part of who we are

The duty, which began as a game, to post every Wednesday and Saturday, is going to stop, I think; I've convinced myself that it's possible for me to do it, and now that I'm convinced, I'll end -- but I am not ending the blog, only the schedule -- remembering Proust as he criticises Sainte-Beuve, in By Way of Sainte-Beuve, (tr. Sylvia Townsend-Warner) for putting out a column every Monday:

During ten years, everything that he would have husbanded for his friends, for himself, for a long-projected book that doubtless he never would have written, had, week after week, to be licked into shape and sent out into the world. Those stores where we keep precious thoughts, the thought round which a novel should have crystallised, the thought he would have unfolded in a poem, another whose beauty had suffused a day for him, welled up from the depth of his mind as he read the book he was to write about, and heroically, to embellish the offering, he sacrificed his dearest Isaac, his last Iphigenia.

“Especially in matters of work we are all of us to a certain extent like Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch who devoted the whole of his life to labours which produced results that were merely trivial and absurd” (Jean Santeuil, tr (?) Gerard Hopkins); the same thought expressed by Yeats in pursuit of another thought: “The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more did I follow the opposite of myself” (Discoveries).

Henri Bergson, “The route we pursue in time is strewn with the remains of all that we began to be, of all that we could have become” (Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell), and it is only after I copy out those words that I remember that Bergson was one of Proust's lecturers at university, as well as his in-law, the husband of his cousin, Louise Neuberger, whose surname suggests Germanness; and it is from German that I find another perspective on those “remains.” Oh, says Jochen Poetter, your experiences are not discarding and littering, they are accumulation.

It is as with every powerful experience (caused by man or fate) that leaves on us its mark, becoming an integral part of who we are. Thus it is not surprising when the visitor only partially resurfaces from his vision of the cathedral and the pictures. Though he will quit the cathedral the following morning, a connection will remain. Perhaps he will drag this edifice around with him for the rest of his days, allowing it to attach itself to his carapace like the pyramidal projections on the back of an old spider crab; not a burden to this long-legged creature, living as he does meandering weightlessly about the ocean floor. Quite the contrary: the fixtures will be loved, they will lighten his loneliness and entertain him with ever-new stories. The polished eye stalks will watch with joy as green veils of algae settle into the empty shells, waving to and fro in the currents and stroking his prickly back.

(from The Tangential Point of a Diaphanous Presence in the book Richard Tuttle: Chaos, the/die Form tr. Mary Fran Gilbert)

along the carpeted floor on hands and knees

One alliterative name occurs to Amanda McKittrick Ros with an I and then a while later another one occurs with an O so she puts them in; but during the period between those two times no alliterative names occur to her, and so the rich aristocrat doesn't have one. Random: that's how it seems. Bourne on waves. Maybe she had a reason. She will put a metaphor inside a sentence that does not need that potency there; the knowledge will come to her that a bed can be described as a boat of dreamland and so a minor character will fall asleep like this --

Divesting herself of her clothing, Rachel soon put herself in a position to guarantee slumber. She wrapped herself well within the fleecy folds of nature, and in less than ten minutes was safely sailing in the boat of dreamland.

(You could say that sleep itself is the boat of dreamland, not the material object known as a bed, but I'm going to associate the phrase with this bed nonetheless.)

The other characters, even the most important ones, will continue to sleep on normal beds unless a new formula arrives in the author's invention, then they will fall asleep on the new formula. If a new formula never occurs then it will be normal beds forever. Her metaphors never seem preordained, or in other words natural, but they flare out spontaneously and distantly, alienated in their setting, like a fit of epilepsy suddenly on a street. The metaphor'd object does not have to be valuable to the plot, or to anything except itself; it is isolated now in itself, the depth or extension or life she gives to this object is rooted in someone else's version of a fantasy, the idea of a bed as a boat that sails you away to a land of dreams is not uncommon, the author not reaching very far to find the shapes of these decorations, she goes to the closest shop for Christmas streamers, inserting them without any sensitivity toward their setting, and I remember Henri Bergson in his book on laughter arguing that people laugh when they see flexibility being arrested or interrupted or invaded by signs of the mechanical: rigidity, repetition, and automatic reproduction. "The more exactly these two images, that of a person and that of a machine, fit into each other, the more striking is the comic effect."

