A word between Celia Paul and Gwen John.

Deeds which populate the dimensions of space and which reach their end when someone dies may cause us wonderment, but one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies in every final agony, unless there is a universal memory . . . What will die with me when I die, what pathetic and fragile form will the world lose? 

— Jorge Luis Borges, “The Witness”

Celia Paul. Letters to Gwen John. New York: NYRB Classics, 2022. (pp. 241-244)
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions, 1962.

1

I keep fumbling back towards a word used by Celia Paul in Letters to Gwen John, an epistolary to a ghost, a correspondence with the spirit of artist, Gwen John. (For more on Gwen John, there is a riveting read on her colors and tone by Neil Lebeter.) The word, itself, is a wraithlike thing that inscribes an affinity while articulating a shared position between them: 

This word, recueillie, is slightly off kilter. The conjugation twitches, but that isn’t what draws me back to the word. I feel like Celia Paul hid something in it; she folded a secret into a pose that becomes a series of re-poses.

In French, recueillie serves as a noun and an adjective for a certain exterior calm, an imperturbable tranquility, a coolness that withholds concern, an unflappable demeanor. 

“You and I have often painted self-portraits by proxy,” Celia tells Gwen. They have also shared this an angle of repose, a position of the body, a pose that becomes a place of encounter in absence. Recueillie, in Celia’s usage, becomes a body. Or an oeuvre: an artistic corpus.

“What will die with me when I die, what pathetic and fragile form will the world lose?” The question belongs to Jorge Luis Borges, but the italics are mine.

2

After spending years as Rodin's muse and lover, Gwen John withdrew from the world to occupy a solitude that made space for art.

After being "the muse" of Lucian Freud and raising a son sired in that relationship, Celia Paul recognizes herself in John's desire to be unperturbed. 

"I have hoped to be unassailable and complete within myself," she writes to Gwen. But there is something that wants to be created; there is "something stirring" inside her, something to which she wants "to be receptive," something that compels her to seek the ghost's "guidance."  

Drawing on the ideal of recueillie, Paul considers her own self-portraits, or the ways in which she imagines herself. 

Her painting, Overshadowed, is a self-portrait inspired by Sofonisba Anguissola's self-portrait that reveals her famous teacher, Bernardino Campi, working in the margins. Titled Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (1539), the artist depicts him "brush in hand, in the act of painting her." Celia’s tone lacks inflection when she writes, matter-of-factly, that the "powerful portrait" of her belongs to him, "as if painted by him, on his canvas."

In this double-portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola, according to Celia:

Although "pleased" with her depiction of Lucian ("it caught him as he was, quicksilver and mercurial"), Celia decided to paint him out of the portrait. But men insinuate themselves into the emptiness that surrounds a woman’s body, especially when this emptiness exists as a repudiation of their influence.

Painting him out didn’t prevent Lucian from leaving what Celia calls "a shadow," a trace of an encounter. 

She tells Gwen about her battle with the impossible stain of Lucian’s shadow:

These eyes "alive and alight with challenge" indicate Lucian's presence. It is a gendered presence, as Celia explains. It is a presence she recognizes and feels throughout her body, from her head to her shadow. Her solution has been to step aside and refuse the cockfights. And Celia recognizes this part of herself in Gwen: both have relinquished the ring and let the men have at it. This is where the pose comes in:

“Only by being withheld (recueillie) can we access this strength.” The pose of withholding merges with the refusal to squander that reserve of energy (or strength) on male artists and partners. It is self-sabotaging to waste one’s artistic energy on trying to win. The palette is waiting to be discovered.

“Your self-portraits are always painted on a small canvas,” Celia continues. And she begins thinking about her own work. There is "a small, dark self-portrait" of Celia’s head and shoulders that "burns with a quiet intensity." The color scheme is “is russet and gray: the colors of late autumn.”

Despite her physical absence, Celia places Gwen in the present, collaborating as her mentor, a spiritual proximate.

“I thought of you a lot when I made this image of myself,” she writes.

And then Celia pauses. You can almost feel her looking up, and away, from the page. You can almost smell the cerulean canvas overpainted and darkened by grays. "I need you more than ever, Gwen,” she continues, “I need you to direct your calm regard upon me, to steady me. I am entering a time of turbulence.” You can almost taste the chilled air of the studio, the scattered brushes, the empty sink. The loneliness is about to begin.

3

In 1996, while restoring "Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola", the specialist laborers came across a spectral spot in the painting. Anguissola’s left hand seems to be holding a glove, but the laborers found that it was actually another hand, covered up in varnish, influencing the painter's hand. Mairead Small Staid describes the hand's implied motion as that of reaching up and "out of the canvas-within-a-canvas, as if to guide Campi’s own hand, as if to take his mahl stick and brush."

I shuddered with pleasure at these descriptions. As for what the Campi, Rodin, or Lucian Freud intended, I have no way of knowing. Nor am I convinced that any member of that trio possessed the self-reflexiveness to know their own intentions, or to distinguish between their actions and their accidents.

In a different sky, there is trio of writers well-versed in self-interrogation; three writers capable of making the sorts of mistakes we call accidents. And I find my recueillie-informed wandering towards them, enunciating their names in a whisper so my dog will not get jealous as I set aside three spoonfuls of mango creme, an offering flavored by the tenderness most writers feel for our ghosts. Yes, it is true. Clarice Lispector and Thomas Merton and Ingeborg Bachmann all died young in fires of their own accidental forgery, in bed with cigarettes burning forever, the accident of sleep.

A clime that could have arrived . . .

A FEW THINGS THAT ARRIVED IN A CLIME THAT COULD HAVE BEEN A HANGOVER OR A MIGRAINE

Enrique Vila-Matas concludes Montano's Malady with a description of Robert Musil on a mountain. As the coat, the hat, and the expression on Musil's face emerge from words, I recognize them immediately from the photo Vila-Matas used to write this. A photograph taken of Musil on a mountain. When I inform my dog that book ends with a photograph of Musil rather than the ghost invoked by the author to meditate, briefly, on the city of Prague, he barks three times. 

The author doesn't acknowledge the photograph at any point in the text. In this, Vila-Matas resembles Samuel Beckett, who rarely ever names the paintings by the Old Dutch Masters that figure prominently in his descriptions of landscapes and interiors. 

Alone in his cottage, Beckett stared at those paintings, described what he saw, and then placed the images in the frame we call fiction. Perhaps he was trying to exorcise them from his imagination. Obsessive relationships are tiresome. There are times when the only way out requires us to reproduce the thing we can't stop remembering. Reproduction can be read as a rite of exorcism. My dog barks again, this time for no reason. One bark seems more like a question than a response. The paintings in question feature dark backgrounds altered by shafts of light that invoke the metaphysical, a word Beckett avoided using since being kicked out of his mother's womb. 

In the past year, I've watched over 118 videos of pilots debriefing the circumstances of various airplane crashes across the world. But only at night. Only when the house is sleeping do I return to my obsession and loop its possibilities. 

The plane crashes are familiar to me. The shape of the horror engorged by the instant of realization that death is inevitable: this is already present when I begin watching the videos. Thus, each viewing offers a sense of recognition wherein the speaker reveals how the thing I imagined did actually happen, as confirmed by the evidence. The videos involving crashes relax me. They affirm my own experiences. They help me let go of the worrisome world and drift off to sleep like most imbeciles. 

Only during those secret moments near midnight when my family sleeps and my dog snores am I permitted to live in the real world of airplanes. Unlike the world inhabited by most upright 21th century humans, the airplane world of minor writers and single barks knows that numbers exist to keep us from thinking about what numbers exist to avoid saying. The odds are not comets but the horizon is saturated with them. 

I rarely leave home without a set of dice pilfered from a board game belonging to my kids tucked inside my backpack. Whenever an unexpected bird enters the frame, I remove the dice from the inner pocket and roll them. But what are the odds? I wonder. How much would the odds matter if we didn't secretly believe literature is a map that seeks to obscure its repetitions? 

Bloody Mary only appears if you say her name three times while looking in a mirror. Dorothy has to click her heels three times to move between two mutually-denying worlds. There is the world with a house on a prairie and a family, but that world feels less real than the one run by the tiny magician. 

Families in houses are not very realistic. Insomnia, on the other hand, is very realistic. 

Montano's Malady situates itself firmly in the field of literature without laying claim to a literary genre. It is a story about a story that cannot be told, just as literary criticism is an imaginary world inspired by its relationship to finding language for the co-imagining of worlds created by others. 

Knock knock, says the book I am currently writing when not writing. 

An ex-lover appeared on the patio as I watered the flowers planted by my children. “Not you again,” I said wistfully. The former was wearing equipment. He was involved in a sort of dressage. He was dressed for a marathon and totally drunk. “You're a liar,” he said to me, in that dolorous tone which appears on the coattails of an unsustainable andante moderato. At some point, you just need an explosion. Like any violin, I wanted at that moment to kiss him, an urge I resisted by nourishing the white and pink flowers, and pretending to be a gentle drizzle located directly above the flowerbed, leaking down from a stationary, spot-specific cloud. So many plane crashes occur because pilots underestimate a cloud, I thought, and what literary critics ignore is how autocriticism isn't a nouveau cumulus dominated by women with pedicures and broken hearts but rather a cloud that has continued reforming itself for centuries across the globe. No cloud can be called an American, yet critics continue to write as if the only language of clouds is contemporary, or some variant of English with an American passport. 

