trying to find a way of getting down

Why should I miss the dirty icicle in La Femme de Gilles, when I can still see “long, black snow-covered hedges” and that “heap of stones” Elisa sits on in the dark during chapter five? It’s not as if we lose her landscape. I don’t know, that page of acute seeing seems good enough for essays in class. “The woman she spots at the table represents Elisa as she was earlier that day, happy and ignorant,” you write, “but this aspect of herself is perishing, strangled to death by her dawning knowledge; this is why she ‘knows’ her and passes, a witness to murder …” At the moment this woman appears she is already a dead Elisa. The polyps on the trees in Octave Mirbeau’s Calvary, 1886, tr. Louis Rich, a book I never even finished, are at least alive: “I recall the park, its enormous trees, strangely twisted, eaten up by polypes [sic] and moss”? That was enough, so I closed the book. (A grackle is drinking from a puddle outside.)

Femme is so constructedly constructed, so smart, so architectural – and yet I finished it, which, as I admitted, is more than you can say for me and Mirbeau; I went through the steps, the fragments of news about the character’s alleged past, lined up and coming together, just as the shock hitting Elisa on the pages around the “dirty icicle” comes together too, in sections: this is a book that teaches you itself quite patiently. Bourdouxhe makes her tragedy like a curriculum. The ending she was planning towards was hanging over her the whole time, even when she was saying in chapter one, “Life is sweet.” As she wrote about Elisa dreaming over her tub “staying still for a moment, soaking in the softness” she was seething with purpose. By the end of this uninnocent chapter, with the husband fed on rice pudding and the little girls bathing in warm water, we’ve probably guessed that someone is going to die. The happy ending has already occurred and now we’re only left with the sad one. Who’s it going to be? Right now everyone is up for grabs. Will it be the husband? Will Bourdouxhe give us a surprise by dropping a roof tile on one of the girls? Was it Seven Little Australians that conditioned me to expect girls in books to die because something falls on them? Didn’t we lose a lot of Ruskin’s dashes; didn’t his editors change some of them into other punctuation, or am I guessing too much because John Lewis Bradley, the compiler of The Letters of John Ruskin to Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, 1966, tells you in the introduction that he is a responsible editor who retained them against reason? “Ruskin’s odd spellings and excessive use of dashes remain.” So, these ineffables or polyps or spasms or scriptless convulsions are still there, and no one can say they represent anything distinct.

I have been trying to find a way of getting down this week – it is so tempting – your promise of quiet – and I should indeed like so much to come – were it possible – But an infinite number of cobweb threads fasten me here – inexplicably – but not to be broken. The strongest being a dim thread indeed – leading I know not where through labyrinths of old times. I’ve just got into some depth about the Egyptian things – and if I leave my work ever so little the sand will all blow in upon me again.” (26th of September, 1864)

At this point in his life he is knotting himself up in the death-figure of Rose La Touche, another dash.

faraway eyes, then three-quarters

Walking down the street to the cinema with them she is still the mistress of the unknowing: “in spite of the weight of her [pregnant] belly Elisa had no difficulty in placing her feet steadily on the stones of the road.” In the house, just after she had taken the money in her hand, she found herself looking at “the things that made up her familiar world” with unusual attention, then the physical approach to her husband and sister is described as a movement of eyes: “slowly turning, at first only halfway, looking straight in front with faraway eyes, then three-quarters, then at last full face. She looked at them both.” So it’s not only her words that’re finding their way to something, it’s also her eyes: now in the street “she let her eyes range brightly over the houses as they passed them, looking first right then left, keenly registering everything that came into her vision. She noticed every dirty little icicle that shone in the rivulets against the pavement; she marked the exact point at which the halo round the streetlamps disappeared into the sky.” Nowhere else in the book does she notice like this. “Passing in front of a lit window she saw a woman leaning over a half-cleared table; she had time to observe her face, her hair, her mouth, her gestures, her life. In that one look, which had lasted merely the few seconds that it takes three walking figures to cross a rectangle of light, Elisa came to know that woman.” When she realises that her husband and her sister beside her “had no real knowledge of such things at all” she is proud she can see them.

I was going to go on like that but then I opened The Journals of Mary Butts, 2002, ed. Nathalie Blondel, and read this sentence in the entry for the twelfth of April, 1920: “Again the difficulty of writing down the most vivid experiences. They fade, & remain just below the surface. This pregnancy appears to be good for clairvoyance.” Mary Butts, I thought, would add something to my thoughts about Elisa’s acute seeing, so I stopped writing the post and read Butts’ autobiography, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns, 1937 (I had the 1988 edition), and The Journals. No, though, aside from the mutual acknowledgement of the possibility of seeing with intensity there wasn’t anything to say about Butts and Madeleine Bourdouxhe except a series of negative differences. Butts presents her seeing as part of a lifelong cultivation of the numinous stemming from an original sensitivity to landscape, a willed and steady process that is always there, while Bourdouxhe pictures it hitting her character like a moment of shock. Here is Elisa, elevated, pleased, finding herself with new powers, while the reader waits for her to catch up, discovering themselves on a bridge. There they stand, hands full of the knowledge the author has given them, witnessing the character who comes closer. Elisa feels as if a peak has been achieved. (I‘ve just read Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. and a Hilda Hilst personage would not have made that much fuss about eating a cockroach.) No, no, thinks Bourdouxhe’s reader to Elisa, we are not there yet. Our realisations will crash together again in a moment. Then you will suffer.

