Pykk

see in the walnut

2012-01-28T04:28:00.020+11:00

I'm going to put Spenser down for a minute because Fay over at the Read, Ramble blog wondered if I would look at a written item of Les Murray's, so I will. It's one of the poems from his latest book, Taller When Prone, a short riddle of a thing, only seven lines long. The first line is a question but that's not where the poem starts; it starts with the title, which is Manuscript Roundel, and this is where things get interesting, because it wasn't Manuscript Roundel when Prone was first published; in fact it was Medallion in the Australian version of the book (which was brought out in the April of 2010 by Melbourne's Black Inc) and then when it was published again two months later in a Christian magazine called First Things it was Knotwork Medallion. The Manuscript Roundel title didn't exist until the following year. Fay I believe is consulting the US Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition, published initially on March 15th, 2011, and by this time it has made its final change.

Knotwork Medallion is available online here. (I'm not going to copy and paste in case there are copyright issues.) There are three differences between this and Roundel besides the title. The word "in" has been added after "egg" in the fifth line, and the horse's straps in lines two and seven are now "red." "Horses all harnessed" in line two becomes "Horses red-harnessed," and "the horse-straps" in line seven becomes "red straps" with no reiteration of "horse."

When you stack the three titles up in chronological order I think you can see Murray's mind move in a clarifying direction, from a general idea of a circular picture-space to a more specialised one; the object described by the specialised one is probably what he had in mind all along. A manuscript roundel is a feature of illuminated manuscripts, a fenced-in area marshalling a discrete image. The word knotwork in the second title might point to the kind of illuminated manuscripts Murray had in mind, old Anglo-Celtic ones, decorated with knot-patterns of twining lines, animals, plants, and figures. The most famous example is the Book of Kells. These manuscripts are religious, written and drawn by monks, and Murray is a Catholic so devout that he dedicates each new book "To the glory of God," so it makes sense that these illuminated gospels are documents he would know and think about; this is a logical avenue for his mind to take.

(A roundel is also a form of poetry invented by Swinburne from the French rondeau, but Manuscript Roundel is blatantly not a roundel: it's too short and it doesn't have a refrain, so the word here has to be a coincidence, not a guide.)

It's easy to see in my mind's eye a relationship between the enclosed typically-circularesque pattern-space of a manuscript roundel and the enclosed ovoid nut-space of the walnut shell in line one with the crenellated wriggle-patterned meat nesting inside. Murray is magicking the walnut; with line one he opens it, "What did you see in the walnut?" the shell is lifted, I'm looking inside, and I know that the poet must be seeing it too because he completes the poem by answering his own question. He's already collapsed the nut together with an art object, an object with history, the manuscript roundel. There is significance in this walnut he suggests, it is more than just a present physical object, it contains pictures; it is an illustration.

That "egg" in line five has to be the seed itself, inside the walnut shell (which is curved and brown as eggs are curved and brown), waiting to grow into a tree. "Held ... aloft" in line six becomes the tree, holding up its branches and supporting this "buttery" at the end of line five. What is a buttery? It can be any of a few different things, but I think the definition that matters here is the medieval buttery, a room that used to be set aside in prosperous English households so that the family had a place to store its beer. (Pricy booze was kept in the cellar.) The beer was held in wooden casks or butts, therefore buttery, the room of butts. Those hand-branches in line six are holding up a collection of butts, that is, brown hard enclosed objects, that is, also, in the compressive language of Murray's poetry, walnuts. And the "egg" is both the holding-aloft and the butts and the buttery because all of these tree-components will come from this one nut, they're all coiled up inside, unified for now but preparing to spring apart.

Now, looking at the egg in line five, I thought, all right, we've described the physical qualities of this particular nut that the poet is holding in our hands, so lines two, three, and four are probably talking about something else. They're a separate sentence, they're not part of this egg-and-growth. They come before. What comes before an individual nut? The history of nuts. What's in this history? We have criss-cross harnesses, we have horses, and we have soldiers who are appearing in movies, we have actors pretending to be soldiers; there's no battlefield glory for this body of soldiers any more, only media fame. Celtic knotwork is made of criss-crossings; possibly Murray's criss-cross came from that, but what else? What about Celtic horses? There is the White Horse, there is Epona the Celtic horse goddess, who ruled, among other things, fertility, seeds -- nuts -- and she was rare among Celtic gods because the Romans worshipped her too. Now look at the etymology of the word walnut which in Old English was wealh-hnutu, meaning foreign-nut, and why? Because walnuts came from the continent, from Rome and Gaul, they were currency in the cultural exchange of an invaded British Isles.

What if the soldiers were Roman soldiers, and the "red" in the American version of line two is not only a response to the red pigment on the criss-crossings in the illuminated manuscripts but also a suggestion of blood, fire, and war; those criss-crossed harnesses are war harnesses, those vexed Xs are the mess of an invasion? I asked M. what he thought of that idea and he pointed out that Roman centurions wore red too. The Ancient Roman war machine has vanished, its exploits are movies, it's Russell Crowe in Gladiator, it's a rushing mob in Ben Hur, a centurion is an actor "wearing the credits / of his movie like medal ribbons." As far as soldiering goes the Roman legions have evaporated. But a large cast of historians and, popularisers, writers, and so on, teachers, poets, have kept the memory of the soldiers lively for centuries and today they can still be imagined, this is their current glory; and this line of people devoted to their memory, stretching back for centuries, might be their equivalent of movie credits. (M. came up with this as well.)

If I'm right then these three lines are there to describe the history of the walnut, the invasion that introduced them to the country where the manuscript roundels appear to be located. Other cultures used manuscript roundels too, but that "knotwork" in the second version of the title seems to connect the poem to the British Isles. As for the straps in the last line "pulling the nut shut" I suspect that they were conjured up from the butts in the buttery. Straps hold casks together, and Murray's usual poetic strategy is to mash several ideas into juxtaposition, making them coexist, a sort of hallucinatory multilayered effect, bringing the universe of notions around one object into correspondence with the universe of ideas around another, so why not take the harness straps of the horses, put them together with the straps of the barrels, and use them to close the poem by closing the nut? The poet pushes the two halves back together, click, the vision fades, the poem ends.

So, Fay, that's my shot at Manuscript Roundel, and thank you for that: that was a pretty fabulous crossword puzzle.

(I haven't even gone into the musicality of the poem, but it might be worth noticing how Murray kicks himself along on a regular s-s-s like a kid with a skateboard: orses, nessed, criss-cross, soldier, edits, eases into yawny vowels, movie, aloft, gives himself a relishable pop-pop with building a buttery and ends with the double-final click of nut shut: the sound itself is an ending, the same door being slammed twice.)

Here is an example of red criss-cross knotwork in the Book of Kells. I'm more sure of a link between this poem and Kells now ("now" is a few days after I made this post originally) that I've looked up one of Murray's poems from the 1970s, The Figures in Quoniam, and noticed that, one, it is directly inspired by the Book, that, two, it associates the word "knotwork" with the Book ("This orphidian knotwork around us, this gold on the I, / surely this is the art of barbarians" he imagines one figure saying), that, three, he also thinks about red lines crossing through whiteness ("You say the High One used Time / and Chance to knit the red veins through the white sinews? / Now this is complexity compounded, and druidical entirely --"), that, four, it's a poem about people and things contained inside shapes on a Kells manuscript page, and that, five, other poems in the same book (Ethnic Radio, 1977) suggest that he has, or had, an interest in Celtic and Gaelic-British history.

It might also be useful to think of Roundel as a modern version of those ancient British, Anglo-Saxon riddles, the ones that present the object, whatever it is, as a series of mysterious objects and actions, not obviously related to the answer. A riddle like that, writes S.A.J. Bradley in Anglo-Saxon Poetry, "challenges the mind by paradox and by signalled ambivalence to seek a correct solution veiled in ambiguous statement, and thus to seek the truth veiled in the metaphor and the spiritual and eternal veiled in the corporal and temporal." If you think of the way Murray's positioned this walnut in time, space, and history (it's here now, but it's also a tree in the future, giving birth to new itselfs and new futures, and it's part of a religious manuscript as well -- rebirth a theme here -- and connected to events so far gone they're practically mythical -- etc) then describing Roundel as an exercise that wants to veil the spiritual and eternal in the corporal and temporal isn't a bad summary.

Here's a translation of an Exeter Book riddle whose answer is rake

I saw a thing | in the dwellings of men
that feeds the cattle; | has many teeth.
The beak is useful to it; | it goes downwards,
ravages faithfully; | pulls homewards;
hunts along walls; | reaches for roots.
Always it finds them, | those which are not fast;
lets them, the beautiful, | when they are fast,
stand in quiet | in their proper places,
brightly shining, | growing, blooming.

(Englished by Paull Franklin Baum)

their owne perfection so

2012-01-25T07:03:00.002+11:00

Pastorella, Spenser says, is the name of one character, a shepherdess (she's pastoral, you see, like me, down in the country last week, housed in high chaparral, looking at horses and grass) and it makes her sound like a brand of butter, I thought (farm maiden holding out a yellow brick), or noodles (Pastarella), and then I began to wonder where the difference sat between this and any other marketed identity. A man on a lion is named Wrath, a brand of boxed-up cake mix is called perhaps D'Lish, and the chopped lettuce I see in our last delivery of supermarket junk mail is named Ready-Pac, which tells me two things, one, that the lettuce is inside a pac or packet and two, that it is always, always ready to be removed from the packet and eaten, which puts it in defiance of rot, decay, death, and passing time, the principles that govern all our days, flesh and vegetable alike; these laws are personalised by Spenser and named Mutabilitie. Mutabilitie in the final cantos of the Faerie Queene tells grandmother Nature that the "greatest part" of everything should be acknowledged hers because everything changes, every part of the world is "incontinent," she is the dominant principle, but Nature thinks about it and refutes her, agreeing that "all things stedfastnes doe hate," and yet, she says, these changing things do not alter utterly and permanently, instead they come back to themselves again.

They are not changed from their first estate;
But by their change their being doe dilate:
And turning to themselues at length againe,
Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate:
Then ouer them Change doth not rule and raigne;
But they raigne ouer change, and doe their states maintaine.

So there is some steady quality in everything, declares dame Nature, some self that recurs and recurs, defying change, which in the case of Wrath must be his wrathfulness, in the case of the imaginary cake mix its deliciousness, and in the case of Mutabilitie, her mutability. She is a state of affairs as well as a woman; she can stand arguing with Nature while at the same time she is happening, she occurs, she is a condition: the moon is "now bright, now brown & gray," "euery Riuer still doth ebbe and flowe," fires become ash, lightning flashes and vanishes, people grow old, buds bloom, and seasons pass. And she doesn't say, "I do this," but "I am this."

Mutabilitie's quality is innate, Wrath's condition is innate, it is utterly inner and outer, it permeates them, meanwhile the cake mix called D'lish is named from the outside, for qualities that it might have, or it might not, but the important part is that the customer should believe, just briefly, or just foggily, or even tiredly or cynically (but somehow going along with the idea because why not, it sounds good enough, it'll do, and even though they know that, "It's just marketing" they still wouldn't buy a cake mix called Crap or Chewy Socks) that the name, D'Lish, is also innate, that the cake really will be delicious, even just a little bit delicious, even just slightly more delicious than the cake mix in the box next door; and the picture on the front of the box plays a role too, but the name holds the impression together.

Yet the name is not a heart but a hat. The product is labelled; the allegorical person is exposed.

It's the growth of detail around D'lish that gives the game away, the fact that the customer can take the box home, make the cake, and decide that the taste doesn't suit them. Not delicious, this cake, not firm but soggy, and the filling tastes like water. Considering, it occurs to me that most of the characters with the decisive names in Spenser are occupying minor roles, those parts that don't ask them to do much more than appear with their qualities on show. The characters who go through extended periods of action, however -- the ones the reader can judge, weigh, and test by watching their behaviour -- their names are less blatant and less restricting.

So Spenser doesn't want a purely wrathful person doing nothing but show wrath, wrath, wrath for pages of adventures, falling in love wrathfully, holding conversations wrathfully, accepting quests wrathfully, never having any other emotion but wrathfulness, and never getting off his angry lion. As the actions began to pile up we'd be able to look at them and triangulate some response more complicated than "He's wrathful" -- and we would do that, I'll bet you, we would move off along the pathways of our own opinions, even if Spenser kept telling us to our faces that the character was nothing but wrathful and angry. People don't always go along with these lecturing tactics, people develop sympathy for villains, people refuse to laugh at the comic relief, people dislike the hero, a thing I've seen on more than one occasion, and a thing I've seen myself do more than once -- hating good King Arthur in Idylls of the King, for instance, that dehydrate prim prissy CEO boofhead, patting himself on the back. I'd run off with Launcelot too.

a faithfull mate

2012-01-22T18:08:00.003+11:00

If Swann has a right to envy Bill Sykes, then those characters who fight for their emotional specifics in a prose universe of vague "odds" and "infinites" have a right to envy the characters in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, because Spenser wants his people to fit their world so well that he names most of them after their personalities, which are also their employments and their actions and their roles. In other words they're allegories. The universe doesn't tug at them, it cleaves to them. They're sometimes evil but they're never lost. (Characters in the other book are always lost and never evil.) The one who devotes her life to impatience is named Impatience, the glorious queen is named Gloriana, the "fierce reuenging" one who rides a lion is named Wrath, and Care (toil-and-care, the poet means, not friendly caring) is a blacksmith

That neither day nor night from working spared,
But to small purpose yron wedges made;
Those be vnquiet thoughts, that carefull minds inuade.

The landscape in the poem isn't infinite or puzzling, instead it fits them perfectly, growing new antechambers when they need a place to go, and shrinking back to scale when they're done. The world is synonymous with their adventures. A lady loses her knight, she decides to travel in search of him, and so the poet hands her an appropriate wilderness. "In wildernesse and wastfull deserts strayd, / To seeke her knight." Then she's tired and wants to lie down, so he gives her a sward. "One day nigh wearie of the yrkesome way, / From her vnhastie beast she did alight, / And on the grasse her daintie limbes did lay." She is unprotected; he sends a lion to assist.

The Lyon would not leaue her desolate,
   But with her went along, as a strong gard
   Of her chast person, and a faithfull mate
   Of her sad troubles and misfortunes hard

Spenser's approach to landscape is a jazz approach. He bulks it out with a riff and sinks back when the solo is over. The characters finish with a forest, they turn their backs, away it goes like a used serviette, and a new one pops out of the box in front of them. The stuff of their world is neverending and absolutely malleable. A knight needs to be rescued from a dragon and so the poet shoves him over backwards into a magically consecrated swamp, explaining that the swamp is a gift from God, but this is even more blatant than the Norse saga-tellers who squirrelled invisibility rings onto their heroes' fingers through the hands of convenient dwarves. Last week in the library, coming across Ivy Compton-Burnett, I found a god in her books too, and the god was her. There she was (and me standing by the shelf with the book in front) writing Chapter Two of Masters and Pastors, and a woman-character says words to a group of men in a room, then half a page goes by, and then the woman does something completely strange -- stranger than any of Spenser's monsters, even the one with the exploding cannibal babies -- she walks into the room. We never saw her leave. There is a line there that the author never wrote: and then she got up and walked out of the room. The rest of the page tells you that this line should exist, it needs to exist; it doesn't exist. It is prominently absent.

I can redact at any time, says Ivy Compton-Burnett. I can redact anything. Or I can add. Every line of dialogue in Chapter One comes with a physical description of the speaker, more elaborate than it needs to be, straightfaced, and casual: a running gag that, through sheer stubborn weirdness, ends up pulling attention away from the element of the scene that, normally, would be the most important -- the dialogue -- and putting it on the incidental grimaces of imaginary faces. To act is to betray yourself -- Proust describes it, Compton-Burnett makes it a feature of her prose for a few pages, then stops. It wasn't important after all. Nothing is more important than the exercise of power. Nathalie Sarraute called her Great. Ha ha ha, says Ivy Compton-Burnett, in this paper world I am Gloriana, I am power, I am queene.

beyond them he could see into the room

2012-01-14T16:14:00.005+11:00

A few months ago as we were walking along a main road I asked M. if the rodeo finals were still in town, and, Look at the taxis, he replied. Are they still advertising country music? Most of what I know I deduce; I see nothing, I hear nothing, or no primary thing, I see the shadows of what once was, I hear its footsteps, seldom witness the thing itself. Two Tuesdays ago we went to a panel discussion called Mob Wives and our compere asked the former wife of a dead hitman when she had begun to wonder what her husband did for a living. When I walked into the room and he was seeing ghosts, she said. Bill Sykes throws a rug over Nancy's corpse, pulls it off again, secondhand information goes up from the flesh like a smoke signal and the news of her murder manifests, manifests, manifests. "He washed himself, and rubbed his clothes; there were spots that would not be removed, but he cut the pieces out, and burnt them. How those stains were dispersed about the room! The very feet of the dog were bloody." But he's a lucky man, say Proust's Swann and the Narrator, both suspicious of their girlfriends -- we'd pay time and money for evidence that solid. Instead they ask other men to spy for them, they concoct stories, they imagine lesbian orgies, they read seduction in a glance, and Swann frustrated stands in Odette's street at night staring at the light seeping through the slats of her closed window shutters -- she's in there, she's with another man -- he knocks -- it's not her window.

Two old gentlemen stood facing him, in the window, one of them with a lamp in his hand; and beyond them he could see into the room, a room that he had never seen before.

He apologises to the men for disturbing them and goes home, feeling glad, not only because his love of Odette is still intact, but also because she will never have to know about that knock on the shutters, which is the physical evidence of his emotions. He's afraid that if she knew he was jealous she might take him for granted. "[H]aving feigned for so long, when in Odette’s company, a sort of indifference, he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof of the excess of his own passion which, in a pair of lovers, fully and finally dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love the other enough." Behaviour is exposure. The inner predisposition puts on flesh; now people can spot it and make deductions. Proust's jealous Narrator spends months struggling unsuccessfully to uncover the same evidence that he receives, years later, suddenly, completely, with absolutely no trouble, from someone who believes that exposure doesn't matter any more, and the experience of jealousy, and the fading of his jealousy, and his later understanding of that jealousy, his reflections on that jealousy, all feed the philosophy that makes him arc up rejuvenated at the end of the book. Pain comes first, followed by an illumination that goes beyond the pain itself, more solution than he'd dreamed or hoped for, and you remember that Proust was raised Catholic.

The promise of writing is that we can have everything we want but only if we take it second hand. This is literature, says Proust, this is meaning, in fact this is reality. Reality is not understood directly but only through reflection and metaphor, secondarily, away from the thing itself.

What we call reality is a relation between those sensations and those memories which simultaneously encircle us [...] that unique relation which the writer must discover in order that he may link two different states of being together for ever in a phrase. In describing objects one can make those which figure in a particular place succeed each other indefinitely; the truth will only begin to emerge from the moment that the writer takes two different objects, posits their relationship, the analogue in the world of art to the only relationship of causal law in the world of science, and encloses it within the circle of fine style. In this, as in life, he fuses a quality common to two sensations, extracts their essence and in order to withdraw them from the contingencies of time, unites them in a metaphor, thus chaining them together with the indefinable bond of a verbal alliance.

But it's a curse, exclaims Fernando Pessoa through a heteronym named Alberto Caeiro (a pastoral poet), it's too much, this connecting, concluding, fishnet intelligence, this brain-made reality, it's exhausting, and it distorts, it's nothing but us, us, us all the time, and why can't we be free of ourselves? Proust was sociable, Pessoa was antisocial, their lifetimes overlapped, Proust was born in 1871 and died in 1922, Pessoa was born in 1888 and died in 1935. "[A] true and real ensemble / Is a disease of our own ideas," he writes, and "thinking is not understanding" and

To see the trees and flowers
It isn't enough not to be blind.
It is also necessary to have no philosophy.
With philosophy there are no trees, just ideas
There is only each one of us, like a cave
There is only a shut window, and the whole world outside
And a dream of what could be seen if the window were opened

So if we were ideally Caeiro-wise in front of a flower we'd see nothing but the flower, in front of a tree we'd absorb nothing but the tree, a tall object that would become inexpressible since we wouldn't be satisfied with the word "tree," which is an idea, or a trigger that creates one, and so, there, then, maybe we're doing the next best thing -- or another thing anyway -- when we detach the tree-thing from the word tree by making metaphors about it. A rose meaning also romance is not only a rose, but also love and pain and Valentine's Day, and, imagine this -- this is all imaginary, but I fantasise it -- the word "rose" actively lifts away from the thing itself on a mattress of metaphor and the thing itself is left there like a pea, waiting to be detected in some inhuman way that's not deduction.

The first two Proust quotes come from Swann's Way (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff), and "What we call reality ..." comes from Time Regained (translated by Stephen Hudson). Bill Sykes comes from Oliver Twist, which is Dickens, and you can find the rest of the Caeiro poems in The Keeper of Sheep, or in Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, translated by Richard Zenith, which is the version I've used here. Anyone who's been thinking of reading Pessoa's Book of Disquiet might want to know that Wuthering Expectations is holding a Disquiet read-along.

Jane Anne Morrison at the Las Vegas Review-Journal published an opinion piece about that Mob Wives panel. In another article she says that she saw the hitman husband giving evidence at a trial in 1979, before Thanksgiving, and she went away on her Thanksgiving break telling people that he wasn't as sick as he looked on the stand, a fake, she said, he's putting it on -- he didn't live to Christmas.

The hitman's wife, whose name is Wendy Mazaros, recently co-wrote a memoir.

for soþe

2012-01-09T05:21:00.028+11:00

I was walking back from the mailboxes when I overheard a woman on the other side of a tree say, "You had your hair cut off!" and I knew that she was talking to S., even though I couldn't see either of them, her or S.; and in fact I haven't seen S. for weeks. But M. had spotted him earlier that morning and came to me afterwards saying, "S. has had a haircut, his hair is as short as mine." I didn't see a single physical sign of S., nor did I hear him reply, but if you asked me who was behind that tree with the woman, I would tell you that it was S. Walking up the street I went past a man who had surrounded himself with a fleece of yellow and white string (unwound from ball or cylinder, it was all in curls), and he was holding part of it in one hand and making gestures with the other, cutting the string with a knife, I thought, and not for at least a minute did I ask myself if I had actually seen a knife, to which the answer was no, not a knife, not even the faintest glitter of metal, absolutely nothing that would establish the actual presence of a knife except the tugging action he was making over the string, which seemed to be the kind of tug you would make if you were trying to cut string with a knife.

Deductions! The teenage narrator in Fleur Jaeggi's Sweet Days of Discipline has a friend who looks at her shrivelled chilly palms and says, "You've got an old woman's hands." The narrator tells us then, "I knew that she was attracted to me." She adds: "I can hardly describe how proud I was." Marguerite Young in Miss MacIntosh My Darling creates her characters like this: first she plants them in a location, like a model in a diorama box -- the mother is lying in her bed, and Miss MacIntosh herself, the narrator's nurse, will walk along the beach -- and then she'll extrapolate their characteristics, getting more and more extravagant -- it's as if she's placed a dot on a bare page and then begun to draw circles around it until the page is full. The dot is the core. But the bulk of the book is made of circles. I wonder if it would have been possible to erase the dot and leave the reader to work it out for themselves. What is walking along the beach?

Miss MacIntosh turns out to be less honest than she seemed; she is also the lord's castle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is not what it seemed to be either, although, like Miss MacIntosh it both was and wasn't. The two childlike leads in their different books encounter the castle and the woman and they come away perplexed, sorrier, and aware that the world can be more complicated than they'd imagined. Gawain draws back into a mood of adolescent shame. "Now am I fawty and falce and ferde." He groans with misery and anger, the blood runs into his face. "He groned for gref and grame / þe blod in his face con melle." He can't stand this mixed state, he blames other people, he wants to be fixed. What can he do? he asks the Green Knight. Give him a solution! Give him a challenge and he'll beat it! The knight laughs and invites him home to dinner. (Doing it in Middle English which means that he doesn't laugh, he loȝe, and þe ryche fest is in his wonez. Come to my wonez, Gawain, he says but Gawain quod Nay for soþe.)

The castle and Miss MacIntosh deliver invisible wounds, they cut, they're invisible knives -- they gesture, their actions gesture, their falseness is a gesture and a knife, but a necessary knife; the wound is the story; the blood muddles out into the cheeks. Gawain wants to be whole and sole again but everyone else treats him as though nothing serious has happened. His friends at Arthur's court offer to show how much they sympathise by putting on sashes to match his sash -- they'll all be in the same club -- but how is this going to satisfy a man who thinks he's a sinner because he was fooled and scared?

Now he's aware of the goulash-world where quests (which are like games, because they have rules), can be manipulated, and people can't be taken at their word, where there are hints -- and there was a book I read last year that had hints built into the prose itself, written by an author who kept using adjectives like oddly and infinitely so that the world of his language would seem to have more depth than it was possible for him to explain: characters were "oddly close" and "oddly troubled" they felt an "odd comfort" though they were "oddly cold" and caught up in "odd tumult" suffering from "odd vertigo" and hearing an "odd sound" or a "sound of infinite dread," yet they had "infinite patience" and things seemed "infinitely simpler" and "infinitely better" in spite of "an infinite darkness beckoning."

And in defiance of that atmosphere of anti-exactitude they kept trying to pinpoint their emotions and discipline them, "resolv[ing] not to let such feelings frighten" them they "refuse[d] to open [themselves] up to such morbid sensations" and instead they were "Determined to banish these loathsome thoughts from [their minds]" and "suppress the dangerous, undisciplined thought." Breathing a grey smudge of odds and infinitelys they were trying to wrestle control of their own selves from the air and earth of their planet -- that was the story it seemed to me I was reading, though it was not the story the author was trying to tell on the surface of the book; on the surface it was a historical drama with thoughts about the nature of love.

They were holding themselves together or trying to; they wanted to fix themselves in place as Gawain wants to do, stubbornly, against the mass of unspecificness that forces itself in on them -- they want to be themselves, under their own control, defined, exact, revealed, not wafted around with odd feelings, infinite longings -- these blurry hints frightened them, or alarmed them, or made them dig their heels in like children -- and by the end I was backing them against the author, who wanted them to open their hearts lovingly and unrepress, but what did he give them to unrepress into, bar this mush of foggy oddlys? You're a con man sir, they could have said to their creator. I think that bridge you're trying to sell me just doesn't exist.

Fleur Jaeggi's book was translated by Tim Parks. Come to think of it the narrator is not a teenager -- she's telling a story about the time when she was a teenager but she's not one now.

Sir Gawain is available online in several versions. Here it is in Middle English with a modern prose translation.

false whispers, breeding hidden

2012-01-01T03:59:00.003+11:00

In 1811 Charles Lamb is talking to a friend about the poet Spenser when he discovers that he isn't, and in fact the Spenser his friend is referring to is a different Spenser, and not Spenser but Spencer, and not the Elizabethan author of The Faerie Queene and the Epithalamion (which Lamb had brought out to show him, wondering why the friend didn't know the poem already when he'd said that Spenser was "an author with whose writing he thought himself particularly conversant"), but the Honourable William Robert Spencer, third son of a Lady and a Lord, friend to Byron, popular author of Beth Gêlert, or the Grave of a Greyhound, a man who had been born in 1769 and who was still completely alive as they were having their conversation, not buried and inert like a Spenser but walking around on viable legs like a Spencer and maybe even writing a fresh poem: productive, warm, soft, still growing hair and nails, smiling, wearing shoes.

He was not Spenser:

Let no lamenting cryes, nor dolefull teares,
Be heard all night within, nor yet without:
Ne let false whispers, breeding hidden feares,
Breake gentle sleepe with misconceivèd dout.
Let no deluding dreames, nor dreadfull sights,
Make sudden sad affrights;
Ne let house-fyres, nor lightnings helpelesse harmes,
Ne let the Pouke, nor other evill sprights,
Ne let mischivous witches with theyr charmes,
Ne let hob Goblins, names whose sence we see not,
Fray us with things that be not:
Let not the shriech Oule nor the Storke be heard,
Nor the night Raven, that still deadly yels;
Nor damnèd ghosts, cald up with mighty spels,
Nor griesly vultures, make us once affeard:
Ne let th' unpleasant Quyre of Frogs still croking
Make us to wish theyr choking.
Let none of these theyr drery accents sing;
Ne let the woods them answer, nor theyr eccho ring.

He was Spencer:

And now a gallant tomb they raise,
With costly sculpture decked;
And marbles, storied with his praise,
Poor Gêlert's bones protect.

Here never could the spearman pass,
Or forester, unmoved;
Here oft the tear-besprinkled grass
Llewellyn's sorrow proved.

And here he hung his horn and spear;
And oft, as evening fell,
In fancy's piercing sounds would hear
Poor Gêlert's dying yell!

"How oddly it happens that the same sound shall suggest to the minds of two people hearing it ideas the most opposite," writes Lamb. Later in one of his letters he will recommend William Blake to a friend and refer to the poet as Robert, which was the name of Blake's younger brother who died at the age of twenty-four, and whose spirit was seen by Blake leaving his body through the ceiling "clapping its hands for joy." William said that Robert came to him in dreams afterwards and gave him advice about printing. Last week I was in a secondhand bookshop buying a paperback compendium of Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, when the man behind the counter started talking to me about Beckett's face -- Samuel Beckett had a distinctive face, he said, and we get people all the time bringing in copies of this one specific Beckett biography and they all have the same photograph on the front -- it's true, I agreed: he had that lined face, that weathered well-lived face, it's serendipity, Samuel Beckett looked like the man who wrote the books that Samuel Beckett wrote. And always a cigarette, said the man. In every single photograph a cigarette, even when he was young.

The photograph of Beckett I knew best was the one on the front of Anthony Cronin's Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist and I couldn't remember a cigarette. They must be film students, said the man. It must be one of the set texts for the film studies course at the university.

"There was something in the tone with which he spoke these words that struck me not a little," remarked Lamb in 1811 and now I was struck too, because I couldn't think of any reason why you would see a student come into your shop with a biography of Samuel Beckett and assume that they were studying film. I was a snail that had been running forward with confidence and now one of my eyes had hit a barrier, it curled back, I hung fascinated, I was searching for a route and the route I'd thought we had was gone: we were not talking about the same Beckett. Who was his Beckett? Who was smoking cigarettes in every picture? Lamb's friend, what was he thinking as he read the Elizabethan Epithalamion, how did he reconcile it with the Spencer he knew, "with whose writing he thought himself particularly conversant"? How was he able to go on talking about Spencer as though Spenser was Spencer when Spencer didn't write like Spenser?

And the copy that Lamb showed him was a first folio, and the first folio edition of Spenser's collected works was printed in 1611, so how did the friend in 1811 reconcile the age of the book with the recentness of Spencer? Somehow he did. For a little while the two poets were not flesh and blood they were syllables, spen and ser, they were noises, and those noises bridged or fogged the difference between Elizabethan and contemporary poetry, they fogged the wear and tear in the folio paper, the unity of sound made them convincing, the ideas roused by those sounds dominated the room, the material world was less important, and Lamb's friend detached himself and flew into a world of impressions, taking spen and ser and cobbling together a universe in which the author of Beth Gêlert wrote faux-Elizabethan poetry and publishing houses issued him in a replica.

He assembled this world out of the tools that had been presented to him, his memory of Spencer, plus this new evidence and the apparent conviction of the other man in the room, Lamb, who was older and well-read -- muddling these items together into a shape and not examining it closely yet, just trusting that it would make sense, that the world would fall into coherence once he stopped and looked: assuming.

I can't read his mind. But no matter what he was thinking, he continued the conversation with Lamb as if he believed that the two poets were the same man, an assumption is the shortest distance between two points, and what conversation is not made up of assumptions?

It's possible that he suspected something and didn't show it. He stood on the surfboard of those two syllables and coasted over the waves. Perhaps he was afraid of looking ignorant if he asked, "Is this the same person?" and maybe he was wondering, as I wondered too, in that bookshop, if the ultimate useful clue would come along in the conversation naturally, by accident, and maybe that's why he let Lamb hear him mutter, "Poor Spenser" as he looked at the folio -- he wanted to help things along, he wanted a small crisis, boom, precipitation, unuttered question answered, everything clear, and that was why he said his "Poor Spenser" in "the accent with which a man bemoans some recent calamity that has happened to a friend, [rather] than that tone of sober grief with which we lament the sorrows of a person, however excellent, and however grievous his afflictions may have been, who has been dead more than two centuries." That tone was the giveaway. "I had the curiosity to enquire into the reasons of so uncommon an ejaculation," writes Lamb. Shortly the mystery was solved.

I asked the man in the bookshop if he knew who had written the biography. I have one at home, I said, and I'm wondering if it's the same author. Privately I was thinking that if we had the biography in our hands he would see that my Beckett was not his Beckett. It would be our turning point. Poor Spenser. He took me to the Biographies shelf in the Movie section of the bookshop and there was Scorsese but no Beckett, Spielberg but no Beckett, -- I stared at the shelf seriously as if I expected to find Beckett there, knowing that I wouldn't. He h'm'd, and I wondered: now what? We were in a mystery and the mystery was mine, I was the only one who saw it, it was my mystery, and if I never mentioned it then no one else would ever know it had existed.

A name is not a person, people mistake names, people play with names, names are not as sacred as their owners wish they were, even parents can be playful with names -- one of Lamb's friends was the barrister and judge Barron Field, author of the first book of poetry published in Australia. Baron Field? asked M. No, I said: barren field. But the choice of name was not as whimsical as it looks. Barron was his mother's maiden name. Kim Jong-il hadn't been dead on the internet for twenty minutes before I saw different people make variations on the same joke. Kim Jong dead? I didn't even know he was il. Kim Jong-il is dead, I told M., and everybody in North Korea is compelled to mourn, the way the Zulus had to when Shaka Zulu's mother died. Shaka was bereft; everybody had to be bereft.

(Everybody had to have his feelings, everybody was the child of his mother Nandi, all of North Korea was the child of Kim Jong-il: vast imaginary families, execution if you don't comply, and the grieving child is surrounded by grieving children but he is the real one and they are not, and all the rest are by definition, acting; and the act can be detected and exposed at any time, if the real child likes. A parent dies and moves are made to see that the child is surrounded with objects whose minds he can read, in short: toys.)

Of course, said M., she was the Queen Mum, and everybody loves the Queen Mum.

The Queen Mum, I mused -- with her kraal full of corgis -- and pictured them there, sand-coloured, like lions.

Here is Lamb's essay: On the Ambiguities arising from Proper Names.

Also the poetry of William Spencer.

