something of no apparent importance

Why should anyone like Phyllis for being a lump of rudeness that presents itself as a thing you can’t solve at a level where everything else is being solved instantly? I don't know why; it is as if she is sticking up for herself, "Like TISM," I think, "but their songs are all about their own irritated shame, or tall poppyism if you want to put it another way” --- “but it is preferable to the opposite”? (“Is her surname Tine?” joked someone this morning when I told them I had been reading a book with a Phyllis.) Chateaubriand’s little vase sticks up from the scene without an explanation when he could have said, for example, "it must have been the sound of some cavity in the ship filling with water." Why does Glanville want to bite the letter-writer’s hand in Charles Grandison? Where does Grandison come from? Where does Clarissa come from? She is a little vase, filling up. From another angle she is Phyllis. In the final part of the Temps Perdu, Proust tells you he has spent seven volumes interrogating a sensation that Chateaubriand remembers twice.

What profoundly modifies the course of their thought is rather something of no apparent importance which overthrows the order of time and makes them live in another period of their lives. The song of a bird in the Park of Montboissier, or a breeze laden with the scent of mignonette, are obviously matters of less importance than the great events of the Revolution and of the Empire; nevertheless they inspired in Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre tombe pages of infinitely greater value. (tr. Stephen Hudson)

He mentions Nerval and Baudelaire.

I was seeking to recall those of Baudelaire's verses which are based upon the transposition of such sensations, so that I might place myself in so noble a company and thus obtain confirmation that the work I no longer had any hesitation in undertaking, merited the effort I intended to consecrate to it …

A thought says, “If those sensations are of “infinitely greater value” than the rest, then what if you made the entire book out of them?” What if there was a treasure box with no gaps between the treasures? But then Volker Schlöndorff reads your treasure box and the primary lesson he remembers is that he wants to make Swann into a movie and his costume designer takes Robert de Montesquiou’s grey suit out of the portrait by Giovanni Boldini and puts it on Jeremy Irons and you are back to the old drawing board, as the cartoon alien says

the blood of the chicken

Reading René Crevel's Babylon, 1927, tr. Kay Boyle in the afternoon, I believed that a line about "the blood of the chicken we were supposed to have for dinner" on page thirty of the Sun & Moon 1996 edition truthfully depicted the unseen side of the ending of Voltaire's dialogue between a hen and a rooster, which I had read the same morning in a translation by Theo Cuffe. It was good to see that the other partner in the chickens' experience - the humans - was exactly the way the rooster had predicted, a group of offhand murderers. The grandmother of Crevel's repressive household is hoping that the blood in the kitchen is that of the bird, not that of the cook, who has been tied up by burglars. These thieves have stolen a bracelet of the Empress Eugénie's hair. Startled by the sound of Françoise slaughtering a chicken, Proust's narrator tries to reconcile the artistry of the family servant with the irritation of this swearing killer who abuses the animal as it fights for life. Montaigne, looking at cannibals, observes that we are capable of many versions of rightness and all of them can seem alien to one another. Crevel, regarding Proust, said that knowing about the switch from an Albert to an Albertine in Lost Time made him "question the entire book and reject certain discoveries the author presented to me along the way". This was in My Body and I, 1925, tr. Robert Bononno. As I was reading Babylon, however, I thought the teenage girl's interest in the muscles of sailors might belong to a gay teenage boy. "The sailor's lips must be soft in that square patch of tan," writes Crevel in My Body as he remembers himself feeling roused at thirteen by the sight of a woman in the street kissing a sailor. Writing about the sailor's colleagues, he says, "Their necks have punctured their jackets and in the opening the powerful flesh is victorious." People will be free to love without worrying about European social mores, he suggests in Babylon: they should abandon their marriages, they should not mind being naked, they should be unconcerned with reproduction. In My Body he puts all of this into the figure of himself and stands alone nude in a field feeling sensuously aware and erotic. Then he is ashamed, worrying that a shepherd or cattleman might see him. The cook in Babylon remarks that the family has dissolved like butter in a pan. Voltaire put the point of focus on the greatest sufferers, the chickens.

he did you

As I was about three-quarters of the way through the end of Anna Moschovakis' 2011 book of poetry, You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, I thought of Charlotte Dacre again, remembering that the sources for various bits of her story would only occur to me after I had read a little way into them; so that I might go a whole page into the episode between Victoria's brother and the wife of his friend before I realised I was reading the tale of Joseph and the Potiphar household. Her contemporaries must have felt that pair of stories existing at the same time too; this sense of seeing two things at once, one of them familiar, the other one new but somehow already visible to the end. And the comparisons between Milton's Satan and Dacre's Zofloya were not made immediately. Eventually they were strong and you were convinced. These inspirations were abducted into the book and now they served its purposes even though they stayed unsubmerged. According to the plot, this Joseph-brother needs to be traumatised and thrown out by the friend so that he can flee to the Alps and become the banditti leader whose face is forever masked. Then his sister will not recognise him when Zofloya flies her there magically to escape the servants who have found her husband's poisoned body inside a trunk and the husband's friend Henriquez's sword-transfixed corpse on the floor of his bedroom in a welter of blood while the scandalously young orphan fiancé is first chained up in a cave with a leopard skin and then thrown into an abyss ("because he loved me more than he did you!" she points out to Victoria). And there is the story that will do the work for you, Joseph and Potiphar. It is Biblical but your book is good, fine, it has a moral, it fits.

