Five Branch Tree

2011-01-27T21:08:00.006-05:00

[I am now on indefinite hiatus. When I started this blog, what resulted was directly tied to the life I was living at that time. But life changes. Sometimes significantly. And when that happens, what we were doing before can become increasingly disconnected. To share a bit about myself, for about the past two years that disconnection has been there for me, but I haven't really had much of a reason to abandon what I had been previously been reyling upon in my daily life. As to how that relates to Five Branch Tree, my heart hasn't been fully in it like it was in the past. Which wasn't a problem necessarily, close enough is close enough, until, that is, I found it starting to become directed elsewhere. Which is where I am at now in my life.

But I do plan on either restarting this blog at some point later on down the road, or start a new project which might better reflect my life if I find myself resettled into a new understanding. Time will prove the worth of doing so. Until then, I could use some good old fashioned Buddhist quiet. For those of you that are maintaining blogs that I read on a regular basis, I will continue to visit as I have. Has been too enriching not to.

This effort has been hugely successful to me, so don't think for a second that I am going out on any sort of down note. Five Branch Tree has proven its worth towards my personal development, and I owe a portion of that to those of you that are also regularly posting your own inner explorations. I thank you all for it. Take care and I hope to see you on the return.]

2011-01-24T12:16:00.003-05:00

CK Williams composes his poetry from the sentence. Captivating and intricate sentences that move the lines to create a nimble music of thought and images. His poetry is some of the most ‘accessible’ out there, which some might find keeps his work away from repeated readings, but there is an assured pleasure gained when sitting down with his poetry. An audio voice emerges from the pages, where, while reading through the eyes, you also begin to hear all the inflections and subtle changes in enunciation. The varied flex of pitch, tone and rhythm. The insistence of breath to easily follow his thought at both intellectual and emotional levels.

Throughout the collection Wait, topics Williams brings to his poetry include relationships, sex, love, aging, various world issues, art, philosophical notions.... An extensive list where it could appear that he is spreading himself a little too thin. That maybe he should choose a few of those and go more in depth. But, I don’t think the weight of the poetry relies upon the topics themselves. Instead, the weight of his voice and thought. His topics include just about everything anyone might think about on an average day, and Williams, to me, provides a poetic voice for those thoughts.

Conclusions though? We don’t have any, so why should Williams? But there is resolution in the art. The delight to be found in language. And in many poems Williams challenges and examines the notion of Judeo Christian guilt and sin. A concept he does not adhere too, but can’t deny that such notions remain embedded within his psychology, as well as within the ways the Western world and our elected leaders proceed at an international level.

When sitting down with Williams’s poetry, it is like having him sit with you in conversation, eye to eye, saying, “I have thought of this.” And doing so in an articulate, thoughtful and heartfelt fashion. Relatively simple, but at times its good to be reminded of how simple human thought and feeling can be.

2011-01-23T18:35:00.001-05:00

[Snow at Argenteuil; Claude Monet, 1874]

2011-01-22T17:54:00.002-05:00

From Daniel Lanois' "Black Dub" project released last year. A fantastic album.

2011-01-20T19:56:00.002-05:00

Here's what happens: you cross the open water and enter the channel and you follow it as it winds through the grass past the hammocks and woodland domes, the swampy islands upon which various animals live their animal lives; you go on through the buggy days and the long buzzing nights and you don't let mischance or false pathways deter you, you keep right on with your goodwill about life and your stubbornness, leaving each lived day behind you, the husk of it drifting in the shallows of the past; you stay with the trail, pushing on and riding the slow current of boggy water draining down the sleeve of the continent-- keep on no matter what-- until one day, some sunny day, you come to the blue waters of the Gulf.

--from 'Three Delays'; Charlie Smith

2011-01-19T20:40:00.001-05:00

.......................So there is
permission, not granted
but given, as a forsythia at the edge of the walk,
having stolen more light
than it can contain, trembles, and the echoes
of argument fade into a fluttering
over the price of butterscotch floats,
and we are dazzled
by the gouge of perception, as if there was in fact a word
we were waiting to hear, not
as completion but as synoptic
and inevitable entitlement—the drift
of some stranger’s conversation,
the memory of a thin mist
moored temporarily over the garden, that face
we saw from the window on the way to St. Albans: beautiful,
indifferent, unequivocably doomed.

--from Fuchsia; Charlie Smith

2011-01-18T20:43:00.002-05:00

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Charlie Smith in BOMB magazine, which provides insight into Smith's writing style and how it carried over into writing Three Delays. Makes me want to read it again....

CSI don’t have plans when I write a poem or a novel, or even hard notions in terms of whom or what I want to write about. I don’t have a template that I try to place things into. I just start writing. What comes out is something that I discover, if I ever discover it, because I don’t ever really go at books critically. As far as the characters in Three Delays, they are imagined people who are discovered, by me and by the reader, in a certain situation, a kind of extremis. A psychic extremis in terms of personality and abilities; a spiritual extremis, expressed, say, by drugs. The veneer that the drugs and the alcohol provide in this book, covering what turns out to be pretty honest emotion, is a kind of carapace. It’s just in the nature of the situation and what’s going on. How long can love last? When do you quit? How do you stay in it under terrible circumstances? All of that is interesting to me—in the lives of these people—so I wrote about it. I’m not trying to figure anything out about it: those are problems for people’s individual lives. I try to let myself be as open as possible to characters and situations within the confines of the book. That means that in my own life I may need to act in certain ways to make that possible, so I’m not distracted by all that’s going on in the world. Live quietly. Let the world take care of itself. Seek a calm heart.

JR Turning this question to the writer: what about ego as a writer?

CS Well, I look at writing not as a management position but as a service position. I’m there to serve the needs of the book. That’s all it is, and the more I’m able to do that, the better the book goes. When I start thinking that I’m the big shot in the book, or that the big shot is writing it, there is no book.

It’s like raising a child or loving a woman; when you really do love them you’re willing to serve. That’s what I find operating in my marriage. I find it operating in the lives of people who have raised families—despite ourselves, despite our shortcomings, and our inabilities, we’re willing to serve the ones we love. A book is like that; it’s not a living thing, but the act of writing is. I go after the willingness to serve the poem, or the novel. I do that as best as I can within my limitations.