And the poetry of Edmund Spenser.

this purpose we take

2011-12-27T15:50:00.002+11:00

Twelve months ago I finished the year by posting a list of favourite quotes poached from books I'd been reading and the year before I did the same, but this year I have so many candidates that instead of choosing favourites I'm going to take the first sentence of the first book I finished in January, and a sentence from the book I'm reading now, and between them I'm going to put fragments from the rest of 2011 and see what comes out -- like so -- and Merry Christmas, by the way, and a relaxed Boxing Day in retrospect, and a Happy New Year -- so -- starting with The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt --

Many still consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centred around this secret in me from which I am separated and which is like my own separation, a precise spot that a human sometimes enters rolling bales of hay, bowing and scraping and flourishing his hat left and right. Dust is plural: infinite dust. This structure we shall call the metaphysical purport of all intuitive revelation of being; and this is precisely what we ought to achieve and disclose by lengthy supplications at passers-by. One of them breaks out in a low howl every time he senses the potential largesse of a deep and complex thing propped up with a stake in the middle. The primitive mind sees disorder in itself and enlists every discipline to keep from contaminating the world. We, says Levi-Strauss, see all disorder outside ourselves, in the world and in other people; our anxiety is that they will contaminate us, a phenomenon that one American commentator rightly saw as "such an unaffected tribute of admiration as few other authors have ever obtained." My own literary work on the contrary was always done as quietly and methodically as a partly dismantled giraffe. People who expect sentiment from children of six years old will be disappointed, and will probably teach them affectation which can only sweat and stare at its own hooves -- a scrawled-over bit of paper becoming a person with a past and a future! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being the Englishman, who made his name training bees, who walked about the countryside covered with them, even to his face and hands, and caressed them and let them drink from his eyes. Children at this age give us no such information of themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the sheer quantity of his reading. Reading has not merely deformed his imagination, it has put it in a Drawer. You are to note, that in March and April he is usually taken with worms, in May, June, and July, he will bite at any fly, or at cherries, or at beetles with their legs and wings cut off, or at the pet of the household, thrusting Sir Christopher's favourite bloodhound of the day, Mrs Bellamy's two canaries, and Mr Bates' largest Dorking hen, into a merely secondary position for four years, at the end of which he died in excruciating pain from cancer of the jaw as his facial bones disintegrated. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art. For this purpose we take a scrap of paper and we write the truth down: "Here is the chalk."

(Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion translated by John Gregg; Cole Swensen, Anamorphosis from Ours and also The Invention of Automata from Goest; Ruth Stone, her poem Always on the Trains from In the Next Galaxy (Stone died this year and one of the obituaries quoted that same poem); Samuel Beckett, The End; Brenda Shaughnessy, Epithalament from Interior With Sudden Joy; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness translated by Hazel E. Barnes; Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary translated by Richard Sieburth; Macedonio Fernández , The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel) translated by Margaret Schwartz; Virginia Woolf, The Years; Guy Davenport, What Are Those Monkeys Doing? from his book of essays, Every Force Evolves a Form; Michael Slater, Charles Dickens; John Ruskin, Praeterita; Jean Sprackland, Tilt, a poem from the book of the same name; Maria Edgeworth, Belinda; John Cowper Powys, Maiden Castle; Charles Lamb, Oxford in the Vacation from the Essays of Elia; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; Susan Sontag, DQ, an essay from Where the Stress Falls; Emily Dickinson, You Cannot Put a Fire Out from her Complete Poems; Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler; George Eliot, Mr. Gilfil's Love Story from her Scenes of Clerical Life; Barbara Goldsmith, Obsessive Genius; Fernando Pessoa, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa translated by Richard Zenith; Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing? translated by W. B. Barton, Jr & Vera Deutsch)

one thing for another

2011-12-24T08:16:00.003+11:00

M. made Lamb's Wool again and this time there was white froth on top -- tasted better -- delicious -- how did he do it? -- he put it in a blender. The downside was that later I had to clean the blender. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and the two things were linked, are linked, and if I had known that I would take the blender apart and clean it later would I have had the same uncomplicated reaction to the froth? Paul in Dune is given powers of prescience and Frank Herbert makes him see that the future is not one path but several paths between which he has to choose; the difference between his prescient and non-prescient selves is that the choice is now conscious, and he never lives happily after that. To live, writes José Ortega y Gasset, is to act in spite of the forces that surround you, and these forces are, for instance, your country, your culture, your family, your soul, and your bad stomach. Reading Carlyle's French Revolution I wanted Marie Antoinette to escape somehow, to veer off from history and flee, in short I was afraid that she would die, and this fear was born not from the simple facts of the story (which I already knew, I knew that she was doomed) but from Carlyle's way of writing about them, which was so exciting that at one point I was actually clenching my fists and leaning forward over the book and all the muscles in my shoulders were bunching up to make knots that spelt out these words: Run, French Royal Family, run! If they weren't going to start running away with some conviction then the muscles in my arms were ready to do it for them. You can't carry out someone else's destiny but I was tense with willingness to try.

They were so bad at escaping that the temptation is to say, "They were asking to get caught," and then, "They must have wanted to get caught," because all of their actions seem so absolutely aimed at that one goal. If an activity is the sum of the actions that constitute itself then their escape would have failed in its objective if they hadn't been caught. Getting away would have been a failure. Everything was calibrated for capture. And yet they wouldn't have said that if you'd asked them -- if you'd said to the adults, "Do you want to be captured and have your heads lopped off in the Place de la Révolution?" then they would have said No, and if you'd asked the children if they wanted to be shuttled around and die of diseases then they would have told you no as well but they didn't have much say in the escape or in any of it. The starving poor women of Paris felt helpless as well (a common human problem, writes Ortega: to be kept away from paths that would realise your destiny), and finally they acted, they demanded bread, a demand that wasn't inventive or new but the persistence was novel and new, they would not be told to go away, they wanted bread they said, they wanted food they said, marching into the room, although if you judge their desires by the results they got then they wanted revolution and not bread -- not bread but the head of Marie Antoinette dropping into the basket, not bread but the crowd running forward with handkerchieves to collect the king's blood, and not bread but modern France itself, so that what they were shouting was not, "Bread!" but "Modern France!" not "Give us such and such," but "Allow the future so and so," not hands reaching forward to take, but hands reaching forward to pass us all Agnès Varda, the Eiffel Tower, and existentialism, and the mouths saying not, "We want, we want," but "You're welcome."

They died, of course, Marie died, everybody dies, the future is always unhappy, but people still want to predict it, although predicting it is absolutely easy: you will die. I know at least one person who puts his trust in a godly apocalypse, preferably sooner rather than later, and when an earth tremor hit the countryside around his aunt's house he believed that it was a sign, or so he said to us, observing, also, that there had been an earthquake in Turkey just the week before, and that other countries had suffered from other disasters. Think of the quake that knocked down the cathedral in Christchurch. He had already predicted the future, now he was looking for evidence that would connect it more tightly to the present. His earthquakes are all metaphorical; they represent the apocalypse as roses represent romance. "A strange thing in man," remarks Ortega, talking about metaphors, "this mental activity that substitutes one thing for another -- from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second." These associations depend on memory (we learn that roses mean romance and then we remember it and act on it) and what if (I thought) we did things the other way around, and formed our metaphors presciently, associating one thing closely with another before we learnt that they should be connected? Then the world would be different, for one thing, Yu Muroga would never have had that trouble with his car.

Muroga was a delivery driver in Sendai when the tsunami hit earlier this year, and I thought of him because I'd been watching footage from his dashboard camera on youtube. First the camera sees the earthquake. The arm of the street light pats an invisible ball. The trees along the sides of the road wave their hands. Muroga stops and waits for it to pass. Everything slows, the light loses interest in the ball, he resumes driving. The video fades out and fades in. This quick fade represents about an hour in which nothing unusual happened. Now he's stopping in a traffic jam. Why is there a traffic jam? Cars begin to run across the road ahead of him as cars do at intersections but they're all going backwards and a grey cushion of liquid is lifting them off the asphalt; they are on a river and none of them are under the control of their drivers, not even the semi-trailer truck that shoots past directly and meaningfully, like a ship going to shore, also backwards. The sky is cloudy, everything is grey, the cars are grey, the water is grey, and a heavy drop runs down the windshield glass. Now water is coming under Muroga's car from behind, the water is running to join the new river ahead of him, now his car is being picked up, now it's wobbling on the surface, now another car has gone nose-down, now there's a ruffle over a current, now the car is caught in this current, now it's flying strongly backwards, now the camera is looking at the sky from the inside of a cave, the cave mouth is framing the camera's point of view, now the car tilts, the water is rolling over the window, the video ends, the car is drowned.

Muroga escaped but the camera never saw him do it. "Yoshi," he said to himself -- all right then, ok, here I go -- and out of the window into the water before the car encaved, this cave being either a warehouse full of debris or just a mass of debris on its own. (Some reports mention the warehouse, some don't.) Next time I see a twig being dragged along a stream I will remember this video and I will believe that the twig's poor life is one paralysing horror of disorientation and vertigo; I will probably want to rescue it.

If Muroga had had the power of prescient metaphor then the sight of the swaying traffic light would have meant, "My car sucked underwater an hour from now" as surely as roses mean romance, and he could have done -- what he could have done I don't know, but he could have done it.

Ortega wrote about metaphors in his essay The Dehumanization of Art, which was translated into English by Helene Wyl. He wrote about life for In Search of Goethe from Within, translated by Willard R. Trask.

in matter is something

2011-12-18T06:01:00.022+11:00

M., feeling cold, decided to make us mugs of Lamb's Wool, which is ale and spice and apples warmed together, Granny Smiths in our case, and bottles of Fat Tire. Lamb's Wool is a wassailing drink, and it owes its name either to the fluffy layer that is supposed to appear on top -- in theory it does, ours didn't have any fluff -- or to an Anglicisation of the Irish-Gaelic La Mas Ubhal, or, Day Of The Apple.

And if the Gaelic theory is correct (and maybe there was a confluence, the fluff suggesting the direction the Anglicisation should travel in, perhaps the white fluff was an arrow pointing the way, eye and ear acting together since they're so close, biologically speaking, only a handshake apart -- I once stayed home from school because I had an earache that appeared also in a tooth) then the lamb in Lamb's Wool is not anything mammalian or woolly, instead it means an apple, and when we say "Lamb" we should think of something alive without legs, a cold round life held together by the same force field as the other kind of lamb, if the physicists are correct: held together by a field of energy that came into existence one moment after the Big Bang -- assuming they're right about that too. The Higgs boson particle will prove the existence of the field, if you want to call it a field, or at least it will make the assumption more concrete and sure -- if I'm understanding this right. It has the power of a mysterious Clag. So they're looking for it, and they thought they might have found evidence a few days ago but no Higgs as yet. Higgs is always elsewhere. It eludes. And there is no lamb, in this drink, the mammal-lamb of Lamb's Wool is not present ever, it is away with the Higgs boson (which I keep thinking of as the Higgs Bosun, a nautical particle), and all the solid things of the world are run through with holes, "Inherent in matter is something unwounded by holes," as Alison Hawthorne Deming states in a poem: all gaps, we are, tight nets that would not look so tight if we were Higgs boson particles, which are perhaps nets of their own holes whose holes are further nets.

The field is a fantasy, the Higgs is the fairy whose appearance will prove it real, it is the fixed shoe that exposes the life of the elf, and the words "Lamb's Wool" described our drink in an evasive way, by giving us its history and not its appearance or its contents, and history is one dimension of a thing, but an invisible one, as the three-dimensional sketch your hand performs with the pen or above the keyboard is an invisible part of any word you write, your wiggle is its history. (I take no credit: this is Walter Benjamin again.) When M. said "Lamb's wool" I didn't know what to expect and when he produced the drink I realised that I had been expecting something different. I was expecting wool in there somewhere. Maybe it would be strained through something, through fibres. But no. I think, said one scientist before the press conference earlier this week, that it would be more exciting if we didn't find the Higgs boson. All that searching and then after all that it's just prosaic and there. What a letdown. What an end.

But take heart, one stepping stone leads to another, the establishment of atoms did not mean the end of the tiny universe, obviously, even though they thought for a long time that they had gone as far as they could go in the direction of extreme smallness. "The word atom itself means "indivisible," or more technically derives from the Greek words for not and to cut," explains the biography of Marie Curie I'm reading at the moment, ἀ-τέμνω, which was once upon a time an accurate description of the object itself, and is now a record of that period of human existence when the atom was understood to have no interior parts. The interior parts of our Lamb's Wool dazzle me, the history, the apples, the different kinds of apple we could have used, M.'s rationale for that particular apple -- I knew you liked Granny Smiths, he said -- which suggests a knowledge of my preferences, which must have been acquired over time, and which relied not only on observation but also on memory, and the conscious retention of that particular memory -- he didn't forget that I liked Granny Smiths even though I don't think I've said the words "Granny Smith apple" for ages. "Every reunion of men, is it not, as we often say, a reunion of incalculable Influences; every unit of it a microcosm of Influences; -- of which how shall Science calculate or prophesy?" saith Carlyle. So there is a seething invisible net tied by invisible points and the giant visible knot in that net is my Lamb's Wool. Next time, says M., he will make an experimental adjustment and try a different kind of ale. Fat Tire may not be the best one if you want to heat it.

Deming's poem is The Charting from her book Genius Loci and the Curie biography is Obsessive Genius by Barbara Goldsmith: a light, short book. Thomas Carlyle was feeling Influence in The French Revolution.

You can make Lamb's Wool with cider too, but we used ale. William Hone wrote about it for the first volume of his Every Day Book (published 1825):

It is mentioned by a writer in the "Gentleman's Magazine," that lamb's-wool is a constant ingredient at a merry-making on Holy Eve, or on the evening before All Saints-day in Ireland. It is made there, he says, by bruising roasted apples, and mixing them with ale, or sometimes with milk. "Formerly, when the superior ranks were not too refined for these periodical meetings of jollity, white wine was frequently substituted for ale. To lamb's-wool, apples and nuts are added as a necessary part of the entertainment; and the young folks amuse themselves with burning nuts in pairs on the bar of the grate, or among the warm embers, to which they give their name and that of their lovers, or those of their friends who are supposed to have such attachments; and from the manner of their burning and duration of the flame, &c. draw such inferences respecting the constancy or strength of their passions, as usually promote mirth and good humour." Lamb's-wool is thus etymologized by Vallancey:—"The first day of November was dedicated to the angel presiding over fruits, seeds, &c. and was therefore named La Mas Ubhal, that is, the day of the apple fruit, and being pronounced lamasool, the English have corrupted the name to lamb's-wool."

(from the entry for October 31st)

Strangely, coincidentally, the last book I finished before the Curie was the Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb -- and some of those Letters are addressed to the same William Hone who wrote the Day Book. "Pray let Matilda keep my newspapers till you hear from me, as we are meditating a town residence," Lamb says to Hone, for example, on July 1st, 1830. "Let her keep them as the apple of her eye."

But what really impressed me, as I was reading the Letters, is that Lamb knew Barron Field, the author of the first book of poems published in Australia. "Kanagaroo, Kangaroo! / Thou Spirit of Australia," etc.

She had made the squirrel fragile;
She had made the bounding hart;
But a third so strong and agile
Was beyond ev'n Nature's art;
So she join'd the former two
In thee, Kangaroo!
To describe thee, it is hard:
Converse of the camélopard,
Which beginneth camel-wise,
But endeth of the panther size

living by violating the core principles of stillness and tranquility

2011-12-13T06:59:00.017+11:00

Now that the subject of Vikings and of people being trees and flowers and the beams of the sun has been handled very adequately and well I will get back to the thing I was going to do before I climbed into the shower full of ants, which was ask my friend the security supervisor if Proust would have made a good officer in a Las Vegas Strip casino. I think, decided the supervisor at the end of our conversation, that he would be better than Ruskin.

I mentioned Proust's asthma and the supervisor said, yes, we have officers with severe asthma, and they're able to take time off when they need to because they're covered by the FMLA, the Family Medical Leave Act. All they have to do is let us know that they have an ongoing medical condition. So we wouldn't penalise him for that. And anyway, I said: medication has improved since the 1920s and so let's guess that he could do something more decisive today than lie in bed limp as a footless sock, with the windows shut, burning pastilles; possibly he could lead an active life, so take the asthma out of the equation, but we'll say he can't work at the Bellagio, because they have that conservatory, and flowers made him choke.

Then, I said, there was that one time he had a job (he took it to satisfy his father, who was worried about his dilettante son) and never turned up for work but just took sick leave for several years -- That sounds exactly like FMLA says the supervisor -- For years? I said -- Psh he says, you have no idea --

Strip casino security work is customer-oriented, and this is where Proust would shine. He was friendly. That would be his strength. He wasn't repelled by people, as Ruskin often was, and he could find value in small talk, as Ruskin couldn't, and he was attentive and complimentary. He cultivated friendships with society people and sometimes his acquaintances called him a snob and a climber but he was not the kind of person Charles Lamb criticises in Modern Gallantry, the one who is only polite to people who will benefit him and then rude to servants and anyone poor or ugly.* Proust was friendly to waiters and butlers, he gave away a couch to a brothel-keeper, and you can see in his book that he thought seriously about the lives of cooks. (All of this is asserted by his biographers, and Walter Benjamin makes it a part of his essay, The Image of Proust. He quotes the memoirs of Proust's friend the princesse de Clermont-Tonnerre: "And finally we cannot suppress the fact that Proust became enraptured with the study of domestic servants [...] domestic servants in their various embodiments and types were his passion.") The social strata of Lost Time dissolve into one another, tailor's daughter marries aristocrat, and the author doesn't sound censorious, he isn't frightened by this liquid mingling (in translation he isn't anyway); it's part of a natural movement.

Here his mind is nothing like the mind of Ruskin, who thought that nature was the opposite of this -- everyone in their place, the world solid not liquid, that was Ruskin's idea of a natural society. Proust's Narrator misses the past, but he decides that movement is inevitable -- the dissolving experience doesn't panic him -- he is fascinated by the telephone, dissolver of distances --

Proust's cook-character Françoise speaks with the kind of subliterate speech quirk that Dickens would have been happy to borrow, but the literate author never despises her for that quirk any more than Dickens despises Mr Dick for his constant reversion to the subject of King Charles' Head or despises his Cockneys for saying w when somebody else would say v, or the other way around. "It's sealed vith a vafer ..." explains Mr Weller in Pickwick. "The wery thing." And Dickens is pleased and loves him.

And Françoise's quirk interests Proust, and if a couple from Iowa came to his casino with speech quirks of their own then they would interest him too, and he would be genial and curious, as security officers are supposed to be; he would say Hello folks, good to have you with us, where are you visiting from? and then Iowa? I have a cousin in Sioux City! How's the snow over there? but only if he actually had a cousin in Sioux City, and if not then he would just express a fascination with Iowa in general, etc, or with the professions of the Iowans, one of which might be turbine engines, and then, Really? he'd say, one of the people who used to live in our apartment worked in turbine engines. Last week the American Society of Mechanical Engineers sent us an invitation to Turbo Expo 2012 in Copenhagen.

The Narrator in Lost Time tries to correct Francoise's vocabulary at least once but this assumed superiority is shallow, it's done unthinkingly, easily, it isn't fruitful, it doesn't lead him into the deep trains of thought that he finds when he starts to consider her seriously, holistically, connecting her back into myth and history or running off into ideas about the human mind. The humane thing to do (which is not to sneer at people who don't know cultured French) becomes the intellectual thing as well; Francoise's quirks are valuable and he has convinced himself of their value, the Narrator has reached a virtuous frame of mind not through moral precepts but through his own intelligence.

What else? Ruskin was disgusted by gambling but it's not likely that Proust would have that Ruskin-disgust. He lived in a different atmosphere. His temperament wasn't built to be disgusted by gambling. He had too much respect for Baudelaire. He was a gambler himself, on the stock market, tempted into buying certain shares by the foreign charm of their names: S. A. Chemin de Fer de Rosario à Puerto Belgrano, Banco Espanol del Rio de la Plata, United Railways of Havana. So say that he wouldn't have been opposed to casinos.

The short time he spent in the military might be a point in his favour. A number of Las Vegas security officers are ex-military. He could tell the interviewer that he had enjoyed the uniform and the camaraderie. His biographers would back him up. As a security officer he could have some of that camaraderie back again, everybody meeting, uniformed, for the day's preliminary briefing, a gathering of collaborators in the secret area of the casino known as Back of House, all of them coming together in that behind-the-scenes room with the metal lockers and the laminated floor, under the plumbing that runs across the ceiling like endless pan pipes, with several tubes lined up together all going in the same mysterious direction, everything nude and industrial and undecorated, greyish-white, and easy to clean -- and then, after briefing, he would step through the door marked Staff Only and onto the casino floor where everything is carpeted, coloured, full of noise, distracting, and the constraining arrow of the backstage corridor becomes a tundra.

By now he is an employee, he knows the secrets of the building, he can navigate the confusing plain of the Floor (and the ordinary word floor in the casinos is pronounced with the same stress of capitalisation that culture takes on when you are talking about Aboriginal Australians; in this context it has a history that sprang off some time back from the common meaning of floor and wound away on its own), and the difference between this environment and Back of House sparks him, inspires him -- why not? -- his Narrator keeps returning to the subject of theatrical artifice and where is there a bigger theatre then the casinos? Every interior is a stage -- Caesars Palace with its massive Ancient Roman set dressing, and the New York New York, which boxes you into imaginary city streets between scale-model tenement buildings, and those uncanny blackish metal trees in the Aria's Crystal shopping arcade, the sinister trees that drip blue light as you walk under them; also the Venetian, where Venice has been streamlined down to a set dresser's symbols, one Lion of St Mark on his pillar, one Bridge of Sighs, one primal song for the gondoliers, "O Solo Mio." (They sing others, but "O Solo Mio" is the default.)

And the Chandelier in the Cosmopolitan which I will never stop admiring because the person who designed it went against the prevailing Las Vegas ethos that says, Build Upwards, and instead created a spectacle that plunges down.** It takes independence to go against the simple orthodoxies.

And he would enjoy the tourists who, walking into this theatrical space, begin shouting out lines as if they've been prompted, usually, "I'm here!" and "Aow!" or "Woo!" and the place name. The script is there, they walk in, they pick it up, over and over again, the same words. I never saw a gaijin in Tokyo screaming Hey, Tokyo! or I'm here! although they probably felt as excited as the people in Las Vegas, and just as thrilled to be here, here, in, my god, look, look, in Tokyo! in Harujuku itself! in legendary Shinjuku! where you go down one of the sets of stairs from the station, turning left into an alleyway, and the pachinko parlours make the evenings more vivid than the middle of the day, a variation on the same suspended timelessness that you find when you walk into the shopping arcade at Caesars with its painted sky always calm and lit, even at midnight and even when the air above the casino is screaming with thunderstorms, a pretty pale blue thoughtful sky with little clouds, the kind of well-fed innocent oil-paint puffs that should attract the fatty putti but never do; the putti are kept out as serenely as the storms. That sky is weirdly silent.

I'm here! says the tourist on the Strip and they try to concentrate and gather themselves in one spot, this is their focus, they are a focus for themselves, they want themselves to be absolutely present, and it's impossible perhaps not to inhabit multiple places at once, in memory, in thought, in body, but they wish it, they're made aware of that wish, they call out, they summon themselves, oh, myself, where are you?

Little soul little stray
little drifter
now where will you stay
all pale and all alone

(from Hadrian: Little Soul, translated by W.S. Merwin)

and the answer for once is a decisive shout, Here! Las Vegas!, although I think it sounds less spontaneous than they want. It's an I-wish rather than an I-am.

Proust would have something to work with. And the past is a constant theme in this town, because the city is young, and it has changed so quickly, and parts of it keep being thrown out, imploded, and replaced. "In Vegas, when things get old, we tear them down," begins an article in the Las Vegas Weekly. "When a show on the Strip runs its course, it closes. Businesses, restaurants, even people come and go, sometimes with little-to-no fanfare. Here, history is fleeting, and what's seen as dated is often demolished instead of saved." Save your ephemera, the writer says, "your theater programs, your menus, scrapbooks, business files and notes -- save this magazine -- because you never know what kind of clues they might one day hold to the past." So little history and yet we demolish it, the journalists reiterate, over and over again in different articles: let's talk to the woman who runs the Neon Graveyard, let's walk through the oldest cemetery in the city, let's go to an exhibition of historical photographs at the Boulevard Mall on Maryland Parkway -- it was built in the 1950s and it's the state's most senior large-scale shopping experience.

If you walk around Liberace's house, which is a suburban ruin, you can see how the large back garden has been segregated into plots of land for smaller houses, and those houses have kept sections of his garden wall in place for their fences. The signature L built into the ironwork has been adopted by people who might not have any other relationship to L, they might be called Jamie or Claire, but they've inherited the dead man's initial. Proust the security officer would have an opportunity to think about Time; in fact Time would be pushed in his face; the magazines fret about Time. "This town makes its living by violating the core principles of stillness and tranquility," writes another journalist, gathering up his resources for a push into the subject of Buddhism. Anything here is connected to transience.

His theme is the theme of this city and that theme is forgetting.

* Lamb is thinking of men being rude to women specifically, but if you replaced "gallantry" with nongendered "civility" the indignation would still make sense. Think of "I shall see the same attentions paid to age as to youth" as "I shall see the same attentions paid to the bus driver as to the politician."

** The light from the Luxor shines upwards, the huge statues at Caesars stand upwards, the Eiffel Tower at the Paris goes upwards, the waterfall at the Wynn comes off a cliff that towers above a lake, the dancing fountains roar upwards, the billboards shoot as high as they can etc, etc.

I'm basing my back-of-house description on only two casinos. The rest might be different. Even those two are different. The flooring in one of them is the colour of the grey skin around a hard boiled egg yolk, and in the other one it isn't.

The Benjamin essay was translated by Harry Zohn.

webs of thought, almost impalpable, coming from every direction

2011-12-08T06:40:00.008+11:00

This is the second part of the post I made a few days ago. It was getting so long that I cut it in half. The "stories" I'm talking about in the first paragraph are the Axe Cop webcomic by Ethan and Malachai Nicolle, and the Norse sagas in Gautrek's Saga and Other Medieval Tales, which were translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards. The Djoleto book turned up three posts ago, so that's why I'm mentioning it without preamble. "Freezing" in the last paragraph is not an exaggeration.

The logic of these stories is not the logic of nature but the logic of need. Axe Cop, who has been locked in a gaol cell, needs to know how to overcome the villain, and so the words A Golden Bladed Chainsaw Can Beat Me, taped to the shoulderblades of the vampire baby standing in front of him, is sensible, sane, efficient, and the reader has the pleasure of seeing a problem solved and the coherence of the fictional world upheld.

These worlds are coherent in the way that a person is coherent. The hero needs a villain and a villain arrives; the tongue is dry and the hand picks up a cup. These person-worlds are sensitive, they have nerves, vessels, blood, running everywhere from the fictional clouds through the fictional air to the fictional grass -- they are responsive, they are in sympathy with their fictional people, they're like those old cartoons -- first the character walking along a road starts to dance, and then the trees dance, and the flowers dance, the sun wiggles its illuminated tentacles in time to the beat, everything is dancing; the person is also the sun, the person is the cloud, the person is the flower.

And "of course," I thought in the shower, "it's true, everything in a piece of writing comes from the author and nowhere else, no character history and no setting can account for it, and psychological realism is only the author's clever fake moustache," and then I remembered my favourite example of this author-giving-improbable-presents phenomenon (I know I've mentioned it before), which is Irma Prunesquallor's hot water bottle (where did they get the rubber? from the author), and then, in the same book, you've got Steerpike's monkey, which he obtains with ease, in spite of the fact that wild monkeys don't exist anywhere in Mervyn Peake's world and there isn't any pet vendor, monkey salesperson, animal trapper, or anyone else who could have found it for him. Charles Dickens could change the nature of a cup.

"What an unfathomable mystery there is in it all!" he said one day. Taking up a wineglass, he continued: "Suppose I choose to call this a character, fancy it a man, endue it with certain qualities; and soon the fine filmy webs of thought, almost impalpable, coming from every direction, we know not whence, spin and weave about it, until it assumes form and beauty, and becomes instinct with life."

So he said to James T. Fields. "Amu Djoleto's Money Galore," I reasoned, "with that strange two-tone jerkiness -- I can imagine it hovering between the two modes of writing, the realist and the post-Viking, those descriptive passages about headmasters' offices being the realistic parts, and then the suddenness with which things happen being saga-like, and there's the author's evident wish that he could make an event occur now and not have to sit around preparing for it, which is not his forte; and, if I'm remembering this rightly, his crooked politician has the magical number of girlfriends -- three -- as fairytales have three good fairies or three questing siblings or as Bosi and Herraud provides three women for Bosi, or as the tall strangers encountered by Thorstein Mansion-Might arrive in a trio. They ride up and surprise him. And if he hadn't met them then he wouldn't have needed to come unseen into Gerroid's kingdom, and the dwarf's magic invisibility ring might never have been useful, so, see, without them he would have been left trekking on and on, waiting for intervention, as people do in the real world, where the sun and the trees are not sensitive to us, as proven by the weather here in Las Vegas right now, which is freezing cold against my wishes, and in an icy wind last week there was that woman I met outside the Post Office, the one who asked me for cigarettes which I did not have, and then money but I only had enough for the stamp I was about to buy for a letter to my granny, and we talked about that wind, which had been blowing all day, sucking crowds of autumn leaves across the roadway in front of the cars like mobs of yellow jaywalking handkerchieves, but all the time I was talking to her she kept putting her tongue in and out, and this was a tic not an insult, since she went on talking casually through it all, telling me that she had lived in Las Vegas for a year and a half and never before had she witnessed such a wind, and, she added, you can't wear sandals in Las Vegas, because the sand will come in from the desert and coat your feet, all the time in and out went her tongue, curling down to her chin and back inside again, and what author gave her this strange trait, this power," I wondered, "what saga is she in, what guidance would she have given me?"

the type continued to be written for many years after

2011-12-06T08:11:00.009+11:00

This post was so long that I've split it in half. I'll put the second part up in a few days.

I was going to follow up a prompt from Whispering Gums and write about Proust's chances as a Las Vegas security officer, but then when I was standing wet in the shower on Wednesday watching ants go up the wall from the gap around the tap I began thinking about the Norse sagas I'd been reading and how much they reminded me of the webcomic known as Axe Cop.

These weren't the more famous sagas, not the more serious or historical or developed ones, no Story of Burnt Njal or Egil's Saga, nothing from the saga-groups known as Icelanders or Kings -- the most disseminated sagas come from these groups -- but smaller sagas, pieces of "entertainment," according to Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards, the translators of the book I'd been looking at, which was Gautrek's Saga and Other Medieval Tales. "The Legendary Sagas, from which the five stories in this volume come, originated in the 12th century, though the type continued to be written for many years after," say they. "They were intended primarily as entertainment -- one might almost say as escape literature." The character Bosi from Bosi and Herraud, "might remind the reader of one or two popular modern fictional figures" because he performs "amorous feats" and has "a fondness for occasional arbitrary violence."

In fact everyone in these sagas has "a fondness for occasional arbitrary violence," and so do the characters in Axe Cop, which is a mad, cartoonish, imaginative comic, all wild battles and people getting smashed, but it wasn't the violence on its own that got me thinking, it was the way the violence was introduced, the way the characters were described and named, and a kind of uncanny purity in both of them, the particular way the stories move, their mutual rhythm, the way they deal with the different parts of themselves.

Characters in Axe Cop are named after their traits, with Axe Cop being a cop who carries an axe, and Uni-Baby a baby with a unicorn horn growing out of her forehead, and Flute Cop a cop who played the flute until dinosaur blood turned him into a human-dinosaur hybrid, whereupon his name changed to Dinosaur Soldier, not only in the minds of his fellow characters but also in the minds of his two creators, who didn't try to hide or normalise this transformation but gloried in it, writing, "And so they became ... AXE COP & DINOSAUR SOLDIER!" Several of the saga characters acquire nicknames from their traits too, Ragnar Hairy-Breeks, Asmund Berseker-Killer, or Stunt-Brunhilda (who is stunted), and one of them goes through a renaming process, like Flute Cop, when his trait changes.

That character is a Norwegian, Thorstein Mansion-Might, "so big that in the whole country there was hardly a door he could walk through without some difficulty," and he is travelling away from home on an adventure when a group of uniquely massive strangers rides up on horses and befriends him. From a tall person in a society of smaller people he becomes a tall person among even taller ones. "In my opinion," says the largest of these strangers, surveying Thorstein's height, which is instantly nonimpressive, "you ought to be called Mansion-Midget, not Mansion-Might." The Norwegian agrees. With that, the story abandons his original name and refers to him from then on as Thorstein Mansion-Midget.

It's this fluidity that characterises both Axe Cop and the sagas -- fluidity coupled with the principle of surprise -- the idea that names and things aren't fixed, that they can change or appear or vanish at will, that Thorstein can be a skilled bowman for one paragraph when he needs to shoot an eagle, even though we've never heard anything about him having a talent for archery before and never will again, that the dwarf whose child he has saved from the eagle happened to have a magic ring which he gives gratefully to the rescuer, who, a few chapters on, discovers that this is exactly the kind of magic he needs if he is going to sneak into the kingdom of King Geirrod the giant. Strange events occur in both saga and comic, not to advance the plot but because the author thinks they're interesting or funny: a giant-woman wears a skirt short enough to display her genitals; a kidnapping is carried out not by a normal kidnapper but by a mythical animal called the hjalsi; Axe Cop can't drive a magic riding spider because a sticker on the dashboard tells him that driving is restricted to "Cowboys and Warriors," and he is not a cowboy and not a warrior and so he has to let a vampire werewolf drive instead, because this vampire werewolf is also a ninja warrior from the moon.

(And it's the word that is magical here. Axe Cop behaves like any warrior hero, always looking for people to fight, but the narrator never describes him as a warrior -- he is a cop. Axe Cop knows this and he abides by it. He doesn't try to drive. And now you could argue that the practice of Law, which relies so much on definitions and words, is an extension of the logic of a six-year-old, because the boy who comes up with Axe Cop's stories and rules is six. His thirtysomething brother turns the ideas into scripts and draws the artwork.)

The reader rarely needs to wait, gifts appear instantly in the characters' hands, inspiration is a fact of life, everything uncanny is real. The people in Axe Cop obtain powers with wishes -- "I wish to be super strong!!" shouts Uni-Baby's father, "And," explains the narrator, "it happened" -- or they know where to go or what to do to find the weapon they need, or it just appears. A king sends Bosi to fetch a specific vulture egg decorated with gold lettering, and in less than a page he's met a woman who can tell him where the vulture lives and how it can be beaten. Gangrene in Thorstein Mansion-Might's saga happens immediately.

They rode as far as the river. On the bank there was a hut and from it they took a set of clothes for themselves and their horses. These clothes were made so that the water couldn't touch them, but the river was so cold that it would cause instant gangrene to any part of the body that came into contact with the water. They forded the river, with the horses struggling hard, but Godmund's horse stumbled, so Thorstein got his toe wet, and gangrene set in at once. When they got out of the river they spread their clothes on the ground to dry. Thorstein cut off his toe, and they were immensely impressed by his toughness. So they rode on their way.

If you turned Axe Cop into prose without the pictures it would look pretty much like that, complete with that touch at the end, And then they went on to the next adventure. There's a terrific transparent naturalness in the way the characters receive their gifts, just taking them as they come, like that set of waterproof clothes "made so that the water couldn't touch them," or, in Axe Cop, "a database of every bad guy, which included all their locations and powers," using them blithely and not feeling surprised by the sheer handiness of it all -- and events around them will barely disguise the fact that these treasures come from one place only, which is the author.

That's why the gifts can arrive immediately, and that's why they're always precisely and foresightfully the right thing, that's why a big man is not just a big man but a man so big he can barely get through doorways, or when the Norse heroes find gold it's not just a little bit of gold or even a usefully comfortable amount of gold but "They found so much gold there they had more than enough to carry." An author can create a tonne of gold as easily as a tiny handful, so why not the tonne?

