small one by the hand." In the meantime: "We remain upright, because it relieves us."



— Present unhappiness consists of nothing but confusion.

Strangers glimpsed through a window make it easier for him to stop thinking about the reproaches. When looking out the window, Kafka quiets "the urge to reproach."

He looks out the window frequently when standing in a room with his father. He describes himself as standing by the window and looking out. The parents and family who have done him “harm out of love, makes their guilt even greater." For Kafka, love is almost more dangerous than hate, or more damaging.

Like other dispirited spiritual seekers, Kafka goes to visit Dr. Steiner and learn more about theosophy. He admits to Dr. Steiner that he fears theosophy because it might add confusion (his word) which would be a problem since his "present unhappiness consists of nothing but confusion.” There is no coexistence between what he feels and what he knows. It is untenable: his happiness in one realm ruins his ability to function in the other.

Kafka quotes from Goethe's diary; mentions that his "foreign nature" is suggestive of a "capacity for transformation". Goes to look at himself in the mirror and spies something transformative about his own eyes.

Unreliable: family, work, religion, bourgeois values.

Reliable: insomnia, restlessness, poison —"The wind blows through it. One sees only the emptiness, one searches in all corners, and does not find one self."

His sleeplessness is related to writing, and this is not true for all writers. At the risk of distinguishing between working habits and demands that work makes on the body, it is simply not the case that all writers suffer from severe, lifelong insomnia. Situational insomnia is miserable, but it differs vastly from the lifelong neurological condition of insomnia. No “sleep hygiene regime” cures or resolves it. Stop blowing smoke up my ass and sending me the bill.

Kafka crosses his arms like a vampire to sleep– or like a man in a coffin. He has suffered from insomnia since childhood. But it is easier to blame the unwritten. It is more satisfying to blow smoke up one’s own ass than to submit to having it blown there by others.


— Long insomnia description here.

— At the risk of being misunderstood.

"The great horror that everything in me is ready for a literary work," Kafka writes. And yet writing defines the condition of aliveness for him. To become alive is to write the book. Life is the thing that wants to be written.

Writing isn’t a substitute for life or an escape from life—it is simply, life. Kafka cannot know himself without writing – cannot even find a word for his condition.

The definition of "real despair": [see quote on p. 5].
An inability to stay inside himself which manifests as a sort of impertinence.
"At the risk of being misunderstood…": [see quote on p. 8].
The room is the prison and the space of revelation.
The desaturation of color dawns on the mind in a room that watches light move – "bounded in a curved line from the head of the bed."
Light gobbles up hues.
The dissolution of self in sidewalks.
"I’m restless and poisonous," Kafka says, referencing an earlier walk in which he "lost the strength for sadness."

—-Even in conditions that today seem unbearable.

"I have no time to write letters twice," Kafka confessed on November 27, 1912.

— No time to preserve a copy of his own words; no time for correspondence; no consideration of writing letters without a keeping a copy because correspondence, too, is a text for Kafka. Like Rilke, Kafka mines his correspondence for stories, metaphors, and figures. Like Rilke, Kafka is better as desiring his interlocutor on paper than encountering that desire as flesh, in real life.

—- Fear of waiting, a terror Kafka connects to his father’s use of a particular word in childhood. The word "ultimo,” and the dread that swarmed his mind when his father employed the ultimo: "the last, feared for so long, could never be purely overcome".

— New headache of a still unknown sort.

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

He is ready to die because he cannot write the book.

He succumbs to time with dread, adding the famous description of having his finger on his eyebrow.

Constant, this sense of despair and being forsaken.

Headaches lengthen as books progress.

"New headache of a still unknown sort. Brief painful stabbing over my right eye."

—- Nothing, nothing.

Betrayed by the noise of neighbors.

Forsaken by everyone and their noises.

Distracted by the shadow of the oversaturated family photos: "Parents who expect gratitude from their children (there are even those who demand it) are like usurers, they are happy to risk the capital as long as they get the interest."

Econometrically-devastated. Emotionally over-laundered.

"I see the task and the way to it, I would only have to push through some thin obstacles and can't do it. —Playing with the thoughts of F."

He loves un-imagining himself in letters to Felice Bauer.

He will fold her into his fictions.

And: "She is again the center of it all."



— Pull quote on bachelor and marriage here.

— The ancient wrong that man has committed.

He returns to reproach in his letters to Milena.

And the poison continues: the pointed fingers, the ultimo, the ultimatum, the thing he does not want to become.

The judgment he leverages against his family.

Judgement is everything, he whispers.

He expresses a longing for sickness, which hides a longing to be tended, which he blames on his mother.

As for his failure to love his mother, he blames this on the German language.

