leaping from rock to rock

"Pairs," I say, "pairing," I say, thinking back to the end of my last post, and then I wonder if all ideas come from the physical world; something is heard, something is seen, and an idea comes afterwards. Each sense a reef and the wilt and sprout of coral. Perhaps people like to put two remarks together for emphasis, to make each one seem stronger and more influential than a single remark on its own -- each friend draws attention to its neighbour; together they're a larger target, better fighters, more thuggish, four fists instead of two; and on some occasions they can make a singsong --

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low.

-- writes Robert Browning in Meeting at Night, putting asymmetry inside the possible symmetry of the first noun-pair, first one adjective, grey, then two, long and black then another rearrangement in the next line, making little sonic upticks with the letter L; and so he keeps the reading citizens awake with his irregularity -- or perhaps the writer of the hypothetical pair puts the phrases together to create a frisson when the two disagree (those two sentences in the Hangover Heaven advertisement, for instance: such close friends and yet they fight) or for the pleasure of creating a suggestive lacuna, which may or may not be filled invisibly by an association (which might depend on a single connective noun, adjective, verb, or occurrence, as in W.G. Sebald's poem Poor Summer in Franconia, which has been translated, for the book Across the Land and the Water, by Iain Galbraith, who writes these three lines, "In the afternoon / my crazy grandfather / torches the fields," followed by this new verse, "My last aspirin / dissolves gently / in a glass," the two scenes, one large-scale one small-scale, connected by things dissolving, burning, and disintegrating (and containing, like two parentheses, everything in the middle ground, which I will imagine is disintegrating sympathetically as well -- the world in other words, is irresistibly getting away from you -- O --)) or by the expectations of the reader. And the singsong itself is a habit and a pleasure for many.

The biblical David in Browning's Saul tells the sad King that "leaping from rock to rock" is one of the "wild joys of living" and I notice that he doesn't say, "from one rock to another rock," or "from rock one to rock two" -- does not tell us that "rock" in each instance means a different rock -- instead he lets us know through the certain ordinary phrasing of this absence (from x to x, he says, a shorthand so embedded in the English language that it must have come to him automatically; it has to be an agreed-upon group-thing because it omits a significant piece of information yet he is confident that the reader will fill the gap without his help) -- that there are two rocks, and that the person is not leaping from the same rock to the same rock, or in other words just prancing or bouncing up and down the way the night elf women do in World of Warcraft, bouncing lightly on their toes when they have nothing else to do, and visible sometimes doing this, through doorways, and out of the corner of your eye, mysteriously unmotivated by anything except what you imagine to be boredom and childishness, -- childishness, even though they are grown women and capable of fighting demons, wizards, ogres, and the magical embodiments of water, wind, fire, and earth, as we so often see in our travels across Azeroth and other planets: those monsters they fight, the otherworldly powers in the shapes of whirlwinds with burning eyes, fire-spirits wearing shackles on their wrists, and also the ordinary bears, wolves, angry deer, even the small harmless animals if she wants to, squirrels, skunks, beetles, moths, anything can be murdered, an idea that has been taken of course from the physical world, where, if I hit a squirrel with an axe, it changes forever, and so does the computerised one but does it die?

always the same and yet

When I was in Year Two or Three our art teacher used to tell us not to draw flying ems when we meant birds. It occurs to me now that she must have spent years watching different groups of children draw the same flying ems, and that possibly she harboured feelings of idealism towards us, hoping that we would show a few of the qualities that children are supposed to have when it comes to art, namely spontaneous freedom and originality. She wanted us to invent our own birds, or at least our own shorthand. Year after year she must have felt a terrible disappointment when her students persisted in these flying ems.

I thought of those ems a few days ago when, coming to the end of Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of Terry Zwigoff's film about Robert Crumb, I saw a picture of Charles Crumb's art. Charles is Robert's older brother. When he was young he drew comic book panels, with characters and dialogue balloons, but over time the dialogue took over the panels, crowding out the characters and spreading into the margins, until everything disappeared, even the letters, and in their place he drew rows of tiny slanting humps that resemble (until you look at them carefully) cursive script.

They look like rows of our ems.

MMMMMMMMMMMMMM

The first thing that came to me when I saw Crumb's ems was not my art teacher but a page in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz. A short way into the book Sebald mentions the French Nobel Laureate, Claude Simon, who, in turn, leads him to the subject of "a certain Gastone Novelli," a man who was tortured in Dachau during World War II. After the war, unable to bear the sight of "any so-called civilized being," Novelli left Europe for the jungles of South America. There he met a group of indigenes who spoke to him in a language that consisted mainly of vowels, "particularly the sound A in countless variations of intonation and emphasis." After some time he returned to Europe and became a painter. "His main subject," writes Sebald, "was the letter A." He painted the capital A "in scarcely legible ciphers crowding closely together and above one another, always the same and yet never repeating themselves, rising and falling in waves like a long drawn-out scream."

Then Sebald prints three lines of screaming A.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I thought of them when I saw Crumb's M.

MMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMM
MMMMMMMMMMMMMM

I had the impression that the vowel man and the consonant man were speaking to one another, one with his mouth open and the other with his mouth sealed permanently shut, but each side as inarticulate as the other, and each one struggling to make himself known. I imagined these two men in a hopeless partnership of the eyes.

This is the kind of romantic fiction you come up with when you're trying to make sense of a mystery, as, perhaps, I tried to make sense of my art teacher, all those years ago, when she told us not to draw flying ems -- told us this so repeatedly, and with such emphasis, that I still remember her doing it, and, in fact, remember the room around her, and the height of her, above us on a chair, while we sat on the floor, which was hard, cold, and not carpeted. Why did she dislike flying ems, I must have wondered, and what did she want us to put in their place? It was often evident that adults wanted something, but the nature of that thing was almost always obscure. They were AAA it seems to me in retrospect, always open-mouthed and expectant, and we, on the floor -- we were MMM.