An audience that expected realism would make the saga-tellers pause and reduce their gold, concerns about the strict believability of the events in the story might freeze them up, but they pre-date Flaubert by centuries upon centuries; they don't have to ignore the genre of literary realism (with its subtle psychological build-up, its immunity to magic dwarves) because that aesthetic does not exist, it is a unicorn or an atom bomb or a rocket ship, and the author of Axe Cop can ignore Flaubert too, because he is six years old, and, so, as far as storytelling goes, he is free to operate at the level of a twelfth-century Scandinavian. His lifespan is his history and he is still in the twelfth century, living through the High Middle Ages of his existence, later he will graduate to the fifteenth century, the eighteenth century, and the twenty-first, his expectations changing all the time, and how long will he be able to keep it up, I wonder, this kind of storytelling -- and so perhaps it is true what they say about older writers, they lose their edge. Philip Roth worries about ageing too, allegedly.

of what we now know

2011-11-30T12:17:00.017+11:00

On Sunday I started a novel by William Heinesen, the same author whose short stories I was reading earlier this year in Faroese Short Stories -- the one who wrote about the two women whose house blew away in a storm -- the author who couldn't mention a man without also mentioning his ship, and then the name of the ship, and then the king of Sweden, and then the king of Sweden's son -- the author who loved digressions -- that one.

The novel starts modestly but gradually it thickens, the characters pile up, their histories pile up, there are several different flavours of everything -- three different Christian leaders (two pastors, one prophet), multiple women dating the British soldiers who are stationed on the Faroes, several ship-owners individually worrying about their fish -- everybody arguing, sailing off, becoming pregnant, dying, falling in love -- and every time someone falls in love or dies it's a new love and a new death, not like any of the rest, and we go inside the heads of cynics and journalists and mystic fox-farmers from Iceland. Then there is the war, which is World War II, people are worried about the Communists, and there is the growing pro-Faroes movement among the islanders, who are subjects of the Danish king. The thoughts of the characters are sketched in quickly and sharply, even crudely, simply, but the simplicity has a purpose; it makes each cast member easy to identify. The subtlety of the book comes not in the fineness of their thoughts but in the variety and shading between competing points of view. And this builds and builds and the story moves along in a bubbling mass.

But I was thinking about Lisa over at ANZ Litlovers, who, in the middle of November, mentioned a Ghanaian Literature Week, held by Kinna over at Kinna Reads, and Lisa had read a Ghanaian short story for this book week, and, coincidentally, I'd been reading Money Galore by the Ghanian writer Amu Djoleto only a month before, and Money Galore was what I was thinking of, in connection with the Heinesen book, which was named The Black Cauldron.* It was the tempo of the two books that I was reflecting on, the way that Money moved in jerks, jumping up one minute, fading out the next minute, and how different it was to the constant bubble of Cauldron, how opposed they were, temperamentally speaking. Because inside each book there is a personality that has nothing to do with the characters or the narrative, and is only concerned with the thickness or thinness of the writing, the speed and start and stop of the sentences, "the particular density with which detail occurs in that writing, the span of sensory stuff in that writing," as David Malouf said once on the radio.

Djoleto writes like a man who had moments of excitement when the story riveted him, moments when he knew exactly what he wanted, followed by moments when he was wandering from A to B and not sure how he was going to get there. He gropes, he repeats. His women characters will enter in a mass of detail, the exact shade of their skin tone will be noted, then their build, but this description will not play a role in their development afterwards, their actions are sketchy, their brains are halfhearted; they become a collection of vaguely sexy presences. They enter with a summary of themselves; the rest is a diminishing of their original essence. We hear passing references to the construction of a new public toilet, and then suddenly the toilet exists, ready to be opened by a politician, and the formal opening is a scene that bounces into focus -- it is a comic set piece. The book wakes up then drowses again. The author gets deeply interested in a headmaster's office, and for a few pages it looks as if this headmaster's school is going to play an important ongoing role in the book, then we go somewhere else, the school becomes background noise, the introduction was out of proportion to its importance.

Money has its own pace, a shout followed by a mumble, or a leap followed by a stall -- a book like a lumpy bed. And I thought, also (my brain walking up West Africa to the chopped-out reverse-L of Mali), of Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence, which has the dense bubbling-pace of Heinesen with a different emotion behind it: the book is one flood of brutality and murder, a tightrope performance on a wire of satirical rage. Heinesen is satirical as well, but less brutal. Both of them will vary the bubbling by taking the reader from a scene with one character to a scene with two or three characters, to a scene with a mass of characters, and then back again. Brutality in Ouologuem is almost absolute, but the flavours of that brutality are so various, so florid, that it becomes both decorative and hideous. Add ennui and it would be Decadent. Mass deaths are followed by more detailed personal deaths and then the miniature story of a dynasty that goes mad and dies. There is gross indiscriminate death and then very precise death. A single kitten is poisoned. A man is torn apart by exactly three crocodiles. One crocodile would have been enough. Two, and you could call it a reasonable amount of competition among natural enemies. But three is just enough to be overkill. The edge of absurdity is tickled with a fingertip.

George Eliot plays this one-character, two-characters, group-of-characters game blatantly in public, devoting whole chapters to one idea or the other -- those groups of men talking in the local pub in Middlemarch, or in the barber shop in Romola, etc -- and then scenes between married couples or family members. Like this she gives us the domestic setting and then the community whose ideas will affect the domestic setting, putting these two spheres of action in proximity. Djoleto doesn't have this ongoing attention to the community; he brings it in when he needs it for a crowd scene and then it's gone.

At the start of the month in a coffee shop I listened to someone giving their opinion on commas (authors used to use more commas in the old days because they didn't know any better, said this person, but now we know better and we take them out), and I thought of this speaker when I came across an editor online explaining that The Man Who Loves Children "breaks an awful lot of what we now know to be rules for good writing" adding "You couldn’t get away with it now" -- and I remember them because I know that if Djoleto had handed in Money Galore during a writing class he would have had it given back to him with marks in the margins, "add more here" "build up to this part" "uneven" "who is speaking here?" and "fix."

But then I hear Ruskin stepping in and saying, no, this unevenness is human, and he tells the story of the glass beads again, and says that he prefers flawed exploratory sincerity to accomplished callow gloss, and he points out that Djoleto wanted to (judging by the story) write about corruption in Ghanaian politics, and behold, he has done that. Would evenness have made the book better? Evenness would have made it even, which is a different thing. It's been proposed that Dante came up with The Divine Comedy because he wanted an excuse to say the name of Beatrice (as lovers love to speak or hear the name of the beloved: see also: Proust) and Money might as well have been written to showcase the opening of that public toilet, a scene that gives us the author's opinion of his country's politicians in one tight burst.**

How do we describe, how do we value, how do we judge? Could I say that Djoleto's book moves like an organism, that it has periods of wakefulness and periods of restfulness, and periods when it wants to sit and fatten itself and periods when it is very lean, and, so, when I'm tempted to describe one of those dense and bubbling books as organic, because I want to do tribute to its motion, its vitality, am I perhaps using the word too quickly and easily, am I disregarding a less flattering idea of "the organic," of life, the life that is not steadily vital, but fades and dies and revives and gasps and dies again ...

Give us uneven beads, says Ruskin the Awkward, devilled in front of his naked wife, give us awkwardness --

*Which has nothing to do with Lloyd Alexander's fantasy novel. Same title but two books completely alien. Heinesen sets his story in a Faroese harbour nicknamed "the Cauldron" and one of the characters makes a sarcastic mechanical diorama-cum-social-critique which he calls "The Black Cauldron," and, therefore ...

Alexander's cauldron is an honest to god necromagical black pot.

** I came across that idea of Dante for the first time in one of Borges' non fiction pieces. If you can get hold of the Selected Non-Fictions then look in the Nine Dantesque Essays section and it should be there somewhere.

in her the peacock-feather-fluttering illusion

2011-11-25T06:33:00.013+11:00

After I'd made a post in a thread on someone else's blog I left the house, and only once I'd got to the place that I was going did I sit down, and, thinking back, say to myself, "That last part sounded passive-aggressive."

The word "passive-aggressive" hadn't occurred to me while I was writing, passive-aggression was not my plan, and yet somehow it had been: it was not my creation and yet it was mine. Sometimes passive aggressiveness can only be seen after the event, and then the passive-aggressive person is like one of those soldiers who receive medals for bravery and say, surprised, "It didn't feel brave while I was doing it. It was my duty. It was the only thing I could do. Anybody else would have done it like that too if they'd been there."

There's someone I once knew whose passive-aggressive statements always made me build nests inside for angry wasps, and for the rest of the morning my thoughts about myself were inextricable from thoughts of this other person,* which was tormenting, and so I went on like this, on and on, tormenting myself for hours, until my torment, trying to make sense of itself, lost its purity and frayed out into contemplation, after which I spent an hour and a half in a coffee shop listening to a member of the Unification Church talk about the Divine Principle of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. This person's friend had once seen a manifestation of God (the friend was there too, the description was hers) in the shape of a gold light behind the back of a stranger in the street; it was an area of such intense feeling that she cried all night afterwards, and now in the cafe she explained -- "I couldn't sleep."

"You have been reminded of the back-end mechanics of passive-aggressive statements," I said to myself during the contemplative period, before I met the Unification Church members, "which is a gift, and if you ever meet that old passive-aggressive person again then you will remember this and your irritation will be more complicated, and yet I'm positive you'll still be irritated, because this is a matter of complication and not the erasure of the wound, yes, that's it, not erasure but scab, new cells assembling and weaving together overhead in mat or knot. Turgenev: "Not without reason has someone said: there is nothing more oppressive than the realization of a stupidity just committed." (Rudin.)"

Proust must have felt ashamed sometimes while he was writing Temps Perdu, it's true, he must have been remembering the embarrassment that he translates into fiction, otherwise how could he translate it?** So these experiences, considered from a different angle, are valuable as well as shameful. I thought: I could go back and ask that person to delete my post, but then what? "Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy since you really do not know what those states are working upon you?" Rilke asks the Young Poet. And Walter Benjamin decides that the inhuman thing about Robert Walser's characters is their health from which harsh guilt has been removed. "If we had to sum up in a single phrase the delightful yet also uncanny element in them, we would have to say: they have all been healed." They are fugitives who have left madness behind them, they have found happy sense in their extreme self-effacement -- and if they are healthy then they have preemptively abandoned their creator, who perished schizophrenic in the snow outside a sanatorium years after he had given up writing (picture the characters running away from the sick man), this creator who politely tried to bury them under a snowfall of qualifiers and surprises, which is perhaps passive-aggressive too, towards them, although from the point of view of the reader it is a unique and interesting literary strategy doled out benevolently by the author like bags of very soft sweets. Dying and homeless as he was, he still desperately had sweets.

His characters are suspended, fraying, masklike, domestically agitated -- each one a bunraku puppet, with a frozen face and extra hidden people hovering behind their shoulders.

Not having learned all too much with regard to herself in the course of her not particularly numerous experiences, she proceeded to acquire, on the basis of an income piling up as if playfully or jestingly, a household which featured silver and gold forks, knives and soup spoons and also leafy plants and a number of sofa pillows, and then from here it as a mere trifle for her imagination -- beginning suddenly to awaken or grow active after having slept or reposed perhaps for days or even weeks -- to instill in her the peacock-feather-fluttering illusion, gliding gently past as if upon a river in a boat bedecked with garlands, that she was a sort of Cleopatra longing for viper bites.

(Microscripts, translated by Susan Bernofsky.

Mire it is then, I decided, mire is where I'll stay. I won't ask them to delete it. I'll leave it where it is. With this in mind I returned to the other blog and discovered, looking at another person's response, that the passive-aggressive aspect of my post had shrunk and faded and now the phrases I'd used seemed insufficient for reasons I hadn't even thought about. But that's what always happens.

* If you're reading this then don't worry, it isn't you. The chance of this person ever reading this, or knowing that I've written it, or of you ever meeting them and knowing that it's them (or of them ever suspecting that I've written it, etc), are so extraordinarily tiny that you might as well regard this person as a straw man I've made up.

** At first I wrote "transmuted into fiction" but the humiliating incidents weren't eliminated, only imitated in another form, remaining in the world like an original language, even though everybody who spoke that language is dead.

I've forgotten who translated Turgenev. (I've looked it up. Harry Stevens.) Rilke was translated by M.D. Herter Norton. The Benjamin quote comes from his essay Robert Walser, translated by Rodney Livingstone. You can find Robert Walser bundled in with the Microscripts but it was originally published in the Walter Benjamin: Selecteds. Which means that I've read it twice in two different books in the past two weeks.

crumbling stone

2011-11-21T04:06:00.005+11:00

I'm still turning over the potential nothingness of most of Gormenghast castle in my head, so excuse me while I part-repeat myself. I'll throw in a few new words so this won't be totally boring. The castle is huge, according to Peake, but vaguely huge, with miles of stone, hundreds of rooms, so big that it can't be detailed by the author (suggests the author indirectly), and this absurd uncontained hugeness is a part of the structure itself, and so it seemed wrong to me when I saw the building framed by the screen in the 2000 BBC television miniseries as though it were a compassable assemblage like an architectural butte; and if I ever filmed it, I think I would give you a very high high shot, with a patch of green nature in one of the lower corners -- because the reader knows there is a forest and a mountain, and paths running away into them so we need the greenery there -- and the rest of the screen would be rooftops, on and on, tiny, detailed, like grains on a beach (but then you will remember that people as large as yourself are living under those grains and your brain will pitch forward and slew around in terrifying vertigo), rooftops covering the rest of the screen, taking up one whole wall of the theatre where you're sitting, which for the effect I want should be an IMAX. And you will feel as if you are falling forward and drowning.

Then we will have Gormenghast wallpaper, which will be the same thing, with the blot of sward by your pillow, or by the sink or by the dog bowl or television or whatever you want, (depending on the room, depending on your furniture) and the rest of the four walls will be nothing but detailed tiny fields of tiny tiles, each tile absolutely delineated and in black and white to make it more unreal and disorienting.

Or else nothing except one small area of detail, measuring less than a cubit square as you will be able to see when when you put your arm against the wall, and in here the story in the books takes place, and beyond that a void with words sketched across it, "crumbling stone," "vistas" and so on, just these thin lines of sketch stretched across the whistling gap to keep it from dropping away. I thought, "If he is writing then he is compelled to name, there is no way to write and not name something, which is perhaps why it had never occurred to me before, this idea of the castle being nothing." Every word either names a thing or prepares it for placement, the ors and buts and verbs and thens being the design and scaffolding, and then the nouns bringing the thing about and submitting it to a category of existence, pin, leg, moose, or table, and even if I write, "There was no moon" (as Beckett does somewhere in Molloy, I think) I have still named a moon and created a moon, and then I tell you that my created moon is somewhere else, which is what I would expect you to understand when you read "no moon" -- not "the moon had stopped existing" but "the moon existed and it was not visible in the sky right then."

I can't deny the moon. I have named its absence, but then I haven't, because I've still named it and not the phenomenon of not-it, which needs a hyphen, "There was a not-moon," or a newly minted word, "There was an unmoon." It was an unmoonish night, I say, and not very starrish either.

"Unmoon? No such thing. Means nothing to me. Pointless," says the reader probably. Can you write about an object in a way that removes it? And then there is Romola's flashing eye, which has a strange existence. If we were somehow in the room where these two people were staring at one another we wouldn't expect to see the flashing eye (am I being presumptuous? are there readers who seriously expect flashes? I'm wary of this "we" but on I'll go) because the rest of the book around this scene has been written in a way that signals Realism. Film it, and we'd see the woman sitting, we'd see her turn her head to her husband, we'd see him put his keys in his scarsella, all of these would be real events, in the terms of the fictional-real, but the flashing eye would be symbolic everywhere, and the flash would go away instantly and live in one of the rooms that Peake never visits.

And once when I was standing on one of the upper floors of the Leid Library at UNLV and looking through a window at the horizon I saw a yellow strip at the feet of one mountain, an area of open desert between the city and the foothills, and then because I was so tall at that moment I saw the desert on the other side of the same mountain, which was the same barren tawny tiger colour, and in that moment I imagined leaving the building and travelling over the mountains, and going and going like Voss, and finding nothing there, until realising finally that the only patch of detail in the world was the city of Las Vegas, and there is nothing else out there at all, no world, no northern hemisphere, no sea, only Las Vegas, and the rest was only the rumours that had come to us through the internet and books, somehow generated by the city itself, which likes to keep us here with the desert cutting us off like an axe from something else, which is maybe Gormenghast castle.

enough to go round

2011-11-17T05:46:00.010+11:00

Almost every morning I type Christina Stead's name into Twitter to see if anyone has posted a link to a new review or article and this morning for about the millionth time I came across somebody tweeting this quote from House of All Nations, "If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn't be enough to go round." It's really a slight misquote but you can say that for most of those lines that get quoted and requoted, "Play it again, Sam," and so forth; people like to sleek down the fluff, a human instinct for tidiness and tool-handiness steps in, and Stead's "amongst" becomes "among" by process of natural evolution. (At least one of the old desert washes under the Las Vegas Strip now feeds into a roadway that slopes down from both sides into the centre -- a street that is also a river -- and either way the rain has a place to rush.)

And I wonder sometimes if the people who post that quote ever want to know how the rest of the words on the page stand around it, the context, the bedding, the rabbit hutch through whose wires that quote's eyes melancholy stare, etc, etc, so I'm going to write down the paragraphs it sits in, on the off chance that anyone out there ever comes searching --

The scene: Michel, an intimate subordinate of the French banker Jules Bertillon, has told his employer that he spent a recent commission on "fifty German Communist books for my library." Then:

"Hey I thought you knew enough already," said Jules, just as suddenly restored to good temper. "I'm surprised at you, Michel, being such a mooch for the Reds. Stalin found out that the workers don't know what to do with money. That's all right. It isn't the Stalins that bother me. They know their game. But a man like you, Michel! A guy makes the money he can. Anyone who doesn't is a bit crazy. If there were the difference of a hair in your brain, Michel, you'd be batty: you'd be standing on soapboxes. That's a tomfool idea to want to try to make everyone rich by confiscating from the smart guys who know how to get out of the tangle early! Why, if all the rich men in the world divided up their money amongst themselves, there wouldn't be enough to go round! It all proves there are constitutional dreamers -- they're sick; you're sick, Michel.

'I say, don't you realize if you gave everyone the same amount of money today, in a fortnight, somebody, some Citroën, some Oustric, some De Wendel would have got half of it back! You're too intelligent, Michel, not to see that! Why, types like me only think in money. Why, take me. When I take off my pants I'm thinking up a gag, when I make water, what the deuce! I'm asking myself why I didn't take a crack at the cheap crook who tried to do me in yesterday. I dream all night and I get up at three o'clock to write down all I've dreamed because there are good schemes among them. When I wake up I think of a check with a big figure if I'm good-tempered, and of petty cash if I'm out of my humor: big or little, but I only think of money. How can the workers beat a man like me?"

House of All Nations, page 102, Scene: Twelve: The Revolution

Angus & Robertson: third printing: hardcover: 1974. First published, 1938.

Bertillon is one of her mad, massive, force-of-nature characters, like Sam in Man Who Loved Children, or Nellie in Cotters' England.

I'm inserting an edit here in early December to say that this is the first time I've seen the quote tweeted in Thai. It looks like this:

ถ้าคนร่ำรวยทั้งหมดในโลกแบ่งเงินทองของพวกเขาแก่กันและกัน จะไม่มีเงินพอให้แบ่ง

paused and turned her eyes on

2011-11-13T04:02:00.017+11:00

The idea of a theatre in the last post didn't come from Peake. I was trying to work out something around a sentence in George Eliot's Romola. The sentence goes like this: "Her eyes were flashing, and her whole frame seemed to be possessed by impetuous force that wanted to leap out in some deed." Romola is the person with the flashing eyes, and she is flashing them at her husband, pausing while she flashes, staying still: "Romola had paused and turned her eyes on him as she saw him take his stand and lodge the key in his scarsella." It's this contrast between stillness and action that stopped me, the body tensing (that is how I picture her "possessed by impetuous force") and all the dramatic movement being placed in the eye.

Around a real eye the muscles pinch and go taut or loose, but the eye itself, the genuine eye, stays round and non-indignant, rotating slightly in the socket but not moving in the free way that a hand or a leg moves. The face moves, the cheeks move, the lips are narrowed or fattened, the angle of the chin changes, all of this goes into a facial expression, but the eyes on their own, flashing like lightbulbs or fireflies -- never, never, never. Two bits of wet and glass. The fictional eye is more flexible. Every real eye wishes that it could be fictional.

I was trying to sketch out a difference between Peake's characters (who take their eyes into a room and then the author sees the room), and Romola, whose eyes are performing a movement of their own without the help of a moving body (the force of them is throwing itself at her husband, they're walking forward and grabbing his shirt). "She's stuck in place, she's still, she's like a what, like a building containing two objects, like a theatre," I thought, "with her eyes like two actors."

She is a presentation-box and her eyes are onstage. Her eye is expressive. The fictional flash is a concentrated emotion. I've seen fictional eyes flash before. The most modern example I think I've read is the one near the end of the first Dune Prelude. One character loses her temper and "Her eyes flashed fire." The flashing eye is always sure of its object. It flashes at someone. The person with the flashing eye is having her emotions obviously. They are clear. (Emotions are not often this clear.) It's as if she's given him a photograph of her mood, look, here it is, unmistakeable. No more work is required. She doesn't have to move a muscle. Romola doesn't actually need to tense her body, or tremble, or perform whatever subtle action it is that suggests the "impetuous force." The character is in fact disabled. She is fixed in place by her emotions and she is therefore harmless.

The author has borrowed the attributes of the entire body, all of its expressive moving power, and given them to the eye. The flash is a fantasy of an effective action that is not taking place.

The flashing eye stays where it is and directs its rays outward. There must be absolute puissance within for the eye is charged like a battery. Most surprising: the owner of the eye is not exhausted and does not collapse. She has moved beyond doubt and now she transfers this lack of doubt to the other party. His job is to know that she is angry. A human being who has lost doubt has moved briefly away from the physical realm, where multiplicity and confusion is normal, and onto a high plane of ideas, where clarity can be obtained. Therefore the flashing eye becomes unnatural. The globe spits out a straight burst of light. A flash of light is spearlike, dry, active, it is not a soggy bobble, it isn't stuck in a bone cup and laced up with meat.* Free and direct, it is maybe Romola's hallucination of herself, just then, as she sits, congealed, locked inside a cage of horror, facing her husband, who has done something terrible.

When Romola's eyes flash she is primarily her eyes, she has absconded from the rest of her body and left it standing empty, and if you could extract the eyes right there in the book and put them in a cage then you would have her like one who had captured her ghost.

* Maybe the eye is productiveness in Walter Benjamin's formulation and the flash is effectiveness: "Effectiveness and productiveness are incompatible. Dampness, closeness, vagueness in productiveness; dryness, outline, distance in effectiveness." (I'm borrowing this from a fragment called "Notes (II)" in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 1: 1927-1930. Rodney Livingstone translated.)

I don't have the Dune Preludes here to check that line (it's somewhere near the end of House Atreides and she's arguing with Leto if you want to look it up) but I'm almost sure of that flash.

had held at bay the illness

2011-11-07T02:57:00.011+11:00

As I was finishing this sentence about Titus Groan in my last post, "How many rooms does the reader never see because no character visits them?" it occurred to me that the answer had to be "None" and "Innumerable." Titus, in the third book of Peake's trilogy, removes himself from the castle and runs into the wide and open outer world, but the author keeps restoring him to enclosed spaces, putting him in a prison cell, or an underground tunnel, or a car, where he usually acts against one other key person, Old Crime in the cell, or Veil in the tunnel. He enters from the wings of one of these stage-areas, exchanges dialogue, then exits to another stage. This two-way opposition works in the other books as well, where you have Flay against Swelter, or Prunesquallor exclusively talking to Gertrude, but Titus Alone is unique in that one side of the dialogue rarely changes. It is usually Titus. He is the static force now, he is Gormenghast castle, the object that carries through the story from one end to the other.

He is trapped and released and trapped and released and trapped again. (You could even argue that the endings of the last two books are being mashed together and relived, mashed together and relived. End of book one: Titus is imprisoned. End of Book Two: Titus escapes from that prison. The body of Book Three: ditto ditto ditto. So that Titus Alone is not a sequel to the other two books but a compression of them, their anthology or compilation tape.)

An alien society is surging somewhere outside the walls that the author keeps putting in place around him, or at least that's my feeling when I read the book -- this surging, this muttering -- the strange culture exists and it has its own rules and laws, it picks up the young man and puts him in a courtroom, then shuttles him into the cell, then persecutes him, but the mutter of this society is happening apart from him; it happens outside and away and it touches him only to harm him, and otherwise it's foggy.

To extend the idea of a stage: this society is the audience gathering in the theatre foyer during the interval to make a verbal judgment that can be heard perhaps dimly through the walls backstage, and the actors come out again at the start of act three to meet this judgment, not knowing what it is. Titus emerges onto the stage, he gestures dimly against judgment, he sulks, strives, panics, and runs to evade it.

Peake wrote a stage play, hoping to make money, but "The reviews were not good," states John Watney in his biography Mervyn Peake, "the work of seven years wasted; the magic wand that was to solve all their worries had broken." It had a short run and he received seventeen pounds. "He had expected too much from it, he had worked too hard on it, and had held at bay the illness that had started to take hold of him."

The next work he finished before "the illness" broke him down irrevocably was Titus Alone, and the characters keep returning to these stage-areas, they present themselves on stages again and again, and the book's writer-character, who squats behind mouldering remaindered copies of his novel in the dark Under-river, is a pessimistic object; he is set up next to his failures, they are on display; and Titus is sent to the Under-river by his author to witness this failure and misery, and to fight an evil pimp named Veil.

Titus fought a different man in the previous book, and won, but now he isn't saving his homeland, as he did in Gormenghast, he goes to commit murder because the other soul disgusts him (as Steerpike did: it is important to Peake that the fight be subrational), and he fights in order to rescue a sick woman so that she can be allowed to die as she wants, on clean linen. Veil is foul in the author's estimation, morally filthy; this is a battle over the clean and the unclean; she dies on clean linen but she is still dead, a small wish is granted but nothing is saved, unless you consider Freud, and the idea that the most independent wish of every life is to control the manner of its death, and yet she didn't control it, she didn't command it, she only wished for it, and it was only through the intervention of a stranger that the wish was fulfilled. It was a ruthless culture that damaged her, and a ruthless culture that pushed her saviour down there to put her on a flawless pillow, which kills her instantly.

I don't have the book with me, so all of this might actually be wrong.

On the subject of that flawless pillow: notice that clean things in Peake are often dangerous. Swelter's axe is clean. Steerpike is clean. The evil technology in Alone is sleek and neat. Fuchsia is messy and harmless. But the Doctor is clean too, and we even see him taking a bath, so I can't say that Gormenwashing is universally bad. Whimsical washing versus serious washing? (The Doctor plays in his bath.)

the sea is one hydra

2011-10-30T16:12:00.004+11:00

The blind men come up to the elephant and one of them finds a tail, "The elephant is like a rope," this person says; and another finds a fat leg, "The elephant is like a tree," and a third finds the trunk, "The elephant is a hose," but if they hadn't already experienced a rope, a tree, and a hose, then what would they find? A Ponge from another planet might recognise other qualities in bread. Christina Stead starts The Man Who Loved Children on a specific street, with a specific house, "Tohoga House, their home," and everything she finds from there onwards, is the book. Perhaps each book is a long search. Mervyn Peake goes to a building of his own, larger than Stead's, almost blank at first, a wall and houses outside the wall, and he discovers everything in that one focussed area of land, not walking through it with the personal and monodirected tone of Ponge, but sensing it multipronged through characters, using them to feel the castle as if they were several tentacles. Mr Flay enters the Kitchens to watch Swelter and the author witnesses the Kitchens; one of the Twins walks through a room and he follows her and voila, the room is exposed to him, here are its details. His voice reaches around like a curious octopus, touching here and there. How many rooms does the reader never see because no character visits them?

Peake was grabbed by an octopus once off the island of Sark, or this is what he told his friend Gordon (or Goaty) Smith in a letter, and he had to beat it to death; in Hugo's Toilers of the Sea the hero in similar straits slices the animal's head off. "He had plunged the blade of his knife into the flat slimy substance, and by a rapid movement, like the flourish of a whip in the air, describing a circle round the two eyes, he wrenched the head off as a man would draw a tooth." Parts of Hugo could make prose poems if you picked them out of his novels, for instance, this description of the sea, also from Toilers:

The indivisible cannot be broken up into compartments. There is no intervening wall between one wave and another. The Channel Islands feel impulses coming from the Cape of Good Hope. Shipping throughout the world is confronting a single monster. The whole of the sea is one hydra. The waves cover the sea with a kind of fish's skin. The Ocean is Ceto. On this unity swoops down the innumerable.

This stolen poem works in strong declarations, certain things are so, and other things cannot be treated in that way, but a word like "indivisible" is precisely ineffable and "Ceto" and "hydra" are mythical -- he is declaring the unprovable, he is declaring the air. Then there is a closing mystery and a new idea. What is "the innumerable"?* Then silence after the mystery. There is a tussle between the power of the language to say and its power to mean. It says what it says very directly, but it means what it means very obliquely. And the same goes for Peake's Groan which is not in favour of the aristocracy but not against it either, which is Dickensian but not, which reflects the England of his day but doesn't, and Steerpike is Hitler but he isn't, and the Rituals are army regulations but they're not, and the author, using passionate and heightened language, posits a dry static society that damages its inhabitants, yet places the book's only egalitarian statement between the lips of a selfish arsonist. The book ends with the baby Titus "enter[ing] his stronghold" after an act of symbolic rebellion (it can't be anything other than symbolic, the baby is a baby, we recognise the rebellion, he can't) which the author regards as a kind of mystic heroism, but the stronghold, to which he comes surrounded by triumphant language, is a prison, antithetical to his humanity. It will not, like a stronghold, protect him from harm. It will do the harm. It will warp him. He comes to his triumphant mutilation.

There is another tension in the books. The readers, if they love Peake, love the castle and the society of the castle, and depend on this society to produce and to frame the characters that they also love. These characters are different expressions of isolation. Fuchsia isolates herself in her attic, Swelter isolates himself eminently above a crowd, Gertrude can remove herself from any conversation by addressing a raven, Prunesquallor separates himself from his sister by chattering, and so on, and so on, or to a cat, and so on. Each one of them is a machine that manipulates isolation (and an experiment in isolation management), and they reveal themselves to us by their methods; by their methods we know them. Castle society makes isolation essential; it also makes it possible. If we love the books then the castle is the heart of everything we love. And the hero wants to take us away from it. The hero, the person we're supposed to be supporting, if we support anybody -- he is our enemy, and we are his.

* It's not a mystery in the book. He means "the wind." James Hogarth translated. Malcolm Yorke mentions Peake's letter to Gordon Smith in his Peake biography, Mine Eyes Mint Gold.

it gives you an itch to look into the nests of spectres

2011-10-29T03:39:00.008+11:00

The father in Bruno Schulz has his cosmology of mannequins, Ponge has his cosmology of bread, and so there is this idea of starting in one place and swelling out, stepping from one point to another (and once you've reached that one you can see the next, so that the more you step, the further you can go, although each step is still a step), until you've reached a point on your single path where you can look back and observe that bread is the universe, or mannequins are humanity and "To see a world in a grain of sand" -- writes Blake -- is a great thing -- "Hold infinity in the palm of your hand." Here in Las Vegas the casinos try to provide us with the sights of the world in a street but we are not fooled, this is not infinity; the street ends, and a grain of sand ends too, but you are considering the grain and it is your consideration that is understood to be infinite, not the object, which is your trigger; and maybe it helps if the trigger is roundish, unique, and so tiny that you struggle to make it out, like a grain, and not, like a roadway, a clear cluttered straightish line that comes to a halt.*

(The Las Vegas Strip is so fulsome, no wonder people feel free to knock it, and call it tacky and undignified. "No dignity is perfect which at some point does not ally itself with the mysterious," writes Thomas de Quincey. The grain, self-contained, focussed, and delicate, is more obviously mysterious than the Strip. Submerged historical processes created the Strip, as they created everything, but the street would rather not have you think about them. "Look," it says, "at this big clean Eiffel Tower. You can make out every single rivet!" Away goes the mystery of the rivets, which might even be decoration and not functional. Possibly there are other forces, more modern forces, keeping the structure together.)

In Ponge, one thing, bread, discovers its equivalents everywhere -- one type of object shows the potential to summarise all objects -- Walt Whitman's persona in the person of a loaf -- and this discovery is the essence, is the poem -- not the thing itself but the discovery, the step-step-step, the taking of steps -- which is thought, or one way of illustrating it.

"When you are hunting something," wrote Victor Hugo in Toilers of the Sea, "you are undergoing a course of training; when you are seeking to discover something, you are caught up in a chain of action. If you have been in the habit of looking into birds' nests, it gives you an itch to look into the nests of spectres."

So, following on from this, say that Ponge, looking at fire, is training himself to look at bread, or vice versa, whichever came first in his life. Lucretius, once he starts thinking about atoms, starts to believe that every natural effect can be explained if you introduce the idea of tiny particles to the equation. He is wrong, so singular concentration is not always fruitful. But go back: this might be the opposite of Ponge. On one hand you take a single starting point and colour the universe diversely (Ponge), on the other hand you take the diverse universe and colour it with one quality (Lucretius). I think I'm just fooling myself with language but the point I'm trying to get to is this: with a system you re-author the universe, you have the appearance of being correct. A barber in George Eliot's Romola says that narrowness is dangerous:

"Besides, your druggist, who herborises and decocts, is a man of prejudices: he has poisoned people according to a system, and is obliged to stand up for his system to justify the consequences. Now a barber can be dispassionate; the only thing he necessarily stands by is the razor, always providing he is not an author. That was the flaw in my great predecessor Burchiello [also a barber]: he was a poet, and had consequently a prejudice about his own poetry. I have escaped that; I saw very early that authorship is a narrowing business, in conflict with the liberal art of the razor, which demands an impartial affection for all men’s chins."

The physical activity of the razor (constantly in contact with the world) opens you out; the mental activity of poetry and druggist-systems closes you in and gives you something to defend; the outward-directed person should have nothing to defend, suggests the barber, and if changing one's mind, as Ruskin says somewhere in Modern Painters,** is an essential part of thinking and being fruitfully thoughtful, then the poet and the druggist are not as alive as the barber who shaves chins. "Much time is wasted in general on the establishment of systems," Ruskin says too, "and it often takes more time to master the intricacies of an artificial connection, than to remember the separate facts which are so carefully connected."

And yet the barber is not completely freethinking, he has his standards, his world is coloured, he measures and assesses, as the reader finds out a few paragraphs later when he goes on talking to his customer, a handsome stranger. "Ecco!" says the barber, "your curls are now of the right proportion to neck and shoulders; rise, Messer, and I will free you from the encumbrance of this cloth. Gnaffè! I almost advise you to retain the faded jerkin and hose a little longer; they give you the air of a fallen prince."

Maybe say that the difference between this barber and his druggist, is that the barber thinks of the result, the druggist thinks of the structure you climb through to get there. The barber sees a man in tatty clothes and intuits, quickly, that the best advice he can give to this man is the opposite of normal advice -- he must not buy clean new clothes, he must keep the old ones -- inventing a new process on the spot, this barber. The new process is unconventional but he trusts in his own prescience -- "almost " -- almost he believes it will work -- and also he likes to tickle people with his opinions.