Then here was Moschovakis, forthrightly telling you that she was about to refer to a chatbot named Anna, and then referring to it, discussing it, describing its conversations with lists, writing letters to it, putting its words into her poems, borrowing its identity, playing with it, etc, without any pretense of unconsciousness toward the source; also without the assumption that you would know that source automatically, as Dacre might have assumed that everyone knew Milton well enough to make the illustration of explicit directive arrows drawn in his direction seem unnecessary or redundant. When Proust writes about the milk boiling over during a metaphorical passage in The Guermantes Way then the description is so long and detailed (I am checking this in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin version, which is all I have on me at the moment) that I think he is writing about something that happened to him recently, possibly even on the day when the passage was written. It is like a diary entry, though he abstracts it away from himself by framing it as if it is a situation that happens to us all, and can be therefore used as a fruitful example of a common problem. It is only his description that makes it familiar, though. It was unfamiliar before he began. To return to Zofloya, the book's modern editor Kim Ian Michiasiw ends his introduction by pointing out that the name itself – "Zofloya" - has no precedent that his research could discover, that it had never existed before, no possible inspiration had been uncovered, and nobody knows why Dacre thought of it.

a purely bi-dimensional figure in outline upon the surface of my mind

Going back repeatedly over several days to Czurda's Almost 1 Book | Almost 1 Life I decide that what I like about it are the lines that feel like non sequiturs whenever I come across them, these cousins to the "rare, almost archaic phrases" that Proust's narrator discovers in Bergotte and which have no real force out of context: "mistresses are normal in aristocratic circles she thought and handed him his fur hat" (Mutilation With Intent). It's because of Proust that I think of them as long excerpts even though they are almost always short, or shortish anyway: but I still have that impression; he says:

I now no longer had the impression of being confronted by a particular passage in one of Bergotte’s works, which traced a purely bi-dimensional figure in outline upon the surface of my mind, but rather of the ‘ideal passage’ of Bergotte, common to every one of his books, and to which all the earlier, similar passages, now becoming merged in it, had added a kind of density and volume, by which my own understanding seemed to be enlarged.

The surprise is similar each time; therefore I can open the book anywhere, and have the pleasure that you might have in a nice dream: look, you say; we're flying again, we are aware of our situation. Books that can be sampled anywhere have to be developed by the reader who adjusts themselves internally and unconsciously as Proust's narrator does until they have their conception of the object in a state that can be regarded in the way that a petroglyph artist so many centuries ago must have regarded (judging from the way they treated it) a rock, the figures positioned without regard for the edges of the space, and no apparent idea that in centuries to come the idea of compositional framing would come to seem necessary. So, similarly the book, once you have developed it properly, has no shape or beginning, middle, end, no form like that: you have reformed it to a prehistoric ideal.

then to another again

Reading Swann in Love again in the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation and arriving at the line about Swann's jealousy resembling an octopus "which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fasten[ing] itself irremovably first to that moment, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again" I'm struck by the stated absence of unification between the person and the memory (since the octopus that touches something could easily have been an amoeba that absorbs it, but no: an octopus retains its separateness from a thing it holds) , thinking that memory and human being in this book are like a pair of lovers under the same author, meaning they exist at a distance and cannot approach one another without some kind of mistake, trick, accident, or bit of good or bad luck. (Here it is Odette writing a letter to Forcheville). The conceptual movements of lovers and memories are governed by an unplanned set of rules. They cannot be consciously tricked. And the same frustration sits behind Proust's recollection of both phenomena: the lover or memorist has no control; they grope, they are gripless.

accompanied by the images of sites

Proustian persons never let themselves be evoked without their being accompanied by the images of sites that they have successively occupied. Sites, moreover, that are not necessarily only those where they have really appeared. For to the series of real places where the hero remembers to have seen them there is added the image of the places where – even before they were encountered in flesh and bone – the hero dreamed of seeing them.

(Georges Poulet, Proustian Space, tr. Elliott Coleman, from Modern Critical Interpretations: Remembrance of Things Past, 1987, ed. Harold Bloom)



The eager look – on Landscapes
as if they just repressed
Some Secret – that was pushing
Like Chariots – in the Vest

(Emily Dickinson, The Tint I cannot take – is best, from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson)

suppose you never were there

The discussion around the excerpt that Scott G.F. Bailey posted on his blog from the rough manuscript known as The Bottom of the Earth included the suggestion that northern hemisphere people used to think of the southern hemisphere as “the bottom of the earth,” or another phrase that was something like that, and so (looking for more knowledge in that area) I read Weitemeyer’s book out of curiosity to see if he used those words or any other while he was planning (euphemism) his move to Australia, but Weitemeyer did not use any phrase at all: he used a series of scenes that suggested a difficulty in obtaining accurate information; difficulty was his description of distance. “Travellers who come from this distant continent, bring us very conflicting statements,” he remembers his school textbook telling him before it segued into a paragraph about kangaroos, wool, and the “vast lake of salt water” that it saw in the centre of the island – imagination – didn’t exist. “It was really an ignorant and disgraceful morsel of information for one of the best schools in Copenhagen to offer to its pupils,” he writes, “but it was all the knowledge I had or could get.” He spoke to a man in Hamburg who was being paid to encourage European citizens to migrate to Queensland.

"Do you yourself know anything much about Queensland?" I ventured to ask; "I suppose you never were there?" "I, no, I never was there-- [says the man] I wish I had been, I should not have to stand here to-day. But we have every information. They have found gold-diggings again. Here are the statistics of exports; I will read them for you:--

Weitemeyer buys his ticket, trusts that he knows nothing; imagines that bushranging will be his recourse if all else fails. “To be the captain of a gang of warriors, half robbers, half gold-miners, roaming over the continent of Australia, seemed a delightful prospect.” On the ship he “stood aloof looking round me in silent wonder as to what the end would be.” Distance is underinformednation and so is wonder. Proust, corresponding about stock investments with his cousin Lionel Hauser, once mentioned that he was interested in Australian gold mines. “With Marcel his investments reflected not incompetence but aspects of his character,” writes Jean-Yves Tadié. “When he dreamed about these names, stock exchange quotations came to resemble railway timetables.” Marcel Proust: a Life, 1996, tr. Euan Cameron. The dying man who whispers the murderer’s identity to his son in The Boscombe Valley Mystery, Doyle, 1892, would not have been able to name his killer if Sherlock Holmes had not been capable of covering the mental distance between the “allusion to a rat” that the son heard and the presence of a large goldfield town west of Melbourne. “He mumbled a few words,” says the son, “but I could only catch some allusion to a rat.” The Coroner asks him how he interpreted the rat. “It conveyed no meaning to me,” says the son. “I thought that he was delirious.” Not until Holmes has wired to Bristol for a map of Victoria with place names marked on it is he in a position to show Watson that “a rat” is not a rat but the end of a word, “-arat.” The abstract proceeds to materialism. “We have come now out of mere vagueness to the definite conception of an Australian from Ballarat with a grey cloak,” Holmes says. The son who, on the day of his father’s death, heard his father calling, “Cooee,” thought that he was being summoned, but the father was shouting to someone else and he did not expect to see the son crossing a distance towards him. “He appeared to be much surprised at seeing me and asked me rather roughly what I was doing there.” Here, at first, is the sound -- in the son’s imagination -- of the father absolutely desiring the presence of his son, and now secondly the father is nonplussed, he appears to have cried out ambiguously and confusingly, both desiring and not-desiring his son – but then thirdly and finally, thanks to Holmes, we all know that he did not think he was calling his son at all, in spite of the fact that “Cooee” was understood by the young man to be “a usual signal between my father and myself.”