[...

...]

JR Billy and Alice are mutually attracted.

CS They see the universe in simpatico ways; that’s what pulls them together.

JR Like pathologies attract?

CS Yeah, in a sense. Early in the book they compare themselves to people who seem to have no particular pathology—the husband Alice has at the beginning of the book is described as a guy without pathology. He’ll just live a good life and prosper and all of that. But they are people with pathology: they’re fucked up and they’ve got to deal with it. Whether it’s their fuckedupness or their nature—I mean, they’re extremely bright and perceptive people but . . . It’s a gas when you’re around somebody who yucks at the same things you do. Whether it’s friendship or a marriage, you can go on that. People who can yuck it up together. They see the same things in the same way and that’s extremely powerful. That’s not to say that it’s some kind of solipsistic deal where you’ve got schizophrenics over there yucking it up.

They’re human beings, they appreciate life—that’s what’s going on with them. They’ve got severe handicaps. Alice is overburdened by rage and fear, and Billy is overburdened by rage and fear that he treats with chemicals. She treats her affliction, I guess, by raging and trying to get over this particularly obsessive, fucked-up way of loving somebody. But, I think, they are, at all times, like I said, just struggling to go forth and get something going. They just happen to be alike.

Truth is, they are both in love with beauty to the point of death. And they find this to an inestimable degree in each other.

2011-01-17T12:05:00.003-05:00

Charlie Smith is the second new author I have discovered already this year, and having written both poetry and fiction, I should have plenty to delve into for a while. Three Delays is his most recent novel in the past ten years and its written in a style I could never tire of. Forgoing narrative plot for loose, almost improvised construction, barreling along in hallucinogenic sentences that can make your head spin through their eruptions of subjective feeling and altered perceptions, the romance of Henry Miller’s excess comes to mind, along with a bit of Kerouac desperado and the heavy weight of a brutally doomed love that you know can only end in tragedy.

The book follows various times in the blundering adult loves of Alice and Bill, childhood friends that fell into an obsessive love as teenagers and which, like moths to a flame, they can’t remove themselves from despite efforts to safely move in different directions. Which might be fine, if it wasn’t for that fact that their love is of a subsuming fire that feeds off of every fear, insecurity, existential angst, romantic yearning and surface emotion that can exist in a person. Appropriately, Bill is a junky supreme incapable of handling reality without a cocktail of mind bending drugs in his system and Alice keeps attempting to break free through a series of stale marriages.

Yeah, this is fun stuff. As misdirected and random as Bill and Alice themselves. Especially when their stories traverse across various regions in the United States, at times exploding violently over in Italy and the back roads of Mexico, and while also encountering various underground criminals, revolutionaries and other equally doomed seekers of a romanticized promised land. A reader can’t help but to both hate Bill and Alice for not staying away from one another while at the same time, never wanting them to leave each other’s side. A modern blend of Bonnie and Clyde and Romeo and Juliet that’s brought to life through the lyrical intensity of Smith’s writing. And every dialogue, paragraph and scene becomes a poem in their own right, both synthesizing Bill and Alice’s mood but then also extending the text beyond itself to navigate into areas of the heart and being that can only be revealed through indirection. Smith is both telling a good story and speculating along with the reader on these issues. Some participatin is required to make the book work because the writing can be a bit overwhelming, even tedious if not in the mood for Smith’s unrestrained effusions, but the world is all to recognizably human to not find oneself captivated.

2011-01-16T19:59:00.000-05:00

[Death and Life; Gustav Klimt, 1916]

2011-01-15T17:28:00.001-05:00

2011-01-13T16:07:00.003-05:00

Chaplinesque
-- Hart Crane

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

2011-01-12T15:58:00.004-05:00

My blog is in need of a correction. On Monday I advised of Saramago approaching 90, but he actually passed away this past summer at the age of 87. With that said, here is an excerpt from his 1998 Nobel lecture:

It was only many years after, when my grandfather had departed from this world and I was a grown man, I finally came to realise that my grandmother, after all, also believed in dreams. There could have been no other reason why, sitting one evening at the door of her cottage where she now lived alone, staring at the biggest and smallest stars overhead, she said these words: "The world is so beautiful and it is such a pity that I have to die". She didn't say she was afraid of dying, but that it was a pity to die, as if her hard life of unrelenting work was, in that almost final moment, receiving the grace of a supreme and last farewell, the consolation of beauty revealed. She was sitting at the door of a house like none other I can imagine in all the world, because in it lived people who could sleep with piglets as if they were their own children, people who were sorry to leave life just because the world was beautiful; and this Jerónimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again.

2011-01-11T18:57:00.002-05:00

"...life is an orchestra which is always playing, in tune or out, a titanic that is always sinking and always rising to the surface, and it is then that it occurs to death that she would be left with nothing to do if the sunken ship never managed to rise again, singing the evocative song sung by the waters as they cascade from her decks, like the watery song, dripping like a murmuring sigh over her undulating body, sung by the goddess amphitrite at her birth, when she became she who circles the seas, for that is the meaning of the name she was given. Death wonders where amphitrite is now...where is she now, she who may never have existed in reality, but who nevertheless briefly inhabited the human mind in order to create in it, again only briefly, a certain way of giving meaning to the world, of finding ways of understanding reality..."

--from Death With Interuruptions, José Saramago

2011-01-10T11:52:00.006-05:00

Death with Interruptions wouldn’t be the first book of Jose Saramago’s that I would recommend, but it does have its delights if a reader sticks through to the end. He returns again in the ususal mode of magical realism to bring forth a parable that can comment upon various social notions and philosophical ideas. This time, a city that finds itself without death after a typical New Year’s. People still age, can be injured, lay in wretched chronic illness, but they will not die. As to why, this isn’t revealed until the second half of the book when ‘death’ is introduced as a character. In the form of beautiful 36 year old woman and who eventually becomes fixated on an unassuming cellist– an identifiable trait shared by most of Saramago’s protagonists.