So I consider the idea of Amanda McKittrick Ros as a machine, mechanically reproducing the effects that have worked for other authors.

The choice of effects is not mechanical: the machine favours alliteration over other techniques, for example. It has its human preferences.

The human preferences are Bergson's "flexibility," the reproduction of the effects is the machine, and Ros brings them close together. Irene Iddesleigh is a uniting agent.

Then the laughter of the Inklings and the laughter of the critics, and the laughter of myself even while I admire (not ironically, not mockingly) the words "icy heights" in her description of Irene Iddesleigh's servant Marjory waiting under the bed and escaping with Rachel's key. And I feel the stairs transformed into Alps.

Marjory, for it was she who lay stretched under the bed of her who never at any time doubted her word or actions, when fully convinced of Rachel’s safe retirement, crept along the carpeted floor on hands and knees, carrying with her the key to victory. Proudly and much agitated did Marjory steal her way along the many winding corridors of carpeted comfort, until at last she came to the bottom of the ghost-like marble steps which led to her mistress; and swiftly running up the icy heights, until reaching the door of danger and blood-thirsty revenge, she, with the caution of a murderess, thrust with great and exceptional care the key into its much-used opening, and heroically succeeded in gaining admittance.

The sequence of events has been directing the reader's attention towards a part of the bed that is not incorporated in the words "boat of dreamland." The top of the bed is the dreamland-boat; that part where the dreamer will stow the sleeping body. The person who is reading for plot is not supposed to care about the top. The plot-reader is supposed to be wondering about the space between the floor and the bottom of the mattress where Marjory is trying not to give herself away. That's where the drama is taking place. The top is less important.

The metaphor-reader is a different person, the metaphor reader doesn't care about the bottom, the metaphor-reader cares about the top.

The words "boat of dreamland" are not important to the plot but they are important to the language universe in a way that is obscure to the reader and yet native to Ros, who swims in that universe like a fish on the other side of the glass that is in front of me: I see it behave, I can deduce that the behaviour is important to the fish's welfare, but the fish is a fish and its gestures are puzzling, they seem abrupt and astonishing, at first she thinks Irene is commendable in the escape scene but some time afterwards she decides that the escape was the act of a moral cripple, the action the same, the attitudes utterly different, as if two woman have escaped and not one, and in fact there is not one Irene Iddesleigh in this book, there are many, all with the same name.

The author admires one woman, distances herself from another woman, thinks one of them deserves to die, thinks one of them deserves to be happy, addresses them functionally as separate beings, and calls them all Irene.

flashing her keen eyes upon Gertrude

Louisa Atkinson, twenty-three, gave her prose its fictional bodily shape (this is how it felt to me, reading Gertrude the Emigrant Girl), by swallowing up the clichés that were living with her in the mid-1800s, this whale drinking in the krill, one example, flashing eyes, "Mrs. Doherty, flashing her keen eyes upon Gertrude," and a brown cheek for a person who worked outdoors, "a healthy glow upon his brown cheek," other habits that appear in other novels establishing themselves in hers, phrases that must have melted easily out of her, familiar words that felt inextricable from one another, "wept bitterly," "plied her needle," and the "musical babbling" of a brook, all of them sustaining her confidence, I'll imagine, letting her make her way forward, clichés being a mechanism by which people advance ("... such old friends, the clichés in our life, are the only strangers we can know," writes William Gass in The Medium of Fiction), a progression that in Henri Bergson's formulation could be described as instinctive, rather than intelligent, the instinctive in this case being the use of tools already to hand, the established ones that fit their purpose, the intelligent being the construction of complicated tools that are excessive to their purpose and offer scope for improvement, two examples, the internet or The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein.