Now this specific cry of “Cooee” identifies the father as a man who could utter that word without regarding it, as the son does, as a privately-owned set of consonants and vowels. Why is the father in this position of wisdom? Because he has emigrated from Australia. He is trying to communicate with a different man, one who has lived in Ballarat, a diabetic who is about to hit him on the head with a rock: someone who is still remembered on the Victorian goldfields by the name he called himself while he was living out Weitemeyer’s dream of bushranging. “'Cooee' is a distinctly Australian cry, and one which is used between Australians,” Holmes explains to Watson. The word that the son thinks of as his own is shared by thousands of people he has never met, inhabiting a continent that he has never visited, all so far away that the news of ownership has never reached him. When Captain James Cook wrote about his Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, 1777, he gave you some idea of the distance between the hemispheres partly by describing the volume of supplies he would have to order before he left, and if I am wrong about this (I haven’t read the book in a while) then I am focussed on it because the phrase, “inspissated juice of wort” has stuck with me. What’s this word, “inspissated”? I wondered, when I read it. In my recollection I crossed the distance between myself and “inspissated” immediately by looking it up. Cook meant that the juice of wort was thickened by a process of dehydration. If I had not been impatient I would have discovered after a few more lines or paragraphs (I forget which) that he wanted to explain inspissation to me himself. Today I know the definition but I am still not comforted and calmed and undisturbed by the words “inspissated juice of wort” and I expect to go on being uneasy until I have found some and drunk it. Fanny Burney’s brother sailed with Cook, by the way: he must have known what it tasted like. A small bat-shaped island near the Australian coast has been named after him. See Henry Stuart Russell’s The Genesis of Queensland, 1888.

to disappear beneath slow sea-water

Put the point at the end of the sentence, said Dorothy Richardson. It is one of the writing precepts that she gives to Miriam in Pilgrimage, and she offered it genuinely, not fictionally, to someone in a letter, following her own advice more and more as the books go on, or so I think now as I'm rereading them, and up to volume twelve, Dimple Hill, the sentences becoming more Proustian in this structural sense, the winding roam that ends with a cap that expands into suggestiveness because it is exact and surprising: "Returned from their first glance at the scene as it showed from the house which before had been part of it and now, itself only a window, left it empty, a vast expanse ending in a wedge-shaped ridge low against the low sky, her eyes sped once more across the flats, now beginning to disappear beneath slow sea-water, and reached the misty ridge and found trees there, looking across at her from their far distance so intently that she was moved to set down the little old spoon raised to crack the shell of the egg whose surface, in the unimpeded light, wore so soft a bloom." Not the same observations as Proust, or for the same reason, but still the sentence-weight placed on the "soft bloom," on a little thing, the capper is aimed at tininess and faintness, a passing object: a flower, in him, a slick of sperm, or a yellow spot that no one else can find, though it revived him when he was dying, said Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, who allowed the other man to lean upon his arm at the Jeu de Palme where Vermeer's View of Delft, 1660-61, was on display in an exhibition "the profits of which were to go to areas of Flanders that had been laid waste by the war." Marcel Proust: a Life, Jean-Yves Tadié, tr. Euan Cameron, 2000. "Several times he came back to sit down on that 'circular settee' which Bergotte rolls off to die," said Vaudoyer. "But," writes Tadié, Proust "did not die in front of the View of Delft." It is strange that this sentence is there in the biography when everybody knows that Proust did not die in front of the View of Delft. Logically we know it, because Bergotte would not have been able to roll away in the same place if his creator had done so first. It is odd to imagine myself as someone who was desiring, sighing, longing to be informed very clearly that Proust did not suffer a fatal attack in the Jeu de Palme before he had written the word "end" in his manuscript, which, according to Céleste Albaret, was an event that occurred in the following year. And what does she mean, asks Tadié, when there are at least four versions of the final paragraph, none of which can be singled out as the one that ended with Fin? "[I]n which version was the word Fin placed at the end? Certainly before the fourth but after the third. It was when Proust had succeeded in inserting the image of giants, which may have taken the place of the 'êtres monstrueux,' that he stopped; it was both because he had achieved a rhythmical fullness, and also because of the effect, not dissimilar to silence in musical tempo, of the single dash (not a pair, as in the Clarac-Ferré edition) which precedes 'dans le temps.'"

If Tadié wants to tell me that Proust did not die in front of a Vermeer then he has an idea of me that does not fit my actual existence, or perhaps that information resolved an imbalanced feeling there in the paragraph for him and he assumed that I, too, would have been arrested by that imbalance and clumsiness, desiring, in its place, a "musical fullness," and so, to get us both through the experience safely, he installed that phrase even though we are on page seven hundred and forty-four in a book where the section titled 'Death' does not come until page seven hundred and seventy-five. Between the two pages Proust nearly has a bucket and a chicken thrown at his head and he goes to the Ritz for dinner more than once.

Why, in that sentence, did I take the word "ice" away from the front of "bucket" and "hot" from the front of "chicken," which would have given them a clearer placement in the Ritz dining room? There must have been a reason. Now, as it is, the bucket might be a manure bucket and the chicken might be alive. The dying Proust is visiting a farm (how, with his asthma?); he is standing on the floor of a barn while a farm person, not looking where he is aiming, is cleaning buckets and chickens off the rafters. Probably there was straw as well but Tadié has not mentioned it. The owner of the farm sees the near miss and loses his temper at the farm person but Proust is charming, as he always was, a quality that Miriam analyses whenever she comes across it in another character during Pilgrimage. What does it mean, to say charming things? she considers. Why is it different in a man and in a woman? Chrisman never praises Ruskin for his charmingness* and nor was Laure charming. She was "pure, dissolute, dark, luminous." "I drank, I bathed in her radiant purity," wrote Jean Bernier, tr Jeanine Herman. L'amour de Laure, 1978. Do I ever know what to do with words? The difference between a live chicken and a cooked one lies between the words "warm" and "hot."