Typically with Saramago’s works, he interweaves intriguing character based stories with the myriad thoughtful speculations than can arrive out of his staged magical occurrences. Both intellectually and emotionally intriguing, which is why I am working through his publications. But in Death with Interruptions, the majority of the book keeps within cerebral speculation mode and it is not until the last third where an actual character based plot solidifies. And that does become a good story, but all too brief and deserving much more.

The rest of the book then largely meanders in hypothetic speculations towards how society would or would not function with the absence of death. Interesting? Yes. Captivating? No. Especially when Saramago relies upon his characteristic page length clause ridden sentences which, in this book, do not cause the insistent voice that can be sharply heard in his better works, and instead, only make the reading unnecessarily more difficult.

Fortunately, Death with Interruptions is a shorter book that can be read quickly. However, at the end, it reads more as an introductory effort to what could easily have been a more substantial novel. Probably best to keep in mind that Saramago is now approaching 90? His ideas are still there, his characters remain identifiably human, but the artistic execution falters in this most recent effort.

2011-01-09T18:05:00.001-05:00

Why do Heaven and Earth last forever?

Because they

do not exist for themselves.

--Lao Zi

2011-01-08T18:04:00.001-05:00

Shostakovich's Prelude and Fugue No. 22 with the paintings of Leonardo Cremonini.

2011-01-06T18:52:00.001-05:00

A Human Being Is Here
--Jon Fosse (via)

A human being is here
and then disappears
in a wind
that vanishes
inwards
and meets the rock’s movements
and becomes meaning
in always new unity
of what is
and what is not
in a silence
where wind
becomes wind
where meaning
becomes meaning
in lost movement
of everything that has been
and at once is
from an origin
where the sound carried the meaning
before the word divided itself
and since then never left us
But it is
in all past and it is in all future
and it is
in something
that doesn’t exist
in its vanishing border
between what has been
and what shall come
It is infinite and without distance
in the same movement
It clears up
and disappears
and remains
while it disappears
And it lights up
its darkness
while it speaks
of its silence
It is nowhere
It is everywhere
It is near
It is far
and body and soul meet
there as one
and it is small
and as big
as everything that is
as small as no thing
and where all wisdom is
and no thing knows
in its innermost self
where nothing is divided
and everything is at once itself and everything else
in the divided
which is not divided
in endless boundary The way I let it disappear
in obvious presence
in vanishing motion
and walk around in the day
where tree is tree
where rock is rock
where wind is wind
and where words are an incomprehensible unity
of everything that has been
of everything that disappears
and thus remains
as conciliatory words

2011-01-05T16:07:00.001-05:00

[Fra Borgøya; Lars Hertervig, 1867]

2011-01-04T15:37:00.002-05:00

From Jon Fosse's essay, The Gnosis of Writing:

I understand so little. And as the years pass, I understand less and less. It is true. But the opposite is also true, that as the years pass I understand more and more. Yes, it is also true that as the years pass I understand a great amount, an almost frightening amount. As a matter of fact, I feel almost faint at how little I understand and almost frightened at how much I understand. How can it be that both things are true, that I simultaneously understand less and less and more and more?

The lucid thought would say, if that’s the case, either to understand little is also to understand much, and that, I would agree, is true in a certain sense, perhaps almost in a gnostic sense, or, the lucid thought would say, it is about two kinds of understanding. And perhaps that’s how it is, yes perhaps it is as simple as saying that in and through the kind of understanding which resorts to concepts and theory in order to understand, I become aware that I understand less and less, and that the scope of such a realisation more and more often appears to me to be limited, while in the kind of understanding which resorts to fiction and poetry to understand, I understand more and more. Perhaps that’s how it is. At least that’s what it feels like to me, who, after having written a great deal of essayistic theory, am now doing it less and less, and now almost exclusively write a language which first and foremost doesn’t mean, but first and foremost is, yes is itself, almost like rocks and trees and gods and human beings, and only after that means. And in this language which primarily is, and which only secondarily means, I feel that I understand more and more, while I also, in and through the other ordinary language, the language which primarily means, understand less and less.

2011-01-03T12:22:00.008-05:00

One of the things I love about literature is picking up a book I know absolutely nothing about, usual at random as a result of perusing the stacks of the local library, and discovering an author for whom I want to read everything that might be available. This is how I discovered Haruki Murakami about ten years ago and how I discovered Jon Fosse (b. 1959) a few weeks ago. Fosse is a Norwegian writer and most notably known as a playwright, but has numerous works of fiction and poetry as well. English availability? Probably not enough.

His novel Melancholy is written as an internal monologue of the 19th century Norwegian artist, Lars Hertervig, who was born into a poor Quaker family in northern Norway, went to the Arts Academy of Düsseldorf in 1852, suffered a mental breakdown and then spent his remaining years either in an asylum or a poor house. The writing is in stream of consciousness form and reminds me of the obsessive qualities that can be found in Dostoyevsky, the bizarre absurdity of Kafka and the personal torturous drama of the protagonists found in Knut Hamsun’s earlier books, Hunger and Pan. Austere repetition is often relied upon to demonstrate the insistence of Hertervig’s thoughts, which means the writing on the surface can drag on a bit, be a tad boring, but also equates to a heavy pleading that can burrow the reader into the pages. It is not the breadth of Hertervig’s thoughts that engages, but the drone of his clinging obsessions that we can all sympathize with and relate to.

Hertervig’s paintings were known for their use of radiant light, but this isn’t the outward focus in Melancholy. More so the opposite. But the light is still there and worked in as subtle contrast, often through Hertervig’s infatuation with a 15 year old girl prior to his breakdown. However, the significance of light doesn’t really become shaped into the narrative until the last section of the novel. At this point, time leaps into the 1990's and the narrator is an accomplished author and a distant relative of Hertervig, who shows signs of sharing some of Hertervig’s emotional disturbance. When his narrative picks up, he is seeking out a pastor to discuss certain ‘mystical’ experiences that have arisen over the years while working on his writing.

Through Hertervig’s life and paintings, as well as the author’s discussions with the pastor in the last section, Fosse equates artistic humanism with metaphysical, even spiritual, notions that could be allegorically aligned with certain areas of theological thought. Language too, as I suspect comes out in his plays even more so. After consideration, perhaps artistic creation is less about creating or expressing one’s world and self, but instead about attempting to reveal the depth and complexity of what lies beneath the surface of our immediate modes of comprehension. Where a truer form of communication can exist.