* Or it seems to. The street itself (going purely north and ignoring the other direction) turns from South Las Vegas Boulevard into North Fifth Street and then ends near a freeway, if you follow it directly, but if you resist directness and turn right around a circle then the street that used to be North Main Street sacrifices its name and becomes the rest of the Boulevard. Now North Las Vegas Boulevard, it heads through the city, going and going for miles, past fast food places and houses, shedding its lanes, getting thinner and more anaemic and less important, and eventually running away into the open desert. Wasting down almost to nothing it walks parallel to the Great Basin Highway for a while, dies away into a dirt road, recovers itself, wriggles, crosses the Basin, and perishes finally at an insignificant T-intersection.

** I can't see it but I know it's in there somewhere. Volume three or four or five. Somewhere near the beginning.

The Hugo was translated by James Hogarth.

like an amoeba and a giraffe

2011-10-27T05:31:00.016+11:00

Calves are born from cows and worms are born from corpses as everybody knows, says Lucretius, but if worms have souls then does this mean that a person's soul, after they die, divides itself into parts and each part enters a worm? He is asking rhetorically because he already knows that the answer is no, of course not, each worm has its own private soul, which it obtains at birth as it germinates inside the corpse.

No two souls are ever the same, he adds, each one is different, they are modulated, and so, reading this, I realise that the Lucretian sense-seeds of hearing and seeing must modulate too, like the souls of worms and people and also the cows, different each time, or else we'd see nothing but a single plane of colour and never hear anything except a single unending sound. One sight-atom must be red, the atom next to it not quite red, the atom next to that one even further into the colour brown, etc, small changes between definite states, those definite states being pure red and pure brown, very rare, and perhaps only ideas in our heads, ultimate measurements that we need to keep to ourselves so that we can describe our world of modulations, holding onto that pure brown so that we can look at a tree and judge it "light brown" or "greenish brown" or in other words not-pure-brown; and anyone who assumed that it was striving for the colour brown in the first place would have to call it an imperfect tree and a failure.

The difference between light brown and greenish brown is the difference between hoops and hoopla; the physical differences between the words are not great but the understood difference is much greater, a hoop is not a hoopla, a hoopla is not a hoop. The contrast between the two letters and the one letter is the journey between one country and another country.

Hoopla and hoop, by the way, goes back to a post I made a few days ago (I'm putting this here in case someone out there is asking themselves, Where did this hoop-hoop come from?), when I was talking to M. about wordplay in French, and the reason I was considering French in the first place, was that I had seen a review for a book by Gérard Macé at the Complete Review website, and from there I discovered an article that mentioned the prose poet Jean Follain, and also another prose poet, Francis Ponge. There was nothing by Macé at any of my local libraries, but I found a copy of Dreaming the Miracle: Three French Prose Poets: Max Jacob, Jean Follain, Francis Ponge and read that instead.

Ponge wrote (this is a word I saw applied to him) cosmologies, and like a god or wizard or autistic naturalist he would take a single thing, "Snails," for instance, or "Fire," and concentrate on it until it was a universe of separate parts or actions -- he wrote a tense psychoanalysis of water ("passive yet persistent in its one vice, gravity"), and saw a generative world-making power in the development of bread in an oven.

He is the father in Bruno Schulz's short stories and bread and fire are his mannequins. He announces new characters and natures for every nonhuman thing he considers. His fire doesn't have the usual personality of written fire -- it's not angry blazing fire or glowing cosy fire -- fire, a phenomena judged by the way it warms or threatens humans -- this is an alien fire, self-contained, strange, "it moves like an amoeba and a giraffe at the same time, its neck lurching, its foot dragging …" an effect of radiant oddity that doesn't only appear in Ponge, of course, or only in prose poetry, and I thought of Les Murray giving muscles to a liquid in The Butter Factory, "paddlewheels sailed the silvery vats where muscles / of the one deep cream were exercised" or Alice Oswald, in her new spin on the Iliad, bringing death down on an ancient Greek with the modernity of a lift. "They met a flying spear / And like a lift door closing / Inexplicable Hephaestus / Whisked one of them away / And the other died."

A reviewer pointed out the lift door and I thought, he's right, a lift door in the Iliad, what a mind, to think of that, what an intelligence, and I was filled with respect for Alice Oswald, and compared her to the Lucretius translation I was reading, which, although it was published in 1916, uses archaic language, all "doth" and "e'en" and "nay," as if the poem had been translated much earlier. The translator loves "vasty" too, as in "vasty deep." There is no Deep in this book that is not also Vasty. Those two words together in that order, "vasty deep", sends the culture-brain zhooshing away like an omnivore vulture, to Shakespeare, Henry I, Part I, and Glendower announcing that, "I can call spirits from the vasty deep," but Lucretius' translator William Ellery Leonard does not have a use for that reference, even though he's the one who put it there; there is no indication that he wants to connect On The Nature of Things to Henry I, Part I with any theme, any idea, any mood, or anything besides those two words, "vasty deep" which run between them now like a fishing line, with the fish on one end and the rod on the other, each made of a substance alien to the other, one flesh, the other wood or plastic -- and each one moved by different aims, one to live, the other to kill. Leonard the fisherman has pulled up Shakespeare on his hook but now he doesn't know what to do with him, all he can do is let him flop back in the water, and then, pages later, fish him up again with exactly the same bait.

It looks as though he had the words "vasty deep" trapped inside him in a mental folder labelled Use This! Correct Poetic Language and when the right Latin trigger arrived in the poem he was translating then they flowed out like a native force, as Blanchot saw words crowd through an author: "Words give to the one who writes them the impression of being dictated to him by usage, and he receives them with the uneasiness of finding in them an immense reservoir of facilities and effects already assembled -- ready without his powers having any role in it." Leonard had been infected by this fragment of literature, possibly picking up the sickness from a schoolbook like the one I found a few years ago at a library sale, a copy of Henry I, Part I, with an index of words at the back, an introduction for children, and the owner's name and the number of their class written inside the cover.

So assume that the translator was haunted as Lovecraft's characters can be haunted, through the medium of a book ("No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet," writes one Lovecraft narrator, shuddering with madness) but the American's Old Gods are unsubtle haunters, they make their victims gibber, babble, rave, stare, suffer visions, and argue with their colleagues ("It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic" says another narrator, referring to a scientific expedition), but the haunting known as Henry I, Part I only has this very quiet manifestation -- it makes you write vasty deep several times in the same poem -- the subtlest ghost you've ever met.

Ponge was translated by Beth Archer Brombert. Blanchot is the same Blanchot I quoted a couple of weeks ago. I've probably used the Murray before as well. Lovecraft's "no hand had touched that book" comes from the end of The Shadow Out of Time and "this contemplated invasion of the antarctic" comes from the first sentence of At the Mountains of Madness.

The Shadow:

It has been hard for me literally to set down the crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course it lay in that book within the metal case -- the case which I pried out of its forgotten lair amidst the undisturbed dust of a million centuries. No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet.

Glendower's line exists so that Hotspur can make his smart reply: "Why, so can I, or so can any man; / But will they come when you do call for them?" and it probably wouldn't be so memorable if it wasn't being chased up by that quick snap, which fulfills everybody's dream, l'esprit de l'escalier realised before it's too late, and the responsive one rescued from regret, saved by himself, which is the best way to be saved.

The great thing about that lift door in Oswald's poem, is that it sounds absolutely natural and normally descriptive, and yet if you describe it baldly, "Alice Oswald put a lift door in the Iliad," it sounds as if it might be attention-getting and purposelessly strange, something that leaps out and throws the poem off, sucking all of your attention to that novelty -- but it doesn't, it is purposeful, the poet maintains her rhythm, treating it as if it's any other bit of description, and it suits everything -- the finality, the sharp mechanical bang-bang of the action -- it looks right.

But why should I say it should sound strange, I ask myself (this is me, asking myself: I ask) when people have been doing this for years, back, back, down to Dickens and the modern science of his fog-dinosaur, right next to -- in the same sentence as -- the waters of Genesis and a city? "As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."

all things act

2011-10-24T16:04:00.013+11:00

Atoms, says the Roman poet Lucretius, who never in De Rerum Natura uses the word atoms -- atoms are tiny elemental objects, "seeds" and "primal particles" and they slip past one another, or else hook and stay close; boundaries hold them in and so they become people or cattle; and there are voids between them, either smaller or larger voids, depending on their purpose.

Besides, if there were not
Some smaller thing, each tiniest body must
Of infinite particles consist, since halves of halves
Will still have halves, not aught will set a bound.
How then will differ the full sum of things
From least of things?

he argues in William Ellery Leonard's 1916 translation, and then states that

... whatso'er
Itself is without parts can ne'er possess
The properties creative matter needs
Must have -- bonds, weights and blows diverse,
Meetings and motions, whereby all things act.

So if we are going to have bodies then we need to have parts, very minute parts, unseeable, invisible parts, but parts. It was 54 BC and he had learnt his atoms from the Epicureans. He wonders, How do we see? and comes up with this answer: that visible objects fire off waves of particles, and our eye receives them. "Since from all things, of whatsoever kind / Matter doth ever flow; so some will shed / Bodies that strike the eye and stir our sight." We hear like this too, he says, we receive waves of sound-seeds, the squek and chirrup of the UNLV basketball players as they warmed up before their scrimmage, for example, the noise of their rubber soles trapping on the polished floor as they ran across the court one way and then back the other way, taking small steps deliberately to juice up their muscles, which were moving there, under the baggy shorts, there, under the skin, the cords flexing and clenching, and all that blood moving, those tall cathedrals on the move, bone staircase, ropes of vessels up and down like pneumatic tubes (prevented by Lucretius' boundaries from dissolving into a universal mass of loose atoms), lovely doomed engineered pieces, one with a chinstrap beard.

Their soles made a specific high-pitched chirp, which was also the sound of the rosellas in the big gum tree in the street behind our house in Melbourne. Those rosellas would mumble around the flowers with their beaks and toes, and then they'd launch themselves into the air like those atomic sense-seed particles and skim down the road in trios, shooting off -- and then you'd think to look up and stare for a moment and the rest of the flock, still in the tree, would become visible to you. A few individuals came out and there were the rest behind them, a single enigmatic clambering body; it was like Fernando Pessoa firing off his heteronyms. Out come the heteronyms with their names and histories (Ricardo Reis, Alexander Search, the Crosse brothers; all the rest of his creations) and somewhere behind this mass of commentary by unbodied people you sense Pessoa, who is thinking, "it so scares me, like a dark forest, to pass through the mystery of speaking" as he writes letters to Ophelia, the woman he never married, and to the fat-faced poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro, who at the age of twenty-five kept his word about the strychnine.

These tiny things, these atoms, these seeds, round seeds, I'll say, ball-shaped walled seeds -- if atoms had looked like this then the atomic bomb would have been something else, it would have blown up and the balls would have -- inflated, I'm going to say inflated -- they would have swollen into spheres about ten centimetres in diameter, and the two cities in Japan would have looked like the room of plastic balls at Ikea, which was a treat for me when I was little, and the people are not dead but rising up in shock, with balls dropping off them, ah what power, let us stop the war at once (says the emperor) or they will send something worse next time.

And now these balls, what do they do with them -- the balls roll away, the wind picks them up, and they stand in whirlwinds on streetcorners with one foot forward (which was the way I saw a column of petals standing once, in Mito, at an intersection on the way to the railway station, a tornado only three feet high, waiting to cross the street, with one toe in the gutter, and if petals are not heavy then these airy atoms will not be heavy either) -- so there are tornadoes and winds of coloured balls, rolling off the land and into the sea until the main island of Japan is sending off flotillas of expanded particles, and making itself internationally visible with this large-scale demonstration of Lucretius' Epicurean ideas about the senses.

The multicoloured balls float to other countries, and these other countries receive them on their beaches, which are functioning, in this instance, as eyes, and so the other countries believe that Japan resembles a bowl of hundreds and thousands.

But this is too hectic, frowns Lucretius, who has stopped existing (his boundary broke, so did Pessoa's, and who can prove that the baby Pessoa was not in fact assembled out of dispersed Lucretius), no, he says, the balls during their long journey would have sloshed around at random on the waves and this is not how my particles and atoms work. They maintain their formations. For this to be right, your Ikea balls need to land on those other countries looking exactly like Japan when the sand sees them. How are they going to do that? you ask him, severely perplexed and not knowing how it's possible. They are atoms, he tells you, still not using that word. They will know what to do.

That scrap of Pessoa comes from his early play, The Mariner, and I found it translated by Richard Zenith in the Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. In this play there are three characters called Watchers, and the Third Watcher says, "When speaking, I think about what's going on in my throat and my words seem like people … My fear is larger than me. I can feel in my hand, I don't know how, the key to an unknown door. And I'm suddenly, all of me, a talisman or tabernacle conscious of itself. That's why it so scares me, like a dark forest, to pass through the mystery of speaking."

The chinstrap beard belongs to a player named Carlos Lopez.

what remains abidingly

2011-10-23T03:59:00.002+11:00

The French enjoy wordplay, I said to M. -- is my impression -- and I was considering French overall, but French is huge, and my mind, putting itself through a swift process of summarisation (concentrate on a flower, advises Ruskin, when the Alps get overwhelming), whittled the idea down to one sentence, or the impression of sentence -- specifically, a part of Jacques Derrida's Demeure, a speech that came with sentences that were so difficult for the translator* that she wrote out her translation and then added the French words as well, so that we could see what Derrida had been trying to do, for example: "I will attempt to speak of this necessary but impossible abidance [demeurance] of the abode [demeure]. How can one decide what remains abidingly [à demeure]?"

(Which is not only a record of Derrida but also a record of the translator's battle as she stands on that crossing between one language and another, a lone Horatius not defending her narrow bridge but struggling to let the invading army across.)

Each new chosen word is like a mirror, tilted slightly back at the one before it, picking up part of its reflection, but reflecting a landscape of its own as well; it comments on the last one and advances it, or -- in other words, a pun.

But behind that impression of Demeure I felt a cloud of other French words pressing forward, Georges Perec, Raymond Roussel, the film Ridicule in which aristocrats hang themselves from ornamental garden trees because the language-games of Versailles are beyond them -- I couldn't think of an example in English, I couldn't even think of a pun (used seriously, I mean, in the public arena -- a pun in public -- not a pun of my own but a quotation, an example of someone else's pun). I tried but nothing would come into my head.

Days later on Sunday evening I was at a basketball scrimmage for the UNLV basketball team. This scrimmage, in which the team splits in half and plays a reduced version of a full game, is an annual tradition, said the journalists later, writing about it, but I went because it was free and I hadn't seen basketball played live before. The new-season's team had already introduced itself to the fans on Friday evening at an event on Fremont Street, bringing along cheerleaders, the new coach, and a set of fireworks. "Friday night was all about the hoopla," said the coach on Sunday before the scrimmage started, "tonight is all about the hoops." So there was my English-language word game, and I was thunderbolted, I was very excited: radiance, radiance, it existed.

In a very small way the conversation had primed me to pay attention, as Ruskin, writing about landscape artists, wants them to understand the anatomy of a tree, and learn to see it, otherwise he is afraid that they will be distracted by the superficial and obvious details on top, "the bark and moss of the trunk." Instead the artist should perceive "the swell and fall and change of all the mass," which is ruled by the "leading lines" of the hidden woodgrain. "[A]s an artist increases in awareness of perception, the facts which become outward and apparent to him are those which bear upon the growth or make of the thing." The "make" here was wordplay. So if I had not been watching for the skeleton or wordplay spirit-dwelling of those words, they would have flown past me meaning almost nothing, glib slogan, cheap phrase, but, hearing them acutely, I noticed how interested he sounded, as if he were not simply a man who was remembering easy lines, but a man who enjoyed being there, and was relishing his basketball, or I might have only imagined that upwards excited smiling inflection in his voice, because I was pleased too; I had received a present, and everything at that moment (which had collected like a concentrated globe) was waiting for the opportunity to mean more than it seemed.

* Elizabeth Rottenberg.

Ruskin's tree comes from Modern Painters. The new coach's name is David Rice and the team is so rapt with hm that they've made a teaser trailer. "Everybody pulls for DAVID. Nobody ROOTS for Goliath. But there was once a time. When this DAVID. Was Goliath." He used to be a stunning player, they mean. Now he is a coach. Another teaser.

David Bellos, Perec's translator, had a good article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

In Chapter 51 of Perec's masterpiece, "Life A User's Manual" (1978), the character Valène imagines a painting of the apartment house in which he lives with its façade removed, showing all its street-side rooms with their contents and the characters who lived there. The project is laid out as an inventory of items numbered from 1 through 179, and each "item" is a summary of a story told elsewhere in Perec's 99-chapter novel.

I was translating the novel, so I had to locate the stories to which the lines referred. But in doing so I noticed (thanks to some prompting) that each line of the inventory was exactly the same length. Exactly 60 keystrokes.

On top of that, the inventory is separated into three blocks, two of them consisting of 60 lines and the last one of just 59. The "great compendium," as Perec called it, thus consists of three squares, the last one slightly defective.

convulsed with a hellborn fever

2011-10-17T08:03:00.015+11:00

On Monday I asked a security supervisor from one of the Strip casinos if he thought Ruskin would have made good security or not, and the conclusion we sort of came to was, Perhaps. "Was he judgmental?" "Extremely judgmental." Then maybe yes ... Or maybe not, but, adds the supervisor, sometimes you get a weird one who surprises you. Could he make decisions? He could. Well that's a good sign.

His pedantic steadiness might have been helpful when he had to write out incident reports, but to get to the report-writing stage he would have had to talk to the guests, gamblers, and visitors, greeting and smiling, following various procedures, being polite and patient, and coping with comatose drunks, who, once woken, would have thrashed and hooted, tearing at his clothes, arms, and hip-mounted radio equipment, not knowing who he was or where they were, or what was going on, in fact knowing almost nothing, having moved purely into the realm of those senses the author would have called animal, sensual, and lower -- an inhabitance he would have despised, surely, respecting knowledge as he did, and writing in his diary, after dinner parties, that the evening had been "boring" because nobody had taught him anything new.

His impatience with smalltalk would present problems in the security world; he would struggle to execute that part of the engagement procedure known in some casinos as Delight.

In Modern Painters, in the category of visual "facts [that] are unimportant" or not worthy of an artist's attention, he placed "a gambler quarrel[ing] with another gambler" and "a sot enjoying himself with another sot." A history painter should not take either of these scenes as his subject, he warned, otherwise the painting will be "trivial." Employed as a casino security guard he would have to work in the land of the Historical Trivial, "the entirely infernal atmosphere of the common cafes and gambling-houses ... infecting every condition of what they call 'aesthesis,' left in the bodies of men, until they cannot be happy with the pines and pansies of the Alps" -- or, in the case of Vegas, happy with the rocks and flowers of the Spring Mountain ranges, the fields and peaks outside the city, along with those other parts of the state so little remembered that you can buy a frame for your license plate that reads Nevada at the top and then Outside Las Vegas at the bottom, dividing all 286,350 square kilometres of the region as people usually divide them, into the one thousand and sixty two square and valley-kept kilometres of Clark County where the city sits, and then afterwards, the rest, an open mysterious wedge-shaped place where someone must live but nobody knows who, and something must happen but nobody knows what, and nobody knows these things because they are too busy getting drunk on the Strip and gurgling and trying to tear off security's trousers and throw up on its shoes.

And therein lies another problem, because Ruskin went vivid with horror at the sight of stain, filth, or dirt, and this vomit on his shoes would have repelled him even more than that time Bartolomé Esteban Murillo pointed a foot at him.

But observe another point in the lower figure. It lies so that the sole of the foot is turned towards the spectator; not because it would have lain less easily in another attitude, but that the painter may draw, and exhibit, the grey dust engrained in the foot. Do not call this the painting of nature: it is mere delight in foulness. The lesson, if there be any, in the picture, is not one whit the stronger. We all know that a beggar’s bare foot cannot be clean; there is no need to thrust its degradation into the light, as if no human imagination were vigorous enough for its conception.

(He's describing Murillo's Two Children Eating a Melon and Grapes.)

The pavement of the Strip is dirty, dotted, spittled with spit,** and covered with the escort service cards, each one smaller than a playing card, that are handed out by Latin American men who rattle the stacks in their hands; you can pick up dozens of soft-porn illustrations this way, women with stars or bubbles on their nipples to keep the pictures legal, women in leotards bending over, women gnawing their bra straps, etc -- and as he lifted his eyes away from these cards in convulsive distress Officer Ruskin would have noticed that the refurbished erupting volcano outside the Mirage was an even stranger imitation of the real thing than the handpainted Victorian marble and fake woodgrain that he hates across several of his books, and as he fled from the volcano to the huge gilt statue of three severed heads outside the same casino -- Siegfried, Roy, and a tiger -- he would have noticed that there was no sign of workmanship on the surface, that it was absolutely free of the human fingerprint of creation, a smooth and flawless object made from no evident natural material.

"Their work should be full of flaws," he said, of young artists, "for these are the signs of effort." Be wary of gloss and finish. But there is no sign of effort around him here; every effect along the whole Strip is achieved by a power that removes flaws. There is ambition and spectacle but none of the personal evidence he liked, signs that people with fingers and minds had been at work -- the hidden carving at the top of the spire, put there by the sculptor who made it for the exuberant human pleasure of making it, the independently-imagined griffon that hangs its paws forward like a "sleepy puppy," and the uneven glass bead that was not clipped out in a factory.

But here, around him on the Strip, the only clear evidence of individual effort has been placed inside all the things he hates, like the dirty spit-marks on the concrete, each positioned there with an individual and induplicate aim, as varied as the leaves that he sees nature provide in infinite arrangements for his joy; and there is your hidden carving and your flawed glass bead and griffin, in a blob of spit (but not made -- not good, not human, because not intelligent, he thinks, as a great brainless tide closes in, and he works out his categories, sorting and numbering the different kinds of intelligence into lists, and unknowingly in spite of his dislike of German philosophy,* he demonstrates one of the observations of Kant, who saw people sort and organise things); and the protest against smooth surfaces is carried out by the thrashing drunk, who knocks one of the guards' factory-manufactured radios off its belt-clip and smacks it to bits.

George Eliot opened Daniel Deronda in a "scene of dull, gas-poisoned absorption" which was a European casino's gaming room, and "gambling" she wrote privately, was "a vice I have no mind to, it stirs my disgust even more than my pity. The sight of the dull faces bending round the gaming tables, the raking-up of the money , and the flinging of coins toward the winners by the hard-faced croupiers, the hateful, hideous women staring at the board like stupid monomaniacs -- all this seems to me the most abject presentation of mortals grasping after something called a good that can be seen on the face of this little earth." Michael Flavin's book on Gambling in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel comes with the subtitle, "a leprosy is o'er the land," a quote, he says, from "a prize-winning entry in the National Anti-Gambling League's hymn-writing competition," and as I try to imagine leprosy o'er the land, seeing it whitely misty drifting down, I realise that I'm remembering two Alice Oswald lines describing frost: "Last night without a sound / a ghost of a world lay down on a world." My leprosy is frost. Baudelaire saw --

Around the gaming tables faces without lips,
Lips without color and jaws without teeth,
Fingers convulsed with a hellborn fever
Searching empty pockets and fluttering bosoms

-- writing like this so that later Walter Benjamin could observe, in his essay, Some Motifs of Baudelaire, that gambling might obtain money for you, like work, but it was unlike work in that it did not build on your past knowledge, and experience was no use to you, each dice-roll was as likely or unlikely to come up trumps as the last one or the next one or the one yesterday or the one next week. Perhaps this would appeal to Ruskin least of all, this spectacle in which learning, knowledge, experience, history and everything else he valued, loved, and stormed over -- the past, in a word: the intelligent past -- had absolutely no importance.

The past, he always had his eye on the past, the childhood root of an adult's knowledge -- and there's a long-lost good little boy that I think I see running through Ruskin's work, a bossy child, subordinate and praiseworthy, showing the latest draft of Modern Painters or The Stones of Venice to his mamma and papa at the breakfast table "as a girl shows her sampler" he tells us in Praeterita, explaining his writing methods in the language of an obedient student. "My own literary work, on the contrary, was always done as quietly and methodically as a piece of tapestry." (He is comparing himself to Thomas Carlyle, the student who is not so quiet and good.) He looks at a picture by Turner and thinks, "The painter has returned affectionately to his boyish impression, and worked it out with his manly power." Turner was like him, he thinks, Turner needed his childhood too, Turner was faithful to the past, Turner would not have been great had he not loved his boyish impressions, and it was not only Turner who was like this but other geniuses as well -- and even the "imaginative mind" itself agreed with him, the very food of it was the past, and the gut of it was memory.

How far I could show that it held with all great inventors, I know not, but with all those whom I have carefully studied (Dante, Scott, Turner, and Tintoret) it seems to me to hold absolutely; their imagination consisting, not in a voluntary production of new images, but an involuntary remembrance, exactly at the right moment, of something they had actually seen.

Imagine all that any of these men had seen or heard in the whole course of their lives, laid up accurately in their memories as in vast storehouses, extending, with the poets, even to the slightest intonations of syllables heard in the beginning of their lives, and, with the painters, down to the minute folds of drapery, and shapes of loaves or stones; and over all this unindexed and immeasurable mass of treasure, the imagination brooding and wandering, but dream-gifted, so as to summon at any moment exactly such groups of ideas as shall justly fit each other: this I conceive to be the real nature of the imaginative mind ...

There's a void when he looks at the rolling dice, an absence where the past should be, and in fear he picks the coin out of Rosencrantz's hand at the start of the Stoppard play and throws it into that darkness, this coin that defies chance and proves it too, by continually coming up heads, making a pattern across what should be a patternless open reach, marking the void, like a spoon that can take bites out of the ocean.

A hard-working cardsharp would be closer to Ruskin's ideal than an ordinary lucky gambler. At least the cardsharp is applying some knowledge.

Benjamin draws parallels between gamblers and factory workers. "Gambling even contains the workman's gesture that is produced by the automatic operation, for there can be no game without the quick movement of the hand by which the stake is put down or a card is picked up." This is even truer today when all the pokie player has to do is press a button, rest, watch, wait, and press the button again, archetypical factory work. "Since each operation at the machine is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it, the drudgery of the labour is, in its own way, a counterpart to the drudgery of the gambler."

The German goes on to make refinements, to quote Goethe and muse about the gambler's job of wishing. "A wish, however, is a kind of experience … The further a wish reaches out in time, the greater the hope for its fulfilment." But Officer Ruskin, who hated factories, would never have moderated his view into anything sunnier than condemnation. The only wish we should project far forward in time, he would perhaps have said, is the wish to enjoy eternal life in heaven (feeling a pang if this is happening during the doubting phase of his life, loftiness if he's still an Evangelical), as, staring at this Benjamin essay with rage, he wonders if he sees gambling trying to take the place of God.

* "The reader," he writes in Modern Painters, "must have noticed that I never speak of German art, or German philosophy, but in depreciation." Pretty much, replies the reader.

* although it depends where you are. You can eat off the pavement in front of the Bellagio.

Baudelaire was translated by William Aggeler. The poem is called Le Jeu. Alice Oswald's two lines were borrowed from Pruning in Frost, which you can find in The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, or, if you're in North America, in a collection named Spacecraft Voyager I published by Graywolf Press with a front cover illustration that looks like one of the giant crystal trees in WoW's Northrend, or if you want you can read it online. I like everything I've heard about her new Memorial. Plans afoot to get hold of that somehow. Benjamin was translated by Harry Zohn and I read the essay in the Schocken Books paperback edition of Illuminations.

"The entirely infernal atmosphere …" appears in the footnotes to Love's Meinie: Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds. Footnote one hundred and thirty four if you're keen. The "beggar’s bare foot" comes from Stones of Venice. All the other stray quotes come from Modern Painters. That "boring" and its cousin-words can be picked out of several entries in his journals. Eliot wrote about the "dull faces bending round the gaming tables" in a letter to her friend Mrs William Cross. I want to give the woman a less anonymous title but I can't find her referred to as anything other than "Mrs William Cross:" a widow with ten children, wearing her husband's name over her own, a breathing tombstone. With all the Cross children around her she made a necropolis.

in them an immense reservoir of facilities

2011-10-10T04:32:00.029+11:00

I am about to give away the ending to Victor Hugo's book, The Man Who Laughs.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have come to Las Vegas, but Las Vegas doesn't have a Wall Street, Wall is a street in New York, so the protesters started their march outside the New York New York casino and moved on from there. We are an ingenious species. Our habit of drawing parallels may be unparallelled. (If we could read the minds of other animals, we would know.*) On September eleventh, people were laying flowers in front of the same casino. These things have their own logic. "Words give to the one who writes them the impression of being dictated to him by usage, and he receives them with the uneasiness of finding in them an immense reservoir of facilities and effects already assembled -- ready without his powers having any role in it," wrote Maurice Blanchot -- the phrases of the world coming into us invisibly, selecting themselves with a force of habit that might as well be their own, and going out on paper or on screen, one sentence not seeming right in the mind of its creator unless it ends itself with after all, and another wanting to include thing in place of a more exact word (a principle that must apply to Blanchot's sentence too, so that, as we read him, we witness the machine of language telling us about itself).

And the protests, the impulse coming in, entering, fed by various streams, and then it comes out, and a group of people walk along the Strip from Tropicana Avenue northwards, up the map where the Boulevard lies straight as a pipe all the way to the Bellagio, the indigenous habits of protest sitting evidently upon them, "an immense reservoir of facilities and effects already assembled," a protest as a kind of writing implement, and the casino standing there in a representative way, offering itself up for the role of a focus, and screaming at them as they march, screaming wildly and insanely at us all, this casino, through the throats of the tourists who have decided to ride the roller coaster on the roof.

When Victor Hugo introduces a rich woman to The Man Who Laughs he is moderate at first, filling in factual blanks, "Lady Josiana had her own fortune. She possessed great wealth, much of which was derived from the gifts of Madame sans queue to the Duke of York. Madame sans queue is short for Madame," but the blanks fill and then they overflow, and the author seems excited by his invention; and he heaps her up. "She wore great dresses of velvet, satin, or moire, some composed of fifteen or sixteen yards of material, with embroideries of gold and silver; and round her waist many knots of pearls, alternating with other precious stones. She was extravagant in gold lace. Sometimes she wore an embroidered cloth jacket like a bachelor. She rode on a man's saddle." Josiana is a "prude," he says, and she is also the most luscious and perverse soul in the book. She is one of the author's fantasy figures, she is full of sex but doesn't care for it, she is full of money and doesn't care for it, she compels awe and jealousy and barely bothers to notice, she is a Zenith!

The Zenith goes to the theatre and eclipses the stage. The audience stares at her.

The woman watched them, and they watched her.

At the distance at which they were placed, and in that luminous mist which is the half-light of a theatre, details were lost and it was like a hallucination. Of course it was a woman, but was it not a chimera as well? The penetration of her light into their obscurity stupefied them. It was like the appearance of an unknown planet. It came from a world of the happy. Her irradiation amplified her figure. The lady was covered with nocturnal glitterings, like a milky way. Her precious stones were stars. The diamond brooch was perhaps a pleiad. The splendid beauty of her bosom seemed supernatural. They felt, as they looked upon the star-like creature, the momentary but thrilling approach of the regions of felicity. It was out of the heights of a Paradise that she leant towards their mean-looking Green Box, and revealed to the gaze of its wretched audience her expression of inexorable serenity. As she satisfied her unbounded curiosity, she fed at the same time the curiosity of the public.

It was the Zenith permitting the Abyss to look at it.

One piece of footage from Wall Street shows the crowd walking underneath a balcony on which, for whatever reason, a group of people in formal clothes are drinking champagne and chuckling. Some websites assume that they were deliberately mocking the protesters, others say that the building was a restaurant just by chance; the people from the balcony don't seem to have said anything. The sources that have picked mocking are outraged; the sight of rich people laughing on balconies has a history, and so the shot seems perfect -- the Abyss below, the Chimeras above. But no one on the balcony is starlike, no one has a bosom you'd call splendid, and the light that falls on them is the same light that falls on the protesters and on the greyness of the brickwork; they have no special illumination, they look ordinary and it's not hard to imagine that no matter how much champagne was flying around, any party with these people would be uninteresting, and you'd wish you were somewhere else, possibly in the street below with a placard, protesting your own adherence to a stereotypical roundabout of balconies and champagne flutes, while, in another place, a police officer was filmed swearing that he was going to beat the protesters with his nightstick; see, we all have our expressive tools: there are placards for one occasion, champagne flutes for another, and flowers in front of casinos when we're mourning.

The zenith and the abyss look at one another in Hugo's book again, but this time Josiana is not present and the abyss is occupied by her diametric opposite, a poor blind humble young woman named Dea. Dea is in the book because she loves the hero, Gwynplaine. He rescued her from a snowstorm when she was a baby. They grew up together. Gwynplaine is deformed, but Dea can't see the deformity. She sees his good qualities, "Gwynplaine sympathetic, helpful, and sweet-tempered." This makes their love perfect. "Dea quivered with certainty and gratitude, her anxiety changed into ecstasy, and with her shadowy eyes she contemplated on the zenith from the depth of her abyss the rich light of his goodness. In the ideal, kindness is the sun; and Gwynplaine dazzled Dea." Gwynplaine adores her. "One nest and two birds -- that was their story."

This pair is so closely associated that when one half seems to have vanished, the other half wills itself to death. Gwynplaine goes missing, Dea falls into a delirium. "Father," she says weakly to the misanthrope who adopted them both, "look here; when two beings have always been together from infancy, their state should not be disturbed, or death must come, and it cannot be otherwise. I love you all the same, but I feel that I am no longer altogether with you, although I am as yet not altogether with him." There is a vacuum between these two matching halves and she is rushing into it.

Gwynplaine returns from his adventure and and finds her at the brink of death. He begs her to live but she is too far gone. "You will hardly believe that I have just explored the whole of life in a few hours!" he says. "I have found out one thing -- that there is nothing in it! You exist! if you did not, the universe would have no meaning. Stay with me! Have pity on me! Since you love me, live on!" She does not. "She folded her thumbs within her fingers -- a sign that her last moments were approaching." "Come to me as soon as you can," she says, "I shall be very unhappy without you, even in heaven." Then "she expired. She fell back rigid and motionless on the mattress." Gwynplaine cries "I come" and walks off the desk of a ship into the water, where he drowns: "the void was before him; he strode into it." Everything is voids and meetings with Hugo, plurals and singulars, either two words or ideas clashing together -- "His head lived, his face was dead" -- or one grand solid declaration of unity: "Gwynplaine was the religion of Dea." He goes from a pair of cymbals to a drum.

It was the upper classes who abducted Gwynplaine, doing it for their own purposes, without knowing that Dea was in love with him, or caring, or even suspecting that this love existed. They kill her, with her collusion. All the suctioning force of her love, which drags her into her death, has no power over the disproportionate strength of the aristocracy, which can carry a character away whenever it likes. The void in this book is not only between Gwynplaine and Dea when he leaves, it is also the gap between the poor and the rich, the untitled and the aristocrats, those who have houses and those who travel in a caravan, and the author isolates this gap, describes this gap, with his abysses and zeniths (or whatever French words the translator is translating; I'm taking it for granted that the meaning is intact) and occupying the gap is what? -- is him, Victor Hugo -- he is the filling in this sandwich, staring at both sides, he holds it together. He grapples it with the hooks of his prose. He talks about the power of a "will." (Ruskin in his autobiography grumbles about those French who can't get their minds off "gloire.") And the inequality being reported here in the US is the reporting of a vacuum -- a vacuum is an imbalance, too much over here, too little over there, that's a vacuum -- which nature abhors, and not only nature in its atomic, vegetable, and animal aspect, but human nature. Any move to fill that vacuum has the character of a necessary force.