“If you think I'm a liar, you should walk down a street with Enrique Vila-Matas,” I said to my ex, fondly. In the years between our last meeting, my ex had developed significant calf muscles. I wouldn't have recognized him if ordered to pick him out from a series of calf-profiles in a police station; there would be no way to say with certainty yes officer, this is in fact my ex without being permitted to smell his breath, a situation that would inflame my fondness and make it harder to resist kissing him. I have been practicing the art of resistance for decades. The autobiographical self is frequently buried inside a nest of abstraction that elides the drunkenness of the author (who might be Marguerite Duras or any significant other) while weaving a mysterious aura around the character who is wobbling on the patio, guising the slur of their intonation with images of the ocean and intensified sand dunes. Every time I read about an octopus, I remember throwing up in the ocean and then trying to swim away from it, like many literary critics swim away from their presence on the page in order to demonstrate to those on the shore that the rigor with which they swim away makes them reliable and certainly more trustworthy than the drunk ghost of a former lover on the patio. Or his author. 

“Did you bang him?” my ex demanded, possibly alluding to Vila-Matas or Duras or whatever author I was reading at that moment. Once again, I remembered how viciously we had fought about Proust, and how all my ghosts existed in relation to their particular misinterpretation of Proust, as well as the various timbres of passive-aggressiveness with which they voiced those self-serving bastardizations (usually when soused) so that, even though their calves and nostrils disappeared from my memory, I could still tell the police how each one of them read Proust. I could identify each one as the X who promulgated that particular bastard variant with Jaegermeister on his breath. “Of course not!” I said to the ex, raising my shoulders indignantly, as if to italicize my refusal to countenance his way of thinking about books. I would never harm a book, no, even if I hated a book, I would not harm it physically in any way. No bang. No boink.

“A seagull went by and I'm not going to follow it,” my ex said ominously. In a fit of insecurity, he had stolen my use of italics in order to draw attention to his own emotional needs and ornithologies. In truth, he had always been the liar and his pants were on fire and his lechery was notorious in certain circles. Even when he was not drunk, I wanted to kiss him and bang things together the way children bang the naked plastic bodies of Barbies together to indicate Love/Sex/Reproduction /Recreation has occurred. I found the Barbies in those positions on a bookshelf in the basement. I felt a migraine inching into the margins of my promiscuous parenting, a regimen defined by my failure to adopt a singular mommy-book method (although I had flirted with attachment-detached paraphernalia in the early days). So I said to my ex that it was good to see him. Truly, it was good to see his calves glistening in the patio sunlight, and to watch all that light shattering over his equipment, shattering and recombining into what could only be described as a shimmery worm looking for attention and italics. “You're a liar,” he said wistfully. “It's a pity that you over-watered those flowers by letting that cloud get out of hand and now all the flowers are dying. They are drowning,” my ex said. “What sort of mother holds Proust against her ex while massacring innocent plants that rely on her for sustenance?”

Knock, knock, said the book. Meet me on the patio.

On the politics of poetry.

[I discovered this post in my website’s drafts . . . which makes it seem a bit dated, if not for the fact that I returned to Pat Parker this morning while mired in editing. And so I am sharing the unfinished draft in the hopes that this very unfinishedness adds another dimension to the original drift . . .]

1

As Israeli’s Right-wing regime shuts down Al Jazeera offices and uses its power to further limit free speech and reporting on the part of those bearing witness to war crimes, I keep trying to parse the utter absurdity of PEN America's refusal to demand a ceasefire in Gaza, a refusal that the board justifies on the basis of not wanting to "be political."

—As if defending the books of LGBTQ authors in Alabama against banning isn't political.

—As if the panel PEN America generously funded in Birmingham, Alabama on bodily autonomy and the criminalization of abortion in my home state wasn't flagrantly political, from the panelists, themselves, to the location of this event at Burdock Book Collective.

PEN International was formed to advocate for political dissidents in 1921—that was the immediate impetus, to protect writers from carceral states that sought to imprison them and limit their speech for political reasons. The PEN International Charter was approved at the 1948 Copenhagen Congress. The original language of the Charter has always been interpreted as a demand for activism, as PEN notes on its website: “We hold meetings with key decision makers to secure legislative and policy change. We work with national governments, regional human rights bodies and international organisations. We submit reports and recommendations, including submissions to the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review.” Annual resolutions evidence the calling-out and naming of nation-states currently involved in gross crimes against human freedom and speech.

If literature weren’t political, PEN America would have no reason to exist.

The Vice President of PEN America, Dinaw Mengetsu, said as much. And so I return to poetry—between deadlines and failures—to remind myself, briefly, that the powerful (including the highly-educated staffers surrounding Joe Biden) fear justice and social change more than they fear catastrophe. Many of them would rather promote catastrophe through legislation, as with the mind-boggling “no red lines” support of Israel and the billions of dollars given to corporations fueling climate change, than imagine a world that refuses this.

The US government funds a genocide and arrests student protestors for refusing to go along with it. The problem is that the protestors can imagine a world without genocide, and this is unbearable to the national-security statists.

2

Poetry also does this work of imagining the impossible. Poetry carries protest beneath its skirt, tucked into its back pocket, buried beneath the closed eyes of an elegy.

Poetry imagines the impossible because the world that we have been given remains intolerable.

Intolerable: this neoliberal air-conditioned nightmare run by the cynical billionaires whose dark money determines US electoral outcomes.

Intolerable: this pageant of cowards in business attire, engorged bylines dripping from their mouths, and resumes so rich that ones needs an antacid to even glance at them.

Intolerable: the paucity of thought in the lives of these ‘thought leaders,’ and the absence of self-consciousness, an awareness of their own thoughtlessness, and a conscience that makes getting things wrong more important than defending their over-published egos.

The intolerables stack and no think-piece can touch the mess in my head; no directive or slogan can settle the ghosts of Gaza’s children, whose lives have been torn from them as the Western superpowers watch and mumble platitudes about “well, if Hamas hadn’t done it what it did, then all these innocent children would haven’t to be dead. . .”

3

Yesterday, I found myself returning to one of Pat Parker’s poems for guidance. A simple poem about love. A poem that does love rather than smother it with roses and ornaments.

Pat Parker knew that poetry was political. She knew what she knew as a Black lesbian-feminist poet and performer. She stood on those stages and spoke her body into those poems to deny the neutrality of white liberals. She did not exist to console or comfort the politically-powerful.

Child of Myself, Parker’s debut poetry collection, was published in 1972, and gave us a series of poems that refused to abandon the child in herself that had been abandoned by family. Like countless poets from Rainer Rilke Rilke to Diane Di Prima, Parker needed to change her life in order to be able to write. And she did so repeatedly, moving back and forth between poetry, activism, and family, attempting to unite these things rather than find herself continuously divided by them.

[When she died, Parker was survived by her partner of nine years, Martha (“Marty”) Dunham, and their daughter, Anastasia Dunham-Parker-Brady, as well as the daughter she co-parented, Cassidy Brown.]

Pat Parker and Audre Lorde.

Personal experience served as the basis for Parker’s knowledge. She married playwright Ed Bullins in 1962, and spent four years “scared to death,” in her own words. Then she married writer and publisher Robert F. Parker, with whom she had two children. The two agreed to a divorce, since Parker felt trapped by heterosexual marriage.

She had her first reading of her poetry in 1963. Her style is hopeful and tender, yet often marked by sharp social commentary grounded in spoken word tradition and radical politics. By the late 1960s, Parker identified as lesbian and played a prominent civil rights activist in the Bay Area. 

In 1976, Parker’s sister, Shirley Jones, was murdered by her husband and his gun. Parker’s autobiographical Womanslaughter (1978) spoke into the grief and fury.

The Black Panther Party radicalized Parker. Determined to live as herself, a Black lesbian woman and a poet who made no distinction between the lyric and the pamphlet in her struggles for gender, racial, and sexual equality. As Jeffrey Davies has written:

Among her most provocative and subversive poetry of the time period was a 1978 poem entitled “For Willyce,” which describes a session of lesbian lovemaking and famously ends with the lines, “here it is, some dude’s / getting credit for what / a woman / has done, / again.”

Throughout the 1970s, Parker strengthened her craft by continuing to write rebellious poetry and teaching creative writing workshops. She also began healing past trauma through her work, including the murder of her sister at the hands of her ex-husband by way of the poem “Woman Slaughter.” It was these personal instances of violence at the hands of men, which had occurred throughout her entire life, that fueled the poet to further the fight for women’s rights and equality.

On November 13, 1985, Pat Parker, who was working as an administrator at the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center, sat down and wrote the following in a letter to Audre Lorde, with whom she had shared a close (often epistolary) friendship since the two first met in 1969:

I informed the women at the Health Center that I am leaving effective January 1st. I am going to come home to my machine and do what I’ve always wanted. Write. I’ve talked this over and over with Marty and she is being absolutely wonderful and supportive. She’s helping me compile a mailing list to try and get readings to supplement my income and we’ve worked out a budget and looked at where we can cut back and cut out and off to make it, so that the pressure of earning money isn’t so great that I have to spend all my time hustling gigs and still not get the writing done.