2010-12-24T18:59:00.002-05:00

Prophecy
-- W. S. Merwin

At the end of the year the stars go out
the air stops breathing and the Sibyl sings
first she sings of the darkness she can see
she sings on until she comes to the age
without time and the dark she cannot see

no one hears then as she goes on singing
of all the white days that were brought to us one
by one that turned to colors around us

a light coming from far out in the eye
where it begins before she can see it

burns through the words that no one has believed

2010-12-19T15:42:00.002-05:00

[Orion in December; Charles Burchfield, 1959]

2010-12-18T14:47:00.001-05:00

2010-12-16T18:45:00.003-05:00

"And now we look upon the earth and sky. This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great deed this earth expects to witness. We know it waits. It seems to say it has great gifts to lay before us, but it wishes a greater gift from us. We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky."

--from 'Anthem'; Ayn Rand

Song of Myself
--Walt Whitman

1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy....

2010-12-15T18:23:00.003-05:00

I look upon the history of men, which I have learned from the books, and I wonder. It was a long story, and the spirit which moved it was the spirit of man's freedom. But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.

--from Anthem, Ayn Rand

There are numerous ways to look at political theory. One is the obvious short view where you look at your current times, watch how the various policies and movements are moved through an established state, take note of what leadership rises and falls, etc. But there is also political theory that runs into the philosophic core of how we understand our relations with other people and ulitmately how we can understand our place in the social world.

With that said, lets think about freedom. Is freedom a right? No. It is our inherent state in the world. We are all born free. No one gives you freedom. You already have it. A right though is an approval by the state where you are allowed this. But then by converse definition, can also be taken away. To say the state allows the right to freedom also suggests that it has the right to take away freedom.

Unfortunately though, I think a common understanding of the state is that it is there to provide freedom, and therefore the actions of the state are the means to accomplish this. With further thought on the implications of such an understanding, a person can see where these means can actually start to become infringements, at least in some form or another. Largely because freedom is no longer understood at an individual, personal level-- which is the only place where it can exist-- and instead at the level of the group. Obviously, the state supports such an understanding of freedom because it legitimizes its own actions-- whether its banning abortion or forcing people to purchase health insurance.

However, if people instead understood that freedom is a quality of life we all naturally possess, not something that is granted or provided to us (including the guies of protection), how then would people comprehend the role of the state? Its a fine line distinction that at first only has subtle distinctions. But with further thought, at least to me, has huge implications towards what type of state a person would want to live within, if one at all.

2010-12-14T15:44:00.002-05:00

While I haven't really read much of Ayn Rand, lurid pulp never came to mind when thinking about her books. But, looks like it was on the mind of some fetishistic bibliophile out there! Below is from the June 1953 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

2010-12-13T12:05:00.003-05:00

Anthem was the first of Ayn Rand’s books to be published and is also the first that I have now read. Its written as a dystopian novella meant to critique the communist and socialist movements which were in place in Europe during the 1930's and the story will sound quite familiar. A totalitarian state has erased past history, has replaced all individual names with numbers (the narrator's ‘name' being Equality 7-2521), work is ordered rather than chosen, romantic relationships are replaced with forced mating, reading is unheard of and all challenges to the established collective result in severe punishment. Pretty close to Orwell’s 1984, as well as numerous other science fiction stories.

One spin though with Anthem is that no one has a sense of “I”. Instead, each person is known as a “we” in order to reflect constant identification with the collective. “I” did not wake up to go to work this morning. “We” woke up to go to work this morning. The whole concept of "I" is non-existent. This at first made the book a bit difficult as it is written in the form of secret journal. And I can understand why versions of this story didn’t include this aspect because it does disrupt the reading a bit. But it did help instill while reading the alternate mindset of the characters and the subsequent transformation of the narrator to an “I”. Should note that mirrors are also not allowed.

How the story proceeds should be fairly obvious, as you are aware from the first page that the journal was being written in secret, and there aren’t really any surprises as the narrative develops. But it was still an interesting book as it is one of the first of its kind and I find it impressive that it was published back in 1936 prior to World War II. However, after doing some research, looks like one other novel proceeded Anthem. Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote a book called We in 1921 and was in response to the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. I would assume that are a number of books that then also influenced Zamyatin's.

2010-12-12T17:18:00.002-05:00

[Black Place II]

"I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life- and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do."
--Georgia O'Keefe

2010-12-11T14:16:00.001-05:00

From Maya Deren's "At Land" with music by Johnny Greenwood.

2010-12-09T08:05:00.002-05:00

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die...

--from Lady Lazarus; Sylvia Plath

2010-12-08T21:22:00.003-05:00

[Women's Head in Profile; Gerhard Richter, 1966]

2010-12-07T12:55:00.002-05:00

While skimming through reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I found little that actually addressed the novel as something other than an intricate, page turning thriller. Fortunately, in a review that combined with the novel the Swedish film adaptation by Niels Arden Oplev, the New Yorker brought to light some of the more serious undercurrents:

Larsson was a reporter, like Blomkvist; he specialized in exposing the activities of the far right, and his fiction is concerned, to the brink of obsession, with cruelties of every stripe. The Swedish title of the book translates as “Men Who Hate Women,” and Lisbeth’s private history—which, unsurprisingly, was riven by familial abuse—is linked to the Vanger saga not by any causal logic but simply by a vague, insistent dread of the tyrannical.

Beneath the sadistic surface, there is a strange cultural masochism in Larsson, as in his compatriot Henning Mankell, whose collected works I once feasted on through a single winter, with the kind of gusto that only crime fiction can excite. It is as though both men want not merely to disassemble the reputation of their homeland as a model—the model—of benign social democracy but to dig backward in a bid to prove that the past, too, was not one of liberal health and justice but a sump of buried transgressions and moral disease. (When you fear for your socialist Eden, the first people you blame, on instinct, will be capitalist dynasts like the Vangers, safe in their havens of corruption.) There can be a twilit sadness to this failing of a myth, explored most beautifully in last year’s “Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future That Disappeared,” by the British author Andrew Brown, who lived there in the nineteen-seventies; but “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” both on the page and onscreen, largely dispenses with the melancholic. The chilly shack where Lisbeth stays with Blomkvist is a comfortless parody of the blissful huts where Ingmar Bergman planted his lovers, in “Summer Interlude” and “Summer with Monika,” and Oplev scorns any hint of relaxation, preferring the stab of high drama: the moment that Blomkvist pinned up a row of photographs, showing the older generation of Vangers, I knew that half of them would turn out to have been Nazis. Was wartime Sweden really just a smaller Germany with added meatballs, or am I missing something?