Meanwhile, Butts is adding new information to her life of research.

Remember: Cocteau in bed; white light in a white room through blue shutters. Jean Desbordes & he in pyjamas blue like the dress of the Virgin. (February 1928)

Remember: The sea tonight when the sun was like a rose – it hardly ever is, but tonight like a huge Cornflower sinking in a mist. The rose path & blue-jade water shadows. The rocket-smoke erect in air, a cone upside down violet hedges below at Chapel Idny. (26 June 1932.)

Remember: As I came into this room about 10:30 – through the windows the sea & sky in the last light – inside jade & pearl. (8 June 1934)

Soon Elisa will have to do something, but you don’t know what: maybe she will be frightened and stunned, maybe she will make an accusation, maybe she will run away from home or commit suicide, though probably not yet because the book has barely started and what are we going to do without her? After she has reached us she will never see a dirty little icicle like that again. They will all vanish from the landscape. We don’t know it yet, but this is the kind of robbery that is approaching us. Butts, however, will not change her determination to see things and soon she will write “Remember” again with underlining; soon we will have from her the sea or a cliff or a tree or the light on a hedge.

but she knew it wouldn’t be a sentence

On page fourteen of the Northwestern University Press edition of Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s La Femme de Gilles, 1937, tr. Faith Evans, the femme Elisa has taken money out of her handbag when she realises that something is occurring; she doesn’t quite know what but her attention is heightened, she feels vague unease turn to anguish, “behind her back there was another world” and now she is going to approach that other world by saying “an essential sentence.”

She knew she was going to speak. She didn’t know what she would say, but she knew it wouldn’t be a sentence that dropped carelessly from her lips, but rather an essential sentence, a sentence of which she would be the perfect mistress.

When the author writes the sentence on the next page you see that Elisa is not in command of her expressiveness. She seems to be figuring out how her meaning should appear. The pressure between the importance of her words and the casualness she is working to impose on them comes out in the punctuation. Instead of announcing her new decision like a “perfect mistress” she hedges with, “I’ve been thinking … I think I’ll …”

“I’ve been thinking – it’s not tiring, going to the cinema … I think I’ll come with you after all, I’ll ask Marthe to look after the children.”

We’ve seen that the “thinking” she refers to was a sensuous surrender to felt knowledge (“She felt it to be so [...] this mysterious insight which seemed suddenly to have seized her by the throat”), rather than the modest intellectual casualness the spoken sentence suggests; see, she is evading the power of her listeners, her husband and her sister, she is struggling to keep the revelation of her perfect mistresshood from them, she falsely stresses her exhaustion (“it’s not tiring”) and her dependence (“I’ll ask Marthe”), in other words her servitude to physicality, at the same time that an instinct, invisible to them, has made her alone and strong in a middle-world, a not-there-yet, as she begins to approach them mentally in her concealment.

at this point where we pause

Coming off Jean-Paul Richter last year into Heimito von Doderer’s The Merowingians, or, the Total Family, 1962, tr. Vinal Overing Binner, I thought at first that the book’s digressions were Richterian (spontaneous-seeming romanticisms) but as I went on I disagreed with myself. This was a machine, a machine-book, making itself through machine-understanding, by comprehending narrative as a machine that depended on the invention of a vital component to generate form. Once it had invented that component, whatever it was (Dr. Horn’s method of diagnosed repressed anger in his patients by observing the width of the angle between their feet), it allowed itself to create digressions around it (expanding a comment about “the reader’s fury” on page 347 by adding “whose foot angle, at this point where we pause in our questionable reporting, must have already reached an impressive degree”). So it fed like an animal on this machinery, and grew to whatever shape it needed to be to accommodate that digression: chapters odd lengths toward the end, etc, all justified by the machine (first half of the twentieth century he had lived through, Doderer, the age of Buster Keaton and Duchamp’s Large Glass, the machines).

The flesh of the characters becomes mechanical (representing its feelings not through ineffable Richter sighing but via reliable foot-angles) and anger can be switched off (when Dr. Horn leads the sufferers through a scientifically calibrated process that introduces them first to stamping music and then to a room filled with smashable ceramic statuettes). To turn the anger back on again (why? Because a completely cured citizenry would put the Dr Horns of the world out of business) you introduce simple irritations, such as artificial grit in the pockets or a bad manufactured smell. A quote from Doderer’s diary in Jorg Kreienbrock’s Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the Question of Modern Literature, 2012, is helpful: “Anger caused by a small trifle (which objectively would not be more than a trigger, in French a déclic), like a breakfast ruined by an indolent waitress or other caricatures of domestic misfortune, functions as the inserted sparkplug for everything we have on our mind.” So there is something “on our mind,” in the author’s opinion, something that exists before the sparkplug. The flesh clicks on and off like a machine but it is not empty.