Intolerable: the way white supremacy has evolved into the meritocracy of exemplarity groomed by neoliberal ideology.

Intolerable: the way those merits get listed on resumes and collected for value.

Intolerable: neoliberalism’s biopower-driven regulation of relationships between humans, and how the gatekeeping of gender is now part of that regulatory function.

“To have an African American body, a queer body, a female body, means that you live an interior life but also an exterior life, one that may be on guard constantly, even in crisis," Kazim Ali said once, in reference to political poetry and to Pat Parker's poetry, more specifically. "It is frightening to me that we live with a madness, that we continue to move through our lives as if these and more were normal occurrences," Pat Parker said in an interview. The normalization of this endless crisis and the pseudo-solutions offered by Wellness Industrialists is galling precisely because the personal and the political are not oppositional. The personal and political are not separate boxes. Love for others is not separate from love for the world.

Despite neoliberalism, amor mundi is relational, as a hope for loved ones that mingles with hope for the world.

"I come cloudy," Parker confesses in a shimmering poem titled "Love Isn't”.

The title prepares us for an inventory poem, a list of things that love is not, but Parker has different plans. She moves against this expectation into a visceral tenderness that could be addressed to a lover:

I wish I could be
the lover you want
come joyful
bear brightness
like summer sun

As a Black lesbian-feminist poet and performer, Parker lays the world she wishes for against the world she is given. The next stanza opens with a turn, an "Instead" that mentions the unsunny things she brings: "I bring pregnant women / with no money"; "bring angry comrades / with no shelter"; bring difficulty; bring those abandoned and harmed by the world. *

Structured in nine stanzas that move from expressing what the speaker wishes to what the speaker does, the poem is shaped to speak loosely to the ancient rhetorical form known as the apologia. The first seven stanzas create this gorgeously structured form of alternating anaphora:

I wish I could be
Instead
I wish I could take you
Instead
I wish I could take you
Instead
I wish I could be

Within these stanzas, Parker repeats the verbs "bring" and "come," adding a litany of possible disappointments: 

I come rage
bring city streets 
with wine and blood
bring cops and guns
with dead bodies and prison

"I come sad," the speaker admits. 

Then, the eighth stanza changes course. Here, in a simple couplet, the poem breaks free from the anaphora to make an intimate (and fairly abstracted) claim:

All I can give
is my love.

The final stanza winds this simple claim into a larger portrait of what it means to love, and what this commits the poet to doing and feeling, Parker uses a new verb, a verb associated with nurture and tending and tenderness. To love is to "care for":

I care for you
I care for our world
if I stop
caring about one
it would be only
a matter of time
before I stop
loving
the other.

Everything hinges on the sudden appearance of the conditional here—-if I stop—and this conditional injects the numinousness of counterfactual into the solid, the constructed, the heavy builtness of the made world.

"Poetry should allow others to wonder at explosions," Jenny Boully has written. Poetry should permit us to imagine the explosions of the buildings and shelters that cannot sustain us. The ‘Us’ is always there in the other. The poem’s other lures the poet from the I’s corset. Today, it helped me to listen to Pat Parker reading “My Lover Is a Woman” —

Soundgarden interlude.

Or, the week I rediscovered headphones and actually used them to listen to music while family life whirred around me.

I've given everything I need
I'd give you everything I own
I'd give in if it could at least be ours alone

I've given everything I could
To blow it to hell and gone
Burrow down in and blow up the outside

The studio version of Soundgarden’s "Blow Up the Outside”.

The version of “Blow Up the Outside” that Soundgarden featured on Down on the Upside.

Love poem. Lunch. And linkage.

Two poems with hyperlinks that may resemble musical interludes or segues or stitches. (Also, word on twitter from Jeff Melnick: Clem Snide is touring this autumn.)

Andy Warhol, Piss Painting, 1961.

"Lunch" by David Saint John

Even the morning dreams of it

Bent over those torn envelopes or steaming
Papers those Cubist towers
Of paper clips and pink erasures

We think we understand so much but nobody
Ever mentions the secrets of lunch

We plan to meet in some cafe
As the sunlight pours off the buildings
Onto the striped canopies the umbrellas above
The white tables

As usual I’ll be late
Stopping on the way to look at books or scarves
Wondering how you’ll tell me
Finally to go screw myself once and for all

The secretaries leaving their martinis
The executives phoning in from God-knows-where

I even knew a man who ate lunch
In typewriter stores driving all the clerks mad
Leaving cigarettes burning on the display desks
Rye seeds in the immaculately polished keys
Even poems in the carriage

So here we are again bent over
Those inscribed tablets those endless commandments
Of the menu

Where the choice of wine is blood
James Joyce once said or clear electricity

"Love Poem" by Paul Hostovsky

I love this poem.
I would do anything 
for this poem.
I am not above
stealing for example.
I stole in the past
and I stole from the past
and I'd gladly steal from your past 
for this poem.
I would lie
for the sake of this poem.
I would lie in the face of this poem 
just to make the poem face me.
Just to feel on my face the hot, sweet, faint 
bad-tooth breath of the poem. 
I could sink to anything. 
I think I could kill.
I think I have killed
for the shape, the sheer 
body of this poem. 
Look how beautiful, 
feel how impossible,
this slender, limned thing 
weighing next to nothing, 
saying next to nothing. 
Saying everything. 
Everything.

Parks.

Gustav Klimt is known for his portraits more than his landscapes. That said, the The Park (1906) gives us a strange juxtaposition of blue, green, and yellow dots, a pointillism (which influences the nine-tenths of this oil painting made up of foliage) and representation (which offers the tree trunks and grass at the bottom). Without the tree trunks, The Park would be almost entirely abstract.

Klimt abandons the pointillist effect in painting the tree trunks and grass. The moss on the thickest trunk is so finely detailed and visceral that I began to wonder if that moss was the beginning of the painting.

All of his landscapes were begun in the open air, though many were finished in the studio. It seems fair to call these landscapes plein air paintings.

Poet David St. John described a postcard of this painting as “an example of cliche so profuse it touched my heart”.

In “The Park"," St. John offers an ekphrasis of Klimt’s painting—one that refuses the separation of landscape and portrait. Like many of us, he reads his affective landscape into the painting. He figurates.

Each line begins in the majuscule: there is a formal presence that undercuts itself by resorting to ampersands. How do you capitalize an ampersand? What is the majuscule of a shortcut?

We are reminded that the poet is looking at the postcard rather than the painting. I don’t see St. John’s “solitary figure”?

The poet keeps this image on his wall: he preserves it.

Moyra Davey has written about single images and fragments, how they possess  "miniaturization", the "possibility of possessing the thing." Images locked to the wall in her room form a  "psychic landscape".

Imago lucis opera expressa: Roland Barthes uses this Latin expression to designate an image expressed by the action of light, which is how he defines photography. And Susan Sontag called a photo "a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask...the registering of an emanation."

Although there is no photo in St. John’s poem, I can’t help reading a photo image into the speaker’s view of Klimt’s The Park. It is as if the emanating spirit of a moment he recollects is there, in that painting. A photo that wasn’t taken. A postcard that mines the gap.

Apropos of nothing, my favorite park piece by Klimt is The Park at Schönbrunn Palace (1916). The reflection is staggering.

Gustav Klimt, The Park at Schönbrunn Palace (1916)

Fassbinder's 3rd reading.

I

“In the throes of an almost murderous puberty," around the age of fourteen or fifteen, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Initially, the novel struck him as “boring”: the first third depicted the directionless chaos of Weimar without putting a claw in his mind, or making him want to continue reading. Fassbinder nearly gave up on Döblin several times, as admitted in a March 1980 essay titled “The Cities of Humanity and the Human Soul”.

But decades later, the adult could still recall the instant when that changed for the teen. It was “p.155 of the 410 page paperback edition” — the meeting of the two “heroes", Biberkopf and Reinhold, mesmerized him. There was no going back after that.

“Devouring, gobbling, gulping down”: these are the words Fassbinder used to describe the state of reading that stopped feeling like reading and began to waver towards something like experiencing “life, suffering, despair, and fear.”

Fassbinder read Berlin Alexanderplatz three times (at least) during his life.

This ‘take-three’ — this reading trinity — intrigues me. Obviously, it speaks to the value of multiple readings, or to the attenuation of interpretations. When he first read the novel, for example, Fassbinder was quite young and bound to his family. He later said that this first reading presented him with a principle that would animate his work, namely, an interpenetration, a mutually-informing dynamic between returning to “one’s own reality” and thinking “morally about being realistic.” The novel “helps you accept the reading as the real thing, as sacred" without climbing on a pedestal to moralize. The crown, itself, is both ordinary and sacred. Ordinariness was interesting and dangerous.

"Life-support," Fassbinder called the novel. Life-affirming to readabout how men ruin themselves because they lack courage to “recognize” their need for one another. In Weimar, the impracticality of the heroes’ feelings made fear the only livable response. This first reading helped Fassbinder admit his own “paralyzing” fear of “homosexual longings”; it prevented him from “becoming completely and utterly sick, dishonest, desperate.” In his own words, Berlin Alexanderplatz saved him.