* I wanted to branch off and start talking about alien species here, but the digression was getting unwieldy.

The person who translated Hugo is anonymous. The Blanchot quote comes from his his book of essays, Faux Pas, translated by Charlotte Mandell.

Here is someone else's footage of the New York New York roller coaster ride. The screaming that starts at about .50 is audible from the road. This is the video of the people on the balcony.

"Upper classes" in the last paragraph refers to certain aristocrat-characters and their immediate friend-underlings who are not aristocratic but still powerful.

overcome, in this particular area, as we are all overcome

2011-10-03T04:18:00.011+11:00

A week ago, or more than a week, I was waiting for a show to begin when I overheard one of the women behind me talking about "my last trip to Italy" and "my next trip to Italy" which had to include Venice, she said, because Venetian architecture was interesting. She had seen the architecture in Rome, and it was interesting and she had seen the architecture in Turin and it was interesting and in fact the architecture in all of Italy was interesting, and there was one place which was not only interesting but clean, "no trash, no graffiti," but I didn't catch the name of that town, wherever it was.

Interesting was the word she liked, and she used it so often that I wondered what she saw or felt when she said it, and what was being subdued into that concertina packed with folds -- the compacted instrument called Interesting -- on one fold the Colosseum, on another fold the Pantheon, on another fold a dome, a tower, a flight of doves (and "craftsmanship" suggests ZMKC), and on other folds the architecture she expected to see in Venice, all the architecture she had heard about, cool walls, archways, canals, an effusion of statues -- Alexander Herzen's "magnificent absurdity" -- "To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself; but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of a genius," he wrote, and then he went on and called the Venetians "eccentric:" "There is no earth, there are no trees, what does it matter?" he imagined them saying, "Let us have still more carved stones, more ornaments, gold mosaics, sculptures, pictures and frescoes. Here an empty corner has been left; into the corner with a thin sea-god with a long, wet beard! Here is another empty recess, put in another lion with wings and a gospel of Saint Mark! There it is bare and empty; put down a carpet of marble and mosaic! and here, lacework of porphyry!" -- a frame of mind the woman must have seen before because it was incarnate only a short way away on Las Vegas Boulevard, a street that anyone could describe with an echo of Herzen: There is no river, we are in a desert, what does it matter? Let us have a lake, a fountain, a canal, a waterfall! Let us have still more gilt statues, more magicians, more lights! There it is bare and empty; erect the Sphinx, the Statue of Liberty, and the Eiffel Tower!

But the audience is the pivot of a difference: the Venetians lived in their decorated city and enjoyed it proudly, but the decoration in Las Vegas is all in one area, and it is not for the residents, it is not theirs, they do not live in that area, and nobody minds whether they enjoy it or not. The statues and waterfalls are meant for tourists, who have no reason to judge the street with love or sympathy; they can go home. If we could get the decorative frame of mind out into the suburbs then this city would look like the Butterfly Club and the Palais Idéal, and people would feel absolutely eminent --

Around all of Vegas the mountains stand, bare, brown, wrinkled, and beyond that, if you're high enough, you can see the long stripped plain of the desert, a hot death; and Venice is approached by by a plain, a river, and a dusty road, wrote Ruskin in 1851; and if you leave Las Vegas and climb one of the mountains then you will see the city in the sunlit valley like a scatter of glitter, or if you approach at night then this massy airy upshot light of the Luxor rises out of the desert behind a confetti of smaller lights, or if you stand in one of the suburbs then you might not see the casinos at all, only townhouses among stones, or the public library where a huge man comes out of his small bashed white caravan every morning and walks away with his dreadlocks tapping at his ears.

As you come into Venice on your boat, writes Ruskin, you will find yourself with nothing grand in sight, only "dismal arches," and "low and confused brick buildings, which, but for the many towers which are mingled among them, might be the suburbs of an English manufacturing town." This is probably not the interesting architecture that the woman sitting behind me expects to see, these areas are not the Venice she imagines, and yet they are Venice, they are not anywhere other than Venice; they are the stair in the children's poem that can only be described by very simple references to the places where it's not: not at the bottom, not at the top, "It isn't in the nursery / It isn't in the town … It isn't really anywhere / It's somewhere else instead," a place like an English manufacturing town, but not quite, or like a towered region, but not quite.

"Ruskin's was a great and scrupulous mind," writes Geoffrey Hill. The scrupulous mind opens his Stones of Venice by telling the reader that he has not trusted other sources blindly but wherever he mentions a measurement in the book it will be a measurement he has taken himself. However they must excuse him, for he did not travel incorporeally and in his imagination, as they are about to travel while they are inside his book, no, he went with a real body in space and time, a nonideal method which comes with restrictions. Sometimes he couldn't get close enough to see a thing; always his understanding was not as adequate as he would have chosen if he'd had a choice. "Life is not long enough; nor does a day pass by without causing me to feel more bitterly the impossibility of carrying out to the extent which I should desire, the separate studies which general criticism continually forces me to undertake," a fret he has already brought up in his journal:

Several times about the same time on Sunday morning, a fit of self-reproach has come upon me for my idling style of occupation at present, and I have formed a resolution to be always trying to get knowledge of some kind or other, or bodily strength, or some real available, continuing, good, rather than mere amusement of the time.

(June 6th 1841)

The character of the Stones has been won from the struggle of its author: he searches for the right description, the right idea, he draws comparisons, but the further he travels into the comparisons the less accurate they seem to him, and the more adjustments he needs to make, and the more he refines the more he needs to refine, the more he sees the more he finds himself seeing. The row of "dismal arches" is noted, and then his eye carries on like the eye of a picture and sees the end of the row, where the brick buildings begin, and the "line" of these buildings needs to be described; it is "straggling." Then there are "four or five domes" rising over that straggling line, and they are "pale" but "the object which first catches the eye" is not those pale domes, it is "a sullen cloud of black smoke" which broods in the air over the straggle -- not over the whole line indiscriminately, he observes, but over a specific area, "the northern half of it." The black smoke has a source, and his eye finds that too; it is "the belfry of a church." Now finally he relaxes into a simple pronouncement: "It is Venice."

It is his scrupulous nature that compels him to write down this string of words: straggling had to be there because line was there and line had to be there because the brick buildings were there, and each one cried out for its due, and then a movement had to be worked out, from one end of the line to the other, and from pale to black. "Style is not simply the manner in which a writer 'says what he has to say,'" states Hill, "it is also the manner of his choosing not to say." Ruskin would rather choose to say, than not choose, but his own humanity obstructs him -- or so I imagine when I read -- he would like to be superhuman -- "I wish Vesuvius," he writes in his diary, "could love me ..."

That sentence, It is Venice, is not meant to sum up the city or act as a conclusion or a final resting place, it is only a pause, a musical beat, a moment of introduction -- see -- he is going to go on explaining Venice for the length of another two books, and by the end of volume three he is still finding new topics. The last chapter before the one called Conclusion is a digression into a subject he labels "Grotesque Renaissance," and in order to discuss the Grotesque Renaissance he discovers that he has to mention a number of disparate things, the poetry of Samuel Rogers, for example, and cottages in Scotland, "the instinct of playfulness" (in four subsections), the "destructive phenomena of the universe," the greatness of nations, Divine beauty, Flemish streets, Biblical Evangelists, the differences between species of dream, and the Inferno of Dante. The "It" in "It is Venice" is not Venice. It is only the euphoric impression that comes to you before you realise that Venice is impossibly complicated. (False mastery followed by apprenticeship; life is an agony of ignorance for the scrupulous.) A description of the Ducal Palace alone takes up nearly a hundred pages of volume two. There is so much ground to cover that the author shortens his observations into lists --

LXVII. First Capital: i.e. of the pilaster at the Vine angle.

In front, towards the Sea. A child holding a bird before him, with its wings expanded, covering his breast.

On its eastern side. Children’s heads among leaves.

On its western side. A child carrying in one hand a comb; in the other, a pair of scissors.

-- which recur for pages.

LXXVII. Eighth Capital. It has no inscriptions, and its subjects are not, by themselves, intelligible; but they appear to be typical of the degradation of human instincts.

First side. A caricature of Arion on his dolphin; he wears a cap ending in a long proboscis-like horn, and plays a violin with a curious twitch of the bow and wag of the head, very graphically expressed, but still without anything approaching to the power of Northern grotesque. His dolphin has a goodly row of teeth, and the waves beat over his back.

Second side. A human figure, with curly hair and the legs of a bear; the paws laid, with great sculptural skill, upon the foliage. It plays a violin, shaped like a guitar, with a bent double-stringed bow.

Third side. A figure with a serpent’s tail and a monstrous head, founded on a Negro type, hollow-cheeked, large-lipped, and wearing a cap made of a serpent’s skin, holding a fir-cone in its hand.

Fourth side. A monstrous figure, terminating below in a tortoise. It is devouring a gourd, which it grasps greedily with both hands; it wears a cap ending in a hoofed leg.

Fifth side. A centaur wearing a crested helmet, and holding a curved sword.

Sixth side. A knight, riding a headless horse, and wearing chain armor, with a triangular shield flung behind his back, and a two-edged sword.

Seventh side. A figure like that on the fifth, wearing a 337 round helmet, and with the legs and tail of a horse. He bears a long mace with a top like a fir-cone.

Eighth side. A figure with curly hair, and an acorn in its hand, ending below in a fish.

He perseveres, he iterates, but the reader knows that it all feels inadequate to him for he says elsewhere in the book, "The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect; it is not going too far to say, that it is most influenced by what it detects least … Indeed there is nothing truly noble either in colour or in form, but its power depends on circumstances infinitely too intimate to be explained, and almost too subtle to be traced." So Venice can't be compassed with lists, or with physical description, or with historical description, or with any description ("too intimate to be explained"), the Ducal Palace is a Questing Beast and he is a Pellinore, chasing it in rings around its columns. His intelligence introduces him to this idea; his intelligence shows him the impossibility; we can all say the word immortality but we are all mortal.

And there are more possibilities. Earlier he saw a piece of work that struck him the wrong way and there his tone changed and he became sarcastic: "The whole monument is one wearisome aggregation of that species of ornamental flourish, which, when it is done with a pen is called penmanship, and when it is done with a chisel should be called chiselmanship, the subject of it being chiefly fat-limbed boys sprawling on dolphins, dolphins incapable of swimming, and dragged along the sea by expanded pocket-handkerchiefs." If he had hated Venice instead of loving it then the tone of all three volumes might have been like that, the Venice of the Stones of Venice would have been a different Venice, because here, although there's no sign that he saw it as he was writing, was a doorway to another Venice, which only sticks its head out of his book now and then, a Venice despised by John Ruskin, hidden usually behind the Venice he respected, and behind that Venice another Venice, to which he is indifferent, and behind that Venice another Venice, which he never visited, and behind that Venice another one, to which he migrated permanently after marrying an Italian woman, and behind that Venice another Venice, where his mother died of food poisoning -- all of these are fantasies now -- and behind that Venice another one where the duty of tourism exhausted him until he didn't want to write the word Venice ever again, and behind that Venice another one, le città invisibili, explains Italo Calvino.

These three volumes are the record of a fight against the despair that has occurred to a conscientious human being who recognises infinity, and Ruskin finds his rest in two places, the idea of Art and the idea of God. He seems most sure of himself when he is sensing the sublime. Geoffrey Hill, who is thinking of a sentence in Unto This Last, writes sympathetically: "He is overcome, in this particular area, as we are all overcome at some time or another in our particular areas of discourse, by a kind of neutral, or indifferent, or disinterested force in the nature of language itself: a force that Coleridge describes incomparably well in the sudden blaze of a sentence at the beginning of Aids to Reflection: 'For if words are not THINGS they are LIVING POWERS, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and humanized.'"

The woman behind me sounded confident in her single word, she didn't pause or apologise (Ezra Pound said that his great-aunt-in-law used "beautiful" all over Europe but apologised) -- she was happy -- she sounded happy -- she sounded happier with her one word than Ruskin sounded with his three volumes -- she had found a word through which the "disinterested force in the nature of language itself" could be ducked or defeated or ignored (something in her had felt infinity approaching and defended itself with Interesting) -- she had short-circuited struggle -- and then the musician arrived.*

* A Senegalese guitarist named King Ibu. He sounds something like Habib Koité (he pointed this out himself, and it's true). The Herzen excerpt comes from the end of My Life and Thoughts. Constance Garnett translated. Ruskin wished that Vesuvius could love him on April 20th, 1841. "I wish Vesuvius could love me, like a living thing; I would rather make a friend of him than of any morsel of humanity." I was reading Geoffrey Hill's Collected Critical Writings. I found the Pound quote in Hill's book, and then I looked it up online and found it again on Google Books in Pound's Pavannes and Divagations: "she consented to admit that the one adjective, beautiful, was not universally applicable to all European phenomena ... but continued to use it with apologies." The "children's poem" is Halfway Down by A.A. Milne.

The Butterfly Club is a cabaret saloon in South Melbourne.

Later: A post about Ada Cambridge at the Whispering Gums blog sent me away after her poems, and it looks as if she wrote about Venice too:

Numb, half asleep, and dazed with whirl of wheels,
And gasp of steam, and measured clank of chains,
I heard a blithe voice break a sudden pause,
Ringing familiarly through the lamp-lit night,
“Wife, here's your Venice!”

the fastidious blocked cleric

2011-09-22T06:07:00.004+10:00

Ideas about trapping and being trapped were still in my head when I opened Kathryn Hughes' 1999 biography of George Eliot and saw from a sentence at the start of the Acknowledgments that she had been trapped too, in the book in fact, for, "Several times," she says, "during the writing of this book I feared that I had turned into Edward Casaubon, the fastidious blocked cleric from Middlemarch who has been working for far too long on the 'Key to all Mythologies.'"

Casaubon is the patron saint of all trapped writers, he huddles fussing over notes, he frets, he is stymied, he refuses help, he ruins his life, he dies before his work is finished, and even if it had been finished it would have been worthless. He married himself to his book, Hughes married herself to George Eliot, and the woman in Kate Jennings' book (the one I was reading in the last post) married a farmer, but after a while all of them realised that their decision was a confinement and they did not know when their confinement would end -- they were closed in, the job was endless, the marriage was going on and on, and why was this happening, bafflement, anguish: what's at the root of this suffering?

You are, says a voice (I am imagining this voice), and the sufferer responds -- Me? The voice reminds them that they entered the confinement freely, they walked in unrestrained, they said silently, "Yes," to the book or the marriage, and maybe they added out loud, "I know, I know, I understand that this is going to take some time out of my life, but I can handle it, I don't mind doing work, in fact I'm looking forward to the job," and the spirit of Writing or Marriage leapt through them, offering to drive them forward like a bullet, keen and concentrated, and they were beautifully glad, huge, and rapt, not thinking clearly, because the thousand impressions and memories that made up this impulse were flowing through them, as if the words Marriage or Book were a switch, and, click, they came on.

But somehow they've been deserted, the bullet has cracked, the clarity is gone, the world is a mist of fiddling details, and which detail needs your attention first, which one is the Key, not to all Mythologies, but to freedom and an answer? This isn't what I agreed to, says the sufferer, looking around. Oh, says the voice, it is. I said yes to a different set of circumstances. I was heading for work and purpose. Oh no no no, says the voice. Oh no. What made you think you knew how to get there? You'd never been to that point in the future before.

There is no prescience, there is no guarantee, and when they pictured themselves studying fruitfully -- and in that spirit said, "Yes, I want the job" -- they were not agreeing to future circumstances but to present delusions, which they didn't recognise at the time but now they do, now that it is too late, and oh, they say, I have learnt something, I suppose, I have learnt the route to the place where I am, and, looking back with their minds, they see the map lying crookedly behind them, a path passing through a hundred tiny decisions and circumstances until it runs to a temporary halt at the backs of their heels -- but it is moving again, and the next step has already been taken.

Forward, forward, says the world to the sufferer, persevere with the mist or else run away into a new mist, as Jennings' wife does, and Casaubon runs away too, accidentally, by dying on a bench under a tree, and his soul, once freed, begins to release his own wife, Dorothea, from her version of this trapping confinement, the marriage that she went into eagerly, gratefully, thinking that she would spend the rest of her life accepting wisdom from a wise and thoughtful man, "the fellowship in high knowledge which was to make life worthier," but she learns her most relevant lesson in less than a year, Dorothea, you are capable of mistaking a pedant for a sage.

"I do," she said at the altar, and not to this but yet to this. Her wise man does not exist, or maybe he does somewhere else but not in her husband, who houses a different spirit to the one she imagined -- a cold, extinguished spirit; and he houses it so fully that he becomes something very rare, a totemic figure, the name Casaubon representing a particular kind of failure, a writer's failure, the failure of misconceived grand projects,* especially of projects that want to be definitive -- but these are projects that need energy, and courage, and elderly Casaubon has no energy left, down, down he goes, he sees death ahead of him, and fearfully he grows even more stiff, hurt, and frozen, feeling challenged by his eager wife, who, he thinks, "sees vaguely a great many fine ends, and has not the least notion what it costs to reach them." He is angry. "For the first time since Dorothea had known him, Mr. Casaubon's face had a quick angry flush upon it." What has she done? She has asked him when he is going to finish his book.

"My love," he said, with irritation reined in by propriety, "you may rely upon me for knowing the times and the seasons, adapted to the different stages of a work which is not to be measured by the facile conjectures of ignorant onlookers."

He shows more passion when he's defending his failure than he does when he's writing the book. The prospect of living with a pedant has replaced the prospect of living with a wise man and Dorothea sees that she will live out this prospect now second by second until her married life ends.

Her predicament is like a punishment, but a punishment for what? What would convince the authorities to let her go? The problem would be solved if she could go back in time and choose again with a different and wiser understanding, -- "Now that I know, I won't marry him," she might say, standing there in the past with her head full of the future, which is now, for her, also the past, because she is remembering it -- she is recalling the horror of the marriage that she will never have.

Instead the author pushes her forward and makes her suffer in linear time like a living person, which feels inevitable but it isn't, not in a book. Eliot could demolish the marriage in a minute if it suited her. She could have planted the crucial piece of knowledge in Dorothea's head before the wedding, and killed the union before it began. She's the author, she can reach in and change anything she likes. She doesn't have to mimic realism. Dickens gave Oliver Twist perfect diction.

But there is a lesson in Middlemarch, and the substance of the lesson is not unique to Eliot: "Nothing ever becomes real till we have experienced it," Keats had written in a letter to a friend fifty years earlier. "Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it." Eliot wants her character to learn. Didn't the other characters warn her about Casaubon before she married him? They did, but Dorothea had to see for herself before she saw. Months had to pass before she learnt. By the time her husband asks her to swear that she will devote herself to his hopeless book she has achieved wariness, she restrains impetuosity, she sees another trap approaching, and she won't say yes or no: "I think it is not right," she answers, "to make a promise when I am ignorant what it will bind me to." ("Then," he might say, "you will never promise anything. We are all ignorant.")

Linear time is not only a convention of the novel here, it is a teaching tool in the book's interior world. Eliot makes the substance of Middlemarch into a demonstration of a principle, and, since the book is a thick thing that takes a while to read, Dorothea isn't the only one heading into a prolonged experience, we are too, and of course the experience was even more prolonged for the author, who may have been teaching herself as she wrote -- in fact it seems impossible not to imagine that she was, because where else does this drive of hers come from but discovery -- not from duty to the readers but from duty to herself, her own urges -- she creates time for Dorothea so that she can waste it for her own benefit -- (torture, stated Victor Hugo once, teaches us how to make our statues seem alive) -- and once that thought is established then the reading public starts to seem incidental to the whole project, which becomes the spectacle of Eliot presenting, to herself, an experience she'd never had -- unhappy marriage -- an unhappiness that she did not suffer with George Henry Lewes, a man, says Kathryn Hughes, who looked like an orangutan or a dog, but with whom the writer lived on "mutually sustaining" terms; he was an author himself, and one of his books was titled, The Principles of Success in Literature.

* Read the comments at the end of this post if you want to see his reputation in action. "I think dissertation-writing makes most people feel a bit Casaubon-y. Heaps of scattered notes and still more to read ..."

Hughes' biography is called George Eliot: the Last Victorian. A few days after I made this post she published an article about Bleak House in the Guardian. "I think it's Dickens's best book," she says. Victor Hugo mentions torture and statues in L'Homme qui rit, which is usually translated as The Man Who Laughs, but the version I found it in was called The Laughing Man.

They knew how to produce things in those days which are not produced now; they had talents which we lack, and it is not without reason that some good folk cry out that the decline has come. We no longer know how to sculpture living human flesh; this is consequent on the loss of the art of torture. Men were once virtuosi in that respect, but are so no longer; the art has become so simplified that it will soon disappear altogether. In cutting the limbs of living men, in opening their bellies and in dragging out their entrails, phenomena were grasped on the moment and discoveries made. We are obliged to renounce these experiments now, and are thus deprived of the progress which surgery made by aid of the executioner.

there was no other amusement but to look

2011-09-16T10:24:00.008+10:00

There's a five-floor building near here, walls in three directions made almost completely out of glass, with solid struts and sections, but mainly glass -- and a storm swept across the valley toward this building last Sunday as I was sitting on the fourth floor reading Tim Robinson's Connemara, which is a record of everything around the coastal area of Ireland where he lives -- and it's a rainy place, Ireland, he suggested, as a vertical sheet of water moved across the Strip and ate the golden casinos as it came, everything vanishing; the pink mountains disappeared behind this curtain and came back later blue with cold.

There was a stand of trees outside the window of the building, and, as the rain closed in, the distance from the building to the trees became the visible world for me, each leaf turned brilliant, outlined in a darker green and standing out staring like an asparagus tip, or monumental graven image. Robinson in my hand was quoting Thackeray, who was caught in Connemara rain about one hundred and seventy years ago and found shelter with a family by a lake. "When the gentlemen had finished their repast, the boatmen and the family set to work upon the ton of potatoes, a number of the remaining fish, and a store of other good things; then we all sat round the turf-fire in the dark cottage, the rain coming down steadily outside and veiling everything except the shrubs and verdure immediately about the cottage."

And "there was no other amusement but to look at the rain," wrote Thackeray, but the lit place ahead of me was full of detail and I was transfixed, see, the flag on its pole blew one way and then turned and blew the other way, kicking up against the rain, a woman ran across a carpark with papers under her arm, and the flower bushes below whipped their heads not quite in unison but differently, depending on their constitution, lightness, and structure -- meanwhile others too, came away from their desks to watch the rain.

Thackeray had objects to look at inside the cottage and he noted them, the "herd, the herd's wife, and a nondescript female friend, two healthy young herdsmen in corduroy rags, the herdsman's daughter paddling about with bare feet, a stout black-eyed wench with her gown over her head and a red petticoat not quite so good as new, the two boatmen, a badger just killed and turned inside out, the gentlemen, some hens cackling and flapping about among the rafters, a calf in a corner cropping green meat and occasionally visited by the cow her mamma." Yet he was bored, but show me a badger inside out and I will be interested in it, I think.* And Xavier de Maistre would have found something more to do with those objects than just put them in a list, this man whose Journey Round My Room I'd read in the same building only a day earlier, when the sky was still regular, and the clouds were white and clean. De Maistre was confined to his room for six weeks, house arrest after an illegal duel in approximately 1790, and he wrote this shorter Tristram Shandyish book about it, a whole book of diversions, taking the features of his room for starting points and flowing off from there, so that the sight of his manservant bringing him breakfast leads to thoughts on the character of the manservant, and a layer of dust on a portrait of his mistress leads him to thoughts about loving her, and the feel of his bed leads to thoughts about the nature of a bed, "the ever-changing theatre where the human species enacts, by turns, engaging dramas, ridiculous farces, and horrible tragedies," and those thoughts lead to other thoughts, until his prison is a fountain of thought.

After Journey I read Kate Jennings' Snake, in which one of the characters is trapped on a farm by her marriage to a farmer, and when I set this against de Maistre's book I wondered if you could say that a definite period of confinement from which someone else will free you is better for the human brain than an indefinite period of confinement from which you have to work out how to free yourself, if you're going to be free -- because de Maistre's tone is happy and confiding, like Sterne's in Shandy, while Jennings' character is distracted and miserable, fretful, isolated, and spiky, but, I said to myself, I can't draw a conclusion from only two books. The idea feels right, but that isn't enough; history tells me that it isn't enough; the idea that the earth was flat felt right once too, and Sir Thomas Browne in the 1600s is in despair over people who believe that a root vegetable has a personality like a human being because it can split and grow in tines and look as if it has legs, "a bifurcation or division of the Root into two parts, which some are content to call Thighs" -- as if the parsnip is another race of human being, or else a sub-group of mythical creature, a botanical fairy. "Many mola's," he writes, "and false conceptions there are of Mandrakes, the first from great Antiquity, conceiveth the Root thereof resembleth the shape of Man; which is a conceit not to be made out by ordinary inspection, or any other eyes, then such as regarding the Clouds, behold them in shapes conformable to pre-apprehensions." (The clouds coming across the Strip had disintegrated into Waterfall. The World was Cloud.)

Later I opened a book of essays onto a poem about another farmer's wife, one who feels trapped even more firmly then the wife in Jennings -- her husband comes in and finds her sitting at the piano, not playing the instrument but sitting like a fern. Then a cow eats too much sweet clover and the farmer punctures it with an ice pick, and we can see parallels between the woman and the cow; the man is not cruel, not stupid, but he deflates her life through the natural processes of his animal husbandry. Jennings' woman makes a break for it but the fern-wife never does, her imprisonment is perpetual, de Maistre runs past her and away to Russia where he is wounded in the Caucasus and marries a Mrs Zagriatsky who is related to the Tsars. Later he comes back to the room in Turin where he was imprisoned and discovers that everything has changed, years have passed, the room is transformed. If Kate Jennings' woman had ever come back to the farm she would have discovered a change as well: her husband went out (feeling miserable and desperate now too, but a different misery to hers) and bought a herd of pigs, and the pigs ate her garden, the hydrangeas, gone, geraniums gone, all the green bystanders, vegetable creatures that did nothing, offended nobody without help, simple as the Mandrake ...

On his return de Maistre tries to tour the room for a second time in Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room, but the new book starts off flatly, weakly, struggling, the old fluid tone gone rusty and slow like Sam's when he returns from Malaya, and for a while I thought de Maistre was going to fail -- he was an author trying to imitate another author who was the author he used to be; he was trying to write himself back into himself, but this is impossible, as Proust in the future would have reminded him, the same water won't come twice out of the well (or put it this way: he wants the power his old self had, which was the power of fluid writing, he wants to ambush his old self and take it back), and he finally starts to have success when he abandons the room and hangs out of the window. The moon is up, the stars are out -- he gives us his theory of the universe, which takes an entire chapter that runs for three lines, and then there is a longer chapter explaining that he doesn't know what the theory means but he's proud of its brevity and "the indulgent reader will also note that it was composed, in its entirety, atop a ladder." After that he tries to both look and not-look at a woman on a different floor who is putting her foot in a slipper, and the old tone is back; he had to get away from his old self to write like himself again.

He can't recreate the pleasure of his entrapment but nonentrapment turns out to be a new pleasure. The author has a problem, a creaky start, he seems to detect it, he searches for a solution to his problem, he perseveres, he abandons the strictly interior environment of his first book, he goes to a fresh place, the windowsill -- and his problem is solved.

And me here in Las Vegas, I was trapped by the summer heat, then the rain came, and when I went outside it was cool, it was fresh, and I thought that I could walk a mile now without sweating, and everything seemed solved -- I experienced freedom as a temperature.

* or not bored but once he's put those phenomena in a list he's finished with them. A spirit of purity fills him, he turns away from the plural world, and watches the rain.

Both of de Maistre's books were translated by Stephen Sartarelli. Robinson was quoting from Thackeray's Irish Sketch-book and the Browne quote comes from Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors.

of the world rather than imitation

2011-09-11T01:45:00.005+10:00

If sleep disintegrates us then the waking human being is a magnet that flings the particles back together. We must be magnets. Proust thought about us going down into sleep, becoming something that was not our dayish selves, being disintegrated, metaphorical, and yet coming up every morning as us again, and not a stranger, not someone else, the fragments reassembling themselves: a "great mystery of annihilation and resurrection," translated Moncrieff. "Habit is the ballast that chains a dog to his vomit," Samuel Beckett wrote.*

All fragments, fragments: the sorting-out of daytime observations at night, the open-eyed hoovering-up of detail during the day, an automatic sunlit occupation, widespread and massive; and so I felt uneasy while I was watching my first 3D movie because the backgrounds blurred out when the 3D objects came forward, and it was as if the filmmaker had told me that that now I had to watch the story through a telescope, with everything obliterated outside a little piercing focussed circle. The eye was not supposed to roam. But eyes want to roam, and the senses fly like eagles, picking up details -- in The Man Who Loved Children we have the peaceful dip of an oar and the cry of a bird going on while the fighting parents pause to catch their breaths: "Exquisite were those moments," even though Sam is "biting his lip in stern scorn" and preparing to shout at his wife who hates him. Still, the bird is crying, and a stranger is rowing unobtrusively down the river, on what mission who knows?

The eye of the author roams outwards, it points to the Pollits but it nests in the trees and rivers, and this fighting, it might say, is part of nature, as water is, as is the kingfisher, and this balance of angry and relaxed forces is "exquisite." Here is a jungle of possible viewpoints. The rower might be able to hear the shouting faintly from the boat, they might be having thoughts about it. The bird might have paid attention briefly, just long enough to work out that these alien noises aren't connected to any other edible or dangerous animal, so never mind, thinks the bird; this ra-ra-ra is irrelevant, and other sounds crowd into its attention, the hum of a beetle, the plash of a fish.

All of this is detail.

So: at the outdoor Maryland Parkway Music Festival last weekend I looked over the shoulder of one of the guitarists, who was chopping at his instrument, and there, crossing the intersection behind him, I noticed the figure of a woman, pale, remote, removed, carrying a shopping bag, moving at a pace of her own, which was the interested pace of a woman who wanted to a buy a carton of milk, and not the pace of the man over whose shoulder she flew now like a distant evangelical spirit.

What did we look like to her? What did she look like to someone walking behind her? (This is one of the good things about living in a reasonably safe place; I don't have to narrow my answer down to, "probably they see a victim," or "probably they see a rich person they want to rob." Maybe they do see those things but I can imagine others.)

The lead singer for the Neo-Kalashnikovs was wearing purple shoes, and the lead singer of the band that came afterwards was wearing purple shoes as well, but hers were dark leather-looking snub-toed shoes like plums with heels, and his were canvas sneakers in a lighter colour, and what do I make out of that? Nothing, it's a fact, and there it sits, and I don't see any evangelical spirits in it, I can't force them in there, but it's a fact, as surely as the woman over the guitarist's shoulder was a fact ...

But the brain tries, I think, automatically, the brain wants to draw together and connect and make conclusions, even incongruous ones, for example: I was reading an essay about J.S. Powers in James Wood's The Irresponsible Self: Laughter and the Novel, when I came across this part of a sentence, "love of the world rather than imitation of Christ"and without hesitation my mind showed me a picture of M.'s Level 85 Troll Priest in World of Warcraft. It was brilliant and sharp, not a vague picture, no pauses -- it appeared. I thought that was wonderful until I read on and saw that the word "priest" was on the next line under "than" and then there were the words, "a conscientious objector in the Second World War," and I realised that I must have pulled out the words "priest" "world" and "war" without consciously seeing them, and my mind had concluded, priest, world of warcraft, and given me a picture.

But I was not confused, and not for one instant did I think that the essay had switched topics to World of Warcraft. I was sure that the subject was still J.S. Powers. Yet when the picture appeared it did not seem immediately weird that I was seeing this troll, it seemed natural and normal, as these strange contrasts do in dreams, oh yes, American novelists, troll priests, everything sane here, but then I began to wonder what was going on.

My eyes must have scanned ahead, taking in a block of words rather than just the ones it was passing over, the ones I was consciously reading -- my eyes must have been rolling around like balls in a bathtub, taking in the lines below, and understanding them just enough to prepare me for the operation of reading them, taking a tour of the future on their own, without me, covertly, in a sneaky but businesslike way, when this idea struck them, and they threw up the picture in a spasm of insight, a brainwave, mimicking a genius.

* in his essay on Proust.

we approached unto those monsters fleet

2011-09-05T05:15:00.007+10:00

Every night as Louie is going to sleep in The Man Who Loves Children she hears a horseman riding along the road outside, ker-porrop, ker-porrop, but after she has slept and woken and slept and woken and days and weeks have passed in the book she realises that these hoofbeats are really the blood throbbing in her head as she lies there in the dark.

Now she knows what the horseman is but she doesn't lose him, she doesn't dismiss him, "she still thought of him riding, though he was now only a phantom," and this is one of the signs Stead gives us that the girl is assimilating the forces around her -- her father's faith in the science of biology, and her mother's faith in magic and superstition -- forging those two influences into the steady selfish spar that will defend her against both of her parents. I've never read an idea like this anywhere else, this subtle and organic use of the confused borderland of sleep, a scene so strange and so natural, so natural because so strange (truth being stranger than fiction, this seems strange enough to be truth) -- so absurd and so likely -- that I think of Ruskin in Modern Painters, announcing that all of the valuable artists are the ones who feel compelled to chase after things they can see, or have seen, either in actuality or vividly in their imaginations, that their most characteristic and brilliant touches are "involving pieces of sudden familiarity and close specific painting which never would have been admitted or even thought of, had not the painter drawn either from bodily life or from the life of faith. For instance, Dante's centaur Chiron, dividing his beard with his arrow before he can speak, is a thing that no mortal would ever have thought of, if he had not seen the centaur do it. They might have composed handsome bodies of men and horses in all possible ways, through a whole life of pseudo-idealism, and yet never dreamed of any such thing.

But the real living centaur actually trotted across Dante's brain and he saw him do it."

After reading that it's natural to imagine that Louie lay in Christina Stead's brain hearing the horseman, possibly as no character ever before had heard the horseman, and Stead saw her do it. Because her mind was working she caught her in the act. Ruskin loves the idea of seeing; he values it so much that he gets agitated in his diary when, travelling in Italy, he believes he is not seeing well."I, with every faculty cultivated and directed to receive the impression of beauty, with every sensation and feeling raised ... was in a state of actual severe mental pain, because I could perceive materials of the highest mental pleasure about me, and could not receive it [ie, pleasure, happiness] from them."

(This is Proust territory, as are the sentences a line or two later: "I was tormented with vague desires of possessing all the beauty that I saw, of keeping every outline and colour in my mind, and pained at the knowledge that I must forget it all; that in a year or two I shall have no more of that landscape left about me than a confused impression of cupola and pine. The present glory is of no use to me; it hurts me from my fear of leaving it and losing it, and yet I know that were I to stay here it would soon cease to be beauty to me -- that it has ceased, already, to produce the impression and the delight. I believe the only part of a journey really enjoyable to be the first six weeks, when every feeling is fresh, and the dread of losing what we love is lost in the delirium of its possession." From The Diaries of John Ruskin 1835 - 1847.)