The language that might have been silenced by indecision and worry leaking out like this, through cliché, so as not to go silent, and Louisa Atkinson with relief (I'm still fantasising) able to glide on to the next part. "Yes," she thinks, "that's what I mean, that's what I wanted to say" -- as the cliché slips out -- feeling the satisfaction of being very nicely aligned with the nurturing atmosphere that hangs around a phrase like "flashing eyes", the lushness of that, the homeland of language saluted by its citizen, the writer unexiled -- encouraged she runs her plot though scenes and figures -- the British immigrant, the native-born European, the native-born Indigenous, a bushfire, a cattle stampede, a sheep shearing, a dance, a funeral, a wedding, the child struck by the branch ("here was a folded sheet thrown over the crushed little body, but the crimson tide had dyed the covering, and all that kind, and loving hands could do, availed not to stem it"), the gold prospector, the stockman, the new chum, a corroboree, a fish-catching expedition, a murder mystery, lyrebirds, flowers, teacups, sunsets, Sydney, pigs, the ocean ("Is she near the ocean," M. asked me, "is she Gert by sea?" -- an anthem joke --), a dead horse, a dead kangaroo, a dead wallaby, and home life as it was lived in the bush, in the city, and in a town.

Under the tent of cliché she will introduce not only sermons but also young new words from the country where she's found herself, "they dashed through the heavy stringy bark forest, and belts of scrub, in pursuit of two young kangaroos, or flyers," as well as details that are idiosyncratic enough to have been observed, giving her a kind of life that is not borrowed from another place; it does not even seem to be generally Australian; it seems to be hers:

M'cMaster was a sawyer and employed in the “gullies” at the back of Mrs. Doherty's property; here he lived in a “shanty,” or roof-like tent, of sheets of bark; a sheet of the same material supported on four saplings set in the earthen floor, served as a table; a four legged stool, one leg of course too short, and always falling out when the stool was moved, completed the furniture: an iron tripod, a tin mug, or two, and a couple of common cracked blue earthen-ware plates completed the inventory; for the rest the canvas ticking filled with dry grass, and the dingy blankets and rug, could be laid down anywhere: gloriously independent of mahogany and chintz drapery.

move camp, murry

So the accent in Bitin' Back, this insertion of Aboriginal words in English sentences, in Australia goes back to the primordial development of the nation's novel writing; the first book published by an Australian-born woman in Australia does it, I discovered when I read that book, Gertrude The Emigrant Girl: a Tale of Colonial Life (1857) by Louisa Atkinson, which knows it doesn't need to translate "murry" to let you know that it's an intensifier, a "very," when one character says a good farm is "murry big" and a different character, later, when they are confronting a bushfire, tells Gertrude that "the blackfellow move camp, murry quick" -- what else is it going to mean if it doesn't mean "very" -- I go through that process of automatic elimination and end up with an answer, the current of universal life meeting an obstacle there and adopting that alien form with a quick evolution. Swifter than evolution of bees or the animal eye.

(If intellect was flesh then it would be years before I understood, the evolution creeping forwards, diverting into a cul de sac, waiting for the birth of twins, mutations, new eggs, and cell-hiccoughs, before the answer would occur to me.)

When I found "murra" in Rosa Praed's The Romance of a Station (1889) I thought, "It could be the same thing again, an intensifier, with a different spelling:" "murra, make haste" says one character -- make a lot of haste -- Praed footnotes it with an asterisk but didn't need to -- the technique has been maintained, new words can be put into that machinery now, new meanings grasped by me (who has been taught how to see it), the narrator inserting "myall" in Bitin' Back, or "goona," a different language maybe (there are many, not a monolithic language-bloc, the characters living in different areas of the country) but the same habit, a human habit, this creation of an alloy, one language putting itself in another, neither one completely lost. "The boy," states the narrator of Bitin' Back, "look myall this mornin." And a character in We of the Never-Never (1908) by Jeannie Gunn makes a joke as he's waving a spear above his head: "Me myall-fellow."