Five years later, when Fassbinder read the book again, he discovered something different in it: a way of thinking about “what I really means”, a way to resist the temptations of “living life secondhand”. The second reading offered the shock of recognition in the realization that many things had had considered part of himself “were nothing more than the things described by Döblin.” The reader had subconsciously turned the novelist’s imaginings into the script of his own life.

II

I want to pause here and note the difference between the two readings: if the First provided a glimpse of a larger reality that implicates the writer and reader, and allows the reader to use as a tool for deciphering life, then the Second reading revealed the extent to which the books we read socialize our imaginations and exert influence on our actions by expanding our views of possibility. Fassbinder’s self-recognition is what comes with the Second reading, but the nature of this re-cognition is to cognize the First readings’ influence on a life.

III

After viewing Piel Jutzi’s film version of Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder felt dissatisfied. He vowed to use cinema to “document” his own “involvement with this very special piece of literature.”

It took a decade, a different epiphany, a way of seeing. Reviewing his own films, Fassbinder discovered that there were more “quotations from Döblin’s novel” in his films than he’d realized — and many of these quotations were unconscious, or unintended. This prompted Fassbinder to undertake a third reading.

The third reading had a purpose: to get a clear picture of “what was going on between me and Alfred Döblin’s novel.” With this third reading, Fassbinder recognized that “this novel, a work of art, had helped determine the course of my life.” The course, here, designates more than how life could be (which he found in the first reading), or the way in which he saw himself in relation to the heroes (which he gleaned from the second reading), but in the art that he had produced. The reading transformed the novel into something like a formative relationship, an intellectual and emotional entanglement that touched everything in his life.

IV

Am I reading too much into the significance of the number 3 here? Perhaps. Poets are prone to such things. Still, the pure reasoners (and their reasonings) might appreciate a quotation from the opening pages of Berlin Alexanderplatz, as written by Alfred Döblin and translated by Michael Hofmann:

V

Berlin Alexanderplatz ends with Franz being committed to an asylum after being arrested for the murder Reinhold committed. The asylum puts Franz through “a reverse process of catharsis,” a socialization that transforms Franz into a normal or well-functioning citizen of Weimar.

The well-functioning citizen is the one who considers it a duty (or even an “honor”) to become a functionary. Like Franz after his reverse catharsis, the well-functioning is tamed; he has accepted the system that exists and defines success in relation to how high he climbs in it. “He will probably become a nationalist,” Fassbinder said of Franz in the interview. There was no way to survive his encounter with Reinhold in the world that the “heroes” had been given.

VI

”Cinema finds its language in the close-up,” filmmaker and former-Surrealist Luis Buñuel said on April 1, 1927. For Buñuel, a close-up is “anything that results from the projection of a series of images that comment or explain an aspect of the total view, whether it be a landscape or a person.”

The art of cinema is established by the relationship between shots. A film is a series of shots. A shot is a series of images. In the usual novel, the story follows a narrative arc. Learning this arc is a staple of writing workshops, as well as conventional rubric for analyzing plot and tabulating the “success” of a novel. The film studio formula, like the narrative arc, focus on satisfying an audience. The happy ending is in the resolution. But independent films, indie publishers, and minor writers tend to focus on experimenting at the level of the line, or how we see, and reimagining how existence is narrated visually.

Fassbinder did not make films that would satisfy the studio formula. Sometimes he even purposefully flattened narrative arcs. He stretched silence just past the point of bearability. His films make me squirm, makes it impossible to avoid reckoning with the gaps in dialogues, or recognizing myself in the rupture between characters who are asking for something as simple and human as comfort. We are never quite the persons we imagine. We are often the insecure freaks we play in ordinary life.

Oddly, the word vicinity comes to mind: to be ‘in the vicinity’ of something is different from merely observing it. Being in the vicinity encourages us to implicate our own eyes in how we see, and what we see, and why. Vicinity-driven thinking acknowledges the traces of the books that we have read on our lived experience. “And even if my reason tried to talk me out of it, I knew that my imagination was right,” wrote Peter Handke in one of my notebooks.

A part of the cover image for NYRB’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, as painted be George Grosz, whose incredible art illustrates the sordid misery that was Weimar for many.

Paul Theroux on Ernest Hemingway

“Lord of the Ring” by Paul Theroux.

Written in 1971, collected in Sunrise with Seamonsters.

Ernest Hemingway imagined himself, as all his admirers now do, a heavy-weight, a literary hard puncher and even physically a formidable opponent. He valued the attributes that the American male (and the Karamojong warrior) value. His biographer shares the attitude and the metaphor: "He ... dealt, almost singlehanded, a permanent blow against the affected, the namby-pamby . ." He took enormous pleasure in flooring a muscular Negro with his bare fists, and delivering a manuscript he could say, "I'll defend the title again against all the good young new ones." He spoke of the discipline needed for writing as similar to that for successful boxing; he was proud of his good health, doing exercises, running, swimming and rising early while he was engaged on a book; and he saw his writing career in terms of the ring: "I started out very quiet and I beat Mr Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr Stendhal." He had the humility to add, "But nobody's going to get me in the ring with Mr Tolstoy .. " His line was that he could lick practically any man in the house.

He was a destroyer and so are many of his characters: even the gentle Santiago recalls a triumphant arm-wrestling match (with a muscular Negro); others of his characters are fighters, inclined towards pugilism. One sees the glamor: his destroyers come in pairs and all eyes are on them; it is one big man against another, and implies competition, ultimately a winner and a loser. We are to admire the winner (Heming-way, not Turgenev; Santiago, not the Negro). But the very reverent biographer concedes bullying: "Throughout the month of May, Ernest's way, not Turgenev; Santiago, not the Negro). But the very reverent biographer concedes bullying: "Throughout the month of May, Ernest's behaviour was often that of a bully." Professor Carlos Baker is referring to Hemingway ruining his friend's catch of a large marlin by firing a tommy-gun at some circling sharks which, maddened by the taste of their own spilt blood, devour most of the marlin. Later in that same month Hemingway beats up Joseph Knapp, a New York publisher. Both of these incidents, tidied up to make the gunner heroic and the fight with the rich intruder a justly-deserved victory, are retold in Islands in the Stream, with the envoi, black calypso singers immortalising the fist-fight Lord of the Ring with a song as in 1935, they "celebrated Ernest's victory with an extemporaneous song about the 'big slob' from Key West." The boxer recalls his famous matches, the novelist his novels; a boxer is bigger than any of his fights and though writing is hardly a competitive art, much less a sport, the novelist postured deliberately to be bigger than any of his novels. The question of "style"', a favourite boxing word, is fundamental to a discussion of Hemingway's work; not style as a literary value but style as a posture, emphasising the face, the voice, the stance.

Hemingway blamed the bad reviews of Across the River and into the Trees on his photograph that appeared on the dust jacket (*Makes me look like a cat-eating Zombie"); the voice is familiar (*You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris ..."); and the stance? Always the boxer's: "Am trying to knock Mr Shakespeare on his ass."

The reputation is all, and counts for more than the writing. Asked who is the most popular American writer in the Soviet Union, the Russian journalist says,'"Papa." The note of friendly intimacy is common: it is the man that matters. The American writer produces a good book and acquires a reputation. The reputation displaces the idea of literary quality: the idea of the author is much more important than the ideas in the work. Interesting, the number of academics who care so deeply about the man's adventures and leave the work unread, or see blasphemy in a low evaluation of it.

Hemingway claimed to dislike academics, but those who flattered him were welcomed at his haunts and in his house; he yarned them, feeding them lines, took them on his boat, and wrote them candid letters. In the letter refusing Carlos Baker permission to write a biography, Hemingway mentions ("with almost bewildering frankness") how he practised coitus interruptus with his second wife. (The fact appears in Professor Baker's recent biography, Ernest Hemingway - A Life Story.) 

Since the aggressive narcissism of commerce and the vanity of money are the driving forces of reputation-making, the progress of the reputation is best described in the language of the stock-exchange. A writer appears on the market; he has considerable long-term upside potential; he gets a divorce and hits a slump, his plane crashes in a jungle and this is a technical rally; he tumbles and bottoms out, he meets resistance at the buyer lever, then rallies again and inflates and firms up and meets a negative critical flow, and so forth. This does not have much to do with writing, but Hemingway's reputation grew without much reference to his work, and in the years since his death, aided by the urgent whisperings of fact-finders and anecdotalists, it has rallied and consolidated sideways.

Now a "new" novel has been found; it was written twenty years ago and apparently abandoned by the author. It is technically his last novel and its publication is a triumph for those obsessed with the man. The novel has no literary importance, but its personal candour is essential. This is of course the basest motive for reading; contemptuous of the art of fiction, the reader is interested in the book only in so far as it gives access to the author: "This is just a story but Ernest Hemingway is writing it . . ." The satisfactions are finding out how Hemingway drank and handled a boat, and spoke, and made love, and treated his friends.

These revelations are considered important, for once the reputation is made and the novel is a study rather than a pleasure (or a bore), the hero of the novel is its author. Fortunately for Hemingway his life began to be studied before he failed as a novelist, so it was never acceptable to say, "This novel is bad." The novels were aspects of the man, and the man's heroism was never questioned.

