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

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

trapped in the shadowless valley

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.