Why does he insist on anger? Why is that the form of expression he chooses for the otherwise unexpressed feelings? Thinking back on The Merowingians in the light of that quote you remember the constant slappings, the punches, the beatings, the incidental details like Richenza manifesting her reaction to the Count by kicking him through a door and “[giving] him such a working over that his gaunt face swelled like a pumpkin”; the number of characters who are dominated by rage, revenge, or violence (Childerich III, Schnippedilderich, Pippin, Horn's clients, the sisters Karla and Sonka who “exhibited a repellent and truly detestable savagery”, etc); the war at the end, the general resort to brutality. The perpetual selection of anger is the unsaid thing in the book. The déclic for the selection is writing. Before that there is a why with no answer. (Is the book is ever aware there is a why?)

their yearnings unsung

Playing his piano, Norwid’s Chopin manifests the perfection that Poland is unable to realise; the completeness of Pericles, or of Orpheus on his lyre, a perfection that comes into the world through a physical effort that is superhuman but also tempered, attentive, “softly”:

… like when boys battle boys –
– The keys still resisting
The source of their yearnings unsung
They softly push back on their own.*

When he separates “one moment” from “one moment,” with his comma, Norwid gives the poem something that it doesn’t have anywhere else, an indissoluble capsule of time where one of the actions he imagines (the otherworldly spirit of perfection perpetually existing) can really belong. If “one moment” can live on its own then it has Pericles inside it. I am only writing this because the missing comma in that one translation still bothers me more than other one-word or one-punctuation mark things that have stopped me recently, like “nozzle” for a goat’s nose in William Carlos Williams’ The Desolate Field or the impression I had during page thirty-one of The Blue Octavo Notebooks, that the translators must have been happy when they found the right words for a cute and boring line Kafka copied from the Jewish monthly Der Jude on December 11th, 1917: “The Bible is a sanctum, the world, sputum.” Kafka, on his own, doesn’t write this sort of banality-cloaker. When he plays with repetition he does it to create a paradox by putting two or more things in tension. “We hold the world fast and complain that it is holding us.” But the partnership of “hold” and “holding” looks straightforward for the translators compared with sputum and sanctum, and my thoughts about the heroism on page thirty-one had nothing to do with what the line meant.


*tr. Jerome Rothenberg and Airie Galles

a great brooding-oven

Each century provides us with new things to conceal,
A territory that offers no purchase to the curious eye of affection,
Overgrown with loneliness, its ever denser leaves.

Günter Eich, Dreams, from Angina Days: Selected Poems, 2010, tr. Michael Hofmann



Now-a-days, when forests are burned to charcoal faster than they grow again, the only thing to be done is to warm the climate a good deal, and turn it into a great brooding-oven, kiln, and field-oven, so as to save the trouble, and obviate the necessity, of having stoves in the houses. And this has been in some measure attended to by careful Commissioners of Woods and Forests, who have cleared away the forests as much as they could, they being full of late winter. When one thinks how very beautifully modern Germany contrasts with that which Tacitus mapped, warmed as it is by the mere cutting down of the forests, we have little difficulty in feeling convinced that a time will come when, there being no more timber at all, we shall arrive at such a temperature that the atmosphere itself shall be our fur pelisse.

Jean-Paul Richter, Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces; or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkaes, Parish Advocate in the Burgh of Kuhschnappel (a Genuine Thorn Piece), 1877, tr. Alexander Ewing

The last one for this year. Sorry, René Char. Sorry Déwé Gorodé.

they seem monotonous

Only the men remaining, able to breathe in peace, each on his own centre in integrated morning mood, the party held together by the ceremonial furnishings of the table and securely apart by the impermanent nature of the gathering.

Dorothy Richardson, Dimple Hill, 1938



Design (perhaps by definition) seems to guarantee outcome
Better yet
Each outcome is intermediary – the very purpose of pattern is to be reassuring
And yet, since they are saturated with psychial ‘pastness’
Patterns cannot claim limitless purity
Patterns amplify reality because they both modulate and prophesy our perception of them
Where at first they seem monotonous they soon become monstrous
Then is all organization portenteous and narrative


Lyn Hejinian, A Border Comedy, 1997

jackals, rhinos, cloud-elephants

For the rest, I was hardly in the mood for coquetry at Weisenbach; a melancholy wind blew under the doors and through the passages of the inn: when the wind blows I am in love with nothing else.

The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand, vol. 6, 1850, tr. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos



This lake, even a mustard seed’s too large to sink in it,
But everyone comes to drink its water.
Deer, jackals, rhinos, cloud-elephants are born,
And, barely born, fall back into the lake.