Islands in the Stream is divided into three parts. In 195 1 Hemingway said that parts 2 and 3 were "in shape to publish" , but he did not publish them. The novel (to use the publisher's term; it is really nothing of the kind) is set in the Caribbean and seems originally to have been intended as a study of the sea. Previous titles of the sections were The Sea When Young, The Sea when Absent, and The Sea in Being, retitled in the present edition as "Bimini", "Cuba" and "At Sea." The sections are loosely linked by the common subject of the sea and by the main character, Thomas Hudson, who is "in appearance, manner, and personal history . .. clearly based on Ernest himself (according to Professor Baker). There was a fourth section, and Thomas Hudson was not the hero of it. This was the story of an old man, Santiago, who caught a marlin and battled to save it; it was published (Hemingway had some reservations about its length) as The Old Man and the Sea. Professor Baker reports that Hemingway was very enthusiastic about the unpublished parts of the book he was calling The Island and the Stream, but rather than publish it he turned from it and wrote A Moveable Feast, his last book, parts of which are prefigured in the reminiscences of Thomas Hudson. Hudson, in his youth, also lived with his wife and small child over a sawmill in Paris in the 192s, and had a cat named F Puss and liked the bicycle races and drank in cafés with James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

Here, perhaps, is the reason Hemingway never published Islands in the Stream. It was autobiography - this is clear from the duplicated recollections in A Moveable Feast - but he wanted it to read as fiction. He wrote it at an age when most novelists turn to autobiography, but rather than reveal the novel as that, he published the story of Santiago and spent the last three years of his life writing a straightforward reminiscence, to which he added ambiguously in the Preface, "If the reader prefers, this Lord of the Ring book may be regarded as fiction . .." It is hard to say whether he would have published the present novel, had he allowed himself to live a few years longer. This is crucial because a writer can only be held responsible for what he publishes himself and stands by; he can't be blamed for writing a bad book that he chose to leave in a bottom drawer.

Thomas Hudson is a painter. He has been divorced and he lives in different places in the Caribbean. He seems to have a separate personality for each place. In the first section of the book, on the island of Bimini, he is a reticent friend, a quiet drunk and a devoted father; he fishes with his three boys and does a little painting of the Winslow Homer variety. The second section is set largely in a bar in Havana; here Hudson is a bar-fly, drinking and betting, and talking at some length to an elderly prostitute; he does no painting. A sea chase occupies the whole of the third section; Hudson is a bullying, Bogartesque ship's captain pursuing Germans along the coast of Cuba. Three episodes, hardly stories, and except for Hudson, who alters but does not grow, the episodes bear no relation to one another. The three boys, Hudson's children, are all dead by the time the second section opens, possibly to give Hudson nothing to live for, though more likely because Hemingway couldn't think of any way of working them into the conversation with the elderly prostitute or the pursuit of the Germans. The artless novelist has his reasons for disposing of characters, usually no more complicated than the eldest boy's in Jude the Obscure, when he hanged himself and his siblings: "Done because we are too menny."

Hudson gets little satisfaction (but evidently lots of cash) from his painting. He is, for most of the book, an aggressive self-absorbed man for whom killing a big fish and disembowelling a German are ways of proving one's manhood. It is the philosophy of combat - perversely based on killing one's friend, for the noblest combat is destroying something beautiful, something one values. "In the worst parts, when I was tiredest, I couldn't tell which was him and which was me," says Dave, one of the sons, after the fish had been caught and killed.

Incapable of creation, these characters see beauty in destruction; considering themselves men in the proverbial sense of the word, their ambition must be to win: to kill the lion, to floor the Negro, to catch the fish, to have always the winning hand. Achievement is irrelevant here (Hudson's painting is all but dismissed as daubing) because achievement implies solitary creation. Winning is another matter: one wins by beating one's opponent. Thus, most strangely: "Am trying to knock Mr Shakespeare on his ass."

"All fights are bad."

"I know it. But what are you going to do about them?"

"You have to win them when they start."

Failure is losing, because losing is humiliation, unbecoming to a man:

"Get it straight. Your boy you lose. Love you lose. Honor has been gone for a long time. Duty you do."

That is Hudson at his lowest point, a loser. He recovers, but others are not so lucky, for the last loser deserves it, as the winner deserves his success. The loser's mortality proves more than the winner's physical superiority - it implies the winner's immortality. So much for the fist-fight between Roger and the wealthy yachtsman, which Roger wins, saying, "That guy was no good, Tom." And Thomas Hudson agrees: "You taught him something." The implication is that the yachtsman has been taught that he will never win a fist-fight with a man Hemingway conceives to be morally superior. In this case the man should know better: Roger is a writer and the sniveling yachtsman he defeats is a publisher.

Hemingway insists on the rightness of the philosophy. Consequently there is an interminable repetition of the words fine and good and true and wonderful and brave and necessary, all applied to bullying and mean-spirited and unworthy acts, "a wonderful chase,” "a fine shot,” "a beautiful kill". A sententious utterance, implying if not employing one of these words, closes each incident. After Dave hooks the swordfish and yanks on him for six hours (and twenty-five pages of the book), the motto is, "But there is a time boys have to do things if they are ever going to be men." An odd thing for a painter to say; but Thomas Hudson is no creator.

There is a great deal of killing in the book, practically all of it gratuitous, as when the swordfish is killed or Thomas Hudson shoots a land crab that appears on his path (". .. the crab disintegrated ... Poor old crab, he thought..”) or the Germans are shelled. Murder is necessary and it is a shame it makes one feel bad:

Then why don't you care about anything? he asked himself. Why don't you think of them as murderers and have the righteous feelings that you should have . .. Because we are all murderers, he told himself. We all are on both sides, if we are any good, and no good will come of any of it. But you have to do it. Sure, he said.

We all are on both sides: "I couldn't tell which was him and which was me," says Dave when the fish is dead; and "He was a pretty good guy," Willie says of the German he's blown to bits.

The philosophy demands the sentimentality of pity. And grief is self-pity. Here is Hudson revealing the death of his son to the mother of the boy, his ex-wife:

"That isn't it," she said. "Tell me, is he dead?"

“Sure.”

"Please hold me tight. I am ill now." He felt her shaking and he knelt by the chair and held her and felt her tremble. Then she said: "And poor you. Poor, poor you."

After a time she said: "I'm sorry for everything I ever did or said."

"Me, too."

"Poor you and poor me."

"Poor everybody," he said, and he did not add, "Poor Tom."

A very large number of suicides, by various means, are mentioned in the lovel as well, remarked upon with a kind of queer joy. Obeying the rerverse logic of destruction, the destroyer as hero, it is consistent that fter subduing or killing every powerful thing on earth, the man, to laintain the image of his invincibility, kills himself. The warrior runs pon his own sword. Self-slaughter is the only acceptable end for the estroying hero; any other death is humiliating defeat. Hudson does not commit suicide. At the end of the book, wounded by Germans for whom has developed an eager affection, he is full of self-love and self-loathing hich, combined, turn to pride and a satisfied self-pity. Motto: "You never understand anybody that loves you."

The Hemingway Stamp, that cauliflower earmark that characterises his worst fiction, is everywhere apparent. Hudson reflects on catnip: "There still should be some catnip in the shelf of drawers of the cat room if it hasn't gotten too dry and lost its force. It lost its force very quickly in the tropics and the catnip that you raised in the garden had no force at all." Hudson has a drink: “... strong with the real Gordon's gin that made it alive to his tongue and rewarding to swallow . .. It tastes as good as a drawing sail feels, he thought. It is a hell of a good drink."

The descriptions of food and wine are given lovingly, while lovemaking is reduced to utter vagueness: "He did something . .. She did something else ..."

The novel is offered as something of a departure for Hemingway, with "a rich and relaxed sense of humor." But nearly all the humor depends on seeing bullying or ridicule as comic: attempting to set a dock on fire, humiliating the yachtsman or taking the mickey out of a tourist or "a fine old whore," or teasing a sleepy-headed servant. In each case there is a victim who is weak or passive; he is made a figure of fun and one is meant to find him contemptible and so laughable. The humor has Thomas Hudson and his friends in stitches, and in many places Hudson says how much he is enjoying himself, but he is an embittered, heartless, unquestioning and deluded man. Physical superiority is what Hudson cares about but he is old and life is unbearable for him. The disappointment and the sour regret give the novel the tone of a suicide note. It is sad to think that Hemingway wrote it, and understandable that he left it in a bottom drawer.

Fassbinder's "Answers to Questions from Schoolchildren"

In 1979/80 a German school class sent out the following questionnaire. The first twenty six questions were asked of all the respondents; the last six questions, the so-called Personal Questionnaire, were formulated individually for each participant in the survey. What follows are Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s responses to these questions (the annotations are my own).

Do you find it difficult not to feel like an outsider in a group of people you don't know?

Depends on the group. In most of them, yes.

Do you consider it likely that there could be an evolutionary regression that would take us back to a very primitive stage of existence?

No.

Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrial beings?

Yes.

How do you picture your old age?

I don't expect to experience it.

What do you think of Christmas without a Christmas tree?

People who have been brought up so hypocritically that they need such symbols should just be left alone until we have a society where such things aren't necessary anymore.

How do you react to negative criticism?

Positively.