Chiron puts the arrow in his beard at this moment in the Inferno. Canto twelve:

Near we approached unto those monsters fleet;
  Chiron an arrow took, and with the notch
  Backward upon his jaws he put his beard.

After he had uncovered his great mouth,
  He said to his companions: "Are you ware
  That he behind moveth whate'er he touches?

Thus are not wont to do the feet of dead men."

(translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

This faith-in-observation over rhetoric and established literary protocol is Proust's strength too, I think, when he describes his narrator's dream about his grandmother, the natural dream-strangeness of that conversation he has with his dream-father, and, just as an aside, although Stead didn't like "dull Proust," I notice that she has Louie go down into sleep in the same way that the narrator comes up out of it, disintegrating into a string of words: "it was a horseman," Louie thinks, awake, "riding up and down and -- wampum, purple strings of shells, fimbriate horsemane shell and the ctenidium deep deep down in this dusty -- red --"

a formless and black mass which all of a sudden passed from the depth of night into a blaze

2011-09-03T03:27:00.012+10:00

When you left me at the end of the last post I was preparing to fall asleep, so I'll pick up there again and say that if Macbeth doth murder sleep then he's only doing what we should all want to do, because sleep murders us, it disintegrates us utterly for hours every day, and if a person came along and did the same thing then they would be our enemy, and we would do anything to stop them, and the government would wheel out its guns and the private householder would stay up all night with a pitchfork, but sleep, evil sleep!, sleep weasels its way into our lives when we're young, and so we think it's as natural as a parent, that's how early it arrives -- and we have no idea how much it hates us, and it's easy to deduce that it hates us, I mean, if I came into your house and knocked you unconscious for hours you wouldn't think I liked you.

What value do we have when we're asleep, I wonder, as I put down my Claire Tomalin; what am I about to do, going under like this in an irresistible submarine, and why not stay awake and find out more about Nellie Ternan, knowledge that might be useful one day, you never know -- a quiz -- ten million dollars -- some detail of Nell Ternan's life, and I whip it out and behold, I am rich, and then I contact Powell's and ask if they still have that copy of Holbrook Jackson's Anatomy of Bibliomania with the blue hardback cover and the margin notes. I move to Tasmania and never see a desert again. Standing on Flamingo today, where it joins the Strip, I looked away down the road to the west and saw the bare scraped mountains with their drawn combed thighs standing up in the distance with the brooding silent meaningful stare of the Victorian Houses of Parliament at the top of Bourke Street, when you're standing in the arcade, by the Myer windows, right in the path of a tram, which is when you move, before they ding at you, and then run you over, and you lose a leg; you are not that toddler who fell under a lawnmower in Maryknoll a few days ago, there are no parents to comfort you -- you are an adult -- so now you lie there in the middle of Bourke Street ruining the view for others with your screaming and your pools of blood.

Proust wrote about sleep but how rare that is; books usually inhabit the waking part of life as though it is the only life we have, the only life the author has; they are not authors but waking authors and so perhaps somewhere there are sleeping authors who write the books we will never read. Ivan Goncharov pretends that he is dedicating a chapter to "Oblomov's Dream" but this only an author's dodge, no, Oblomov does not dream, he appears to fall asleep, "Sleep had cut off the slow, leisurely flow of his thoughts and carried him off in an instant," translates Stephen Pearl, but he is really awake in the past, remembering himself in childhood, his family home, his parents, his schooling, everything factual and blissful and sane. This is not a dream, it is a time machine, it is an author's manoeuvre. We know that the description we are reading is not a description of a dream because no dream is that long and that neat. Not even life is that neat. It only becomes that neat if memory and wishful thinking collaborate to neaten it.

Doctor Prunesquallor, at one point in Gormenghast, dreams about the other characters with such mysterious insight that we can guess he has merged partly with his creator and achieved a unique and godly perspective on the book that he himself inhabits. Otherwise he has merged with us, he looks back over the book with our eyes, and understands the experience of reading in a confused dream-way, in scraps, as we do when we sleep, and any book might seem like this to one of the characters if they dreamed back on it afterwards, just gestures and scenes, compressed and vivid, not necessarily connected; and in this dream the villain running across the earth is accompanied by a shadow made of rats. The rats never appeared in real life but they are a summary.

Some authors give their characters prophetic dreams, and Iris Murdoch makes a joke out of that idea in The Italian Girl when she has one character come in near the start of one chapter and then another chapter and then another, describing almost the same dream, which stars, I think, a ringing telephone. The normal reader, who recognises a trope when they see one, will probably decide at first that the author is foreshadowing, and maybe they will even take it seriously the second time, but by the third time it's starting to feel ridiculous, and by the forth time we are in the position of readers who are being asked to decide if these dreams are foreshadows as well as running gags, or if they are only running gags. So the dreams have become mysterious to us, but not in the way that a dream in a novel is usually, predictably mysterious. The mystery is usually, What Will This Prophecy Look Like When I See It Realised Concretely In The Plot? Cassandra comes on, the other characters fleer and scorn and the audience thinks wisely, "No, you should listen to her, you should pay attention" -- then the story continues, events occur, and the audience says, "I was right, fantastic, brownie points for me."

But once the serious atmosphere of prophecy has been destabilised by humour we've been pushed closer to the role of the other characters in the play, who feel, uneasily, that this is something too crazy to believe, and then what are we?

Proust is strong on the subject of dreams because he doesn't treat them like toys, like hammers for banging in plot-nails, as Goncharov does, or like jokes, although the dreams in Temps Perdu are both useful to the book, and also funny. He respects the strangeness of a dream and he can give you an idea of it in prose. There's a good example in Cities of the Plain, when the narrator dreams about his dead grandmother, and the grandmother in the dream is dead and alive at once, as she is to his brain, to his consciousness; he is used to thinking of her as a living being because she has been alive all his life but at the same time he knows she's dead, and these two pieces of information wrestle together as he sleeps.

In the dream he has decided that he is going to visit her but but his father tells him that he shouldn't try, "she is quite lifeless now," and yet, he adds, this person with no life would somehow suffer from headaches if her grandson asked her to think too hard -- therefore he mustn't go. She exists somewhere -- his father even offers him the address -- then he says, "I don’t suppose the nurse will allow you to see her." The son pleads. "You know quite well I shall always stay beside her," he says, "dear, deer, deer, Francis Jammes, fork," as he wakes, surfacing, the cloth of the dream coming apart and snagging up things here and there.

The argument between the father and the son is bizarre, it doesn't make external waking sense, but it makes total emotional-sense and dream-sense. His grandmother, exists, in emotion and memory, she is present in every dimension of his life except one -- but he can't reach her, thanks to this thing called death, which acts like an invisible wall or a series of magical excuses keeping them apart. His father has intercepted his desires before (we learnt in Swann's Way that he prefers not to let the narrator kiss his mother goodnight) so let him represent this standing-in-the-way being called Death. It is mad and it is absolute expressive sanity. It is the epitome of poetry, it is metaphorical.

Proust follows the narrator up out of the dream and describes him going through that migration, emerging from sleep like a man stepping off a plane in a foreign country and remembering the airport where he got on.

But already I had retraced the dark meanderings of the stream, had ascended to the surface where the world of living people opens, so that if I still repeated: “Francis Jammes, deer, deer,” the sequence of these words no longer offered me the limpid meaning and logic which they had expressed to me so naturally an instant earlier and which I could not now recall. I could not even understand why the word ‘Aias’ which my father had just said to me, had immediately signified: “Take care you don’t catch cold,” without any possible doubt.

He observes, and he has the patience to describe his observations, and translate them into the language of fiction (he must have adapted the tenor of his own dreams, and re-understood them into his character) and draw conclusions and even make the sad situation droll; he brings science and philosophy into his book, and the whole work is a kind of compendium or hybrid, with its false-memoir, myth, analysis, theory, and philosophical deduction, its mixture of cartoon character-tags with deep character-depth, and also here a nod to his friend Francis Jammes, who was the poet he was visiting on that night in World War I when he came home in the dark with bomb-smashed spears of glass stuck to his hat. Céleste was frightened for him but he told her it was wonderful, his eyes were stars, and the sight of aeroplanes flying over Paris appeared later in Time Regained. "The city seemed a formless and black mass which all of a sudden passed from the depth of night into a blaze of light, and in the sky, where one after another, the aviators rose amidst the shrieking wail of the sirens while, with a slower movement, more insidious and therefore more alarming, for it made one think they were seeking an object still invisible but perhaps close to us, the searchlights swept unceasingly, scenting the enemy, encircling him with their beams until the instant when the pointed planes flashed like arrows in his wake. And in squadron after squadron the aviators darted from the city into the sky like Walkyries."

Strange thing. Hours after I'd posted this I was reading André Gide's North African Journals when one of Gide's friends appeared in Biskra, and it was Francis Jammes. "I was waiting for Jammes with delicious impatience."

Jammes gives me his cane. It is made of ironwood and comes from the "Islands." It delights the children here because the handle is a greyhound's head: it is polished like jade, and yet so crude that it seems to be whittled. I've never seen anything so odd. Down the shaft, there are verses in capital letters, including these:

A squirrel had a
rose in its teeth, a donkey
called him crazy.

And these, which he used to put at the top of all his letters:

A bee sleeps
in the thickets of my heart.

(translated by Richard Howard)

founded on the celebrated papers

2011-08-29T06:13:00.020+10:00

As I was writing about personal book lists in the last post I thought of Philip Pullman, who put a list of his own together for the British book chain Waterstones -- they've had a couple of them but Pullman's was the one I remembered because he had Anatomy of Melancholy on there, and I'd been thinking about the Anatomy of Melancholy, as you know if you've read back a bit, which perhaps you haven't and instead you've been swimming, like Tim Winton, or working as the people up the road do, collecting cans and crushing them into sacks, repetitive work, but I'd rather crush cans with them than be one of the homeless men who sit in car parks with scavenged clothes and other goods set out on trestle tables; and no one envies these men because the heat out there is somewhere over forty degrees Celsius and has been at that approximate temperature for days.

They must be stiff with sweat these men, first sweating and then the sweat drying, and then sweating again over the dried sweat, and then sweating again, living in their geographical layers like those Elizabethans who never took more than one bath a year, and so we see them out there in the carparks, these men who live like Queen Elizabeth the First, though she did not have to deal with forty degree heat -- their problems are foreign to her, and yet there's no reason why they would not write poetry as she did.

O Fortune! how thy restless wavering State
     Hath fraught with Cares my troubled Wit!
Witness this present Prison whither Fate
     Hath borne me, and the Joys I quit.
Thou causedest the Guilty to be loosed
From Bands, wherewith are Innocents inclosed;
     Causing the Guiltless to be strait reserved,
     And freeing those that Death had well deserved:
But by her Envy can be nothing wrought,
So God send to my Foes all they have thought.

She wrote that verse in 1554 while she was kept prisoner in the Gatehouse at Woodstock Manor, and also three lines on a window --

Much suspected by me,
Nothing proved can be,
Quoth ELIZABETH prisoner.

-- engraving them into the glass with a diamond because ordinary writing materials were taken from her, but the homeless have no diamonds, nor do they have windows, and so you see how people are muffled by their poverty, yet she was ingenious to use a diamond and so why not they with other objects? She was not using a diamond, she was using a tool. Yesterday I passed a man who was selling a plastic candy jar three-quarters full of things that looked like doorknobs. There's something she never had. Modern life is a panorama of opportunities, and, as is often observed, the average First World individual lives more comfortably than those who used to call themselves queens and princes.

A Dickens would look at them and go away to write something like his description of the Monmouth Street secondhand clothes-dealers in Sketches by Boz (but adapting the place-names): "We have always entertained a particular attachment towards Monmouth-street [the local carpark], as the only true and real emporium for second-hand wearing apparel ... Through every alteration and every change, the local carpark has still remained the burial-place of the fashions; and such, to judge from all present appearances, it will remain until there are no more fashions to bury.

We love to walk among these extensive groves of the illustrious dead, and to indulge in the speculations to which they give rise; now fitting a deceased coat, then a dead pair of trousers, and anon the mortal remains of a gaudy waistcoat, upon some being of our own conjuring up, and endeavouring, from the shape and fashion of the garment itself, to bring its former owner before our mind’s eye. We have gone on speculating in this way, until whole rows of coats have started from their pegs, and buttoned up, of their own accord, round the waists of imaginary wearers; lines of trousers have jumped down to meet them; waistcoats have almost burst with anxiety to put themselves on; and half an acre of shoes have suddenly found feet to fit them, and gone stumping down the street with a noise which has fairly awakened us from our pleasant reverie, and driven us slowly away, with a bewildered stare, an object of astonishment to the good people of the local carpark, and of no slight suspicion to the policemen at the opposite street corner.

Then every reader would see animation pent up in those limp clothes and they would respect the homeless zookeepers who guard them, baking there for hours next to their scavenged radios, watching the denim that waits on the tables like hyaenas, preparing to inflate itself with ghostly flesh and race away snarling as soon as it can -- coats growing teeth and tusks, and jeans with dried salt across the backs of the thighs in layers like a million dead seas, those seabeds dropping fossils as they run .... or Elizabeth Jolley might write about these men but she would try to enclose them in a building first, because her people, though homeless and wandering in spirit, have usually been shut into some piece of property, an old age home, or a boarding house, or even their own farms, "running," writes Helen Garner, through all her books "is the strong connecting tissue of land, land, land: the obsession with the ownership of land, the toiling and the self-denial and the saving for it."

Which comes down to the bare problem of being in a body, because all bodies need to be somewhere, either farm or carpark, and the logistics of manoeuvering this thing around are a problem for us all: poor flesh.

But to get back to my point, I was reminded that the personal book-canon can be a lot of things, it can be a piece of advertising, and not only advertising for yourself but for other objects as well. In the case of Pullman and Waterstones it was advertising both a man and a book shop, with the author offered the chance to advertise his loves and the shop advertising its wares, which happen to be also his loves.

Advertising will grasp anything, it will take art movements, revolutions, jokes, dictatorships, calender dates, and events that have nothing to do with the objects being sold; but the brain of advertising has tentacles everywhere and sees a straight line where others see curves; it can't see surrealism but there's a reason for that. In the mailbox this morning I found a piece of junk mail from a supermarket, and "Back to School Savings" was printed on the front, black over yellow, with a row of pencils lined up on each side of the phrase, but because it was a supermarket the goods being sold on special were incongruous onions and cuts of meat: chuck steak, cantaloupes, chicken drumsticks, and bread -- melón chino, piernitas de pollo, pan de barra said this bilingual sheet -- and what is the kid going to do with a cantaloupe at school I wonder, what are they going to do with a bag of raw chicken drumsticks -- here they come into the classroom smeared with blood, making works in pink watercolour on the door handles -- and how can one thing be associated with another so strangely like that, bread with school, oh, simple (says advertising) I put the word here, "school" and then I put a photograph of bread next to it, and like this the magic is done.

Which is why advertising can't see surrealism.

Last night as I was reading Claire Tomalin's biography of Nelly Ternan, the actress who was the love of Dickens' later life, I came across the playbills she'd had reproduced for the book, whole posters advertising goods even more transient than cantaloupe and chicken drumsticks -- they advertised one single night of theatrical sketches each.

These performance came and went in a few hours, faster than the lives of mayflies.

One of them was "an entirely original, ironical Burletta of Man and Manners, in two acts (founded on the celebrated papers by "Boz,") called / NICHOLAS NICKLEBY;" / Or, Doings at Do-the-Boys Hall," which was due to be carried out "This evening, TUESDAY, Dec. 18. 1838" and never in that way again. (Somewhere in the past people are sitting in a splintery hall, waiting for Mr G. TAYLOR as Ralph Nickleby and Miss RICHARDS in "her first appearance here" as Kate Nickleby, they lean forward, they eat an apple, I can see it all. A thought: theatres do not have windows. Is this the picture that was going through the heads of the people who decided that North American schools should be windowless? The classroom is a theatre or opera house, and the teacher is a jealous performer who does not want to share the stage with the outside world. A poster for the first day of school: "The Science Teacher, Miss BIDDELL (her first appearance here) / After which A PAS DE DEUX by The HEADMASTER and A STUDENT")

Tomalin points out that Dickens hadn't finished writing Nickleby yet on Tuesday, Dec. 18. 1838, but never mind; the actors made up an ending. I came to the page where the Ternan sisters meet the man himself during the production of his stage collaboration with Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep, and then I put the book down and fell asleep, because sleep at that moment was more tempting than books. Today I'll resume the book but I won't resume sleep until later, I will fall asleep at a point in time no earlier than ten o'clock at night and probably far afterwards, and do we go back into sleep as if it is a book, I wonder, is that the experience we might feel if we were aware of it, picking up at the paragraph of sleep where we put it down?

if I know one thing better than another

2011-08-27T13:53:00.004+10:00

Meanwhile Holbrook Jackson talks about book collectors, and bookworms, and people who love to bind their books, and people who love to assemble libraries of books they never read, and impoverished people who spend their money on books instead of food, and people who will decorate a wall with false bookshelves, but this Bibliomania of his was published initially in 1930 and when I'd finished it I realised that he hadn't mentioned lists of books, which today are everywhere, and then I wondered if I should say to myself, "That's proof the book is old, people didn't publish book lists back then, they didn't make a big thing of them," or if I should say, "They did exist and he forgot them," but instead I wavered and said: "In this respect I am not adequately informed about the habits of bookpersons; I do not know," which only confirms the usefulness of knowledgeable books like Holbrook Jackson's.

1001 Books to Read Before You Die, is one of the lists I'm thinking of, and then there's the ones you see on blogs or just online: My Favourite Books, My Desert Island Books, My TBR Pile, Books I Bought Recently, My Latest Library Haul, Books On My Shelf, and Reading Challenges (the Cat Book Challenge, the Daphne du Maurier Challenge, the Scandinavian Reading Challenge, the Modern Library Reading Challenge, the Essay Reading Challenge, the Art History Reading Challenge, the Read Your Name Challenge for which "the challenge is to read your name in book title first letters, ultimately spelling out your name," and more)* until it seems that if the world was made for nothing more than the production of a book as Mallarmé said, then books were made for the making of lists of books, and that, faced with the great spreading-out of viewpoints that books represent, the reaction is to apply a focus, as we try to make the sun more useful by putting it through a magnifying glass and setting an ant on fire.

A search for focus, for accuracy, for measurement -- huge measurements if the list is a Great Literature canon, and measurement on the micro scale if it's one of those personal canons, like the one Junot Díaz gave to his Oscar Wao, although from the point of view of a person, which is the point of view we all have, I think it's the other way around, and the macro foreground is the personal canon, acquired with our own labour, and the background, the more minor thing, is the Great Literature canon, which exists somewhere like a cloud on a mountain (glance up and there it is, the cloth on the rock, and this, say the Capetonians, came about after a pirate had a smoking competition with the devil -- and likewise the Great Books canon is assembled out of other people's huff-and-puffing work), and phantom university professors might flit by your shoulders shrieking at you if you haven't read Candide (Nick Hornby suffers from that vision) but I think you can neglect the cultural canon in ways you can't neglect the personal canon, the personal canon nestling close to the heart, discovered by you, and the other one existing mystically, outside, like the neighbourhood outside your window, into which you step, but in which you do not live (as John Berger would like you to live) -- no, you live inside your house, among your furniture. Lord of the Rings is part of Wao's furniture; he's furnished the house himself, he puts his books in order solemnly, setting up this secret name or hieroglyph, on which he might meditate as Berger meditates on one of his landscape paintings: "It is only its shortcomings that fascinate me. In these I can see the possibilities of a more accurate metaphor: I can feel all that has escaped me."

The painting is a disguised arrow, pointing to the landscape he has seen and to the idea of himself seeing it, it is the painting not of a tree or a hill but of his viewpoint and contained in that painting invisibly is John Berger, sitting in nature with a paintbrush and possibly a folding chair, both eyes open. "John Berger is not blind," says the painting. "In case you thought he was."**

The private canon, pointing to the personality of the owner, is charged with meaning when the owner looks at it, although other people might grin. "Lord of the Rings? Then he's just a run of the mill fantasy geek," an ignorant boy, this Wao kid, suckled on the obvious. "He hasn't even bothered to go searching for unusual fantasy novels, he's just grabbed the big fat blatant one."

-- the world says, staring at the Wao bookshelves. "I like fantasy," it adds, "but eclectic fantasy please, I like to dig a little, you know what I mean? I have taste. I like Lud-in-the-Mist. Hope Mirrlees. Older than Tolkien. Nineteen twenty-six!" I stare at people's bookshelves, and I feel closer to them when I see a book I know, although I wonder what they think of it; something different to me probably, and so we are apart after all.

The personal canon or the desert island book list is another face for yourself, built by yourself, not the one nature happens to have given you, no, I'll do my own, and stick it together out of the debris I've come across, Wao might say, this fortress and this signboard, yes, Lord of the Rings here and the Dragonlance novels there -- and these are scraps that I will solder together, selecting and discarding (only the first two Dragonlance trilogies, not the later books), and with them I will build a cyborg part, or addendum, which will reach out into the world like a tentacle, directed by myself but not made of flesh, my new hand, waving to strangers and saying, "Hello, I'm here," or, as I watch, picking up a pin that was too small for my natural fingers. If Holbrook Jackson's people had met Nell from The Haunting of Hill House they would have wanted to cure her with books: if I know one thing better than another I know this, that my books know me and love me, he quotes from Eugene Field, and better a library than a monstrous house.

The reader knows that Nell hears the Bibliomania people calling to her, because her excuse, when she tries to explain to Dr Montague why she has been running out of her room at night in a haunted house, is, "I came down to the library to get a book" -- which she offers up as proof of absolute sanity.

* Examples: My Favourite Books, My Desert Island Books, My TBR Pile, Books I Bought Recently, My Latest Library Haul, Books On My Shelf, a page of Reading Challenges, and 1001 Books to Read Before you Die.

** Of course this means that if you own a realistic painting, a landscape or a portrait, then there is an invisible painter sitting on your table or standing on the kitchen counter, or hovering around whatever room the painting is in, exchanging a constant gaze with the artwork, staring ferociously at your wall, and you walk through this person, or put plates through them, or something like that, every time you move in front of the painting. My aunt has two photographers eyeballing walls in her dining room.

so radiantly set out with rings and jewels, lawns, scarves, laces, gold

2011-08-26T04:13:00.009+10:00

I went from Holbrook Jackson's Anatomy of Bibliomania to a book of essays by John Berger, a whiplash change of viewpoint, since Berger is a Marxist who hopes that one day a revolution will reduce the desire of human beings for private property, and Jackson is a bookman -- "bookman" is the word he likes -- who spends six hundred and forty-six pages singing glory hallelujah to personal libraries. Anatomy itself is a covetable item of private property, I know, because I wanted to buy it at Powell's in Portland once upon a time, after I found it on a shelf under a window, hardbacked and blue and noted in the margins, and I hung over it like a moon of love, but the book was marked at twenty-five dollars and covetousness never made anyone rich, and so the one I read was a library copy.

He's imitating the Anatomy of Melancholy, as you can see by the title, and he splits his examination of the bibliomaniac into different categories, as Robert Burton did, so that a chapter that opens with The Misfortune of Books is separated into I. Trials and Tribulations, II. Books Lost and Found, III. Neglect and Misuse, IV. Perils of Fire and Water, and the chapter called A Digression of Book Worms is divided into I. A Common Enemy in Every Age, II., The Legendary Bookworm, III. The Bookworm and His Several Variations, IV. Nomenclature and Classification, V. How The Bookworm Discovered America -- etc -- and he fillets quotations into his sentences with Burtonish italics, like this:

Some would have them be microcosms, embracing all life: the making of Shakespeare's mind was the making of the world. Books, said William Wordsworth, are a substantial world both pure and good. Leigh Hunt would have that they are half of the known world, the globe we inhabit being divisible into two worlds: the common geographical world, and the world of books; and he holds further, they are such real things, that, if habit and perception make the difference between real and unreal, we may say that we frequently wake out of common life to them, than out of them to common life. Stephen Mallarmé cries that the world was made for nothing more than to produce a beautiful book, which some even among good bookmen may account a heresy ...

("The making of Shakespeare's mind …" came from Gathered Leaves by Mary E. Coleridge and this fact is in one of Jackson's footnotes.)*

The book is a rush of voices culled and organised and sub-organised and then organised again, clipped off in mid-flow however the author wants, both rabble and order, the author as supervisor or cat-herder, commenting on the personalities of the cats ("and though I adventure to affirm nothing of the truth and certainty of this supposition," adds Jackson at the end of the sentence quote above, "yet I must needs say, it does not seem to me unreasonable") though he doesn't rhapsodise as much as Burton sometimes did,** and he doesn't express himself in lists, while Burton was an author who, overrun by the atmosphere of babble, listed and babbled himself, chucking himself into the stream and babbling more than anyone, a man who fought in two directions, a man saying, "There are too many raindrops to count," and then trying to count them -- lists, lists: -- setting up obstacles for himself and clawing his way over them: -- like this: -- "she," he writes, "was so radiantly set out with rings and jewels, lawns, scarves, laces, gold, spangles, and gaudy devices …" and "For besides fear and sorrow, which is common to all melancholy, anxiety of mind, suspicion, aggravation, restless thoughts, paleness, meagreness, neglect of business, and the like, these men are farther yet misaffected …" and, "Parents and such as have the tuition and oversight of children, offend many times in that they are too stern, always threatening, chiding, brawling, whipping, or striking," and, "For in the head, as there be several parts, so there be divers grievances, which according to that division of Heurnius, (which he takes out of Arculanus,) are inward or outward (to omit all others which pertain to eyes and ears, nostrils, gums, teeth, mouth, palate, tongue, weezle, chops, face, &c.) belonging properly to the brain, as baldness, falling of hair, furfur, lice, &c" -- and then kept expanding his book whenever a new edition came out, well, you might say, there are always more words, some lose their wits by terrible objects, he claims. In this labyrinth of accidental causes, the farther I wander, the more intricate I find the passage, multae ambages , and new causes as so many by-paths offer themselves to be discussed: to search out all, were an Herculean work, and fitter for Theseus: I will follow mine intended thread; and point only at some few of the chiefest.

A zoo of words, a marshalling of ornament, this arrangement of verbs and nouns as if they were objects on a shelf, and this intimation of flood, of flooding; every time he begins a new list he starts us on a road that could go on for twenty lines or end after only three examples, a rollercoastery and exhausting way of writing -- exhausting for the reader, who is suspended in a state of excited and deranged vigilance, never knowing what the writer is going to do next, he might veer off into another list, he might come to a sudden halt and chop the list short with "&c." All writing asks for dominance over the reader but Burton makes the dominance obvious. The book is all dominance, this ragbag encyclopaedia, a Johnsonian exercise, a hysteric maintaining his hysteria.

Johnson used to rise early to read him. "It is, perhaps, overloaded with quotation," he told Boswell. "But there is great spirit and great power in what Burton says, when he writes from his own mind."

* You can find it here, with an introduction by Edith Sichel.

FOR most people there is a beginning and an end. It is important to recall that they were born, and that they died at such and such a date. But to say of Mary Coleridge that she was born in September 1861, that she lived nearly forty-six years, and died in August 1907, means little. She was never of any age, and excepting that as life went on she grew and ripened, she was much the same at twenty as at forty.

** eg. "Expect a little, confer future and times past with the present, see the event and comfort thyself with it. It is as well to be discerned in commonwealths, cities, families, as in private men's estates. Italy was once lord of the world, Rome the queen of cities, vaunted herself of two myriads of inhabitants; now that all-commanding country is possessed by petty princes, Rome a small village in respect. Greece of old the seat of civility, mother of sciences and humanity, now forlorn, the nurse of barbarians, a den of thieves. Germany then, saith Tacitus, was incult and horrid, now full of magnificent cities: Athens, Corinth, Carthage, how flourishing cities! now buried in their own ruins: corrorum ferarum, aprorum et bestiarum lustra, like so many wildernesses, a receptacle of wild beasts. Venice, a poor fisher-town, Paris, London, small cottages in Ceasar's time, now most notable emporiums."

small seeking sounds, feeling the edges

2011-08-22T14:07:00.001+10:00

In this post I am going to give away the endings to The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, both by Shirley Jackson.

I walked home today, past the 99c Store, past the vacant lots where the stunted mesquite trees grow here and there like ferns, past the broken plastic, the blue dumpsters, the men with shopping trolleys who hook their stomachs over the sides of the blue dumpsters, the Mexicans on wooden stools who crush aluminium cans under a set of pine trees, and I came in, and sat down at the computer, and when I saw a Venn diagram online I began to picture one of Henry James' books as a large circle with small circles pressing against the outside and overlapping slightly in each place, and the book itself was the large circle and the subjects of his metaphors, allusions, etc, the spectre of the judgmental anonymous they who make Lady Agnes wonder if her house is mentionable, were the smaller circles, all coming in from the outside, like spermatozoa to a huge egg, always reminding it of themselves, as metaphors do, and intersecting with it everywhere so that it was trapped, in danger of leaking.

But The Haunting of Hill House was simpler, and it was a pair of circles overlapping in the middle, normally Venn-wise, and one of the circles was the character Nell or Eleanor, and the other was Hill House itself, and by the end of the book Nell is living completely in the overlap at the centre, which represents a point of extreme solitude, this upright I with its sharp angles top and bottom and no space inside to lie down or be comfortable -- she is always standing and always alone.

I've read House recently, and one of Shirley Jackson's other books, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and in both cases the story ended in a unification between two parties, like this, and in both cases the unification is preceded by violence, in both cases the outside world seems hostile, and yet the mood of each ending is different. Nell and Hill House make a cold marriage, despairing and cruel, but in Castle the two sisters have decided that they love one another so much that they want to stay together until they die, walling themselves off from the rest of the world, which comes to them and leaves baskets of eggs on the doorstep, or calls out to them in an angry voice then goes away frustrated when they don't reply, treating them like totemic witches or madwomen.

This is an idyllic ending, I think, because life for both of them was going to be so disastrous otherwise that staying together in the kitchen of their burnt-out mansion, deep in love and eating jam, is the best thing that could have happened to them, and may we all have such good relationships with our siblings, even when they are mass poisoners and leave arsenic in the sugar bowl.

But it is a creepy ending, some say (I've been skimming online reviews), this closed-off partnership between unusual sisters, one mad, one gentle, but love between unusual people is the same happy ending whose nonachievement we cry about in Phantom of the Opera and King Kong, so sad, we say, so sad, he was such a tragic figure, yet when it happens in Castle, it's creepy. People don't know what they want, I swear.

Nell is lonely, but she was not born lonely, as Hill House was born lonely, "by itself against its hills," and she was not built warped, as the house was built warped. She learnt to be lonely during the years she spent caring for her sick mother. Nell "had no friends," says Jackson, and although for a while she thinks she might have made some this idea turns out to be a failed hope, she is too self-critical and shy to make friends, she reacts awkwardly when Theodora tries to praise her or paint her toenails, and this Hill House adventure, which was going to be the liberation of a brand new Nell ("I have at last taken a step," she thinks as she is driving to the house, believing that she is breaking free, more steps will follow, the rest of her life is approaching) instead confirms that she does not have a knack for togetherness, she is natively alone, and through a procedure of supernatural hauntings and social missteps she inches closer into an intimacy with the lonely house and its freezing doorway and its eerie cherubs and its vanishing black dog and the bodiless booming noise in the hallway: "the crashing came again, and Eleanor and Theodora saw the wood of the door tremble and shake."

She wavers, as humans waver, but the house does not. The house never relinquishes its malevolence. It does not change mood. It is itself, like a character in Peake going to the Cool Room. Like a Peake character it has a massive presence. Jackson's other characters are thin when you compare them to the house; her Dr Montague is the stock figure of a professor, and Luke is not much more than a gesture in the direction of a flippant young man. He's a piece of wood with the word BANTER nailed on the front. If Swelter or Countess Gertrude appeared among Jackson's characters, they would dominate them as firmly as the house does. These characters are thin because they are tools, the author's tools, and once they have helped her to unite Nell with the house she flicks them away in two sentences.

Hill House is "not kind" she tells us, but it loves Nell better than the author loves Dr Montague.

Nell is unable to make friends without discarding the loneliness that has become her essence or her armour. She won't or can't discard it. Yet she wants friends, she wants to be part of the group, and at the same time she wants her own house, she wants to live behind a set of walls, isolated and private, she wants togetherness and isolation one after the other, a problem that the house may have solved for her when it brings her into itself at the end of the book, and she becomes a haunting spirit, inhabiting that Venn diagram overlap. "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality," Jackson says in the first line of the book, and Nell has to go mad before the house can eat her up, she hears a voice inside her head, she talks to statues, and what has ruined her sanity? She has realised that she is alone.

Perhaps now she is no longer being pulled in two directions, perhaps she has become inhuman in her inner harmony, entering a nirvana of ghosthood. The sisters at the end of Castle have reached a sunnier unity. Never again will they have to choose between their home and the outside world. Constance will not be tempted by the idea of boyfriends. This is the acme of a decisive ending -- all problems are solved. But Jackson has made the situation terrible. All problems are solved, but now nobody can escape the solution. The solution is insoluble.

Nell wants what the monsters outside my bedroom door wanted, she wants to come in and be part of things, as I did too when I was starting school, confronted with other children in the playground who had it in their power to say, "Go away, we don't want you." Spare us from, "Go away, we don't want you," but Nell is never spared. She buckles under the nightmare of all children. It is friendship or death with her in the end, this huge and crucial value put on friends by a person who never has any. "Good bye," she says to her associates, not friends, on the second last page, "Good bye, good bye," though it is the last time that she will ever say good bye to anybody, because if any of them visit the house after this then she will be trying to come in to their rooms, banging and rattling, or laughing, or doing some other terrifying thing -- "pattings came from around the doorframe, small seeking sounds, feeling the edges of the door, trying to sneak a way in" -- and what was a child like me supposed to do when adults are capable of behaving like that?

Away she drives to Hill House as if off to adulthood, free from her mother at last, and failure finds her quickly, she is tempted, she succumbs, and no wonder I didn't want her in my room: go away, lonely silent Nell, says my seven-year-old self, go away.

a little explaining, of the temperate zone

2011-08-18T09:17:00.005+10:00

So James unveils his headline ghost in The Ghostly Rental but in The Turn of the Screw he does not unveil, in fact he makes the ghosts as vanishing as they can be and still be ghosts, or perhaps-ghosts, since it might be the case that fragments of the nameless governess' fear are taking on the morbid shapes of people. In The Last of the Valerii he comes closer than he does in Rental to the effect that Laura Miller refers to as "the dissolution of boundaries," but it's the change of narrator that really sets him loose in Screw. The voice in Valerii belongs to a sane character who describes the symptoms of a man who is being gradually won over by a supernatural force but in Turn of the Screw it's the possessed person who speaks, and the symptoms -- I saw a light! -- I heard a noise! -- are all we have to live on as readers. Reject them and we are expelled from the story, we have glanced into it through the window like Peter Quint and now we leave, gesturing backwards at the governess, who stares back at us with arctic fear.