2010-12-06T12:43:00.003-05:00

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is going to be a bit of a departure from what I typically work with on this blog. I won’t get into whether or not it can be classified as ‘literature’, instead state the book doesn’t rely upon the more intuitive qualities which compose more artistic forms of writing. To exemplify, I can easily put it this way: the original Swedish title was Män som hatar kvinnor, translated as “Men Who Hate Women”. Nothing indirect or intuitive about that. Sounds like something that would be thought up by a person who has a very personal reason for writing a book- which Larsson did as he was a witness to a gang rape when he was 15 years old.

And the book is disturbing, but Larrson does (just barely) avoid exploiting his subject mater. The novel is undoubtedly written as a thriller mystery, and meant to be a page turner. Right there should be a red flag. And while each section begins with a brief statistic about the percentage of women in Sweden who have been victims to various forms of male predations, these are not really backed up or expended upon within the story. To the point where they seem to rely upon more shock value only; a lack of a strong connection between the statistics and the actual story that is being offered to the reader. Weak.

But while Larsson wove together his intricate and sickening plot, I think he was always very mindful towards how he would write about the more horrific aspects of his tale. During such moments, the writing turns journalistic and with an objective, ‘this is what was found’, tone. And this rather than trying to presume to know what it would feel like to be such a victim. Instead, Larsson turns away to focus upon the issues which surround the causes for sexual violence and raises questions towards how sexual violence is or is not dealt with at a social level.

We can’t forget that there is also the issue of how to end such a story. Since it’s a commercial mystery, bad guy loses and good guy wins. Is this inappropriately glossy? Of course it is. But we all know that it is our duty to separate the real life issues from the fiction. And that there is no such thing as bad guy losing, good guy winning. Horrific stories are not meant to have resolution. That’s why they are horrific. However, a book’s artistic approach can reframe a reader's understanding through such things as the aesthetic qualities, the way in which the matters are to be understood, how they are told, the intent behind the author, the context they are placed in, etc.

So while there is a good guy winning at the end of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it’s the thoughtful issues imbedded in the text that provide the real resolution. I just wished Larsson would have taken the risk of decreasing the engagement of his plot to substantiate these more than he did. I have concerns that this “wildly suspensful...an intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller” will, at times, not be read as anything more than that.

2010-12-05T16:43:00.002-05:00

You will remember that leaping stream
where sweet aromas rose and trembled,
and sometimes a bird, wearing water
and slowness, its winter feathers.

You will remember those gifts from the earth:
indelible scents, gold clay,
weeds in the thicket and crazy roots,
magical thorns like swords.

You'll remember the bouquet you picked,
shadows and silent water,
bouquet like a foam-covered stone.

That time was like never, and like always.
So we go there, where nothing is waiting;
we find everything waiting there.

--Pablo Neruda

2010-12-04T19:31:00.001-05:00

2010-12-03T07:06:00.002-05:00

[Edvard Munch]

When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one’s ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now also
of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby meets the gaze
of the great granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth’s and heaven’s,
until the sun rises, and they stand
in the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.

--Galway Kinnell

2010-12-01T18:39:00.003-05:00

Like a lot of people, I first started reading poetry in anthologies. The only problem with that is you don't have the surrounding poems to help enrich the poems that are selected. Sort of like the difference between seeing one painting and an entire series. With that said, this first poem would have been written when Kinnell was in his mid 30's. The portion of the second, written to his daughter while an infant, in his mid 40's.

Poem of Night
--Galway Kinnell

1
I move my hand over
Slopes, falls, lumps of sight,
Lashes barely able to be touched,
Lips that gave way so easily
It's a shock to feel under them
The indifferent smile of bones.

Muffled a little, barely cloaked,
Zygoma, maxillary, turbinate.

2
I put my hand
On the side of your face,
You lean your head a little
Into my hand-- and so,
I know you're a dormouse
Taken up in winter sleep,
A lonely, stunned weight.

3
A cheekbone,
A curved piece of brow,
A pale eyelid
Float in the dark,
And now I make out
An eye, dark,
Wormed with far-off, unaccountable lights.

4
Hardly touching, I hold
What I can only think of
As some deepest of memories in my arms,
Not mine, but as if the life in me
Were slowly remembering what it is.

You lie here now in your physicalness,
This beautiful degree of reality.

5
And now the day, raft that breaks up, comes on.

I think of a few bones
Floating on a river at night,
The starlight blowing in place on the water,
The river leaning like a wave toward the emptiness.

And now from Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight:

5
If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a cafe at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where wine finds its shapes in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be a memory,

learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come-- to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
that tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

2010-11-30T19:59:00.002-05:00

From a 2001 article, The Loveliness of Pigs, in the Christian Science Monitor:

Kinnell believes that poetry is inherently personal - it's one person's exploration of life, of what it means to be on earth. But, he adds, poets must take things more seriously. "You can no longer just fool around.... We need a deeper sense of the preciousness of our time here as conscious beings."

That consciousness has always been present in Kinnell's work. Whether he's writing about his family or describing the loveliness of sows, Kinnell's work reveals affection for creatures both great and small. Indeed, he claims that the "other animals are the angels. Human babies are the angels."

A pig as an angel?

"I try to see past the usual clichés about things," he smiles. " 'Pig' is a pejorative word, but if you get to know them, get a feeling for them, you see that they have an extraordinary beauty. When creatures don't have an extraordinary beauty, it's because the person in contact with them is not seeing it. I feel more and more in love with other creatures as I get older."