*"The ability to coo as gently as a dove was not a notable characteristic of Ruskin."

in which we arrive at the kind of ecstasy described by Proust

I think of John Cowper Powys and the message that he offered to any moment, glance, glimpse, or little incident. “You are massive and endless,” he promised, “you are not closed, you are not over, nothing is over,” expanding the glimpse of ordinary dung in Porius, and seizing, for example, a wall in Spain -- “I have no doubt that my turning the walls of the Seville tobacco factory into a clash of such vast immemorial ideas as those represented by Siegfried on one hand and Parsifal on the other, was one of the most deeply authentic, deeply felt and fully realized gestures of my life” (Autobiography) -- stuffing the moments; and by stuffing he is trying (if you believe him) to hint at an ecstasy there, noting it in Proust:

[T]he mood in which we arrive at the kind of ecstasy described by Proust and without which, he admits, most people go through their entire life, is not a mood connected with what we call “beauty,” nor with what we call “truth,” nor with what we call “love.” It is a mood or let me say a moment when we are made rapturously happy by what Wordsworth calls “the pleasure which there is in life itself.”

(Marcel Proust: Reviews and Estimates in English, ed. Gladys Dudley Lindner)

He will make his characters “rapturously happy” in that way -- though “happy” is the wrong word: they are beyond happiness into a place where “happy” is irrelevant, the invocation of rapture dismisses happiness -- hence the mythopoeic realism of his books, in that any instant, no matter how minute, is the hero at the end of the fairy tale, the human being, formerly misrepresented by their smallness, becoming a king or queen: the moment is momentous, it is ecstatic, it is in fact monstrous (if you think of the endlessness of it, and this piece of royalty reigning forever, getting bigger, attaching itself not only to Parsifal and Siegfried but also to everything that those two are attached to, and then furthermore, etc, seeping instantly everywhere, the whole world gassed in microseconds); it is full of words, it has bulk, it risks being ridiculous up there with its prosy fat and sceptre; and an onlooker during one of Powys' lectures in the United States described the entire performance as “vaudeville.” “Instruction or interpretation of literature was entirely subordinated to entertainment” (J.W. Abernathy, in a letter to The Dial, March 26th, 1917).

Powys, however, called it “a sort of transmigration of my soul.” “I succeeded eventually in hollowing myself out, like an elder-stalk with the sap removed, so that my whole personality, every least movement I made, and every least sound I made, and every flicker, wrinkle, and quiver of my face, became expressive of the particular subject I was interpreting,” which he sees in Proust as well. “Proust keeps up his serpentine progress through the hearts, nerves, and brains of all his people with an intensity of analysis so exquisite, so finespun, so levelling, that instead of feeling the mixture of puzzled and respectful awe we feels in the presence of Joyce and even of his alter-ego Stephen, we are prepared to argue with him in our own minds, so real have his people become to us, and expostulate with him as to his treatment of them, as if all he had done was just introduce us to them, and that formality once safely over we could take our own view of their proceedings and their fate ...”

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)

an air of human music

I assert my right not to be Dora Wilcox, says Daniel Deniehy; I assert my right to write like music, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” that line they always quote from Walter Pater, an old line to you though it is not as old as me, who died in 1856, twenty-one years before it was written. I never knew it.

For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation — that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape — should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.

The “chamber music” of a fly in Proust, “evoking heat and light quite differently from an air of human music” in the Moncrieff translation, gives the fly itself the character of summer, “the flies' music is bound to the season,” and of course it is bound to the fly as well, in a chain (my imagination makes me wonder if the singing fly is accidentally telling the universe that it wants to aspire to the condition of music as well, since it is going in that direction, and one day we will all grant the wish it never asked for and it will disappear ...), see, then, I have tied myself to night, not night, your night, their night, it's my Night, and Wilcox has a bellbird and a nightingale, the bellbird bound to Australasia, the nightingale bound to England, a bondage expressed over five lines in London and again in Two Sonnets from the book Rata and Mistletoe (1911)

I. The Nightingale

Last eve I heard an English nightingale
Pouring her very soul out to the sky,
When nothing moved save Solitude and I
Pacing the fields together till the pale
Enchanted moonlight flooded all the vale.
And she sang on, and high and yet more high
Toward Heaven thrilled that rich and passionate cry,
Till at the full it seemed to flag and fail.


Thou art the embodied Spirit of the Past,
O Nightingale ! thou singest Love and Sorrow
For all that was, for all that could not last,
Being too perfect ; never shall to-morrow
Assuage thy pain, nor ever grant relief
For thy superb and all-consuming grief.


2. The Bell-Bird

Not so thou carollest at break of day,
O Bell-bird ! when the world is flushed with light
And slips triumphant from the clasp of night,
And the wind wakes and blows the clouds away,
And the hill-spirits rise and shout at play,
Rejoicing. Then thou takest sudden flight
From tree to tree, and warblest with delight.
Thou and thy comrades, jubilant and gay !


Thou singest of the Future, radiant Bird !
Surely the Gods have lent thee sacred fire
And taught thee songs forgotten or unheard
By old-world men ! thou singest of Desire,
Youth, and high Hope, and the infinity
Of all we dream the Newer Worlds may be.

etiolating and moderating influences

Critical theory -- from its beginnings in the work of Marx and Nietzsche -- sees the human being as a finite, material body, devoid of ontological access to the eternal or metaphysical. That means that there is no ontological, metaphysical guarantee of success for any human action -- just as there is also no guarantee of failure. Any human action can be at any moment interrupted by death.

(Boris Groys: Under the Gaze of Theory)

I'd argue that Cambridge is a writer who senses and reacts, not a writer who reasons, but she is a prime noticer of interruptions even at the end of A Humble Enterprise when she has spent her book leading up to a marriage, arranging the marriage, getting rid of oppositions to the marriage; now she begins to wonder if she should be happy because she has succeeded. "Also, however well a marriage may begin, nobody can foretell how it will eventually turn out." The marriage could go wrong, everything could go wrong, the world could explode tomorrow; Proust points out that the sun might kill us all next weekend.