James made boundaries dissolute even on the level of a sentence, and even in stories that were not about ghosts; he liked to allude, he liked to use metaphor, he liked to write as if a source of mysterious judgment was always waiting over a character's shoulder waiting to burst onto the page and condemn them, and so he danced fastidiously around subjects that had done nothing to deserve this fastidiousness -- he could have been fastidious about a man eating a sandwich -- he puts a thousand veils over a bean -- or a thousand mattresses over a pea -- and then he pats the mattresses and says, "My readers, you must be fairy princesses to feel me -- you must be fine." Everybody who reads James is potentially a fairy princess. The veiling even extends down to ordinary character background, the basic information that a less infiltrating novelist would state bluntly and quickly so that they could move on with the foreground parts of the story:

Lady Agnes meanwhile settled with her girls in a gabled latticed house in a mentionable quarter, though it still required a little explaining, of the temperate zone of London. It was not into her lap, poor woman, that the revenues of Bricket were poured.

(The Tragic Muse)

Always this crazy delicacy -- "mentionable" to whom? we never get to meet them yet we're asked to trust that they exist somewhere on a hovering level, a great and formidable They -- and why has London been turned into an exotic continent or globe with this "temperate"? -- and why screen us still further after the delicacy of "mentionable" with "although it still required a little explaining" -- this even finer categorisation of the refinement? (The language is faithful to Lady Agnes' point of view, but it's not as if the author has to step out of his own character to use it. In other words you could say that he's choosing her eyes to look through because they let him write like himself.)

It's as if he's smuggling meaning to us, as if the the main problem he and we face is not understanding, a more normal concern for an author, but exposure and invasion. Why would we bother with these layered disguises if there was not a possibility, a fear, that somebody else, like the creature outside my childhood bedroom door, might come in?

the one between the mind and the exterior world

2011-08-16T02:12:00.004+10:00

In this post I am going to give away the ending of a Henry James short story called The Ghostly Rental.

Once upon a time, I think, there was a character in a book who said, I don't believe in ghosts but I'm afraid of them, which is my position too, on the matter of ghosts, ghouls, spirits, monsters under the bed, and the bland nighttime door behind which hides the strange creature that waits, and never makes a noise, or else does, but it's a small noise -- just loud enough so that you don't know whether you heard it or not, and so you sharpen your hearing -- ssh. When I was six or seven I watched this same bland door for hours and it never gave me a sign to say that it was not dangerous, so I kept my eyes open and maintained an atmosphere of alert and suspicious intelligence, prepared for the moment when the signal would be given, and what form that signal would take I didn't know, but like the judge in the porn case I'd know it when I saw it, and this silent staring competition went on between myself and the door for hours, but only one of us was staring, and the other had no eyes.

And yet I've never believed in ghosts, I don't know why they would exist, and if a brutal murder sets up sympathetic vibrations then why don't abattoir workers spend most of their time dodging sheep ghosts and pig spirits, or is each abattoir closed inside a network of charms and anti-ghost spells that the rest of us don't hear about, and before each shift the workers undergo a careful cleansing, and hang the ritual pendent around their necks -- it contains garlic, thyme, one white hair, and a mysterious ingredient, and if they lose it then they are possessed, their eyes roll back in their heads, they let free a terrible scream, and the person next to them looks around at the noise and says, Not Again Charles, That's The Third Time This Month. They have training videos called, How to Care for your Amulet, and Pendent Health and Safety.

"The literary effect we call horror," wrote Laura Miller in her introduction to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, "turns on the dissolution of boundaries, between the living and the dead, of course, but also, at the crudest level, between the outside of the body and everything that ought to stay inside." Yes, I thought as I read: that is the horror I had, the feeling that something outside might come into the room; I was never afraid of anything already inside, or of anything outside that could be trusted to stay outside, but the sight of the pointed nose or hand around the edge of the doorway would have been the worst moment of them all. I don't know what they would have done once they had crossed through the doorway because my imagination never went that far. It was coming in that I could imagine them doing: they would terrifyingly come in.

"In the psychological ghost story, the dissolving boundary is the one between the mind and the exterior world," says Miller. "The psychological ghost story is as much about the puzzle of identity as it is about madness. " Then she brings in an example from Henry James: "The governess in the The Turn of the Screw yearns to be a heroine, to do something brave and noble, and to attract the attention of the dashing employer whose sole directive is that she never, ever bother him. She wants to be someone else. Without the mission of protecting her two young charges from mortal danger she's merely a young woman squandering her youth in the middle of nowhere." I've been reading Henry James' short stories in order, thanks to the local library, which owns the Complete Stories 1864 - 1874, Complete Stories 1874 - 1884, and Complete Stories 1884 - 1891, and his psychological mysteries were sharp from the start, but his early ghost stories, his horror stories -- a form he comes back to several times -- are not so sharp, and the horror story in which we discover at the end that a young woman has spent two decades or so dressing as a ghost and waiting in a lonely house to annoy her father, is not as strong as the realistic one in which a young man accidentally does something terrible to a woman, something life-shattering, appalling (but of the real world, not ghostly, not Horror) and he reacts, not by caring or even thinking about the thing itself, but by ardently and suddenly wishing that she would like him -- and this is a story with no otherworldly mysteries, unless the young man's heart is another world, which it virtually is -- and his friend, who is also our narrator, wonders at the signs he sees emitted from this strange other planet, he tries to work out what they mean, up to the point of the story's climax, when there is a sort of answer, but not really; it's only the another sign, the most extravagant one, and so we end with extravagance but no explanation.

The young man in this piece of psychological realism is impenetrable all the way to the conclusion but meanwhile the ghost in the other story is unveiled decisively, "I stretched out my hand and seized the long veil," says the narrator, "I gave it a violent jerk," revealing the woman underneath, "not a disembodied spirit, but a beautiful woman, an audacious actress," and like this we're presented by the author with a false spectre of simplicity and understanding, and this down-to-earth explanation seems less convincing than the ghost, which at least gave us the honest anticipation of oddness that we expect from things other than ourselves, unless they are present by habit and then we take them for granted, like the furniture in Proust's narrator's bedroom, with which he associates himself so absolutely that sleeping in an unfamiliar hotel bed sends him mad with anxious frenzy. (Over the length of his holiday a necessary animal complacency is able to reconstruct itself around the new set of furniture and his frenzy subsides, the furniture becomes friendly -- which is what my bedroom door was never able to become at night, no matter how long I looked at it, no matter how long I stayed in the room, it was never familiar in the way that Proust's narrator's hotel furniture becomes, it was always promising horror, it was always about to startle me, it never joined with me, in the way that the narrator's objects join with him and have meaning to him and send out complicated yet amiable signals; it was a predatory door and it lived in my bedroom like a tiger, or like the narrator's girlfriend who worries him constantly because he is paranoid and also because she keeps having lesbian sex.)

James brings in another ghost for a twist ending but by then I was already irritated and it didn't seem to excuse the truly loopy idea of this woman and her melancholy cosplay. Though I reflect that if she's willing to drift around in a gloomy house all by herself at night with the lights off then she's braver than I am. But the necessary animal complacency probably kicked in somewhere along the way, and after the first few years she must have been sighing with boredom, well, well, another night at the haunted house, and perhaps this is the defence of the abattoir workers too, rethink this: they are not wearing amulets, instead they have grown so accustomed to the vengeful squealing of the pig spirits that they yawn at it, hum hum hum, and the ghosts retreat, dispirited by the indifference of their custodians, sagging with neglect as Proust's narrator's furniture is never allowed to sag: the narrator holds the chairs and drawers in thrall, he imposes a personality on them, which they obtain at the price of their liberty, the liberty they might have had if they had been allowed to spend their time alone in the bedroom, unperceived, lazy, and characterless.

poor finery

2011-08-13T03:40:00.006+10:00

When I started the last post I honestly imagined that I was going to segue into the subject of our local library, and not flit around over schools and meat pies and Simone de Bouvier's hair. Have you tried menudo? I did for the first time on Saturday and my appretite curled up at the smell, but I wonder now, after diluting the soup and cooking it some more, and adding lemon juice and finding it edible, if the tripe was underdone and it was the excrement itself I was smelling, sunk and strayed into in the deep tissue of those intestines,* and who can deny an intestine the right to smell like that, when digestion was its original purpose and not the posthumous appearance, chopped and mutilated, in soups, where the filaments that were meant for active purposes instead float out limply in the washy currents, like shag carpet underwater? "Soup," says the intestine, "goes in me; I do not go in it," and it would go on complaining like that helplessly as the universe was reordered around it, while its cousin in spirit is the pig who was executed in 14th-century France for eating the face off a baby, "and why," asks the pig, seriously bewildered, "when it was food like any other food? I've been eating food for years and no one has ever --" It looks at the baby's parents for an answer and sees that they are miserable. "There is something there," says the pig, "if someone could explain --" but it is dead.

M. was tickled when I didn't eat the tripe soup straight away because, he says, I am usually the one ordering a duck's tongue or a grasshopper "to find out what it tastes like," and as I eat I appeal silently to the skies, see, here is something interesting in my life (which is less strenuous than that of the duodenum), I am eating the tongue of a duck.

"Also," I say to the skies, on speaking terms with the firmament, "also, I have read Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen's Barbara, that prize jewel of Faroese literature, which the library was going to throw away." When I tried to run it through the check-out machine I discovered that it had been removed from the system, and the librarians only managed to lend it to me by reclassifying it under this title: on the fly items. We cancelled it, said one of them, because nobody was borrowing it. We were going to sell the book. Someone must have put it back on the shelves by accident.

The illustration on the front cover is a reproduction of a painting by William Heinesen, the same Faroese author who wrote the short story about the two women in Tórshavn losing their house in a storm. Jacobsen is a plainer writer than Heinesen, by which I mean that he never goes baroque, he never spirals off into side stories about ships or ballads or other ideas that might have caught hold of his curiosity. If he considers those things he never lets us know. As I read I was thinking, "If Heinesen had written this it would have been different, I would have heard about the history of Barbara's house, and the private lives of the sailors, and other miniature tangents would have appeared on the story like gargoyles and knobs on an old church, not essential to the structure, but giving the book such a specific aesthetic that finally you decide that the structure is there for them, it is the addition, it is the part you need to make excuses for."

I wouldn't classify those two writers together at all if they didn't have the same nationality; I wouldn't compare them; it wouldn't occur to me. If Heinesen's story is a beast with twenty legs then Jacobsen's is a sleeker organism, running toward a single end, which is the downfall of the title character -- a sad downfall from the author's point of view, because Barbara makes herself vulnerable by constantly falling in love, and he presents this lovingness to us as evidence of a large, eager spirit. "Was there any game that she did not immediately want to play?" one character wonders. She has "lively eyes" that give "quick green glances," often shining or fluttering in translation, "Her eyes shone, she was like a lighted candle among them." She is vigourous, she is physically adept, she volunteers to carry heavy loads of peat in a leyp: "There was no stopping her, she laughed gaily, and everyone admired her." When a shopkeeper offers her a secret inspection she invites a friend along -- she is not selfish, she likes to spread her bounty, she loves to make a situation bigger. She does not lay plots or anticipate the plotting of others. She is an innocent. Exultation is her natural state. "Barbara's eyes shone, her voice bubbled like a spring, she grew prettier and prettier in her zeal for beauty." A new man enters the story and she falls in love with him, and then another one comes along and she loves him too. She's a polyamourist in a monoamourous society. She'd make a good Mormon husband.** But other Faroese gossip about her and her lovers grow jealous. The large spirit will be thwarted by the consequences of its own excess. "[S]ome called her wicked Barbara."

All of this has been sketched in by the end of chapter one, so Jacobsen's purpose from there on is to complicate the idea: he decides that he needs surprises and different perspectives. He introduces an intellectual character who chats with his friends about the merits of an impulsive life, he points out one of the dangers of her openness when the shopkeeper falls in lust and begins to turn people against her, he brings in other nationalities -- Barbara falls for a mainland Dane and then a Frenchman, and we watch as this embodiment of the islands makes love to outsiders while the native Faroese shopkeeper seethes and grouses. (If that makes the book sound like pro-Faroe propaganda then I'll point out that this shopkeeper is Jacobsen's meanest and most bitter, petty character.)

He has a dozen ways to thicken the story (Heinesen disperses; Jacobsen thickens), and there's a good example of this close to the end, when Barbara asks a group of men to help her catch her fleeing lover, and the men agree, even though they know that this particular action she's taking is against the law. And so this extra detail about the law (which would not be there if Jacobsen didn't know something about the concrete environment in which his story is set, and Barbara is an excellent book for anyone who wants to see concrete details of the Faroes leaking into a fictional story, for example, the author tends to shorten the name of Tórshavn to just Havn, as the South Africans I know like to shorten Johannesburg to Joeys or Jo'burg) means that Doom is hanging over this chase. Even if these people reach their object they will not be comfortable, there will still be strife in their lives, they will not be able to sit easily and say, "Good, that's over;" they will still be tense in spite of their success. And this tense half-muted expectation of a threat characterises the end of the book. People are defeated, but there are more problems to consider than the immediate experience of defeat. Life goes on and it will be miserable.

Jacobsen's Faroese live in a landscape of constriction and infinity, small groups kept straitened by open seas. There is water running up against them everywhere, in the sea, or in a river, or a brook, a waterfall, or in a storm, or snow, or mist, or in the peaty ground itself, or on the grass, "They walked in the dew-wet grass," and even inside the houses: "Barbara went to the window and drew helpless drawings and lines in the moisture." "Water there was in God's plenty on Faroe," agree the citizens of Havn as they exchange it with French sailors for wine. The stretches of sea between the islands hold people apart, and so do the mountains, those incredibly high steep peaks; and even the seasons hold them apart. "Their passage out through the long Sorvag's fjord was in darkness. It was a long row that awaited them, which was otherwise almost never undertaken in winter." The rowers are bringing their pastor to Mykines, the westernmost isle of the Faroes. He promised he would visit the Mykines people at Christmastime. They have been part of his parish for more than a year now, ever since he moved to the Islands, and he has never seen them.

Give him flat ground, a road, and a car, and he could have been there fifty times already. But every trip is wonderful, every trip is exhausting, every trip is an effort.

"They pulled manfully on their oars and were in good heart. On both sides dark nesses and frost-covered fells glided by. When they came into the mouth of the fjord they could discern the distant Mykines in the starlight, thrusting up like a single mountain out of the western ocean, shining white at the top. But its sides were black and steep, and allowed no place for snow." The village is excited. "Pastor Paul had hardly set foot on shore before the bell in the little sod-roofed church began to ring joyfully and scatter its tones into the bright morning air. It was a glad day for everyone on Mykines." People crowd into the church and the author shifts us from a panoramic description of the landscape down to the domestic level of the humans, who are exchanging hellos, but we have already seen that the island around them is mighty and inhospitable. "Mykines grew bigger before the bow in the early winter sunshine, flame-red and crude in its wild, jagged might. It was a vision and a terror all in one." Against this backdrop sounds the little ring of the bell.

The Faroe Islands in Barbara are like this throughout: all wildness and constraint mixed in together, small gestures outclassed against vast landscapes. Barbara is the only one who tries to live up to the sheer mad force of these seas and cliffs. The unstable world is life itself to Jacobsen's Faroese, and this life is especially developed in his heroine -- she is more changeable, more physical, more expressive, than anyone else, and yet confinement is necessary for her too. The limited society of the island makes her an object of gossip but it also protects her. When other characters wonder what would happen to her if she migrated to the largeness of a mainland city they conclude that she would become indistinguishable from a prostitute and the author doesn't disagree. In the city the framework of respect and tutting that surrounds her at home would vanish, and she would be ordinary.

From a reader's perspective you could argue that she is something ordinary, that she is yet another example of the literary Wild Girl, one of those old-fashioned nature-maidens, all passion and no brain, sexual without guilt: medicine for the scholar, grandmother to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. (Penelope Fitzgerald ponders her in The Blue Flower.)

But Barbara is not any random bit of land, she is specifically the Faroes, and so she is overwhelmed by the French and the mainland Danes, she offers herself to them, she cuts down flowers for their food, and when she marshals the forces of the sea against them (in the form of rowing sailors who "could do nothing else under Barbara's eye" except obey her) she falls short, she fails, the foreigners are larger, they are stronger, they are puissant, they can afford expensive ships, and her bedraggled situation is summed up on the final page in a description of the luggage she thought she would take with her to Copenhagen, "rubbish and tawdry"-- this is the first time the heroine has had this kind of description thrown at her by her author, behold, despair, he deserts her, he turns cruel -- "randomly huddled-together," "trash," "poor finery" -- and here, not in love, is her moment of terrible exposure.

* the stomach actually. I've just looked it up.

** Only a minority are polygamists and the rest disown them, I know, but Barbara likes to marry the men she loves, and if she could only find a church in which wives were allowed to take multiple husbands it would solve a lot of her problems, although the husbands would still get angry when she paid more attention to A than to B or C than to D. I don't suppose it would be a very good solution.

This copy of Barbara (Norvik Press, 1993) was translated by George Johnston. He adds: "The novel was translated into English once before by Estrid Bannister, a friend of Jacobsen and in many respects the original of Barbara. Penguin published her translation in 1948, and it has long been out of print."

rack and ruin

2011-08-10T11:29:00.007+10:00

There are other American pronunciations besides Eye Rack; we know someone who borrows her books from a Lie Berry, a soft and fruity thing with a fine ripe pop. The books taste sweet and none of them tell the truth. She found her nearest Berry in a gated area in front of a school. Windows are not part of the normal architecture of most of the American schools I've seen, just passing by as I do, walking or riding, and whose idea was that I wonder: who decided that students should be blind, and what a horror, what a blank and inhumane thing, and someone should be ashamed of themselves for that idea but probably no one knows who that someone might be, and not even the person themselves, if there was a single person, and not, more likely, a cabal, not a physical cabal but a cabal in the air, a feeling, an impression, a vague message passed to and fro above the heads of children -- ah, it will be better for them if they don't have windows -- no windows for them! -- says this parliament of ghosts. If there are windows then the students will look out and strangers will look in and perhaps there will be a tree, and the child will not look at the teacher or at a book, they will look at this tree, and think, a tree, when they should be dwelling on George Washington or how to bake an apple pie or a hot dog or some other American thing. Then there will be neither apple pie nor hot dog nor awareness of George Washington and the whole nation will go to rack and ruin, to ruin and rack, and after writing that phrase twice it occurs to me to wonder where it came from. Why rack and ruin?*

The origin of rack and ruin is the kind of thing that children do not learn when they have windows to look out of, and trees, and passing strangers leering at them, all paedophiles and tuckshop ladies, or whatever the US equivalent is to a tuckshop lady. The pie was always half-cool and the flavoured milk was always half-warm in my brown paper tuckshop bag but what magic that was, and what an honour, to be the one who was chosen to fetch that black plastic tub at lunchtime, and a practical privilege too, because they let you out of class a few minutes early, and the school was quiet, everybody else still gluing paper to cardboard or writing the letter A, and you ran away from all of that, you and your partner, over the concrete pathways and under the awning.

What a strange unbounding you experienced in this silent mysterious landscape, which had the features of a school but the atmosphere of a deserted battlefield, and as you went on it became apparent that you could do anything you liked and no one would see -- you could climb over the fence and run away forever, or you could sit under a bush, and it was probably at moments like this that the idea of existentialism occurred to somebody -- to Sartre -- thinking the word freedom! as he was sent out to pick up the tuckshop bags with Simone de Beauvoir, who wore her hair wound on top of her head even at that age, which must have been about seven or eight. He let her bear most of the weight of the tub on the way back and she thought, why do all the boys behave like this, talking about themselves as he's doing now, jiggling around and smoking pipes, and why do they all have such short hair? I am the Second Sex.

* Rack and Ruin.

Maybe the schools do have windows, but only in the walls facing away from the road. That's possible. I might be looking at the only windowless walls and thinking that this phenomenon extends all the way around the building, and is it a mistake to imagine that the full nature of an American school building can be discerned from only a single view of the walls? They might have bow windows on the other side.

trapped in the shadowless valley

2011-08-06T04:56:00.006+10:00

It occurs to me that I've been in Las Vegas for a while now but I never write about it -- so -- during summer, which is where we are now -- the sky dominates the landscape, larger than any mountain, more significant, and a massive penetrating pure blue, unstained aside from a thin heap of dirty pillows over to the right hand side of the view, next to a stiff peak (other clouds rise over this mountain sometimes and impersonate it, but they are too soft, too billowy, and the peak is too hard, too straight, too angular, and nobody is fooled) and the air is hot, so hot that even the shade is hot, every atom of the air is hot, and each nucleus needs a drink of water and a rest, each electron spins around with its tongue out. It's nine o'clock at night as I'm writing this and the temperature outside is thirty-seven degrees. During daylight hours it goes up to forty and beyond. But Eye Rack is even hotter, said Skip Martin when we saw him play his horn at the Freakin Frog on Tuesday night, oh yes, in Eye Rack, where he has been entertaining the troops, it goes up to fifty degrees. The troops house themselves in jackets and helmets and the heat is fiendish.*

His pronunciation, the idea of a rack, and a human body part on that rack, and the implication of torture, dragged my mind away to Kafka's short story, In the Penal Colony -- dragged it there as we were sitting in the bar, and the band was running off into a tune that had something to do with the US marines. (The marines have a theme song, M. said, and this was a version of that theme song.) I was thinking of that hot area where Kafka located his Apparatus. "The sun was excessively strong, trapped in the shadowless valley, and one could hardly collect one’s thoughts." There was the Apparatus in my mind, sitting like a small dark house against the overlit sand, which was the same colour as the sand in the southwest North American desert, and the cliffs of the valley were something like the slopes of the mountains in the background here. And the horror of that story, which is a Gothic horror, but it takes place in the dazzling sunlight. Weak and confused people are trapped in a sinister place, and terrorised by a mysterious authoritarian force, which is pretty much the go in Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho as well.

The uncanny atmosphere that a writer like Radcliffe might want to distribute into castles, mountains, cliffs, bandits, storms, ghosts, cobwebbed paintings, and so on, becomes focussed, dark and a single thing: the Apparatus.

In fact the uncanny is really the contact point between these two. They are both unheimlich.

Then the head Officer of the penal colony dies, the Traveller leaves the island, and the suffering of the characters has ended for now, so the story ends too. Thinking about this, and thinking about a few sentences at the end of the second paragraph in my last post -- the ones saying that if Freda couldn't have been made to suffer then James wouldn't have written about her -- and she wouldn't exist -- I wonder if it's not better, if you're a fictional character, to be tortured, to be born into the wrong place at the wrong time, or to the wrong family, or to be poor, or to wish you had a lover, in short, to be unhappy, otherwise who writes about you? And if they don't write about you then how do you exist? A dilemma for the fictional character. To be unhappy or to not exist. And then, when you are happy -- when you are assumed to be happy -- when David Copperfield finally marries Agnes for example, or when Louie Pollit escapes from her father -- your author isn't interested in you any more. Your happiness is worthless, they say, go away, vanish, bring on the next sufferer for my rack, and down you go into the grave, and a new victim heaves into view, ho ho, says the author, rubbing both hands, what a relief --

* He said it in Fahrenheit. There's footage of him at the Freakin Frog online, here, for instance. A great night, if you're in Vegas. They start at about ten thirty, but if you arrive early there's a jazz duo and that's all good too.

The version of the Penal Colony I've quoted was translated by Ian Johnston.

all was because of your noblesse

2011-07-31T00:49:00.016+10:00

Going from Le Morte d'Arthur to The Spoils of Poynton (Henry James) with my brain still on the subject of knights and knightly codes, and tragic deaths, and so on, and noble Launcelot not killing the man who was gripping his thighs, etcetera, I decided that the exquisite fineness of feeling suffered by James' Fleda Vetch, was in fact chivalry, a compelling chivalry from which her personality, her very Self, could not be separated -- and the problems she faced were not due to the chivalry per se, but to the reluctance of the world to recognise that chivalry for what it was, and reward it.

Which it cannot be commanded to do, except by James himself, and there is the stumbling block, he has a stake in the maintenance of the world's indifference to chivalry. Freda is chivalrous and other characters are not, and a lot of the tension in his story can be located at that crux. On one hand he sympathises with her, on the other hand he sabotages her. Why sabotage? So that he can go on acting like an author. Without the crux there would be no Spoils of Poynton. Fie on you, Henry James, you two-faced gentleman. But without the Spoils of Poynton there would be no Freda Vetch.

When, in chapter sixteen, she refuses to take advantage of her superiority over a rival -- a superiority she has come by honestly, not conniving for it, not plotting for it, but just naturally happening to have it -- she is in the same situation as Sir Launcelot in the Morte when that man grips his thighs. The man has committed a murder, Launcelot has been cast in the role of a judge, and justice could be very easy. All he has to do is administer a coup de grâce with his sword and everything will be over in two minutes. Instead he tells the man to get up and fight him. It is not enough for the man to act like a criminal, he, Launcelot, must act like a worthy knight, and therefore no coup de grâce. He can't kill a man who refuses to act like his equal. No, replies the man. I will not fight you. I'm going to stay down by your legs, where it's safe. "Now will I proffer thee fair," says Launcelot, "I will unarm me unto my shirt, and I will have nothing upon me but my shirt, and my sword and my hand." And Fleda Vetch unarms herself too, she will not take advantage of her advantage, but she tries to be fair.

Her rival is not so scrupulous, and Freda loses the thing she thought she had. Other characters are defeated with her; it would have been better for almost everybody if she had been less chivalrous. Be ruthless, the others might have said to her. For our sakes, be ruthless! But what she needs in her life is not ruthlessness, but a sword and a horse and the incredibly delicate organisation of a Round Table, which can only be maintained in a book with a rigid repetitive structure, and over whose dissolution King Arthur wept, and the knights said to Sir Launcelot as he was leaving Arthur's court forever: "we all understand in this realm will be no quiet but ever strife and debate, now the fellowship of the Round Table is broken; for by the noble fellowship of the Round Table was King Arthur upborne, and by their noblesse the king and all his realm was in quiet and rest, and a great part, they said, all was because of your noblesse." And Freda Vetch might sigh and say, I wish mine was this welcome.

the element that aroused people to stylized violence

2011-07-27T02:48:00.010+10:00

Michael Dirda once asked, I recall, whether it was possible to go from a good book to a computer game, suggesting rhetorically that it wasn't, and sending out, I suppose, the message that the two things were too different, way too different, and yet people are always doing two things that are not similar. Waking is not like sleeping, and getting out of bed is not like either waking or sleeping, and playing chess is not like fighting a lion, but if an angry lion came into the room while you were playing chess and tried to eat you you would find a way to fight it, because you do not want to be eaten; no one does, or almost no one, though there are a few people who have a fetish for it, but they are so rare that they presented a court in Germany with a dilemma in 2004, namely, if you help a vorarephile act out his fetish by eating him, are you a murderer? Manslaughter, they decided, and gave the cannibal eight years in prison. Let that be a lesson to us all

But the memory of Dirda came to me earlier as I was reading Le Morte d'Arthur from cover to cover for the first time, because, "This book," I said to myself, "is built like World of Warcraft" -- in that the story is a series of quests, delivered to the hero by a series of people who are often complete strangers to him, and carried out with obedience and fidelity, even though the person might well be lying for all you know, and occasionally is.

Over and over again a knight meets a damosel or a wounded fellow knight, or some other person, and this person asks if the knight will help them by slaughtering an enemy, or rescuing a spouse, and Yes says the knight, he says yes I will Yes. In WoW this stranger is known as the questgiver and they wear a golden exclamation mark, but many of the questions they ask are the first cousins of the questions in Morte. Oh rescue my daughter, they say, or, won't you go to that hill over there and kill the demon who has locked my friends in cages? The centaur agitate me, they say, so please kill fifteen of them. Bring me their eyes.

And the knights don't argue, and in WoW you don't argue either, and there is the expectation that the quest will be accepted at face value, without the quester raising one eyebrow and saying, No, that sounds insane, or, I'm tired, why don't you do it yourself? Arthur's knights assume that the person is telling the truth. It's surprising that so few non-knights take advantage of this. Somewhere there is an alternative Morte, an even longer book, telling us about all the times somebody did the equivalent of calling an emergency number because their cat was stuck up a tree, or just because they were drunk.

The ritual action takes place, and then it happens again, and then it happens again: the quest is given, the quest is accepted, and the knight wallops away on his horse. But there are variations operating within this formula, and it's these variations that let the book be a book, a story, something impersonating movement, and not a laundry list of quests and walloping and helmets being brast, on and on and static like a Biblical Begat. (This corpse, it twitches, the statue, it moves.) The setting changes, the person giving the quest changes, the identity of the hero changes from one part of the book to another, the knight is maybe weary but he goes anyway, wondering if he will survive, or he is fresh and angry and goes off with confidence, or he is Sir Launcelot, who always wins, or he is Sir Cote Mal Tail, who is only an average fighter but does his best regardless. A surprising event will come between the knight and the end that he expected for his quest, and he will have to pursue goodness along another route. He can't walk away and leave the quest dangling unfinished, because he is a knight, and negligence looks not goodly in a knight.

In Book VI of the Morte a woman comes to Launcelot through a forest, pursued and terrified, begging him to save her from her husband, who believes, erroneously, that she has been sleeping with her cousin. Launcelot tells the man not to kill his wife. The husband courteously agrees to obey. "And so Sir Launcelot rode on the one side and she on the other: he had not ridden but a while but the knight bade Sir Launcelot turn him and look behind him, and said, Sir, yonder come men of arms after us riding. And Sir Launcelot turned him and thought no treason, and therewith was the knight and the lady on one side, and suddenly he swapped off his lady's head."

Traitor, says Launcelot, and goes to buffet him, but the knight refuses to fight. He falls "flat to the earth and gripped Sir Launcelot by the thighs, and cried mercy." Launcelot can't fight a man who won't fight, and to kill him as he crouches flat to the earth would be ignoble, and so he is presented with a problem, which he must think about, and solve, and so this episode in the book is not like any other, and nor is the one in which Sir Gawaine accidentally kills a lady who throws herself across the body of a knight he's trying to slay, and nor is the one in which -- but none of them are completely like the others.

So there are the constants and then there are the variables -- one thing stays stiff, one thing jiggles -- and it's like a life, or a day, because in a day you get up, you walk to the kitchen, you eat, but the food you eat might be an egg or it might be cereal or natto or maybe you have to run outside to the shops to find something edible because the cupboard is empty; and like this each day is different. But the larger structure is there, the sun comes up, the sun goes down, and food is eaten. And I start to remind myself that in literature there are variations on the nature of the repetition itself. Elizabeth Jolley repeats scenes almost word for word, pages apart, Gertrude Stein writes almost the same words in a different order, and Ann Killough, whose Beloved Idea I found at the library a while ago, sets a word down on the page and then repeats it stiffly in a new sentence, carrying this word on and picking up a new word -- first "wall", here, then "garden:"

She thought perhaps it was the wall

That perhaps the metaphorical wall around the garden was the element that aroused people to stylized violence.

That made them want to deposit their ideological ordnance inside the garden and make a clean getaway.

In How I Became a Nun, César Aira's narrator remembers that when she was six she played a game, pretending to be a teacher instructing an imaginary class; she invents forty-two children and all of them have to have (because this is a rule of the game) dyslexia, but in each case it's a different kind of dyslexia. "For example, then, one child's peculiar dyslexia consisted of putting all the vowels together at the beginning of a word, followed by the consonants … I hadn't invented disorders so much as systems of difficulty." And the large event is animated by vibrations as a cage is animated by birds. "The repetition that didn't always happen," writes Aira's narrator, "gave me a measure of life:a surprise gift for me to unwrap, mad with joy, as the flow of sound [from the radio] made up its mind to be the same or different."

Aira's book was translated by Chris Andrews. Malory's book has been rewritten several times by different authors, each author trying to make the language less antique. Mark Sarvas posted on the subject two weeks ago. The "original Malory" he quotes from (Oxford University Press, 1971) is written like this:

"I wyll wel," said Arthur, and rode fast after the swerd.

And whan he cam home the lady and al were out to see the joustyng. Thenne was Arthur wroth and saide to hymself, "I will ryde to the chircheyard and take the swerd that stycketh in the stone, for my broder sir Kay shall not be without a swerd this day."

My 1994 Modern Library copy modernises the spelling but not much else.

I will well, said Arthur, and rode fast after the sword, and when he came home, the lady and all were out to see the jousting. Then was Arthur wroth, and said to himself, I will ride to the churchyard, and take the sword with me that sticketh in the stone, for my brother Sir Kay shall not be without a sword this day.

the climber scrambles and clambers ever higher

2011-07-21T03:20:00.000+10:00

I've put this link in the sidebar but I'm going to add it here as well -- it is Brian Sibley's Radio 4 serial adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Titus books. I can't say anything about Episode Two, because I haven't listened to it yet, but Episode One is excellent, just an excellent example of books being taken apart as books and put together again as radio. The opening lines of the first book, the outer houses clinging like limpets to the castle wall, don't appear until almost twenty-five minutes in, and he inserts them as we're following a character away from Gormenghast for the first time, and seeing it from without -- which is exactly the point of view of those lines. So he's paying attention to what things mean.

He has (and he had this too, back in 1984 when he turned the trilogy into a radio two-parter) an Under Milk Woodish habit of eliding his lines, and slicing them up, so that one character might start a description and another character slip in to finish it, or the narrator will begin to explain a point, then a character in the scene will speak and the narrator will pause naturally, as if a comma has uttered, then go on. The whole play flows and flows as though we're listening to a river running on and each ripple has a new voice. This is how he gives us Nannie Slagg leaving the castle to find a wetnurse for the baby --

A Bright Carver: One from the castle comes amongst us.
Nannie [to herself]: Ooh, but I must remember the right words …
Narrator: Nannie Slagg
Nannie: The bright carvers.
Narrator: Fourteen inches taller on account of a black hat
The Bright Carvers [responding to Nannie]: The castle!
Narrator: Topped off with a bunch of glass grapes that flare in the moonlight.

-- and here are the two narrators taking part in the same sentence --

Titus: Meanwhile, Steerpike the climber scrambles and clambers ever higher
Narrator: Through the dusty matted mass of ivy
Titus: Ever nearer to my world

-- and here's the technique in Milk Wood:

First Voice: Ocky Milkman, drowned asleep in Cockle Street, is emptying his churns into the Dewi River,

Ocky Milkman: regardless of expense,

First Voice: and weeping like a funeral.

The lines slip after one another pauselessly; the pauses in this play occur within the actors' performances, their own pauses, in character, the Doctor, for example, giggling, hesitating, then laughing again. (James Fleet as Doctor Prunesquallor gives individual personalities to passages of speech that, written down, would not be anything more useful to an actor than the flat nudity of "ha ha ha.") They slide on one another's heels like those staggered splitlines of Shakespeare's, in King Lear, Scene Two, Act Two, when Kent says, "It is both he and she / your son and daughter," and Lear follows immediately with, "No." Online versions of the script don't seem to replicate this, but the Oxford Shakespeare I've got here shows the nos and yeses arranged down the page from left to right like a set of steps. Kent: "Yes." Lear: "No, I say" -- and then the next line shuttles all the way back to the left side of the page as the tempo skips a beat and then it begins to make steps again: "I say yea," "By Jupiter I swear no." Maybe Kent, feeling thwarted by "No I say," had to pause to gather himself together for another assault on the unbelieving and knuckleheaded world, who knows; the actor can interpret it as he likes. But the way the lines are placed -- the fact that the playwright means them to follow one another quickly -- "conveys an increased sense of dramatic moment," writes David Crystal in the Oxford's introduction. And it does, even on the page. "An increase in tempo is also an ideal mechanism for carrying repartee," writes Crystal, and he quotes another example of stepped lines from Taming of the Shrew. Kate and Petruccio: "You are withered. " "Tis with cares." "I care not." The Titus books are known among other things for their slowness, but Episode One moves like repartee, like a grand conversation, addition on addition like a stack of challenges pushing onwards, like a train, clack clack clack.

suddenly the hour of liberation came for this yearning creature

2011-07-15T04:48:00.016+10:00

Cliffs and birds, I say: cliffs and birds.