Some critics use the word "spiritual" to describe Kinnell's work, but that is not a word he would use. When he writes, he addresses his work "to being." He thinks in terms of accuracy, of capturing what seems to be truth in a particular moment and context. "It is almost as if the words are imitations of something else - shapes of reality."

2010-11-29T12:04:00.003-05:00

America has a number of great poets that are now over the age of 80 and one of the lesser known of these is Galway Kinnell. Living and writing largely from the North East woodland region, Kinnell has compiled a body of work that touches upon all of the major dramatic themes of humanity, as starting from the singular experience of the individual, with such experiences as love, solitariness, sex, birth, loss and death, but then also extending into the broader issues of war, technology, modern ‘progress’, art, etc. And in the backdrop there remains Kinnell’s love for the natural world. Not a glossed over and imaginary view of nature, but into the blood, piss and shit of nature, as most notably found within various poems he wrote in the 1970's that focus upon specific animals and the crossover qualities that compose both their lives and ours. Poetry too. From one of his more well known poems, The Bear:

the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

There are two reasons why I find myself always returning to Kinnell’s poetry. The first would be his being absolutely at home in the mysteries of the physical world, which is a form of spirituality known to many poets and artists. Kinnell doesn’t turn away from the basic processes of life, as is the case with more religious outlooks, and instead looks at just how nasty it can be, but comes out accepting, even grateful for, our ultimate physicality, our ability to participate and bear witness to life. It’s a viewpoint that in turn allows both philosophical speculations, such as the ability to grasp the infinite because of our ultimate transience, and emotional attachments to the varieties of life experience.

The other reason I return to Kinnell’s poetry is because of his ability to feel and make the reader feel, showing the connections that exist between the physical and the emotional. This is often accomplished through free verse poems which arrange scenarios that almost resemble settings for larger stories, but are then incised with poetic utterances which open new dimensions for relating to what’s being told. Kinnell’s poetry displays the constant interaction we have with our life experiences and the array of perceptions and understandings available to us. And the stronger the interaction, the stronger the passion one has for life. From Another Night in the Ruins:

How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?

The only problem with Kinnell being still alive is that we do not have a Collected Poems published yet. Instead, readers will have to settle with the all too thin New Selected Poems or head to a local library and work with whatever might be on the shelf. But when a Collected Poems is finally published, I will be one of the first to purchase a copy. The amount of his poetry that I have been exposed to is far too thin considering how strongly I react and enjoy his works. I look forward to the day that will be changed.

2010-11-28T17:47:00.003-05:00

[The Hermit (Man Resting); Rockwell Kent, 1919]

2010-11-27T18:14:00.002-05:00

From the youtube description: Edgar Jerins is a realist artist whose monumental charcoal drawings bring to mind the novels of Russell Banks in their poignant dissection of suffering, loss, family strife, and love.

2010-11-26T10:22:00.001-05:00

The Beauty of Things
--Robinson Jeffers

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things—earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars—
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality—
For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant—to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

2010-11-24T16:09:00.002-05:00

[The Adirondack Guide; Winslow Homer, 1894]

2010-11-23T18:46:00.004-05:00

...smoke dissipated finally into a haze, then rose into the dark sky, undetected by humans anywhere, within the Reserve or without, making it the private knowledge only of the animals and birds residing in the Reserve, the deer and bears and coyotes, the bobcats and fisher cats, the foxes, martins, and mink, the hawks and eagles and ravens on the rock-topped peaks, and, on the lakes below and in the cold streams tumbling into the lakes, the beavers and the loons and the lingering Canada geese, and, standing in the muskegs and shallows of the headwaters of the Tamarack River, the herons and cranes, and the owls returning from their nocturnal hunts to roost in the high branches of the spruce and pine trees, where, still higher and in among the crags, the solitary cougar lifted its heavy head from sleep and smelled the smoke drifting downwind from the Second Lake, and the great cat moved off the rocky ledge and made its way down through the conifers to the open birch forest below and loped still farther down to the bands of oak, hickory, maple, and poplar that crossed the lower valleys that lay between the mountain ranges of the Reserve: all the animals and birds in steady uniform migration from north to south, an instinctual response to the smell of smoke, a felt command registering in their collective brain to track the smoke, not to its source, as humans do, but to where it grew faint and they could no longer see or smell it...............

--from The Reserve, Russell Banks

2010-11-22T11:58:00.005-05:00

The Reserve is not like any other Russell Banks novel out there. The gritty realism of the struggling common man is replaced with a post-modern melange of 1930's Hollywood romance cut-outs, insidious sexual undercurrents that would be at home in a Tennessee Williams play, subtle tinges of film noir, characters that might be identified as the uber-elite and in a secluded setting of a wilderness sanctuary deep in the Adirondacks that's exclusive to members only. To do such things as fish and kill rare furry animals. And doing so during the Great Depression. Quite the turn for one of America’s greatest authors and who is known for his sprawling epics.

With the pop approach, the book almost reads like a side project for Banks, as is in vogue with authors these days. It seems like he decided to have a bit of fun with this one. When Russell the Muscle decides to bring out a wily cast that includes Jordan Groves, a wealthy artist who flies about his ego in a sea-plane and traverses the world for new sexual conquests, and Vanessa Cole, a mendacious gadabout that is capital T trouble for everyone that shakes her hand, you can imagine how the irony becomes so heavy you swear the pages are about to fall from the binding. And one can’t help but feel humorously voyeuristic when reading The Reserve, like the narrator is hitting your arm here and there to have you take special note of the juicy parts.

Yet, the book does incorporate serious issues. The usual Banks theme of the sins of the parent inflicted upon the innocent child remains. As well as the blinded difficulties that result when the insatiable male ego does not know when to say when. Or, more importantly, when to acknowledge defeat. And the issue of class division remains as well. Wealthy New England townies don’t survive real well in wilderness cabins without the quaint servant help of the local folk, to do such things as deliver groceries and act as guides through the threatening terrain. In fact, the issues become very serious as the narrative unravels, but the less said the better.

So does the approach work? Does Banks successfully merge plastic with depth? I’d say the novel is close enough where it would be a call to make by each individual reader. I do know that it was a page turner, that I was both humored and appalled, and that I got quite a bit to maw upon when I reached the end. But the book does feel pieced together a bit and I wonder if there was an imbalanced focus upon the plastic rather than the depth. However, despite the characters being presented as ‘types’, there is still enough presented for a reader to feel the blood flowing behind the celluloid.