People pursue their pleasures from habit without ever thinking, were etiolating and moderating influences to cease, that the proliferation of the infusoria would attain its maximum, that is to say, making a leap of many millions of leagues in a few days and passing from a cubic mili-meter to a mass a million times larger than the sun, at the same time destroying all the oxygen of the substances upon which we live, that there would no longer be any humanity or animals or earth, and, without any notion that an irremediable and quite possible catastrophe might be determined in the ether by the incessant and frantic energy hidden behind the apparent immutability of the sun, they go on with their business, without thinking of these two worlds, one too small, the other too large for them to perceive the cosmic menace which hovers around us.

How is Ada Cambridge going to stop progress, which is the book itself? Calling on "nature, who is the mother of all wisdom" she finally shuts herself up. Nature believes in marriage and nature says that marrying was the best thing the characters could do. An appeal to nature as a fixed finite authority, recognised by everybody, this is how she puts on her brakes, by becoming Rosa Praed for a minute. The spirit of finity is Praed's friend; it has to come to Cambridge, she has to summon it, for once, like a genie that will get her out of trouble.

(I'm going to modify "she doesn't reason" by saying that she does reason (she makes equations out of thoughts, "this plus this plus this") but the expectation that she will come to a conclusion perplexes her; it amazes Ruskin too, when he thinks about it --

Do you suppose I could rightly explain to you the value of a single touch on brass by Finiguerra, or on box by Bewick, unless I had grasp of the great laws of climate and country; and could trace the inherited sirocco or tramontana of thought to which the souls and bodies of the men owed their existence?

-- even though he comes to conclusions constantly and in the same book, Ariadne Florentina, calls an Indian painting "damnable" without any more reasoning than, Because it is:

Giotto or Raphael could not have made the black more resolutely black, (though the whole color of the school of Athens is kept in distinct separation from one black square in it), nor the green more unquestionably green. Yet the whole is pestilent and loathsome [...] entirely damnable art.)

a place to lie and a little food

Long after Molloy's cows, later, in the Moran section of Molloy, the sheep are also pastoral, not only located in pasturage but so promising in their tantalising quiet and poetical-pastoral atmosphere that Moran is stricken or awed. "I looked around me again incapable of speech." He wants to say that he is willing to remain by the shepherd. "I longed to say, Take me with you I will serve you faithfully, just for a place to lie and a little food." He senses a paradise, then he is expelled. He leaves and goes on, perhaps into hell. The bees, when he reaches his home, are dead.

But then he is not in hell. First there is winter, then summer. Either real or imagined. He is more like Persephone. "They were the longest, loveliest days of all the year. I lived in the garden." He has been released or freed or permitted into some state or another. I think it is unusual in this book to have two long-sounding relaxed words like that next to one another, "longest, loveliest." I have not double-checked but I believe is not a normal Beckett habit, that relaxed extension of sound. Moran has mentioned "living in the garden" several times now in different tenses. Who knows where he is? Now he is paying more attention to "a voice" that tells him to act, and as he is trying "to understand what it wanted" he refers to himself in the third person: "It did not use the words that Moran had been taught when he was little." Then the I is restored. "I understood it, all wrong perhaps. That is not what matters. It told me to write." But when he goes inside, the act of writing detaches him from himself again. "Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining." Which I read like this: It was not midnight at the time that I was writing, "It is midnight."

I read it as though his ability to unselfconsciously have a memory is being loosened from him perhaps, as he writes now, reflecting on the start of his body of work here, which the reader has just spent however-long addressing with their minds and eyes. I was in a different state as I was writing, he says. I was not myself. I was torn away from myself. The voice that urges me to write is the voice that forces me into the third person. Though he is still writing as he says it. If he is speaking then he is also writing.

This is not like those books that wind around in a circle comfortably and unite with themselves when they tell you in the final paragraph, and then I began to write this story, the same story you've been reading ... The start of Moran has been disturbed, not reinforced. Molloy is not similar to The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, which also ends with the narrator writing the first line: "When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house --" or even like In Search of Things Past, whose narrator has discovered the nature of the book he was meant to write. Moran has discovered the book he was meant to write but it is not a relief.

The act of writing has taken him away from the long lovely summer days to midnight and rain: it is a dark act, it has interrupted the image of the summer garden and the crucial songs of the birds whose voices are inexplicable. In 1930 Beckett wrote a monograph on Proust. "Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit," he wrote, and "The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day." (Every moment is the moment to escape from sin, says Kierkegard in Sickness Unto Death, tranalated by Alastair Hannay: it is sin to remain in despair, for despair is sin.)

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.

autumn enters with fruit

The stone tilts under Marcel's foot, the memories are born for the first time, the act of production is compressed, and there are other yolkish egg-generations throughout the book, each at a different stage; the madeleine the most famous; and now I am thinking of Georg Trakl who takes one word and another and sets them in that productive compression, the words "child" and "sweet" close to "death" or "corpse," or the words "bleak ferns" and then in the next line "crystal blossoms," (The Night), or describing autumn with "dark" then a bright word, "yellowed" (The Autumn of the Lonely One) --

The dark autumn enters with fruit and fullness
The yellowed sheen of lovely summer days.
A pure blue flows from husks of moldered dullness

-- the prose tilting between one feeling and the next.

Imbalance is the word I think (and once I say a thing I am never sure -- always I think, I think --): but there is a force running back and forth between the balance of the poem and the imbalance of the word-ideas, gravity not knowing where to seat itself, a miniature torture niceness and pain, as in Lautreamont, the little boy and his tortured fingers, Trakl removing the padding that would be natural (though not inevitable) if he was writing prose (I am thinking of a prose-exposition like this: "The little sweet girl crept to the gate that opened into the dark garden where crows were flying and the leaves the of the trees were rustling, the gate creaked as a skeleton was moving its joints, and she put her hand on the metal ..." which he would compress down to a few words like "child in dark garden"), he places the words close together as if there is no other thought or calculation between them, and as if the one followed the other intensely and natively in the poet's mind. The girl is only juxtaposed with the garden and is not in it or located in a physical spatial relationship to it, but with it in some place where one thing is with another, and what space is that: where do these things exist together that are declared firmly, the existences of them, and placed there, juxtaposed, but juxtaposition itself is the landscape they live in.