Poem #130, from I, Lalla, the Poems of Lal Ded, 2011, tr. Ranjit Hoskote

[before our own comprehension] (preliminary

Death being the first form of Life which we have had the power to Contemplate, our entrance here being [before our own comprehension] (preliminary to our own) an Exclusion from comprehension, it is [strange] amazing that the fascination of our own predicament does not entice us more. With such sentences as these directly over our Heads we are as exempt from Exultation as the Stones –

Emily Dickinson, worksheet jotting, published in The New England Quarterly, 1955



Like a critic I thought form was an equilibrium
Which progressed by momentum from some original reduction
Of fear to the horizon

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, from the title poem in The Heat Bird, 1983

the dense bush

The village itself, like most other villages, was made up of clusters of several hundred small round mud-and-thatch huts, which were scattered all over the plateau. The majority of the people, again like any other villagers in the land, were subsistence farmers by trade. Their lives revolved around their fields, which spread out on the eastern side of the village, across the valley. Also closely involved with their everyday way of life was the dense bush which almost enclosed the village in all directions but the east. Somehow, everything: the village, the valleys, the thick bush and the fertile brown fields were all in turn surrounded by hills and mountains.

Wilson Katiyo, A Son of the Soil, 1976 (”Not for resale outside Zimbabwe,” says this Longman reprint from 1988.)



That we are ourselves and that our leaders in space-time do not in fact exist; that there is sufficient peace in each of our deaths to maintain a universe of light; but we retain a compartment of loathing in each as a weapon; that we would as soon kill a leader as follow one; that to kill means to negate you before us, to void your identity so it is like ours, though less rich (your great ignorance) if you interfere at all with our lives, now passed in voluntary negation; that we also retain certain ancient shamanic or visionary powers, which allow the projection of images in public arenas, that is mind space, for the purposes of haunting, cursing, omenizing, and terrorizing those who would harm us or innocent others. this is not a fiction as document: it is proposed as vision to be deployed for instruction, weapon, solace, or nothing at all, we want you mindful that we see you, in all ways previously ascribed to omnipotent deity. i will continue to present the range of our power our syntax our marks our reflections and conversations, as scribe, as names, as light, as seer and as creature owl. you will do as you wish but may yet be affected, for you are not in control of all matter, and we are forceful and capable of changing the particles, for example, of thought and ideation. you may not be able to bear it; we hope you cannot.

Alice Notley, How the Dead Women may operate, from Negative Space, from Alma, or the Dead Women, 2006

repetitions and variations

We can observe these forms everywhere in nature, and we see how easily all forms of matter on earth – so why not the human consciousness as well? – will yield to what I’m calling the regulating effect of chance. In this way, we can find comfort in imagining that it’s possible to write as easily as frost creates its fernlike repetitions and variations on a window-pane, or as concisely as the flesh of kiwifruit clings to the black cardinal points of its seeds, and even that it might be possible to write completely gray on gray, as when a large cloud, without edges or breaks, will very slowly, as it spreads, begin to reveal a consistency and a direction.

Inger Christensen, The Regulating Effect of Chance, from The Condition of Secrecy: Essays, 2018, tr. Susanna Nied



Shudders of cold convulsed her. Her teeth chattered in an icy frost, full stop. Her shapely ice-cold hands lay still (as in a deep frost, shuddering with cold, slender woman with eyes wide open, renowned silk sheets), full stop. Her shining eyes wandered flickeringly in the dark, and her quaking lips breathed, colon, open quotation marks, capital o-aitch Helena, em-dash, em-dash, Helena, em-dash, close quotation marks, rotation marks, flotation marks.

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1929, tr. Michael Hoffmann

our look is what keeps (forever)

The black is a cruel tangent to the little girl’s forehead and cheek. We can never escape from the other, grown-up face that has to deal with our looking and has seen our type before: we are intruders, we feel the pressure of the pages – the possibility of imaginative freedom – against our fingers; our look is what keeps (forever) the pages unread.

T.J. Clark, in his preface to the revised edition of The Painting of Modern Life, 1999. The painting he's describing is Manet’s Le Chermin de fer, 1872 – 73.



Here nothing is decided but only here can the power of decision be tested.

Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 1948, tr. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins

strolling grandly over the roof

For weeks he had forced himself not to look for Isobel, but this effort of will was no longer needed. He was like a man who stops writing letters to a friend he is soon to meet in the flesh.

Jessica Anderson, An Ordinary Lunacy, 1963



Mid-May had passed, and after the bell he heard the cry of a kite.
“So it’s here again,” he muttered to himself, listening from bed.
The kite seemed to be strolling grandly over the roof, and then it flew off toward the sea.
Shingo got up.
He scanned the sky as he brushed his teeth, but the kite was nowhere to be seen.
But it was as if a fresh young voice had departed and left the sky over the roof serene.

Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain, serialised 1949 – 1954, tr. Edward J. Seidensticker

between them are mixed ashes

The Poet is dead in me – my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been my imagination) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stick of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed & mitred with Flame. That is past by! – I was once a Volume of Gold Leaf, rising & riding on every breath of Fancy – but I have beaten myself back into weight & density, & now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat and square on the earth amid the hurricane, that makes Oaks and Straws join in one Dance, fifty yards high in the Element.