The language of the Faroe Islands is anciently spoken but only recently brought to print, and when the people open their mouths they come closer to the Vikings than anyone else bar their neighbours across the cold blue sea to the north-west in Iceland.

"It was a collection of folk tales that was to give Faroese its written form," writes Hedin Brønner in the introduction to Faroese Short Stories. "V.U. Hammershaimb, publishing the tales in Copenhagen in the 1850's and again in the late 1880's, created an orthography based on etymological rather than phonetic principles." Hammershaimb borrowed the old ð, which is used by only two other living alphabets, the Icelandic and the endangered Elfdalian.

(Elfdalian is the Anglicised spelling of a word that is also Övdalian, Övdalsk, Övdalską, Älvdalska or Älvdalsmål, a language in Sweden with a small number of speakers, three thousand, roughly, living in Övdaln, and most of them over forty-five.)

The Faroe Islanders imported a printing press in 1852 "but it was then used only to print material in the Danish language" until "the appearance of the first newspaper in 1890." Then there was "a landslide" of Faroese printing. "Polemic articles and pamphlets joined forces with patriotic poetry." At that time the Islands with their steep shores and green fields were ruled from the mainland by the Danish crown, and the island patriots were saying, See us, we are not another group of Danes, we are ourselves, we are Faroese, with our kvæði songs and our grindadráp hunt, the gannet, the seal, the neat and local sheep, and an evident amount of sexism, as only men are allowed to club whales to death and have their short stories translated by Hedin Brønner.

Literature in mainland Scandinavia was already well-evolved by the time the Faroese began to write their fiction, and so this collection, whose oldest writer was born in 1871 and the youngest in 1932, is a kind of compression of a national literature, a pressed-down strata, the youth of a literature and its developed adulthood existing almost simultaneously, with some stories that are folk tales arranged for the page (the storyteller's ums and ahs and digressions removed, the story proceeding from start to finish at the same steady pace, which is the pace of your reading, and no interruptions unless you want them; no one has to go to the toilet, no one burps, no one speaks) and other stories that have been informed by the author's tertiary education on the mainland, prankish in a literary way, the author taking joy in the act of writing, of sentence-making, noodling with words on the page, one written thought leading to another, and the second one more extravagant than the first, the glee of a writer one-upping himself.

William Heinesen, prince noodler, opens his Night of the Storm with a hurricane tearing the roof off a house owned by two seamstresses. "Cloth and drapery flapped about their cheeks, and patches and half-finished garments fluttered through the air like frightened birds," he writes. Then he is inspired further, he becomes specific, he sees the scene and a single garment grabs his eye. "A nightgown stood leaning out of a broken window, desperately gesticulating in the wind, but suddenly the hour of liberation came for this yearning creature. It got loose and went heavenward with rapid wingbeats." Now that he has gone from the general cloth to the specific and personalitied nightgown he merges them, and we have a general mass rushing full of specifics and characters. "And the ravaged house continued to spew forth more of its homeless contents -- wood splinters and sticks, ashes and paper and most of all -- cloth. Wet remnants and rags, long ribbons and tapes whipped at the faces of rescuers and spectators.. Indeed, the impecunious old seamstresses' modest tatters and rags had been stricken with uncontrollable fury and were carrying on an obsessed reign of terror."

The distance between him and Bruno Schulz here is very narrow, but Heinesen doesn't cross into the other man's dreamland. He's too jocular for the uncanny. The story has a sad end, but the author is an author of digressions, and in these digressions he takes real joy; the story on the whole seems to be a vehicle for digressions. When he decides to give two characters a love affair that ends unhappily ("for tragic and compelling reasons") it isn't enough for him to tell us that the young man was miserable and left the island, he first has him join "the English Mission and get baptized again," and then set out on his long voyage, sending his sister "sympathetic letters from foreign lands," until finally he dies, but the author doesn't simply say "he died," no, instead "he went down with a British ship in the Mediterranean during the First World War," and what's more, the courtship became the subject of "a moralizing ballad, 'Flowers of Sin.' No one knows," says Heinesen, lying, "who composed it, but it is to be found in the collection known as Absalon Isaksen's First Book, which is kept in the archives of the Tórshavn library."

Exultant with this invention he veers back to the seamstresses. "But now we shall hear further of what happened to the two old seamstresses …" None of these details are necessary to the story, the fact that the young man joined the English Mission, and died during the First World War are incidental, and The Night of the Storm could have proceeded equally well in an A-to-B sense if the author had written, "And then he left the Faroe Islands on a ship and never returned."

But by the time one of the seamstresses dies at the end, the wealth of details associated with her is so rich and bright and thick (she is enchanted royalty, the fairies keep on giving) that her death is the end of something more vital than a basic A to B, and I wanted her to come back so that I could have more of the vengeful modest tatters and "young fellows from the Seamen's School" who perform chain dances and sing "the tragic but at the same time gloomily-delightful Køngens Son of Engelland, the tale about the English king's son who went down with his gilded vessel off Jutland." (Heinesen loves the worldmaking power of adjectives, not just a vessel but a "gilded vessel," and a character who is a smith is not just a smith, he's a "berserk smith": and this is more exciting, like decorations on a Christmas tree. The author's habit of going off on tangents makes it seem almost likely that at any moment he could decide to follow one of these adjectives and conduct the story away in that direction -- into an exposé of the Faroese berserk smith community, or a history of gilded English ships.)

The chain dances have made him veer off again, and he resumes: "But back to the two homeless maidens …" And as I write this I realise that the plainly-told folk tales in Faroese Short Stories might have the narrative of the storyteller's stories, but Heinesen has the storyteller's style, the open possibility for endless side-thoughts, and additions, the speaker responding to his own mood with another invention, oh yes, not only this but also that, and another thing as well, now I'm going to tell you something else, now watch as I … and I have a glimpse of writing as a further form of speaking, the piling-up of ongoing thoughts, formed and shaped and sent out, and made larger.

Dedalus Books published an English translation of Heinesen's The Lost Musicians in 2006, and there's a sample of the book online.

for the house to be preserved

2011-07-04T03:13:00.007+10:00

I know that some of the people who might read this post already know about the renovations to one of Christina Stead's old childhood homes, but aside from pointing out the petition in the side bar I've been holding off on mentioning it until the deal was done, the jig up, the operatic lady singing her sing. This is the summary I'm going to put on Pykk's Christina Stead page. If anyone knows of any other significant newspaper articles, blog posts, etc, let me know and I'll include them.

In 2011 the latest owner of her other childhood home (the family moved here after Lydham Hall) decided to modify the property and in June the plans went to the council for approval. There was opposition, people said that the house should be preserved, quotes were obtained from authors. Opponents set up a petition and a twitter account but the council passed the plans nonetheless. The renovations were reported by Street Corner, Domain, the Wheeler Centre, the Independent, the Wentworth Courier, the New Zealand Herald, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Guardian, and the Telegraph. ANZLitLovers blogged about it, and so did A Better Woman, Clarissa's Blog, Whispering Gums, and A Pair of Ragged Claws. The house is named Boongarre, or Stead House, it is located at 14 Pacific Street in Watsons Bay, New South Wales (here are some photographs), the owner's name was Mark Schwarzer, and the Wheeler Centre sounds as if they found her biography on the side of a cereal packet.

David Stead moved his family to Boongarre in 1918, which was, he says, the same year he talked to a group of crayfishermen who believed they had seen a hundred-foot extinct prehistoric shark upsetting their crayfish pots.

He wrote:

In the year 1918 I recorded the sensation that had been caused among the "outside" crayfish men at Port Stephens, when, for several days, they refused to go to sea to their regular fishing grounds in the vicinity of Broughton Island. The men had been at work on the fishing grounds -- which lie in deep water -- when an immense shark of almost unbelievable proportions put in an appearance, lifting pot after pot containing many crayfishes, and taking, as the men said, "pots, mooring lines and all". These crayfish pots, it should be mentioned, were about 3 feet 6 inches [1.06 m] in diameter and frequently contained from two to three dozen good-sized crayfish each weighing several pounds. The men were all unanimous that this shark was something the like of which they had never dreamed of. In company with the local Fisheries Inspector I questioned many of the men very closely and they all agreed as to the gigantic stature of the beast. But the lengths they gave were, on the whole, absurd. I mention them, however, as an indication of the state of mind which this unusual giant had thrown them into. And bear in mind that these were men who were used to the sea and all sorts of weather, and all sorts of sharks as well. One of the crew said the shark was "three hundred feet [90 m] long at least"! Others said it was as long as the wharf on which we stood – about 115 feet [35 m]! They affirmed that the water "boiled" over a large space when the fish swam past. They were all familiar with whales, which they had often seen passing at sea, but this was a vast shark. They had seen its terrible head which was "at least as long as the roof on the wharf shed at Nelson Bay." Impossible, of course! But these were prosaic and rather stolid men, not given to 'fish stories' nor even to talking about their catches. Further, they knew that the person they were talking to (myself) had heard all the fish stories years before! One of the things that impressed me was that they all agreed as to the ghostly whitish colour of the vast fish. The local Fisheries Inspector of the time, Mr Paton, agreed with me that it must have been something really gigantic to put these experienced men into such a state of fear and panic.

(from his Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas, published in 1963. I found it on the Unknown Explorers website)

flux, mere flux

2011-07-01T05:00:00.006+10:00

Nina -- and when I say Nina I mean one of the two teachers in Muriel Spark's 2004 book The Finishing School, the one who teaches afternoon lessons in comme il fait -- Nina talks with aplomb on any topic that comes into her head, she talks about elephants, about Ascot, about hypocrisy, about criminal boyfriends, and she tells her students that if you are pursued by a snake then what you need to do is sit on the ground facing the snake with your legs apart and while the snake is trying to work out which foot to bite you should chop its head off with your knife. She is absolutely confident and serious and ludicrous yet truthful and I wonder if she would be a good model of behaviour for Mr Toots.

As you can see from my last post I am thinking about the problems of Mr Toots.

If Mr Toots could pursue a topic with Nina's indifference to shame then he could tell Florence Dombey that he loved her straight away, without sabotaging himself. He could go into the subject in depth. But, no, that wouldn't work because Nina only holds people in thrall like that when she has the cape of the classroom around her, when people are listening to her because she is going to tell them how the world works and how they should behave in it; this is the promise of the class. Also she is in a Muriel Spark novel, and this is the way people talk in Muriel Spark novels. They are mysterious with non sequiturs.

On the outside they are presented rigidly. The author will describe them with the same character tag again and again. (Different students in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie are known in shorthand: "famous for sex," the "silent lump," the one with "tiny eyes," etc.) But then they will do something almost unprepared-for -- and yet you could see it moving underneath that strangely dotted surface of tags and gestures, and in fact the surface rigidity itself is enough to let you know that things are not as they seem, because these brief tags and stiff spoken lines leave very obvious gaps, they do not explain; the author is not explaining everything to the reader, she is touching on the characters too slightly, she tells us too little, and perhaps in this way she lets us know that she thinks that as human beings we cannot know people. People will always surprise us.

"If we were constant beings by nature, like angels, it would be easier," she wrote once in a letter to her lover, Derek Stanford. "But we are flux, mere flux. No, not 'mere' flux -- necessary, right & proper flux."

Mr Toots is a constant being, like an angel, and the flux of his disorganised behaviour is only a mere outward flux -- he is rushing home and throwing himself on the bed because he can't bring himself to tell Florence Dombey about his constant inward state, which is one of love. He is attracted to her from beginning to end. His feelings are solid, like a long stuffed tube that never alters its diameter. By contrast in The Finishing School one character will start the book admiring her husband and by the end of the book she will have left him for the next-door neighbour, and a heterosexual man will hate another man to the point of wanting to murder him, and then he will decide that he is in love with him, and gay.

"Leave Dombey and Son," a concerned friend might say to Mr Toots. "Leave Dickens. Move to a Muriel Spark. You won't get anywhere with the heroine in a Dickens novel. He never lets them marry characters like you. Look at young John Chivery in Little Dorrit. Dickens lets his people jiggle around and give off energy but he keeps them on track (with some exceptions. Miss Mowcher veered but she had help) and if they're villains then they get to be superlatively villainous, and if they're ridiculous they get to be superlatively ridiculous, and if they're talkative they get to be superlatively talkative, and so they expand their god-given personalities to the fullest extent, but we know where it's going, don't we -- we know that the villain is going to suffer, die, or vanish at the end, and when a specific type of man shows up we know that the book is going to end with a marriage, and she's going to marry him. But Muriel Spark is different. Spark will let you hope. You might marry Florence Dombey in a Spark. It's not impossible."

Wrong, wrong, the friend is forgetting what Mr Toots is made of, Mr Toots is made of words, and if this word-thing (assume for a moment that he is a thing) moved into a Muriel Spark novel he would be freer, but he would have to change, he would not be Mr Toots, and the readers would be afraid of him perhaps or scornful of him or they would hate him; there is something ominous about the intractable mutability of her characters. He might be annihilated instead of rewarded. There's freedom's risk. The world become newly unreliable. He would not be as easy to see, or as easy to touch, and the readers would be less likely to recognise their own silliness in him, their own fallibility, because who thinks they are Miss Jean Brodie? She is totemic, a stiff totem, not an intimate one.

Freedom and uncertainty but also coldness and distance. Would it be worth it, Mr Toots? You live in a tyranny now, but the tyrant loves you.

a mouse would hardly find a foothold

2011-06-29T12:00:00.027+10:00

Despair, despair: among other things I've been trying to find a way to segue, on this blog, into the book of Faroese short stories I found in the library two weeks ago, and so far no luck, I can find no doorway into the subject, no guiding loving star, no mineshaft, and it feels as if I might as well be trying to climb up the cliffs that, I am told, rise from the sea around the shores of the Faroe Islands where all of these stories are set.

The Faroese writers associate the subject of cliffs so naturally with the subject of birds that I assume that it is normal for all of the other islanders to think like this as well, first cliffs and then birds, birds and then cliffs, specifically nesting birds. Characters go "fowling in the cliffs." A man who wants to kill a pair of ravens ("black as pitch and shiny as steel") in Sverri Patursson's Winning of the Bounty first acquires his bait in the shape of a dead lamb and then tosses it down a scarp. "Then he went all the way out to the edge of the bluff where the ravens were nesting lower down. He dropped the lamb so that it went rushing right past the nest and didn't stop until it reached a shelf below it. The birds were at the nest with their young, and when the carcass came tumbling down past them, they both flew out and began to circle close to the cliff."

The hero of one of the other stories, M.A. Winthers' To Catch a Thief, is a bird-poacher, one of those cunning but poor folk tale characters who outwit the rich and powerful. When he wants to trap himself some birds he goes to "one of the best of the Lað farmers' fowling places. It was impossible to walk down to the ledges in the face of the cliff here, and anyone who wanted to get to them had to use a line -- about twenty fathoms of it. The cliff was sheer from the edge down to the ledges, so sheer and smooth that a mouse would hardly find a foothold."

The Lað farmers try to catch him but he turns the tables on them and by the last paragraph of the story they're paying him to do their fowling.

I realise that I've found my way in. Here is my doorway: cliffs and birds. But before this, trust me, I was sitting here like Mr Toots in Dombey and Son, who never can work out how to tell Florence Dombey that he loves her. Instead he flails at the topic, hesitates, helplessly sabotages himself, "goes home to his Hotel in a state of desperation, locks himself into his bedroom, flings himself upon his bed, and lies there for a long time," moving the heart of the reader, who sees that he is a poor fool. Chesterton calls him "this little dunce and cad." Yet "Toots," he says, "expresses certain permanent dignities in human nature more than any of Dickens's more dignified characters can do it. For instance, Toots expresses admirably the enduring fear, which is the very essence of falling in love. When Toots is invited by Florence to come in, when he longs to come in, but still stays out, he is embodying a sort of insane and perverse humility which is elementary in the lover."

When Nicholson Baker perceived this love and humility in himself he wrote about it in U and I, a book which is both a memoir and a record of being haunted by thoughts of John Updike. Updike is the U. As he reaches the end of the book Baker the admirer meets Updike in the flesh -- twice -- and blurts at him -- maladroitly -- trying to be suave -- and goes away feeling that he has made the older writer dislike him. He stammers, he lies, he makes a gawky reference to The New Yorker. "I would never have done it either -- drag in The New Yorker name so obviously to get his attention -- except that life was too short not to. Those ticking seconds of signature might be the only chance I would ever get to embarrass myself in his presence.

When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: they have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality where gradations don't count."

But Toots is very delicate, he doesn't blurt enough, that's one of his problems. And me, I hesitate, I think, "That doesn't work." I am Tootsish, though I do not express certain permanent dignities of human nature. Baker says that a writer who wants to introduce a new topic should be bold and charge in -- take command, change it, make it change. Chutzpah is vital. In February and March after VIDA put out that report about the low number of women who published reviews, articles in magazines, and so on, some magazine editors said, well, women lack confidence, they don't stand up and propose articles on subjects they know almost nothing about, as men do; they don't volunteer.

More maladroit blurting may be the answer, or else women will be condemned to go home to their hotels in states of desperation, fling themselves on their beds, and lie there for a very long time, never embarking on blog posts about the Faroe Islands, and knowing that they are not as brave as that utter lunatic in the M.A. Winthers story who climbs down twenty fathoms of rope and risks his life above a peeling sea to trap a few birds when nowadays he could just take himself off to the SMS Mall in the capital Tórshavn and buy off the menu at Burger King instead. But the Lað farmers are not going to employ him for doing that.

Faroese Short Stories was translated by Hedin Brønner. Photographs of those cliffs "so sheer and smooth that a mouse would hardly find a foothold" are not difficult to find online, and here is one of them. Here are some birds sitting on tiny ledges on the cliff-face. Here are people lying on the ground at the top of a Faroese cliff as if they're at a picnic. Here is a waterfall coming off a cliff into the sea near the village of Gásadalur. "In 2002 there were only sixteen people living in Gásadalur, and several of the houses stand empty today," reports Wikipedia. Two bucks and I'd move there. I should point out that the book was published in 1972 so the cliff plus bird combination may not have the grip on the Faroese imagination that it once did.

after you move your eye

2011-06-25T00:46:00.015+10:00

A hallway runs through this flat from the front door to the room at the back, and as I was walking down that hallway yesterday I thought of the word telescope in my last post and gradually I felt worried. It seemed important that I should turn on the computer and change telescope to magnifying glass straight away, otherwise people would think that I didn't know what I was talking about, I thought.

But reading the post I saw that it was not telescope I had written but telescoping, and so magnifying glass would not be able to replace it, because the word I needed, which would have been magnifying-glassing, did not exist, and even if I had claimed my right to domination over my own small bit of language and invented the word I wanted, the sentence as a whole would have become obscured by this distracting showboat of a phrase, doing me no good and doing it no good either, and not helping anyone who tried to make sense out of me, in fact ruining everything. I had been reading several books of poetry by the American poet Louise Glück, and for a 2006 collection named Averno I remembered that she had written a poem called Telescope, in which the poem's "you" takes a telescope away from their eye and feels a vertiginous unreality. "There is a moment after you move your eye away / when you forget where you are / because you've been living, it seems, / somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky," she writes.

The telescope has given you a sense of closeness, she says, but that closeness is false; you do not live in the night sky with the planetary bodies; you are not "participating in their stillness, their immensity" as you imagined. Gradually the you realises that its sense of identification and unity was false, and as it achieves its quietude the poet concludes like this: "You see again how far away / each thing is from every other thing."

But as long as you had the telescope to your eye you had an equivalent of metaphor: disparate objects had been persuaded to unite, or to exist in the same place. We cannot live in metaphor, we are apart, every poor metaphor is fighting against the separating powers of the universe, all microscopic pinpoints snubbing one another and rolling around like grapes on a tray. Two of the writers I've read recently have gone out of their way to say that metaphor is important to poetry. One was Jorge Luis Borges and the other was Susan Sontag, and their examples were so similar that I wondered if Sontag, whose speech (she was accepting the Jerusalem Prize) was published decades after the Argentinian died, had found the idea in the same place that I did, the 1967-8 Norton lectures that came out with Borges' photograph on the cover over the title, This Craft of Verse.

But perhaps that is impossible, because the lectures were left in a recorded form for "more than thirty years" said Calin-André Mihailescu, the man who arranged the publication, "the tapes gathering dust in the quiet ever-after of a library vault" and so Verse didn't come out until 2002, one year after Sontag received her prize. The similarity seemed so great while I was reading it, however, that I wanted to believe she had somehow known, a message getting through, maybe a verbal report, but why would anyone bother to hold onto that nugget of information for thirty years, "Borges said that metaphor was essential to poetry, and he used such and such specific examples"? Or was she there in the audience, her mind clinging to this part of the lecture for decades before she found a use for it?

"One difference [between poetry and prose] lies in the role of metaphor," she wrote, "which, I would argue, is necessary to poetry. Indeed, in my view, it is the task -- one of the tasks -- of the poet, to invent metaphors." Borges says more or less the same thing but he comes to it out of a discussion of Leopoldo Lugones an Argentine poet who composed hundreds of new metaphors for writers to use when they referred to the moon.

Sontag also refers to the moon. I would like to bring out examples to prove my point about their similarity but both books were due back at the library about a week ago.

It's probably a coincidence and I don't want to use that as an excuse to dismiss it. What a strange thing. (But I know from past experiences that if I borrowed the two books again and tried to find the similarities I would be left wondering what I thought I had seen -- "These aren't alike; this is tenuous.")

Emily Dickinson's metaphors conduct the shrinking and growing effect that I was trying to get at with my telescoping and magnifying glass. Now I try to approach the idea of violence in her work, my impression that her metaphors, which jam objects together in startling ways, are violent towards their material, sadistic even, and I tell myself that if she could speak to the Abbey in He parts Himself -- like Leaves she would say, "You want to be strong stone because you are an abbey, but I will maintain a grip on you and with my powers I will turn you into quaintest Floss." She is sadistic with whimsy, I decided. What can I compare that to? A burning giraffe entered my head. Surrealism! What is an Abbey made of Floss? It is as weird as "the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella," Lautréamont's phrase that was borrowed with honours by André Breton, the strangeness of that, and the threat inherent in those ridiculous objects, the sewing machine with its stabbing needles, and the dissection table, which is, after all, a table where things are dissected. Surrealist whimsy is not kind, it loves to startle you with its viciousness, it takes a man and replaces his face with an apple, or it teases the Mona Lisa with a moustache, it dares you to underestimate it and call it childish, ludicrous, and silly, and so does Emily Dickinson, who sometimes seems to be a girl of about six exclaiming, "How happy is the little stone / That rambles in the road alone." In his introduction to her Complete Works, Thomas H. Johnson tells me that her famous correspondent Thomas Wentworth Higginson "was never convinced that she wrote poetry. As he phrased his opinion to a friend, her verses were 'remarkable, though odd … too delicate -- not strong enough to publish.'"

of quaintest Floss

2011-06-19T03:31:00.015+10:00

There were no libraries close to us in Arizona and for six months I borrowed nothing, but now we're within walking distance of the Clark County Library System, one outlet of, and they have books upon books, three copies of the Purgatorio, three Complete Shakespeares, two Anita Brookners that I hadn't read, two Hannah Arendts that I hadn't read, two translations of Murasaki Shikibu's Diary, ("As autumn advances, the Tsuchimikado mansion looks unutterably beautiful"), Helen Garner's First Stone, which was unexpected (and more than one Richard Flanagan, and strange, strange, finding those Australian names here, and what do they make of Robert Drewe's Shark Net I wonder, and then I wonder why I wonder), and the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, the poet slipping through telescopic hallucinations small and large with Alice in Wonderland quickness. The Sun is huge, the Daisy is small, she has them both, she puts them together with a dash for handcuffs. The Frost that possesses the World is a respectable and dark Sepulchre, but the Sepulchre is made of quaintest Floss, and the Abbey is a small Cocoon. The sea will overwhelm her as though she be Dew, but she will stare it down with the force of her small nouns. What does it conquer? An apron. A belt. Sea be not proud. It will fill her shoe with pearl. The world is animate and full of intentions. The Sun has a Whip to drive away the Fog, and the ship that walks on water must have feet. This is an uncracked logic.

Such will to power transmitted through so many tiny Bees.

That line of Murasaki was translated by Richard Bowring and published in the Penguin Classics version of the Diary. She goes on with this sentence: "Every branch on every tree by the lake and each tuft of grass on the banks of the stream takes on its own particular colour, which is then intensified by the evening light." Yes, answers Thoreau. "Was there ever such an autumn?" (The Journal, Oct 14, 1857) Both Murasaki and Thoreau were awkward around people, I notice, or both thought they were. Both of them wonder if they seem cold.

The Dickinson poems I've mentioned here are, He parts Himself—like Leaves—, I started Early – Took my Dog –, The Sun and Fog contested, and There is strength in proving that it can be borne.

Looking at it from the outside, the library branch near us falls somewhere between ZMKC's library in Budapest and her library in Canberra. Not so many knobs as the first one. Not so low as the second one. You enter it from the car park and not the street. If you walk into the building from the street entrance you come into a small round foyer with a flight of stairs at the back and signs saying Theatre.

and then a boulder of granite

2011-06-17T04:06:00.012+10:00

On the fifth of June a poster named George left a note in the comments section at Whispering Gums, saying that he couldn't think of "poetry involving rocks," and it hit me as I read this that John Kinsella's Divine Comedy had very few rocks in it. "Which is strange," I thought, "because Kinsella is writing about a small area of country Western Australia, and there is a mountain nearby, which he mentions, (it is "the tallest hill/mountain in the wheatbelt -- Walwalinj, or Mount Bakewell") and yet I can't remember him writing about the rocks."

I went and checked. He discusses the mountain as a whole mass, and he mentions "granite" in a number of places as a casual feature of the backdrop, and at least once he turns the granite into a liberated rock, and invents a "boulder of granite" --

They hesitated,
then, without opening their beaks,
ventriloquised, a jam tree speaking

and then a boulder of granite,
I couldn't separate the voices

-- and then there are some stones, "rose quartz chunks," but he doesn't concentrate on rocks, on any rock, in the way that he concentrates on animals and plants, on living creatures, on mushrooms in Sub-Paradiso: Mushrooms, or on a white-faced heron in Canto of the Uncanny, or on snakes in the Canto of Serpents and Theft. "You lift snakes from roads -- / before compression -- drivers / swerving 'to take them out'" he writes, and H. in Arizona did this too, she swerved her car to hit snakes. "Is that a snake?" she would wonder, and it was only a poor black stick lying patient by the side of the road in the twilight; and when I was in Thailand I met a university professor who told us that he did the same with his car for dogs, though Arizona snakes are probably in better physical and mental shape than Thailand's stray dogs, with their ribs like cage bars containing the heart in a basket, their sores like trapped lava bubbles, the skin running in concave descents off the spine, and the ears and legs that aren't there, limbs in absentia and the senses diminished, sight stripped to half with the loss of an eye, and there is such a mass of these dogs in that country, such a mob of these damned-looking creatures, Pestilence and Plague, War and Rape (you can see this as you are sitting outdoors at a restaurant, two of them under the table next to you), trotting in herds at night behind you, so that you look back, or not you but I, I looked back, as I was walking along a road in the warm early night after the evening thunderstorm which used to arrive regularly at six o'clock, and there were the discs of the eyes, marking time about two feet off the road, a line of them, so quietly, a fleet of horrors and ghost-lights -- and in a fantasy I see their missing legs vanished into the same hinterworld as John Kinsella's rocks, present once but now gone, gone, and never thought about by anyone again, as if the dogs had never had legs, and the countryside by a mountain had never had rocks.

Teejay in the comments section points out the existence of James McAuley's poem, Granite Boulder.

And Freddy (also in the comments) posts a Kinsella poem called Negation of Granite.

think it pretty

2011-06-15T03:39:00.022+10:00

Evelyne Bloch-Dano's Madame Proust: a Biography opens with a young Jeanne Weil preparing to marry Adrien Proust, and for the length of a few chapters I was sorrowful, thinking, "It's Penne Hackforth-Jones and Barbara Baynton all over again," because Bloch-Dano, for her own convenience, turns these people into fictional characters and has them fall silent ("Jeanne fell silent") and stare at plates ("She lowered her eyes and stared at the plate") in ways absolutely undocumented by evidence. She does not seem to be doing this out of energy and inspiration, as Peter Ackroyd does when he puts lines in Charles Dickens' mouth during Dickens, but because she worries that we, the readers, will lose interest in bits about plates and families if we don't have a friendly face there, smiling and staring like a piece of cardboard with a curve drawn on it, and two dots for eyes. Or the dots are cut out, and the author peeps through.

Ackroyd's inventions are phantasmagoria; they make Dickens seem stranger, larger, and less explicable; but Bloch-Dano's inventions shrink Jeanne down to the size of a schematised heroine whose brain tinkles its thoughts out neatly and in a logical order, as the brains of human beings do not do.* "Jeanne was ready to admit that she didn't dislike Adrien Proust. She even felt she might be able to love this quiet man with his gentle ways. He was serious, hard-working. But she knew so little about him," writes the biographer, mind-reading ghoulishly; the mind is dead, the brain is decayed, and it leaves no documents to support her.

It is a distraction rather than an addition and I wonder what else the author might be fabricating. I doubt her.

But then Jeanne Proust gives birth to her first son, Marcel, who is destined to be researched in the future, and the author acquires so many facts that she can abandon the padding. Now she can start to strike facts together like flints and make sparks. My favourite spark comes on the last page, after Bloch-Dano has been telling us how Jeanne and her son would argue over his bedtime. He would go to bed late. But the first sentence in Lost Time is, "For a long time I used to go to bed early." "Jeanne would have loved those words," writes Bloch-Dano, and for the first time I saw that sentence as an in-joke aimed at a mother who was dead by the time it was published, and would never respond -- this joke, generated, born, and left to shoot off into the darkness, like the Voyager probe that represents a desire to say hello to an alien rather than a realistic plan for actually meeting one.

Whether the line was meant that way or not Bloch-Dano doesn't know and nor do I, but when I saw that this thought had occurred to her, I realised that she had experienced in Lost Time the kind of window-quality that Borges saw in all books, the Narnian-wardrobe, a series of doors opening into possibilities -- a book not as an end in itself, but as an epicentre.

And I thought: "Any book could be like that, if we could look at it like that, but how do you look at it like that?"

You love it, I think; you have to love it first, you have to love it so much that you trust it to become an epicentre, and so it becomes one. It responds to your wish. "Fall in love with a dog’s bum / And thou’ll think it pretty as a plum," Françoise says in Swann's Way. Lydia Davis translates. Qui du cul d'un chien s'amourose, / Il lui paraît une rose. But it is both things at once, an epicentre and a book, and an arse and a rose or plum. There is the book, or the arse, you look at it, you concentrate, and there is your focus. Henri Raczymow looked at a single one of Proust's characters and wrote a book of one hundred and forty-eight pages about the relationship between this character and one of the living people who inspired him. Proust was jealous of this man, says Raczymow, and he was glad to kill the character. That line of thought gets him, Raczymow, onto the subject of Judaism, and is it not significant, he asks, that the Jewish character Albert Bloch decides to give himself the pen name Jacques du Rozier, when the Parisian Judegasse mentioned by the character Baron de Charlus is the Rue de Rosiers, and the letter Z, as we all know (now he is referring to Roland Barthes' S/Z) is "the letter of mutilation"? "By incorporating this z in du Rozier, Bloch mutilates and chastises himself. He effaces and censures his Judaism." Also! Charles Swann's daughter Gilberte (Swann is the character who gave Raczymow the idea for this book in the first place) drags the tail of her S across the letter G when she signs her name, G.S. Forcheville, the 'Forcheville' coming from her stepfather, after her father's, Swann's, death. "Of course this S isn't exactly a Z," says Raczymow, "but it's close enough. And doesn't it belong to Barthes' paired S/Z? For it served the same purpose of "cutting, crossing, and slashing.""

Raczymow, who leaps between thoughts too abruptly, is as convincing as a man who tells you that a butterfly is a species of bat because they both have wings; his focus on Swann and his real-life part-counterpart has overwhelmed him, but still, a focus puts the mind in a seed and invites it to sprout; it makes the mind a seed or bud or nut, and a famous book is a prime focus: look at all of the essays that have come out of famous books, look at John Livingston Lowes' The Road to Xanadu -- six hundred and forty-eight pages out of a poem of six hundred and twenty-five lines. Books give birth to books, it's miraculous. Focus is the thing. And not only books, but anything. What else? Cees Nooteboom decided that the way to acquaint himself with Gambia was to interview the president. "So on that Friday morning I take my first steps toward a president who, in the end, I do not manage to reach, but that was not the point anyway." Hannah Arendt often liked to orient her thought by touching on Romans and Greeks. In The Promise of Politics she thinks of The Iliad next to The Aeneid and uses the word amazing twice on one page. Thoreau wonders about the origin of his surname and ends up with mead --

Feb. 15. 1852. Perhaps I am descended from that Northman named "Thorer the Dog-footed." Thorer Hund …

Feb 16. Snorro Sturleson says, "From Thor's name comes Thorer, also Thorarinn." Again: "Earl Rogenvald was King Harald's dearest friend, and the king had great regard for him. He was married to Hilda, a daughter of Rolf Naefia, and their sons were Rolf and Thorer … Rolf became a great viking, and was of so stout a growth that no horse could carry him, and wheresoever he went he must go on foot; and therefore he was called Grange-Rolf.

[…]

King Harald "set Earl Rogenvald's son Thorer over More and gave him his daughter Alof in marriage. Thorer called the Silent, got the same territory from his father Rognvald had possessed." His brother Einar, going into battle to take vegeance on his father's murderers, sang a kind of reproach against his brothers Rollang and Rolf for their slowness and concludes,--

"And silent Thorer sits and dreams
At home, beside the mead-bowl's streams."

And stereotypes are a focus and a way of grasping. Stuart MacIntyre finishes off his Concise History of Australia by telling you that Australians are "a largely undemonstrative people" who "rally in misfortune; fire and flood brings out the best in them," and, oh, see, this is why I am never at my best, having never encountered fire or flood and instead proceeding undemonstratively and feebly and when the American at the library spoke to me yesterday I did not understand her accent, and instead of asking her what she meant I grinned and went away and almost left the building without finding out how to open the cases of the DVDs I'd borrowed.

Focus is the one magic force. The words of a spell are the focus for a wish. A witch or a wizard is only the Don Bradman of wishing.

* This is key for me, although I don't know if I've explained it very well. It's not the fictionalisation of real people that bothers me, it's the way that Bloch-Dano uses it to make her subject tidy and small. I go to a biography to see the person made bigger, and more detailed, and more interesting. Not smaller, and less detailed, and less interesting.

Bloch-Dano is French and her book has been translated into English by Alice Kaplan. Raczymow's book is known as Swan's Way, or, originally, La Cygne de Proust, and it was translated by Robert Bononno. Nooteboom goes to Gambia in his essay Lady Wright and Sir Jawara: a Boat Trip Up the Gambia, published in Nomad's Hotel, a book of his travel essays. It was translated out of Dutch and into English by Ann Kelland. Thoreau was writing in his journal.