All characters are juxtaposed with their books and with other characters in other books, this protagonist existing against a backdrop of other protagonists, this villain against other villains, though once upon a time each one of us must have encountered the ur-seed of them all: the one who represented that ur for us, the beginning of the whole rigmarole of protagonists and villains in our lives, whose identity and significance, at that point in time, to us, would have been invisible, even if that ur was in fact, as I have no doubt someone somewhere has already theorised (and probably I have read and forgotten), ourselves the readers, us: ourselves wandering divorced from us through each book and the reader pursuing them, crying come back, come back or watching in resentment and despair as those other creatures embark on their adventures.

suspecting that I owed each moment of life

So the chilly weather came and the dandelions burst into those seed moons that look like frost but feel like fur. Put one against your lips and you have kissed a mouse. (Home is a bushfire summer, the trees are burnt, the Tasman Peninsula roars, here the winter, the cold ground, the dull car noises.) The leaves turned yellow in the grass, the Cosmopolitan sign was the same as it had always been, but the sign over the hamburger restaurant down the road lost six of its letters when the lights went out in them (the shapes still present but the intelligence gone); the changes in the natural world seemed seasonal but the humanly-constructed things seemed to deserve a prejudicial word like "broken," though the hamburger sign goes dead so regularly that you could call it seasonal and say that its seasonal cycle lasts about three weeks, and that it has a faster life than flowers. Conan Doyle, speaking through Sherlock Holmes, said that once you have eliminated all the impossibilities then whatever remains no matter how loony, must be the case, and what is the case, Wittgenstein said, is the world, though Einstein tried to fix his own theories to make the universe static, yet it would not remain so, and the possibility that the sign is simply breaking down at random in a planless way and can't be fixed is a possibility that won't be eliminated, which is why no one can say seriously that the sign is in fact informed by nature to go dark on cue every three weeks; perhaps some worker stays in business this way and nature likes him in particular for reasons it cannot articulate to the rest of us except through this sign; note that the Lord spoke to Elijah out of personal preference. The idea that the sign is designed to cycle through its behaviour like a plant is whimsical and whimsy or magic should be ignored sometimes, I think, because it did not help me when I was searching for the lard in the kitchen a few minutes ago, and I was making an automatic buttering action with my hand as if I had a knife and the knife was lifting lard out of its lard-box. That magical summoning gesture did not work, magic was doing nothing for me except give my wrist a little exercise, reason was everything, or memory, and the power of my hands, and the muscles that run up the arm, the whole collection of pieces, long strings, damp flocculents like curtain cords, juice, gum, red strata, the buttering gesture not powerful on its own, but only after memory had reminded me that M. had moved the lard into a plastic yoghurt container, and then my fingers lifted the lid and there was the lard that shone like snow and was welcome to my eyes though it would not have been welcome to the eyes of others, who I have heard say, "Lard!" in horror voices just before they pour sugar sugar sugar into their coffee -- ha ha I think, watching them with this pour pour pour, you will die of sugar but no man is an island and thoughts of death remind me that as they die so will I, and not seasonally but forever although George MacDonald in Lilith thinks this is a good thing, and that we will find a more religious and therefore spiritual life in death; also childhood ponies will be returned. I never had a pony and will miss out on this part. MacDonald dwells on this resurrection, and it is the climax of his book, and the point of the whole thing, and the reason it was written, but the passage I remember comes earlier, I gloss over the resurrection blah blah blah and recall instead the monster worms that come out of the ground to eat the hero but moonlight paralyses them. He walked through the night "never suspecting that I owed each moment of life to the staring moon." We are kept safe sometimes by mysterious accidents. Safety stands on a cobblestone, the cobblestone tilts, safety comes awake and feels inspired, aha, orroight it says: then it puts itself in motion. Of course that cobblestone is a reference to the last book of In Search of Lost Time, and Marcel stopping in the courtyard, saying with pages of words, aha, orroight, like a man about to fix a sink. I need to do something with my life or be forever like Marcel in the first one billion pages of the book, and not the Proust who is the narrator (Roger Shattuck divides him like this into Proust-the-Narrator and Marcel-the-Aging-Boy, and I think it works well) and not, I don't know what, always staring at the three trees, which say to me nothing and only wave.

sensible enough, one would hope

Some of those opinion-words (the ones like "perfect," "good sense," etc) have been palmed off on Dunnett's characters but the language is the same once and again the same in everyone's mouth -- it is herself, badly disguised -- or she decides to involve the reader in these opinions, doing this (for example) after a tense scene that takes place between two characters during a festival, writing, "after that, the day was more the sort of festival it ought to be," without letting you know who has defined "the sort of festival it ought to be." It must be you and her together, maybe, working all this out with the collusion of a vague society of the book's anonymous inhabitants who are engaged in the festival: but it is not them, it is her, she assumes that anyone who reads the word "festival" will experience notions of frolicking happiness, the opposite of that angry just-read dialogue, and feel, at a level of thought formulated so automatically it is virtually subconscious, that this is how the day "ought to be."

(But, but, isn't that interesting, an author assuming her readers into herself and inhabiting them like a subtle Walt Whitman, see how intriguing it is, well, I say, well, clawing at my head, I don't want myself coerced into this nudge, nudge, nudge of a condemning mood against the characters, who are unnatural people, she says, because they are perverting a human day into what-it-ought-not-to-be -- that judgment is not my judgment -- maybe I was bullied as a child --)

The action in the plot is violent and surprising, one man betrays his uncle, a merchant is sabotaged, the kingdoms of the ancient British Isles can't keep their boundaries stable, but the language neuters violence with complacent words like "satisfactory" -- "The meal, served in the large room of the Vatican Palace, was satisfactory" -- it has the same opinion as the Countess in Proust's unfinished Sainte-Beuve book, a woman who does not like people who "exaggerate" (she is criticising Balzac); these people make things seem larger than the scale her mind inhabits; a meal in King Hereafter will never be an ecstatic experience, only a satisfactory one. The author gives a character a present and eviscerates his delight.