What party game do you like best?

The Truth Game. (1)

What do you think about the hostility toward children in the Federal Republic?

There is a larger problem, that of people who have been showered with too much fake love, and thereby help to preserve society in its present form.

Do you see the mentally ill as a burden to our society?

In our society there's no one who isn't mentally ill.

Do you find it difficult to show your feelings uninhibitedly to someone close to you?

No.

Under what conditions would you be prepared to make a great sacrifice?

For love.

In time of personal crisis, would you consult a psychiatrist or a psychologist?

Certainly.

What degree have you earned?

None.

Would you be willing to adopt a handicapped child?

No. (2)

Do you think other people like you?

I make it so hard for other people to like me that only a few are left.

Do you look forward to the future, or do you approach it with pessimism?

That's not an issue for me.

Who is your hero, and why?

Heinrich von Kleist, because he succeeded in finding someone who wanted to die with him.

Were you brought up in an authoritarian way? If so, do you regret it?

No.

When and why were you last embarrassed?

I'm always embarrassed when a person in uniform looks at me.

What does your self-confidence rest on?

On my skill.

What do you consider most important in a relationship between partners?

Constantly reexamining the values on which the partnership is based.

Do you see nuclear energy plants as a threat?

No.

Do you allow yourself to be influenced by other people's moods?

Depends on the moods.

What do you think is needed for a perfect Sunday morning?

Caviar, champagne, the Eighth Symphony of Mahler, "radio activity" by Kraftwerk, the Sunday Bild paper, a book so exciting you don't want it to end, a friend, a good friend, and the possibility of unplugging the phone.

In your experience, what trait or what kind of behavior has turned out to be particularly helpful in establishing contact with others?

I can't answer that like a normal person; for me it's my so-called prominence.

Are your television plays based on true happenings?

There aren't any true happenings. The true is the artificial.

Do you allow yourself to be influenced by others in your choice of a topic, or do you pick everything for yourself?

From the moment you make up your mind not to live on a desert island you no longer pick everything for yourself.

What party do you vote for in the Bundestag elections?

I don't vote anymore.

Do you believe in the things you show in your films?

Yes.

Do you like to play sports, and if yes, which ones?

Table tennis, swimming, faire l'amour.

How do you visualize your professional and private future?

There isn't any past, there isn't any present, so there isn't any future, either.

(1) There is a “Truth Game” in Fassbinder’s film, Chinese Roulette, though he could be referencing another Truth Game entirely.

(2) This is simply to acknowledge that some readers might have reacted in shock to this statement, a shock that, in many ways, both denies and privatizes the challenges of caring for persons who require continuous assistance and whose independence takes different forms than that of the abled. It is aberrant that people who are incapable of caring for disabled children are permitted to adopt them, just as it is aberrant to live in a country where disabled parents and children do not receive extensive subsidies and support from their government. And it is aberrant to believe that anyone should ever be forced to birth, raise, or adopt a child against their will and inclination.

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…

Rilke's "Letter to a Young Girl"

While in Muzot, on December 8, 1925, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of short prose poems titled “Four Sketches.” This "little notebook with four prose-pieces" was sent to Monique Briod on December 10. In one of the pieces, Rilke refers to a “billoquet”, a variation on the French word, bilboquet. The billoquet was a type of wooden toy, consisting of a cord with a ball on one end and a stick on the other. The goal of the game was to catch the ball on the spike-end of the stick.

Jeanne Bôle's L'Enfant au Bilboquet (around 1880)

For some reason, I kept thinking of the motion of tossing and catching a ball on a leash, and how this leashed ball makes the constraint of the game visible—-and how visible constraints appear in Rilke’s correspondence as the limits of what can be said and transacted in language.

His “Letter to a Young Girl” mesmerized me as a teen. Back then, it seemed so daring in its unboundedness. Now, it is beautiful precisely for the severity of its constraints. I share it here, this little world of consecrated words in epistolary form. This little ball on a leash of its own:

You know that I am not one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul, since my soul would thoroughly dislike being served in such a fashion. All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood, for which reason I precede my work, through a pure and simple way of life that is free from irritants and stimulants, as with an introductory prelude, so that I cannot be deceived over the true spiritual joy that consists in a concord, happy and as if transfigured, with the whole of Nature.

A little time yet, and perhaps I shall no longer grasp all the conditions out of which these songs (the Duino Elegies), begun ago, arose. If you know some of these works someday you will understand me better; it is so difficult to say what one sometimes means. If I look into my conscience I see but one law, relentlessly commanding: to lock myself into myself and in one stretch to end this task that was dictated to me at the very center of my heart. I am obeying. For you know that being here I have wanted only that, and I have no right whatsoever to change the direction of my will before I have ended the act of my sacrifice and my obedience.

I have now done almost all the preparatory work, that is, I have redressed the uncomfortable delays of my correspondence. Think, I have written—I counted them this morning—115 letters, and not one was less than four pages, and many ran to eight, even twelve in close writing. (Naturally I do not count what has gone off to you. That is not writing, that is breathing through the pen.)

How many long hours of letters! There are so many people who expect of me—I hardly know what: help, advice—from me, who find myself so helpless before the most imperative urgencies of my life. And although I know they deceive themselves, are mistaken, still I feel tempted–and I don't believe it is vanity–-to tell them something out of my experiences, some of the fruits of loneliness. There are young women as well as young girls terribly deserted even in the bosom of their family. Young married women appalled at what has happened to them. And then all these young working people, mostly revolutionaries, who come out of literature and write drunken, malicious poetry. What shall I say about the state prisons without any orientation whatever, take refuge into them? How to raise their despairing hearts, how shape their formless will, which under the violence of events has taken on a borrowed, quite provisional character, and which they now carry in themselves like an alien strength, the use of which they scarcely know.

Malte's experiences oblige me from time to time to answer these writings from people I do not know. He, he would have done it, if ever a voice had reached him. Furthermore it is he who obliges me to continue this sacrifice, exhorts me to love with all my love's capacities all things to which I want to give form. That is the irresistible force the usufruct of which he left to me. Imagine to yourself a Malte who should have had a lover or even a friend in that Paris that was so terrible for him. Would he then ever have entered so deep into the confidence of things? For these things (he often told me in our few intimate conversations), whose essential life you want to reproduce, first ask you: Are you free? Are you ready to dedicate your whole love to me? To lie with me, as Saint Julian the hospitable lay with the leper, in that ultimate embrace that can never be fulfilled in an ordinary and fleeting love of one's neighbor, but has for its impetus love, the whole of love, all love to be found on earth? And if a thing like that sees (so Malte told me), if it sees you busy with even a single line of your own interest, it will close itself to you. It will perhaps bestow a rule upon you with a word, make you some slight sign of friendship, but it will forgo giving you its heart, entrusting you with its patient nature and its starlike steadfastness, which makes it so much resemble the constellations of the sky.

You must, in order that it shall speak to you, take a thing during a certain time as the only one that exists, as the only phenomenon which through your diligent and exclusive love finds itself set down in the center of the universe and which in this incomparable place on that day the angels serve. What you read here, my friend, is a chapter of those lectures I received from Malte, my only friend during so many years full of suffering and temptations, and I see that you mean the same, absolutely, when you speak of your drawings and paintings, which seem  valid only because of that infatuation with which brush or pencil carry out the embrace, the tender taking of possession.

Don't be frightened by the expression "fate", which I used in my last letter. I call fate all external events (illnesses, for example, included) which can inevitably step in to interrupt and annihilate a disposition of mind and training that is by nature solitary.

Cézanne must have understood this when during the last years of his life he removed himself from everything that, as he expressed it, might "hook him tight", and when, religious and given to traditions as he was, he yet gave up going to his mother's funeral in order not to lose a working day. That went through me like an arrow, when I learned it, but like a flaming arrow that, while it pierced my heart through, left it in a conflagration of clear sight. There are few artists in our day who grasp this stubbornness, this vehement obstinacy. But I believe that without it one remains always at the periphery of art, which is rich enough as it is to allow us pleasant discoveries, but at which, nevertheless, we halt only as a player at the green table who, while he now and again succeeds with a "coup", remains nonetheless at the mercy  of chance, which is nothing but the docile and dexterous ape of the law.

I have often had to take away Malte's writings from young people, forbidding them to read them. For this book, which seems to emerge in the proof that life is impossible, must so to speak be read against its current. If it contains bitter reproaches, these are absolutely not directed against life. On the contrary, they are the evidence that, for lack of strength, through distraction and inherited errors we lose almost completely the countless earthly riches that were intended for us.

Try, my dearest friend, to run through the overabundance of those pages in this spirit. This will not spare you tears, but will contribute to giving all your tears a meaning clearer and, so to speak, more transparent.

[Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910-1926, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969): 255-258.]

Edgar Boutanche, Bilboquet (2014).

Kenneth Koch on the tennis racket incident.

There is no artistic form or chimera that Daniel Kane has not sampled. There is no medium he hasn’t dabbled and dipped before daubing a novelty from it, then subjecting the creation to the kiln of his omnivorous intellectual appetite.

I respect this particular greed in a textual mammals. Surely, something greed-like brings me to share an amusing segment of literary history here, as discovered among Kane’s What Is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde.