Coleridge in a letter to William Godwin, March 1801

It seems to those who cry that all is lost, almost all almost lost; worse still it seems on the one hand that all has been lost by me, on the other hand that all has lost me; a double mourning then spreads itself over the earth like two sheets, one black, one white, one feminine, one masculine, one easterned, one westerned, and between them are mixed ashes, showing now carmine now grey,

Hélène Cixous, Neuter, 1972, tr. Lorene M. Birden

a step when it is taken

Read this year.

What is a sentence. A sentence is a duplicate. An exact duplicate is depreciated. Why is a duplicated sentence not depreciated. Because it is a witness. No witnesses are without value.

(Gertrude Stein, How to Write, 1931)

“We will advise you to take any step you have decided on,” said Miss Luke. “It must be advisable to take a step. There is more point in a step when it is taken.”

(Ivy Compton-Burnett, More Women Than Men, 1933)

as if she was

As I was looking at three translations of Norwid’s Fortepian Szopena I noticed that everybody had translated one of the phrases, “co chwila, co chwila,” with a different set of words. One of them liked “moment, by moment,” another one “each moment, each moment,” and the last one, “from beat to beat.’ That was Teresa Bałuk, later criticised for being too nice and smooth by Agata Brajerska-Mazur, who said that in order to translate Norwid well you need “extensive knowledge -- not only of the translated text but also of the but also the whole of the author’s works and ideas.” (I don’t have any of that and I’m still disturbed by the infidelity to Norwid’s comma.) Arie Gallas, who co-translated the “each moment, each moment” version with Jerome Rothenberg, lists Polish among the Foreign Language Skills on his C.V., but their poem still comes with an afterword that claims he is “hard to conceive for those of us cut off from him by language.” Rothenberg, Gallas, and a third writer who has just entered their article, Jeffrey C. Robinson, prove their point by quoting Polish writers who agree on “the impenetrable obscurity of [Norwid’s] style and his jarring syntax” (Czesław Miłosz). Their list ends with Bogday Czaykowski, who believes the dead poet “thought of himself as a reader of signs, of traces left by God for human beings to recognize and decipher.”

All of the Polish-English dictionaries I could find told me that “chwila” meant either “moment” or “instant”, with the Cambridge Polish-English Dictionary adding another suggestion, “while.” If, for some magical reason (say aliens cast spells on you), you needed to translate Norwid’s “chwila” as “while,” would the phrase have to become “in a while, in a while”? But then we’re always looking forward to a piece of future scenery without inhabiting our own moment and that seems to be the antithesis of those three real translations by Bałuk, Rothenberg, Gallas, and “moment, by moment”’s Danuta Borchardt.

Translation was on my mind. When I walked upstairs from the Norton Simon’s Ellsworth Kelly exhibition to the Henri Rousseau painting of monkeys in the galleries above I imagined the pointed leaves in Kelly’s Suite of Plants Lithographs were being echoed in Rousseau’s jungle. I remembered how happy André Gide sounds in his journals when he notices that his dislike of Alexandre Dumas is shared by an author he admires, Colette. It’s good for him to see his sensations removed from obscurity in another person.* On Monday, after I had stepped away from Maurice Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure, 1950, to watch Agnes Varda’s 1968 film, Lions Love (… and Lies), I had to put the book down for the rest of the day because Viva, one of the Lions characters, was reciting Blanchot’s lines in my head every time I came back to them. I had been reading a chapter that describes the condition of Anne, who is, argues Kevin S. Fitzgerald, a kind of Euridice removing herself from Thomas, who is an Orpheus. “[F]or Thomas's limit-experiences resemble the near death experience of Orpheus in Hades.”

“Then, suddenly,” writes Blanchot, in this translation by Robert Lamberton, “with the noise of a tempest she entered into a solitude made out of the suppression of all space, and, torn violently by the call of the hours, she unveiled herself. It was as if she was in a green valley where, invited to be the personal rhythm, the impersonal cadence of all things, she was becoming with her age and her youth, the age and youth of others.” Although I wouldn’t normally have seen a connection between Thomas and Viva, I realised that if the Warhol star really had begun saying those lines it would not have sounded wrong. The movie, in which people often borrow phrases from Shakespeare, or from Michael McLure’s 1965 play The Beard, or, in one scene, from St. Augustine, would have made sense of the words as they came out of her Buster Keaton stoneface, and the translation from one place to another would have felt legitimate.** Varda’s works are arguments for the carrying capacity of movies, all except Vagabond, 1985. (People who like Vagabond will talk about the personality of the protagonist rather than the filmness of the film.)

Instead of reading Thomas I wached the Melbourne Cup and fooled about, trying to fit the word “translation” around the death of Cliffsofmoher – translated from one of the three hopes of Ireland into nothing or something stupid like that. In light of the dead horse it seems strange to see all these live people running around.




* Originally I wrote “his hatred of Alexandre Dumas” which was nice but I was working off my memory of the passage and “hatred” felt like too much when I looked it up.