His wife of course would be delighted, and so was he: no one in Alba had such a cup. It was perhaps churlish to feel that something of a less domestic nature, a psalter perhaps, would have been more flattering from one high bishop to another.

Wry, wry, and wry again when a man during an attack sighs at his enemy because the weather is cold, "I don't know why, in the midst of all the elaborate plotting, you didn't have the common sense to keep your cloak on." Reading, I realised that Dorothy Dunnett couldn't endure the same world that she was trying to invent, rough sty where a cooked meal makes the air stink "with the smells of hot beef and grease," and you have to slosh your horse through an icy stream if you want to get to the other side; suffering in this world is necessary, but in her language no one suffers, though they may do a thing that is not "convenient."

They battle, herself and her world, they wrestle, she wins, she has won before the first page opens (you have to imagine the war from its traces), she murders violence, and here is the point where I connect her to Freya Stark (two posts ago), saying that Stark's language wants to unite sensuously with the world it is describing, and grasp it, and note a green thing with the simple adjective "green," planting it in the sentence firmly so that it suggests absolute greenness with acceptance of that greenness by the author who is issuing this undisguised description (and William Carlos Williams, when he wanted to explain a sight that was "the most important, the most integral that it had ever been my pleasure to gaze upon" gave his nouns a single word-friend each, first "red" for the wheelbarrow, then "rain" for the water, then "white" for the chickens, implacable, solid, planted, loved, respected), while Dunnett's language flies away from the world it is pretending to describe, evading the green thing's greenness by escaping into these otherwordly measurements of the gods. The character Macbeth has a hard point to make about another man, brutal, horrible; he has to soften it with a little polite bit of exasperated language before he can form his thought in the Dunnett-world: "He was sensible enough, one would hope, to realise that extra bloodshed was useless."

He is not protesting against bloodshed, he is protesting against too much extra bloodshed, which is not convenient or satisfactory, not shed with good sense, skilfully as it ought to be.

She goes to write thugs and plotters and Vikings, all pragmatists, but her language is polite, polite, it searches for the boundary line of taste, and remains carefully on the good side, manufacturing sins and informing you that they have been dodged. I protest, "But I do not think that those are sins."

the transformation imposed on reality

I found a secondhand Vintage Books reprint of Dunnett's King Hereafter with the words "stunningly realized novel" on the back: "the celebrated author of the Lymond Chronicles peels away a thousand years of legend to to uncover the historical figure of Macbeth," but after the first few pages I was reading the language rather than the story because the language was biting me while the story was not and I think it makes sense for animals to pay attention to anything that attacks them (myself a book-animal) so that they can stay away, in future, from the bushes in which that enemy hides itself, and the caves where it sleeps; my animal mind nipped back and now it will express itself in quick barks and bite a flea under the back leg where fleas hide.

I was comparing her to my memory of Henry Treece, whose books I do not have here, but he was a historical novelist too, and one whose work I read when I was a child or teenager, and I was absorbed in them, especially the end of Man With a Sword, in which Hereward believes he is talking to someone when he is in fact falling over dead. For a few words Treece lets you think that the character really is speaking, then he slides up to you with the news that he is not; his death arrives in your mind while you're still occupied by the idea of his dialogue. Reality in Henry Treece's books is made up of these acts of surrealism. I am going to call this effect magical, by which I mean that he uses sleight of hand to show you things you know are impossible; you know they're impossible even while they're happening. Hereward is not dead and alive at the same time because this is not that kind of book; your brain has to turn the idea over and conclude that he is dead or else you can't finish and will be stuck forever mentally at the second-last page.

But reality in Dunnett's book is simple and a person does not hallucinate; instead the colour of their hair is noted truthfully, and they smile or frown to show their moods; every bit of behaviour is measurable, any action can be set out along her invisible ruler, as in, for example, "she parried them, thoughtfully, in different ways. Several places along the table she could hear the Earl her husband doing the same, but more skillfully." "Different ways," being unnumbered, might be infinite; her husband is more skilfully infinite, talent is limitless but even the infinite can be judged; and the author is an utter judge, squinting and saying, "This is less skilful, this more so," but by what measurement?

And like this her language removes her from the world of the characters to an environment of particulate estimation of the vague where she can write, "The ceremony was not a success, and neither was the banquet afterwards, at which the King's mother found herself seated staring across two tables at the young King of Alba, who had the good sense to stare woodenly back."

It was this appeal to alienated assessment that agitated me, these words that measure invisible things so absolutely, a phrase such as "good sense," for example, and then the extension of that evaluating sensibility through the entire book at the level of a white-noise hum with phrases like "perfect teeth" ("Lulach's perfect teeth showed in his slow, charming smile"), or the news that a man in a ship "made no mistake about his landing," or that another man decided to "dwell rather longer than was convenient" in someone's house when he could have gone elsewhere, all these words staving off an opposite existence, sadder and sharper, where teeth are not perfect but scratched or mucky, and a man landing a ship might not be perfect either, a wooden stare might not be good sense or even bad sense but only an ambiguous thing with inestimable consequences, that the success of a ceremony might not be able to be measured in a summary, that the length of a man's stay might not be able to be described with urbane words (that the anger and shame of the host might crack through), and that no one could ever say confidently, "It was a good answer, and a correct one," as the author does at one point, and again, "It was good advice" -- denial, I say, and wring my hands: it pretends to be a world like my real world, but it is not; it is an alien that will not admit itself, staring me in the face -- (I point, it wears an innocent expression, it is a lamb ) -- uncanny animal -- bright -- prose like plastic surgery -- it doesn't know what it is --

This is one of the reasons why I don't write book reviews. Whenever I don't agree with a book I feel frantic and not methodical; I am extinguished by outrage, and I am not like Proust, who attacks Sainte-Beuve in well-paced sentences translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner. He is angry but the speed of the prose in translation is the speed of reason. "Style is so largely a record of the transformation imposed on reality by the writer's mind that Balzac's style, properly speaking, does not exist." (Calm, sharp, thoughtful man, arming himself for the next sentence, rolling up a little ball of trust in the reader's heart, yus, ya, I'll trust him --.) "Here Sainte-Beauve is completely off the scent."