2010-11-21T17:53:00.002-05:00

[The Veteran in a New Field; Winslow Homer, 1865]

2010-11-20T17:37:00.002-05:00

Quality can also be a collaboration. When that happens, you might end up with something that resembles Martin Scorse's filming of The Band's farewell performance back in 1976, as captured in their film, The Last Waltz.

2010-11-18T18:48:00.003-05:00

[Robert M. Pirsig]

One says of him that he is "interested" in what he's doing, that he's "involved" in his work. What produces this involvement is, at the cutting edge of consciousness, an absence of any sense of separateness of subject and object. "Being with it," "being a natural," "taking hold"-- there are a lot of idiomatic expressions for what I mean by this absence of subject-object duality, because what I mean is so well understood as folklore, common sense, the everyday understanding of the shop...Zen Buddhists talk about "just sitting," a meditative practice in which the idea of a duality of self and object does not dominate one's consciousness. What I'm talking about here in motorcycle maintenance is "just fixing," in which the idea of a duality of self and object doesn't dominate one's consciousness. When one isn't dominated by feelings fo separateness from what he's working on, then one can be said to "care" about what he's doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one's doing. When one has this feeling then he also sees the inverse side of caring, Quality itself.

--from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

2010-11-17T18:42:00.003-05:00

[Mural Fragment; Robert Motherwell]

"I'm not sure what you mean by classical reason."

"Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You've never had to understand it really. It's always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I'm talking about. Some people still condemn it because it doesn't make 'sense'. But what's really wrong is not the art but the 'sense', the classical reason, which can't grasp it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art's more recent occurrences, but the answers aren't in the branches, they're at the roots."

2010-11-16T18:46:00.002-05:00

"Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you'll see the difference. The craftsman isn't ever following a single line of instruction. He's making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he'll be absorbed and attentive to what he's doing even though he doesn't deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn't following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind's at rest at the same time the material's right."

"Sounds like art," the instructor says.

"Well, it is art," I say. "This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It's just that it's gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous."

--from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig (pg 167)

2010-11-15T12:40:00.003-05:00

Back in my early and mid twenties I would pick up Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and begin reading at any random page. But while I have been quite familiar with the book and Pirsig’s ideas, I had never read the story through from cover to cover. But a friend recently loaned me his copy after reading it, so I thought it was about time to do so.

For those not familiar with the book, Pirsig focuses much less upon Zen and much more in deconstructing Western modes of logical thought and how they have shaped the way Western civilization understands the world, as through scientific reason, rationality, and subjective (romantic)/objective (classic) dualism. The background on the history of Western philosophers is substantial, but of more interest to me would the connections made with our social institutions. The education system in particular as that’s where people are fully indoctrinated into the Western thought process and its social constructions.

As Pirsig was writing for a Western audience, it would be necessary to go through this process in order makes sense of the non-logical methods of comprehension that are introduced in the later half of the book. As someone who has been learning about Eastern thought since being a senior in High School, I would say that this approach works quite well. It doesn’t really explain what Zen is (to do so would be a contradictory effort as the concepts of Zen are transmitted through experience rather than study, as something that’s cultivated rather than acquired), but the book can open a door that allows a realization that new forms of interaction can exist.

While the book is two-thirds philosophical exploration, the narrative is written from the perspective of a man and his young son out on a cross-country motorcycle trip, and this was my main interest in reading the book straight through. The necessary elements for a work of drama are there (the narrator had been formerly institutionalized after a nervous breakdown, he speaks of ‘ghost’ named Phaedrus that is actually his former self prior to electro-shock therapy, his son shows signs of mental illness, etc.) the book never reads as such. Instead, it incorporates a human element to demonstrate how the philosophical concepts are not to be left as vague abstractions and generalities, nor to only critique the short comings of Western civilization’s thought process, but how the same concepts can be applied at our personal lives as well. Deeper yet, to the core of how we comprehend the essence of our selves.

At the end of the book, Pirsig strives to conjoin the rational and the irrational modes of human thought through a notion of Quality. Its a huge concept to pull into a blog post, so I’m hesitant to say much on this out of fear just making a mess out of the concept. But I think I’m safe to say that Quality results when the irrationality of inspiration and creativity finds an expressed form through rational logic, not the other way around. All to often its believed that rational logic is the method for arriving at Quality.

2010-11-14T18:55:00.003-05:00

[The Dream; Franz Marc, 1912]

2010-11-13T16:41:00.002-05:00

Opening scene for Werner Herzog's, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

Translation: "Don't you hear? Don't you hear the dreadful voice that screams from the whole horizon, and that man usually calls silence?".

2010-11-11T20:00:00.002-05:00

Kaspar Hauser Song
--George Trakl

He truly cherished the sun, climbing crimson down the hill,
the paths of the forest, the singing blackbird
and the joy of green.

Steady was his dwelling in the shade of the trees
and pure his countenance.
God spoke a gentle flame into his heart:
O man!

Silently his footsteps found the city at evening;
the dark lament of his mouth:
I want to become a horseman.

But animal and bush followed him,
house and a dusky garden of white men
and his murderer sought him.

Beautiful the spring and summer and the autumn
of the righteous man, his soft step
past the dark rooms of dreamers.
By night he remained alone with his star;

saw snow fall in bare branches
and in the darkening hallway his murderer's shadow.

Silver fell the head of the one yet unborn.

2010-11-10T21:23:00.002-05:00

Whispered In Afternoon
--George Trakl

Autumn sun, rare and hesitant,
and fruit drops from trees.
Silence dwells in blue spaces,
a long afternoon.

Death bells of metal
and a white animal breaks down.
Coarse songs of brown maidens
are scattered in falling leaves.

The forehead of God dreams colors,
feels the gentle flight of madness.
Shadows whirl upon the hill
fringed black with decay.

Dusk full of sleep and wine;
the flow of mournful guitars.
And as if in a dream
you turn toward the mellow lamp within.