DANIEL KANE:

You know, one thing I wanted to ask you about was your involvement with Ed Sanders, who was one of the kings of the Lower East Side; he edited the legendary Fuck You / a Magazine of the Arts, he ran the bookstore The Peace Eye, he formed the band The Fugs. Regarding Sanders’ arrest on obscenity charges for distributing material including his own mimeograph magazine Fuck You / a magazine of the Arts, Sanders told me he remembered you and John Ashbery were character witnesses for him. You were called to testify on a day you were playing tennis, and apparently had to rush downtown and present your case on Sanders’ behalf while holding onto your tennis racket. Do you remember this?

KENNETH KOCH:

Ed Sanders was one of the good guys. How could anything be more absurd than being arrested because you have certain books in your bookstore? It was very funny because Ed called me up and asked me about being a character reference. Fuck You/a magazine of the Arts was not something I subscribed to but I read a lot of them and thought it was very funny. I remember Sanders distributed a great questionnaire which asked all the downtown poets about their buggering habits. I liked very much the magazine’s big solicitation for people to volunteer for a filming of a Mongolian cluster fuck. This turned out to be a key issue of the trial. I was annoyed with the magazine a few times though, especially when I was on the list of people Gerard Malanga fucked—I certainly wasn’t one of those people! John and I agreed to be character witnesses. The trial kept getting delayed. Ed had a civil liberties lawyer who kept on waiting to get a good judge. Every month or so I’d get a phone call saying, “This might be the day for your appearance. Be ready.” I was told to wear a Brooks Brothers suit. On one particular day I was aware I might be called down to testify, but I was scheduled to play tennis. At the tennis court, a big announcement came over the loudspeakers on all the Central Park courts. “Kenneth Cock! Kenneth Cock!”

I jumped into my gray flannel suit and grabbed my tennis racket. John Ashbery was already there. They were just starting the trial. They dismissed the case. Here’s why. This was after the big SCREW magazine case, in which I think the decision had been made that obscenity could only be against the law if it encouraged other people to engage in it. So, our lawyer had sort of tricked the opposition lawyer into concentrating his case entirely on the solicitation of people to be filmed during Mongolian Cluster Fuck. Now, the judge was someone with a sense of humor and a brain, and our lawyer had explained to him, “You don’t really believe that they’re going to make a movie called Mongolian Cluster Fuck! What is that? Obviously, this is a joke, so this doesn’t fall under the purview of the law. "So the judge explained this to the other lawyer and dismissed the case. I had prepared a list of about ten things I thought were socially redeeming about Fuck You, but I never got a chance to state what they were.

DANIEL KANE:

I remember one of the first things I saw going through back issues of Fuck You was a form one could fill out indicating a willingness to participate in a "Fuck-In" against the Vietnam War. There was a box you were supposed to check adjacent to a line which read, "Yes, I will fuck-in." But you also had an option—you could check the line which read, "Preferring to eat dick, I will suck-in."

KENNETH KOCH:

[laughs] That’s good!

Ed Sanders’ mug shot after the Peace Eye bust by the New York City police, January 2, 1966.

[addenda]

__ the fantastic Ed Sanders Archive, as created and made available for PDF download by Granary Books.

__ a little whimsy on whimsy and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kenneth Koch, and hipster t-shirts (or taking them off) from Daniel Kane, himself…

A little Krzhizhanovsky.

1

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky melted and soldered every mold he touched. Genre, syntax, realism, ontology, esoterica—all were defamiliarized by his strange textual juxtapositions and alchemical grammar. He is uniquely formidable. In fact, I cannot think of another writer who rattled the sanctified conventions of text in as many ways and with as much commitment as K.

“Though Krzhizhanovsky wrote for some twenty years, Soviet censorship and World War II conspired against him, and none of his fiction was published in his lifetime,” writes Kevin Huizenga, who resurrected K’s novel,The Return of Münchausen (NYRB Classics) as a comic for The Paris Review. Notably, in a play on the game of playing, Huizenga tucks a tiny “NYRB Classix” label at the bottom of the square.

Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov translated K’s travelogue-cum-travel-rogue, The Return of Münchausen, a novella that plays with the legendary character known as Baron Munchausen. As NYRB’s website summarizes:

Baron Munchausen’s hold on the European imagination dates back to the late eighteenth century when he first pulled himself (and his horse) out of a swamp by his own upturned pigtail. Inspired by the extravagant yarns of a straight-faced former cavalry officer, Hieronymus von Münchhausen, the best-selling legend quickly eclipsed the real-life baron who helped the Russians fight the Turks. Galloping across continents and centuries, the mythical Munchausen’s Travels went through hundreds of editions of increasing length and luxuriance.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, the Russian modernist master of the unsettling and the uncanny, also took certain liberties with the mythical baron. In this phantasmagoric roman à clef set in 1920s Berlin, London, and Moscow, Munchausen dauntlessly upholds his old motto “Truth in lies,” while remaining a fierce champion of his own imagination. At the same time, the two-hundred-year-old baron and self-taught philosopher has agreed to return to Russia, Lenin’s Russia, undercover. This reluctant secret agent has come out of retirement to engage with the real world.

Truth in lies is a sharp way of describing the challenges of craft in literature. Whether fiction, poetry, or theatre, one hopes that the chemistry of words makes something gold like truth from the cheap metal of lies.

Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov also translated K. for Columbia University Press’ publication of Stravaging “Strange”, a hodge-podge of Krzhizhanovskian forms including several short fictions, excerpts from his notebooks—aphoristic glimpses of his worldview, moods, humor, and writing methods—and reminiscences of Krzhizhanovsky by his lifelong companion, Anna Bovshek, beginning with their first meeting in Kiev in 1920 and ending with his death in Moscow in 1950.

Caryl Emerson’s fastidious “Introduction” is a labor of love and profound scholarship that also paints a portrait of Krzhizhanovsky’s nonconformist, polymathic spirit. He was restless, curious, eager to ramble. Although determined to travel the world, K. lacked the money or status to do more than wander around Moscow. As Soviet censorship and passport regimes limited his movement, he took to the page to create fantastic, uncanny worlds. Like many, he traveled by writing. The books title— Stravaging “Strange”— is built from this very tension: “stravage” is an old Irish/Scottish word for wandering aimlessly about.

Per writing process, “a fantastical plot is my method,” K wrote, “First you borrow from reality, you ask reality for permission to use your imagination, to deviate from actual fact; later you repay your debt to your creditor with nature, with a profoundly realistic investigation of the facts and an exact logic of conclusions.”

To offer a small sample from Stravaging Strange, “Material for a Life of Gorgis Katafalaki,” set in Berlin, Paris, London, and Moscow, inventories the inane travels and trials of a nationless outsider trying to establish himself in a career of some sort. Though low on money, Gorgis is rich in imagination and absurdity.

An excerpt from "Material for a Life of Gorgis Katafalaki" by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky:

Metafiction seems a flimsy, tourist-style designation for the sort of metaphysics imbricated in Krzhizhanovsky’s narrations.

“Krzhizhanovsky’s real subject is not the gap between fiction and reality so much as the gaps inside the real itself,” Adam Thirlwell writes:

The metafiction is really metaphysical. So that it should be no surprise if a corpse, in “Autobiography of a Corpse,” reasons in this manner, arguing that space “is absurdly vast and has expanded—with its orbits, stars and yawning parabolas—to infinity. But if one tucks it inside numbers and meanings, it will easily fit on two or three bookshelves.” It is just one more example of Krzhizhanovsky’s exploration of language’s tricks.

Read this book. And read Thirlwell’s brilliant criticism. And please excuse me while I go and declare myself a state before the teens come home and annoy me with their energetic democratic commitments.

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.”

Cento notebook, 26 March 2024.

One night, when he was studying the course of the moon and its revolutions and was gazing open-mouthed at the heavens, a lizard crapped upon him from the top of the roof.

— Aristophanes, The Clouds

I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it.

—Anne Sexton, at some point

Sex has an x in it because the lovers cross just there and forever, and that letter, that character, has, in itself, no meaning, and no sympathy or mercy.

—Larry Levis in conversation with David Wojahn, 1982

Murderous parlor music.

Henrik Ibsen disliked the English title, Ghosts. The original title, Gengangere, can be literally translated as "again walkers", "ones who return", or "revenants". It has a double meaning of both "ghosts" and "events that repeat themselves.

OSWALD. He was one of the first doctors in Paris. I told him my symptoms; and then he set to work asking me a string of questions which I thought had nothing to do with the matter. I couldn't imagine what the man was after—

MRS. ALVING. Well?

OSWALD. At last he said: "There has been something worm-eaten in you from your birth." He used that very word—vermoulu.

MRS. ALVING. [Breathlessly.] What did he mean by that?

OSWALD. I didn't understand either, and begged him to explain himself more clearly. And then the old cynic said—[Clenching his fist] Oh—!

MRS. ALVING. What did he say?

OSWALD. He said, "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children."

MRS. ALVING. [Rising slowly.] The sins of the fathers—!

OSWALD. I very nearly struck him in the face—

MRS. ALVING. [Walks away across the room.] The sins of the fathers—

OSWALD. [Smiles sadly.] Yes; what do you think of that? Of course I assured him that such a thing was out of the question. But do you think he gave in? No, he stuck to it; and it was only when I produced your letters and translated the passages relating to father—

MRS. ALVING. But then—?