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 --

designed to be seen in relation

I was reading Ruskin's Fors Clavigera when I came across Giotto's Charity, like this, in the Ninth Letter, "and make the field gain on the street, not the street on the field; and bid the light break into the smoke-clouds, and bear it in their hands, up to these loathsome city walls, the gifts of Giotto's Charity, corn and flowers." Of course I was rivetted immediately, as you are too, I know, because Proust read Ruskin, translated him as well, critiqued him in the preface that has been published separately as On Reading, and he uses Giotto's Charity in Swann's Way, Swann himself giving that nickname to a kitchen maid who wears "ample smocks" which "recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of the allegorical figures in his paintings." Well, how goes it with Giotto’s Charity? he says to the Narrator, in Moncrieff's Englishing.

And, so, because I have a human mind and because that mind likes to link thing to thing and make what seem like logical deductions at the time (following the same neat and weblike system as more obvious logical deductions, such as, for example, the one you'd come to if you saw a body hit the pavement ahead of you, then looked up and spotted an open window) -- because my mind likes to deduce, and I can't say the same for yours, since it would be presumptuous, you being you and not me, so I shouldn't -- and perhaps I shouldn't even say this about me, but that's another deduction, and as I said, I'm addicted to them -- a hunter in a jungle, thrilled by pawprints -- anyway, because my mind likes to deduce, I thought that Proust must have had Giotto's Charity lodged inside him after reading the Fors, and, therefore, when the opportunity arrived for a comparison to surge up in his mind and run out of the brain into the medium of language, which was waiting like a prophylactic to enclose it, then Giotto's Charity was there, ready to go, schloop, into the rubber. Well done Giotto's Charity -- provided by chance, stored against need, and utilised at last. The final step being the rare one. Think of all the brainstuff we never use, piles of it, lounging in heaps. They talk about an author's influences; one day they should look at all the author's noninfluences, all those hundreds of books they read and forgot. Reading: what a near-total waste of time.

If all the authors in the world mentioned Giotto's Charity in every single book then I would probably have passed over it in Ruskin and taken no notice, but as it was the words gleamed out at me, a point of focus and apparent clarity, golden bridge for a second, and I shaded my eyes, impressed by the shine or sheen. And the same when I came across the phrase "all the year round" on the first page of Charles Dickens' introduction to the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, knowing that he used the same set of words twenty years later as the title of a magazine. That human habit of linking, too, might have been the reason why an article about Geoffrey Hill appeared in the Guardian on January 31st, an article that ZMKC linked to in a comment after my post about Les Murray's Manuscript Roundel. "Carol Ann Duffy is 'wrong' about poetry, says Geoffrey Hill", is the article's title, and the journalist, Alison Flood, was referring to a lecture Hill gave last November in Oxford. It was one of the same Oxford lectures I was listening to while I was unscrewing my bottle of oil. Duffy in an interview had decided that "the poem is a form of texting" and Hill in his lecture disagreed, saying that poetry is language condensed but texting is language truncated, and also that "texting is linear only. Poetry is lines in depth designed to be seen in relation or in deliberate disrelation to lines above and below," which is true.

He mentions two of Duffy's poems, and mentions, too, her background and his, very similar, he says, neither of their families were wealthy. One of Hill's grandmothers at least was very very poor, as we know from the Mercian Hymns. She was a nailmaker, "hare-lipped by the searing wire." "Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak / this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood / and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg." But he and Duffy have gone in different directions: she is Britain's poet laureate, a populist, eager for outreach, and he is Geoffrey Hill, with a reputation for difficulty and being a crank and a harlequin, as he describes himself, a Ruskinian role -- Ruskin in the Fors is aware of his popular place as a crank, and plays with it -- I think plays is the right word -- he plays with it and also is it; and the same with Hill, who refers to himself in the lectures as a "Ruskinian Tory," and again in an interview he gave afterwards. "I would describe myself as a sort of Ruskinian Tory. It is only Ruskinian Tories these days who would sound like old-fashioned Marxists. I read and re-read Ruskin, particularly Fors Clavigera."

But Duffy. It's worth mentioning that Hill doesn't drag her into the speech gratuitously, no, this isn't a tangential attack, instead he integrates her, combining her with other references, for she is, it seems, like them ("them" being the Elizabethan poets, London riots, popular singers, and other items he mentions) part of the ordinary material of his days, whatever came along to aid him, debris that he seeks out or scoops up by chance. She is part of a larger atmosphere of opinion. He brings her in as he brought everything else in, ideas clustering around a core, a hazy rather than direct method of building an essay-point. As far as essays goes he really does essai, like Montaigne, like Fors too, in a cumulative way which lets him wander, like water in a mangrove swamp, as opposed to, say, water firing itself straight down the chute of a ravine, instead spreading out into marshes, pools, and billabongs, but always remaining water. So too Geoffrey Hill, no matter what he talks about, always reminds you that he is Geoffrey Hill. "Shit-eating grin," he happens to remark at one point, discussing the behaviour of politicians, and the phrase seems so appropriate that he stops and relishes it all over again, "shit-eating grrin," and gives his considered opinion of the words. And he marvels as he remembers that he is standing near a place where Ruskin lectured, once upon a time, with Thomas Carlyle in the room, a pair of friends, although Ruskin wouldn't let Carlyle have free run of his garden, because he spat.

But the point I was getting to when I mentioned the Guardian, was that the interview Hill read, the one with Duffy, was published in the culture pages of that same newspaper, as was a review by Sam Leith which Hill critiques later, and in fact listening to these lectures I get the impression that he reads the book pages of that publication pretty avidly, and so, when, at the end of the lecture, he makes a disdainful comment about the art and culture sections of newspapers overall, you could connect that disdain back to the Guardian in particular, although all other papers can be implicated as well, since he didn't name one when he was doing his disdaining.

I suspect that the link between the article and the speech, the initial bridge, the moment when Alison Flood felt the focus of alertness take shape between herself and Geoffrey Hill, was the same instant that he brought up the name of her employer, a word to which she must be perpetually alert, brain trembling for its cue like brain of lynx or jackal, his voice tickling the trigger marked Guardian inside her head, so that the true subject of "Carol Ann Duffy is 'wrong' about poetry, says Geoffrey Hill" is not Geoffrey Hill or Carol Ann Duffy or the lecture or Oxford or poetry or professor or laureate, but the paper itself.