After Bella-Vista, which is quite recent, I take up La Maison de Claudine, which I did not yet know. I enjoy reading in it: “Neither my brothers’ enthusiasm nor my parents’ disapproving amazement got me to take an interest in The Three Musketeers.” Yes, I am glad not to be the only one who failed to lose his heart to Dumas père when his companion in boredom is Colette.” (11th of February, 1941. Translated by Justin O’Brian.)

Hatred was not really honest. “I can’t say hatred,” I thought.



** If I were Varda I would be making a joke about Viva’s stoneface being a stoned face, but it needs a French cadence and I’m not French. It would suit her general way of using words, Mur Murs, Faces Places, and so on.

destroying rocks

“Poets are routinely and shamefully used by their society to have a culture,” wrote Alice Notley as she was describing the life of her friend Steve Carey, “to have a culture at all.” She went on to add that Carey was “the product of society’s use of him”. He was dead. As soon as you read this you remember that part of the earth from Cyprian Norwid’s grave was transported from France to Poland one hundred and eighteen years after his death and buried in a crypt under Wawel Cathedral along with sixteen kings, two saints, a cardinal, a general, the Queen Jadwiga who lived from c. 1373 to 1399, the Queen’s daughter who lived for three weeks, and Adam Mickiewicz. Whatever else you may say about the United States, they have not shifted the remains of Steve Carey. Let’s say something nice about Max Richter, Jean Paul’s son, who resisted his father’s constant lectures about respecting poets, when “someone” (tr. Eliza Lee, Life of Jean Paul Richter, 1850) asked him what they would do if his parents died and he answered first, “We would weep,” but then “We would go out a little into the street,” pushing back (I say) against the initial desire to sound poetically moved and instead rethinking himself into a prosaic reaction, refusing the temptation to borrow his intelligence from poetry, in spite of his father, who, when his characters in The Campaner Thal, 1797, tr. Juliette Bauer, reached an elevated point in the Pyrenees, brought out a dictionary of contemporary poetic bliss and said that they “looked again towards the heavens, lo! all its stars were gleaming, and in place of rose-woven wreaths, the mountains were clad in extinguished rainbows, and the giant of the Pyrenees was crowned with stars instead of roses.”

The characters in Campaner Thal have been discussing the likelihood of immortality as they climb the mountain – what does Kant think about it? – and God? – is Uranus populated by nuns who like the dark? – until they reach the summit, where the scenery joins their imaginations to create a complementary argument for a mutual and comprehensive appreciation of the subject that has been skewing them.

[I]n this moment it was with each of our enraptured souls as if from its oppressed heart earth's load had dropped away; as if from her mother's arms, the earth were giving us, matured in the Father arms of the infinite Creator; as if our little life were over! To ourselves, we seemed the immortal, the exalted. We fancied that our speech of man's immortality had been the prophecy of our own, as with two great and noble men.

In the preface to the story Jean Paul has already told us that “Poetry alone reconciles the past to the future, and is the Orpheus's lyre which commands these two destroying rocks to rest,” so now, here, poetry is landscape; poetry is in the appreciation of landscape, the sublime knowledge that the stars, heavenly burners, are also substitute roses.

A hot air balloon is nearby and why not. The character Gione, longing to match her physicality to her mind’s desire for beautiful solitude, mounts to the stars in the basket alone. Just near the beginning of the story (many pages ago) she appeared to die; her devastated friend Karlson wrote a poem “entitled, Grief without Hope, which declared his disbelief, for he had never broken the Ambrosia, whose delights a trust in immortality affords. But just that strengthened his enfeebled heart, that the muses led him to Hippocrene's spring of health.” Miraculously Gione recovered and her fiance could respond to Karlson’s gift of the poem with a letter to let him know that he’d read it to the person he thought was deceased. Out of this miasma of events she had become “the immortal one,” a nickname that seems respectful, playful, and awestruck. Richter, or so the legend goes, wrote his first worthwhile book after he’d had a vision of his own death at the start of November in the year 1790, a destructive upset that killed off the earlier self who had advocated against ornate writing. “The writer who produces many comparisons, who composes in an ornamented style, appears to me to have little depth,” he had written in 1779. His American translator Eliza Lee points out the joke. “The passage in which Paul speaks of florid and ornamented writing is remarkable, as he condemns a style that was afterwards so singularly his own.” He was saved to make poetry: saved, rescued, hooray: he lived until he was sixty-two. Max died at nineteen. Ha ha, we laugh.

happenings, trivia, misfortunes

Cyprian Norwid sees “sorrow, sorrow, from end to beginning”* in addition to the partitioning of Poland between Russia and Prussia, but the Polish aristocrats themselves precipitated it, he says in at least one poem: it is not all the fault of the Prussians and the Russians, who, in 1863, went into the Pałac Zamoyskich on Ulica Nowy Świat and threw the piano of his dead friend Frédéric Chopin out of a window. Why? “Because there is no place on earth where intellectuals are more dependent and more humiliated than in Poland. All the people who work with their brains are someone's clients, they are teachers of children, hangers-on. ... without well defined positions, and their undertakings are either feeble or not well thought out - abnormal in fact! Since history does not tolerate a vacuum, [Polish historical space] is filled with accidental happenings, trivia, misfortunes - every fifteen years.”** (Marian Sokołowski read that in a letter she received from him on January 27th, 1864, shortly after the piano incident.)