And exists everywhere, that habit, n'est-ce pas, and has existed in other language combinations. I see it when I read the comments in the Lusaka Times of Zambia and someone writes, "I seriously think the police are doing a kama donchi kubeba on Sata," Sata being Michael Sata, the nation's president, born in 1937, once upon a time a cleaner employed by railway stations in London, now the leader of his nation by democratic vote, "life," wrote Elizabeth Grosz, "is a kind of opening up of matter to indeterminacy, a qualitative transformation of matter into the unexpected, the surprising, the never-seen-before," (Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, thanks to Anthony@timesflow's links on Twitter) while Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution sees a constant transformational effect ongoing in all of nature, the same thing seen by Marcel Proust, going to Bergson's lectures then putting a fictional shape around his ideas in the Temps Perdu, and, "I'm glad you've read some Bergson and liked him," he writes in a letter to Georges de Lauris, dated April 1908; by that time the philosopher had been married to Proust's cousin Louise for nearly twenty years.

Nothing that happens has ever been done before, writes Bergson, the Australian word "murry" had never appeared next to "big" or "quick" before the foreign alphabet arrived, and the word "very" or other intensifier had never found itself replaced by the letters m-u-r-r-y, but here it is in 1857, replaced, and in 2013, a sensation in me like a tickle when I read it, a reaction to a phantom, the word that is there and isn't.

gestures and movements of the human body are laughable

Thomas de Quincey swerves and so does Robert Walser. Walser was an author who could write a sentence that was like a game of Exquisite Corpse, a series of pieces fitted together, as I was reminded ages ago by a post at Wuthering Expectations, a quote there -- "Outside a car awaited me, which then whisked me away, and so off I drove, and no doubt am still doing so to this day" -- a line from the end of The Dinner Party a piece from a book of Walser pieces, Masquerade and Other Stories, translated by Susan Bernofsky -- with the fold in this Exquisite Corpse coming between drove and and, both the first segment and the second segment making sense in themselves, but together disconcerting.

Nonsense writing, this is, I think, the sensibility of Nonsense writing, the awareness that sentences are made up of parts, and that the parts can be played with -- and if sentences then maybe also the world? -- the spectre of that imaginary dictatorship is tantalising; the Nonsense writer is a dictator in that dragon world; the dictatorship is called Nonsense and funny but every dictatorship looks ridiculous from the outside -- North Korea's Kims like fat dumb bears in playtime suits -- which he, Walser, achieved with a pencil not a pen, I read, in an essay by J.M. Coetzee in the New York Review of Books.

The pencil and the self-invented stenographic script allowed the purposeful, uninterrupted, yet dreamy hand movement that had become indispensable to his creative mood.

Suggest that this putting-together of parts is comic in accordance with Henri Bergson's description of comedy movement: "The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine." (Laughter: an essay on the meaning of the word comic, published 1900 in French, as Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique.)

The last part of Walser's sentence sits against the first part as it would if it had been imported from a foreign place that was hostile or indifferent to the first part; pieces of a machine don't care about one another either, but the mechanic bolts them together so that the machine works; Walser has bolted two parts together to make the machine of the sentence work; it's a strange sentence but it's a sentence; you can paint your cog with daisies but the clock still works; develop this if you like into a philosophy of the world, indifferent parts fitting together, the indifference reflected everywhere, Nonsense reflecting that reflection, the hostility in Alice, the solitary characters in Peake, and the people in Lear's limericks who're brutal to one another.

There was a Young Person of Smyrna,
Whose Grandmother threatened to burn her;
But she seized on the cat,
And said, "Granny, burn that!
You incongruous Old Woman of Smyrna!"

Proust's narrator wants to retaliate against Charlus but cannot do so on the same plane as Charlus; he does not live on that plane, he is not an aristocrat, he is in the other man's house, he cannot read the other man's behaviour, what does he do? He grabs the Baron's hat, he stamps it to pieces, and this strange and unexpected activity is quickly absorbed into the realistic scene, Charlus adjusting -- Proust alert to Nonsense -- Nonsense is not unrealistic --