—- And there is some venom in me, some poison I can’t articulate, connected to the terror of dying, of being erased, of not ‘surviving’ the aesthetic of late capitalism’s cuteness, of being consigned to eat the dust of my own dustbin; or finding the self defined by the pseudo sanctity of its therapy-industrial complex that takes middle-class American experience as norm and extrapolates all kinds of borders and inhumane boundaries that demand continuous police, that need incessant forms of policing (holy shit has anyone ever craved police as much as 21st century US)? I want to position love as a counterpoint, but it is easier to be generous when the world is built around preserving your ‘lifestyle’. Or: it is easier to be generous when the world is glossed by the generosity we bestow upon ourselves in continual self-esteem baths and self-affirmations. The literary world is certainly generous (yet suffocating), exciting (yet predictable and mechanistic), sensitive (yet obsessed by status, self-positioning and winning). One writes to spite it sometimes. One writes furiously, sneaking the no-no of adverbs in the pile of relentless things waiting to be written, hardly daring to wonder what will be read, if any of it gets published, if you will ever stop cringing when imagining being read. And there is that venom in it: no one will forgive you for saying the thing you have written. Maybe Kafka was blessed? Is it better to be read when dead? Milena, I am so dirty…

Anatomy of the passions.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

Could never precisely or doubly ‘command the contraction.’

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

A lightbulb.

Henry David Thoreau and the Aeolian mode:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Emerson’s words:

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

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

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

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

Giving birth.

A new time.

A new man.

Anew-ing . . . the newness.

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

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

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

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

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

M: “Is that natural?”

ME: “What is Nature?”

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





Filters, faces, the expressivity of not saying.

“Total resistance to the grasp”

Faces are illegible to me now.

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

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

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

Alleged “scene of flirtation,” per Duchenne:

“Sideways for ecstasy and sensual delirium”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to Arthur Rimbaud "Nocturne Vulgaire" . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(mon pouvoir de pouvoir)

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Rilke's First Elegy with Bianca Stone.

A gust inside the god. A wind.

—-Rainer Maria Rilke, “Gesang ist Dasein”

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

—-Czeslaw Milosz, “Artificer”


1 How it began


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

—- Mark Wunderlich

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

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



2 “First Elegy

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

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

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

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

A few immediate observations:

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

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

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

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

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

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



3 “No One” in Correspondence

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

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

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

Perhaps there is something else as well, a None.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


4 Rilke as poet of desire

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

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

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

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

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

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


5. Translations and interlocutory frisson

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

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

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

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

Yellows on the cutting floor.

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

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

To begin with the shape of it—

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

Four stanzas of different length.

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

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

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

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

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

To stare at that “tenor” for a minute—

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

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

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

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

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

To return and discover two gestures—-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First gesture: there is a painting . . .

Second gesture: there is something else . . .

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

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

The look at the painting—-

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diminishment is not dissimilar from incompleteness.

And the monstrosity—

According to the current description offered by Tate Museum:

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

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

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

The singular monster v. the many—-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The final monster—

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

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

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

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

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

Jean-Paul Clébert's Paris.

“A personal investigation”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He is our guide to Paris' less touristed vistas.

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

There are moments expressing the stark physicality of poverty:

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

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

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

Photo by Patrice Molinard. Source.

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

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

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

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

Jean-Paul Clébert in his writing office.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Searches on Clebert reveal nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

Legends are made of so much less.

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

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

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

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

11 thoughts after reading a nocturne by Elizabeth Willis.

1

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


NOCTURNE

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


2

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


3

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

4

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


5

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


6

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


7

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


8

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


9

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


10

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


11

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

Forbidden music; in variations.

1

It always begins foolishly.

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

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

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



2

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

“Plato,” I whispered.

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

I ceded the playlist and set off on the hunt.

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

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


Remedios Varo, The Flautist (1948)

3

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

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

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



4

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

- Plutarch, Alcibiades 2.6

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

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

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

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

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

5

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

- Aristotle, Politics

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




6

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

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

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

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

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


7

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

8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where am I now, he thinks. 

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

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

The flautist is my head is eternally femme.

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

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

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

Where am I now?



[Postlude wherein speaker resolves to libate Xanthippe later]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nobility of soul, surely!” replied Socrates.

“And where may a person get this ointment?”

“Certainly not from the perfumers,” said Socrates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus do the men worry, think, and drink.

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

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

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

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

A conversation on dancing follows.

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

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

Socrates intercedes:

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

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

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

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

Celan again.

1

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from Pierre Joris’ translation notes on the poem.

5

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

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

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

(Italics mine.)

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6

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

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

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

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

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

7

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

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

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