If you were being selfishly reasonable you could point out that no one was using the thing at the time but once it had crashed viciously through the window it provoked into existence “Norwid's masterpiece” *** and“perhaps his finest lyric”**** Fortepian Szopena where it is able to represent both the desecration of intelligence and the spark of future action ("The Ideal – has reached the street –").

Therefore -- you state rudely -- it was more use out of the window than in.

I mean, he was dead. (1810 - 1849)

By transferring the energy of an irregular piano-self across that rectangular window-boundary, we (the universe personified in a person or mob, or, if you pull back further, the Tsar whose army it was) precipitated the further energy of a p – etc.

Thank you to the Tsar.

But no one should ever excuse their own cruel behaviour by arguing that their actions are hypothetically inspiring some poet somewhere, not when you can find the most important thing everywhere, Lal Ded says in I, Lalla: the Poems of Lal Děd, 2011, translated by Ranjit Hoskote, who discusses the scholarly and extra-scholarly struggle that brought Lal Ded to this point of understanding. “No orchard bears fruit for the barren mind,” she may have said, although her corpus expanded after her death and so who knows; she was inspirational like the piano. Whoever thoughtlessly heaved that instrument out of the window (I’m guessing it was thoughtless: a "barren mind" and no fruit), they are about on the level of the dog that gave Ron Padgett an ending for Dog by barking in the street at 6 a.m. -- if any dog did so – proving that it was alive for no reason when his friends Ted and Erwin, mentioned earlier in the poem, were “no longer here”. Some necessary energy has departed with them: no one will ever replace them. Chopin’s playing, says Norwid, was like the apparition of a Antique Virtue in a larch-wood country manor. (Borchardt)



* My Song, by Cyprian Norwid, tr. Danuta Borchardt, from Poems: Cyprian Norwid, 2011
** Quoted in the Volume XIII, Number 3 issue of The Samartian Review, translation credited to the staff of the magazine
*** Adam Cedro in Vol. 30 of Studia Norwindiana, 2012
**** Joshua Wilson in the New Republic, May 29th, 2012

“along various” “dirty pathways”

Thinking of Scott G.F. Bailey’s suggestion that all books should be judged by the Four Humours, I tried it out.


Choucas, 1927, by Zofia Nałkowska, tr. Ursula Phillips
This Polish humanitarian Zofia Nałkowska brings characters from different nations together in a mountain sanatorium. All dispossessed in some way. They are afflicted with illness; they are afflicted with hatred for other nationalities. The narrator wishes that the suffering of the human race would end but it will not. Her observant resignation orients Choucas towards winter and decreases sweating. The choucas-birds, acting out a representation of the crowd inside the building, increase phlegm by removing heat from the humans and displacing it into the enigma of animals. The sincerity of the author generates a consistent, light black bile, but underlying warmth (quick feeling) improves the story’s health, removing digestion problems and clearing the bowels. Concealment piques the melancholy and keeps excessive phlegm at bay. Overall a hardy book though the liver is small.


Titan, 1800 - 1803, by Jean Paul Richter, tr. Charles T. Brooks
A prince’s proud, eccentric, excessive, unfortunate, sometimes secretly malicious, plotting friends and associates show him how to be a balanced person as he observes their personal disasters, e.g., dying, going mad, whatever. The author’s temperament is natively sanguine; we assume his hair was thick ditto urine. The aim, in spite of his constant airy digressions, is still ultimately phlegmatic. Titan’s desire for sanity rejects choler, melancholy, and dryness. (Counterpoint: should the habit of punishing other characters be diagnosed as choleric impatience? Could the digressions be described as fevers? This line of enquiry is not totally convincing.) Expect a shapely stool while reading.


Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz, 2013, by Maxim Biller, tr. Anthea Bell
One of the real Bruno Schulz’s former students remembered him saying, “We [artists] can turn day into night and night into day. We may cover snow-capped mountains with luxuriant foliage. That is our, the artist’s, freedom, and such is artistic truth, which we can demonstrate through our works.” Maxim Biller’s Schulz doesn’t know anything about that. I think Biller would like his fanfic to be brunette and lithe with a fresh complexion like the stories real-Schulz wrote, but the calculations he goes through – the insertion of Schulz-facts and bits from the stories and the faithless strangulation of Schulz’s air-infused methods (the artist’s “freedom” becomes hallucination, people really are birds) – are too anabolic.