OSWALD. Then of course he had to admit that he was on the wrong track; and so I learned the truth—the incomprehensible truth! I ought not to have taken part with my comrades in that lighthearted, glorious life of theirs. It had been too much for my strength. So I had brought it upon myself!

MRS. ALVING. Oswald! No, no; do not believe it!

OSWALD. No other explanation was possible, he said. That's the awful part of it. Incurably ruined for life—by my own heedlessness! All that I meant to have done in the world—I never dare think of it again—I'm not able to think of it. Oh! if I could only live over again, and undo all I have done! [He buries his face in the sofa.]

“From the piano part of Beethoven's Kreutzer sonata. This manuscript is at the Juilliard Library, and was made by 4 copyists with the collaboration of the composer.”

But how should we speak of the fathers in the murderous parlor?

OSWALD. [Impatiently.]Oh, "father,"—"father"! I never knew anything of father. I remember nothing about him, except that he once made me sick.

MRS. ALVING. This is terrible to think of! Ought not a son to love his father, whatever happens?

OSWALD. When a son has nothing to thank his father for? has never known him? Do you really cling to that old superstition?—you who are so enlightened in other ways?

MRS. ALVING. Can it be only a superstition—?

OSWALD. Yes; surely you can see that, mother. It's one of those notions that are current in the world, and so—

MRS. ALVING. [Deeply moved.] Ghosts!

OSWALD. [Crossing the room.] Yes; you may call them ghosts.

Larry Levis' first confession.

[What follows is a section from “Autobiography,” excerpted from Larry Levis’ essay collection, The Gazer Within. The entirety of the title essay,“Some Notes From the Gazer Within”, is available online thanks to Blackbird.]

“First confession”

My mother, whose maiden name was Carol Clement Mayo, was Irish. I was raised as a Catholic, which is to say, raised to believe that such terms as mystery, spirit, and the Holy Ghost were real presences rather than abstractions. To be raised as a Catholic is to grow up feeling guilty for something but not to know quite what it is. At seven, like other children, I went to my First Confession so that I could receive, afterward, my First Communion. Like other children, I had to make up sins on the way to my First Confession, mostly venial sins, like lying or having "bad thoughts." I had made up about ten little sins, but I felt I ought to confess to at least one big Mortal Sin, just to get it down somehow, from the start. A mortal sin was serious business. If you didn't confess, do penance, and gain absolution by Communion, you would go straight to hell in the next life without a lawyer made of air at your side, without even an arraignment or hearing. I looked at the list of the ten mortal sins and realized right away that I didn't qualify as a transgressor for nine of them. The only one left was a word I didn't understand, and so I thought that must be the sin that I had committed, the one that applied to me. And so, at the age of seven, after confessing my little, imaginary venial sins, I confessed to adultery, I did it in a casual, offhand way, "And uh . .. I committed adultery," I said. The priest stopped mumbling to himself in Latin. There was, in the shadowy, screened, small space of the confessional where I knelt, a silence, a pause. I could tell I'd made some sort of impression. He asked "How many times, my son?" "Just once," I replied. And then he asked, "How old are you?" "I'm seven, Father," I answered. And so he then explained what adultery was. And after he had finished, I said, "Oh no. I haven't done that?” And so it must have been something else that I had done that I wished to atone for, though I didn't know what it was. I still don't. But Catholicism works its shrewd miracle in the seven-year-old psyche, or soul, before the mind can question it.

You feel guilty for something or other you've done or just thought about doing, and you can't remember what it was or know what it was, and it keeps you in line, for a while at least, off the streets and out of trouble. Sometimes it works for ages. What else could have coerced peasants to lug huge stones up a hill for a cathedral except a hope to atone for the only sin they had all committed, the sin of being mortal, of being born and knowing they were flesh, and flesh must die. They didn't do it out of altruism. It doesn't exist. I was eight or nine when I realized this. I was loitering around by my father's abandoned chicken shed, a long, low building that still smelled vaguely of chicken dung. I was trying to pray without any self-interest. I couldn't do it. St. Augustine knew this long before I did.

Besides, it was a world with a chicken shed in it. My father once had a going egg business. He hated it. He hated chickens, and he finally grew to despise even their eggs. "What was the happiest day of your life?" I once asked him. "The day I got out of the chicken business," he answered; there was more to the world than belief, or disbelief.

I wasn't religious and never have been. The Mass was in Latin, and the incomprehensible sound of it had a beauty, but going to Mass always bored me. It seemed like a complete waste of time. And catechism classes were worse. The nuns longed for any opportunity to punish us. They watched as if we were a group of suspects the police had rounded up. They knew we were guilty of something.

The Catholic Church understood Freud's concept of the superego centuries before he articulated it in 1940. The cathedral on a hill is its palpable and visible representation, or, in Freud's simile, the superego is "like a garrison above a captured town." In the case of the church, it is a garrison so effective that it doesn't even need soldiers. Its windows are beautiful. Its frescoes and painting and sculptures, depicting absence in enormous detail, are priceless. It enabled Dante to imagine hell, and it was at least the stepmother to a ninety-year period of Italian art, a period of corruption, betrayal, incest, assassination, intrigue, and unsurpassable art. The church knew beauty and evil were sleeping together, and gave both allowances to do it. Two thousand years of stolid, industrious virtue and Swiss peace perfected the cuckoo clock and the dairy cow. I suspect the Swiss dairyman had a good deal of placid self-esteem. Michelangelo hated himself. And a later figure, Caravaggio, was mean-tempered, an inadvertent murderer whose self-portrait, as Goliath, is full of self-contempt and despair.

In the Age of Therapy, First Confessions could be seen as a ritualized form of child abuse, psychological in method, permanent in effect. But you can't take the Vatican to court. The painting on the chapel's ceiling doesn't respond to a summons and is tricky evidence.

In my case, I would lie awake as a child, full of vague yearnings which were sexual, which I did not know were entirely normal. I was never abused nor molested nor violated as a child. I simply felt that I was a violation, that I was guilty of being alive.

But if it was a violation, it was a pleasure. Besides, how guilty can anyone feel, at seven or eight? I was a boy like other boys. I didn't rebel against guilt, I forgot about it.

Before I was born, a priest drowned in our swimming pool. He had a weak heart and dove into cold, fresh water. My mother came out with a tray of glasses and ice tea and saw him bobbing there. She felt terrible about it. I always thought it was amazing. Priests were full of a mysterious divinity. They had a little bit of God in them. They weren't supposed to die like other people. This one was a young priest from Kings-burg. His lungs were full of water. His body was heavy. My mother pulled him out and tried to revive him with artificial respiration, but of course it didn't work. I always imagined him floating face down in a robe and vestments, dressed for saying the Mass, and asked my mother about it once when I was still a child. "No, silly," she said, "he had on bathing trunks." God died in his bathing trunks, I thought then, for priests were the form He took on earth. Did He really die, I wondered, or did He just do it to show that he could do it too, flick It into the pool water like a fourth of July sparkler burning too close to the hand? He did a lot of things just for effect, I thought: Yosemite National Park, for example.

Thinking about God made me tired. I had trouble believing in everlasting life. What did it look like? It seemed more likely that one just died in the end, and that was that, I had begun to think. If the spirit rose off you like a mist, so what? I'd hunted quail in thick ground fog that broke up and parted like mist when the sun burned it off. I hunted without a dog and entirely by intuition and always found quail. My senses grew alive and sharp when I hunted. The quail would burst up around me. I had a twenty-gauge shotgun and would usually bring down four or five by the time I'd finished. It felt real. It was pointless to think about God. Heaven made me feel tired, baffled, resigned, sad as when someone tells you a lie, and you know it's a lie, and wonder why he had to do so. When I cleaned the quail they were still warm inside. Their feathers gave off a pungent, wild smell that was like nothing else. I neglected to cut their feet off; it didn't seem important. My mother hated cooking them. I'd have to break the thin gray sticks of their legs off before she was willing to.

People now confess to all kinds of things, in public, on television. I have a feeling they too make up the things they confess to, just as we did, at seven. But they enjoy it, they like confessing to things. If they've done something that can still shock an audience, they even get paid for it, or make money later by confessing it in a book. They are absolved of their sins by the show's ratings and by book sales. We were supposed to feel embarrassment, shame, and contrition over what we had done. We were just kids. But we tried. We'd shut our eyes and concentrate and try to feel each one of those things. We couldn't, and we would feel sorry when we couldn't. They should have paid us money for it.

"But God comes to see without a bell."

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”

Isabella Hammad, “Things That Have Died By the Pool”

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)

"My Story in a Late Style of Fire" by Larry Levis

“ At the recollection of a name, all the characters return with their costumes and their language to play their roles as they played them life and I can see them performing their actions in front of me like a God entertaining himself by gazing at the worlds he has created. One especially - the first love, which was never violent nor passionate, since erased by other desires but still remaining in the depths of my heart like an ancient Roman way traversed by a wretched railway carriage.”

— Gustave Flaubert, Memoirs of a Madman (translated by Andrew Brown)

“Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.”

― Nathaniel Hawthorne

And a poem by Larry Levis.