ULULU: Clown Shrapnel, 2007, by Thalia Field
Field’s tireless invocation of flexible performance (both in startling poem-text acrobatics and in the mutating characters) gives this book a healthy youthful physique, though the examples she uses (without violating them) are rooted in the first half of the last century or earlier – Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, 1895, 1904, Alban Berg’s opera adaptation of Lulu, 1935, Louise Brooks in the Lulu film Pandora’s Box, 1929, the modernist-beloved circus structure – suggesting an attachment to the past indicative of melancholy. Anxious activity is tempered by a refutation of repressive internalisation that, while manifesting violently, has the potential to produce sound sleep. Both the sleep and the likelihood of heavy sweating can be read as phlegmatic. The book is addressed outwards, to the audience and the same audience in implicated in the activity (ULULU: You, Lulu), placing the sociable sanguine elements in a dominant position.


The Descent of Alette, 1996, by Alice Notley
Alette’s fate is to enter a receptive state that will reward her with symbolic advice and totems while she looks forward to an event that functions as some sort of summary and as an arrow to the reader. This is an essentially pre-modern way of regarding a narrative, redolent of Romance of the Rose, Dante, etc. There is a high degree of catabolic reactiveness baked into the text by the poet who breaks down her lines into bursts of words separated by inverted commas.

“I walked into” “the forest;" “for the woods were lit” “by yellow
street lamps” “along various” “dirty pathways”

Naturally the catabolic style can be identified as choleric, these bursts of artificial presence are like flames; at the same time it is vocal and sociable, therefore sanguine. (Is it in danger of consuming too much? Also, looking back at ULULU am I in danger of diagnosing all poems as sanguine?) Both of these values coexist unproblematically with the melancholy self-questioning of Alette. Imbalance enters when we think of phlegm. Readers should consider a cool, wet climate. Eat cheese.

according to a pattern drawn from a patchwork quilt

When you mention advertising of course you can't forget the way that Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage comes, after a while, to begin a passage with a sentence about some person or event you have not encountered yet, speaking about the thing as if there is already a large context all around it and filling you with the desire to be up to speed with the rest of your compatriots who are now standing around you, holding a discussion you are excluded from.

It is as if they all have a Fiat!

There is, for example, the first sentence of Clear Horizon, 1935, the eleventh book, “Between herself and all that was waiting to flow in and settle upon this window-lit end of the great empty room, was the sense of missing Lionel Cholmley.” As if you knew Lionel Cholmley. You have never met Lionel Cholmley. Lionel Cholmley? Then there are three pages about Lionel Cholmley. Cholmley! He was worth knowing! Cholmley! He exits forever. “Having paid him tribute while pouring out her tea and getting back to the window-end of the long empty breakfast table, she bade farewell to Lionel Cholmley.” His radiation lingers – it is the idea of speaking without posing, intensified – “And instead of going to face down the room from the hearthrug, or to pose with the curve of the near-by grand piano, he remained in his place and said his poem as if he were a momentary spokesman, like a vocal testifier in a religious gathering, and, although his poem was heroic, his voice was only a little fuller and more resonant than usual, and quite free from recitational ‘effects.’ So that the poem prevailed …”

Soon afterwards, Miriam watches as a stranger rises in the crowd at a Lycurgan Society meeting, “slowly stammering out his simple words, annihilating the suave pseudo-Nietzsche on the platform,” and Amabel next to her says, “Mira! He’s real!” The man is not Lionel but he is a continuation; he is a Lionel-tentacle, and Amabel is the one who invents a new phrase for he is quite free from recitational ‘effects.’ The radiation is still there, spreading its ad of realness, so that soon (with the whole atmosphere presaging) Miriam will stop going to Lycurgan meetings and veer towards Quakers.

At the same time there is something buried, something muffled, as there was when her mother died and the book waved its hands obliquely, leaving open the possibility that you would not find out. That muffled-ness points to a world somewhere where everyone does things unexpectedly, for reasons you will never know (as though her mother had gone on holiday).

There’s a different form of radiation in Nanni Balestrini's Blackout, 1980, tr. Peter Valente, when the author springs some phrase on you and then repeats it on the next page surrounded by different lines and then maybe again in two pages until you realise it could occur in any place at all and still justify itself through radiant penetration. Honestly the poem has no way of saving itself from its lines. Nobody will veer anywhere; they are immediately present, because the line, “you persecute your persecutors with the truth” can occur after or before (as if on top of) the line, “meanwhile this occasion has unmasked all the petty tyrants who swore to me that they would eviscerate our friendship” (p. 26) or after or before the line “redirect your letters from Nice to Provence because tomorrow I’m leaving for France and who knows I may travel much farther” (p.27) until it is always unmoored – it always has the atmosphere of meaning something ... He put the poem together, says the editor, by “arrang[ing] the book’s text

according to a pattern drawn from a patchwork quilt with strips sewed at 45 degrees across a checkered base, developing a chart […] indicating which borrowed fragments would be placed in which numbered sections, in varying ratio depending on the cut.”

You are always waiting for a line-reappearance. It will be the same thing but in a new setting like a repeatable horror jewel. It is as if Lionel Cholmley kept coming back in as Lionel Cholmley, not as an anonymous stammering Lycurgan meeting man or as a Quaker or a statement from Amabel. What do monsters advertise, these M.R. James yūrei that stalk after you?