2010-11-09T18:39:00.002-05:00

A July, 2007 post at the blog for Harper's Magazine provides the following from Trakl's medical records, from a doctor at a field hospital who did not now about Trakl's poetry:

As a child he attempted suicide. At the age of 5 years, he jumped into the water. His most recent attempt earlier this year. Otherwise he was ‘completely healthy’… Excellent student. University studies no difficulty. Served in 1908. During the mobilization, he volunteered for duty. Ordered to the front on August 1… For years he suffered from periodic severe psychological depressions with anxieties, then he began to drink to rid himself of the anxieties. Since his childhood he suffered from hallucinatory visions in which a man would come up from behind him with a knife. These visions had stopped for 12-14 years and suddenly resumed 3 years ago; besides that he often hears bells ringing. He does not believe that his father is really his own, rather he thinks that in the future it will be revealed to be a great lord.

Georg Trakl Dichtungen und Briefe, vol. 2, pp. 729-30.

2010-11-08T11:29:00.005-05:00

Well, over the past few weeks I haven’t been busy all the time, as part of my being away included a wonderful camping and hiking road trip down south. Wonderfully pastoral that is, but possibly quite the opposite of Georg Trakl’s poetry. Trakl was born in Austria in 1887 with various mental health issues, possibly including a form of schizophrenia, and found himself being forced to drop out of school in 1905 as a result of various drug addictions. He then went on to become a pharmacist (possible to feed his drug use?) and began to write serious artistic efforts after socializing with a group of European bohemians. Shortly thereafter as a result of his medical background, he bore witness to the burgeoning horrors of World War I, ending when he died of a drug overdose/suicide at the age of 27.

Trakl had his own personal demons while living in a world with even bigger demons, which doesn’t make for a happy life. But it can result in some tremendous poetry. His style is somewhat similar to the German Expressionists, with whom he has been compared to. On the surface, he's ruff, primitive, direct in emotional intent. However, Trakl’s work is filled with surreal subtleties that can appeal to the most trained classicist. His images resonate with confounding depth, on occasion the lyricism of a brief piece demands to be read several times (but note that I am only working from English translations), and there are reoccurring visual and metaphoric motifs to connect his poems into a unified whole. Prominent examples being his consistent note of the seasons, dream like gods/myths and the symbolic use of familial relations, a ‘sister’ being most prominent, to express the poet’s need to extend beyond the individual self and into a greater whole. Quite often the line between reality and the dream world are blurred, which brings in both horror and a sublime transcendence. In short, shocking beauty. His poem, De Profundis:

It is a stubble field on which a black rain falls.
It is a brown tree that stands alone.
It is a whisper-wind that circles empty huts.
How sad this evening.

Beyond the hamlet
The gentle orphan still gathers scanty ears of wheat.
Her eyes gaze round and golden in the twilight
And her womb awaits the bridegroom of heaven.

On their return,
Shepherds found her sweet body
Putrid in the thorn-bush.

A shadow am I, far from gloomy hamlets.
God's silence
I drank from the grove's well.

Cold metal emerges on my brow.
Spiders seek my heart.
It is a light that goes out in my mouth.

At night I found myself upon a heath
Stiff with filth and the dust of stars.
In the hazel-bushes
Crystal angels once more sounded.

(trans. by margitt Lehbert)

For how to track down his poetry, there are several publications out there with English translations. I found my 1973 copy at the local Grand Rapids library. Amazon.com has a collection that dates back to 2006. And some of his works that have been appropriately translated by the American imagists Robert Bly and James Wright are available online here. It would be interesting to compare and contrast the translations out there, as I’m sure the original poems are quite open for interpretation and for determining what would be most important to focus upon with the translation.

2010-10-18T11:18:00.003-04:00

[For the next three weeks I’m going to be extraordinarily busy raking leaves and cleaning gutters (as well as a few other things) and will be left with almost no time to read blogs or work on my own. So I’m ducking out until the second week in November. I continue to thank everyone for any ongoing interest and for sharing your efforts.]

2010-10-14T20:10:00.002-04:00

IN THE AIR your root stays on, there
in the air.
Where earthliness clusters, earthy,
Breath-and-Clay.

Looming
up there, the banned, the
burned: a Pomeranian, at home
in the Maybeetle song that stayed motherly, summerly, bright-
blooded on the edge
of all cragged
cold winterhard
syllables.

With him
the meridians wander:
sucked
up by his
sun-steered pain, which bonds these lands after
the noonday speech of a
loving
distance. Every-
where is Here and Today, is a radiance
made of despairs, that
those who've been sundered step into with their
blinded mouths:

a kiss, at night,
brands the sense of a language they waken to, they--:

gone home again to
uncanny anathema
that gathers the dispersed, those
led through the stary-desert soul, the
tentmakers up there in the zone
of their gazings and ships,
the tiny sheaves of hope
with a rush of archangels'wings, of destiny,
the brothers, the sisters, those
found too light, too heavy,
too light on
cosmic scales in their blood-
defiling
fruitful womb, the lifelong aliens
spermatically crowned with stars, heavily
camped in the shoals, the bodies
embanked in swollen heaps, --the

ford-beings, whom
the clubfoot of the gods
comes stumbling over-- by
whose
star time too late?

--Paul Celan, (1963)

2010-10-13T19:25:00.003-04:00

What happened? The stone stepped from the mountain.
Who awakened? You and I.
Language, language. Fellow-star. Earth-cousin.
Poorer. Open. Homeland-like.

Where it went? Towards not expiring.
Went with the stone, and with the two of us.
Heart and heart. Weighed and found sinking.
Growing more heavy. Taking on lightness.

--Paul Celan

2010-10-12T18:57:00.002-04:00

.....Certainly the poem, the poem today shows-- and this I think has only indirectly to do with not-to-be-underestimated difficulties of word choice, with the sharper fall of syntax or heightened sense of ellipsis-- the poem unmistakably shows a strong bent toward falling silent.
.....It holds on-- after so many extreme formulations, allow me this one too-- the poem holds on at the edge of itself; so as to exist, it ceaselessly calls and hauls itself from its Now-no-more back into its Ever-yet.

.....But this Ever-yet could be only an act of speaking. Not simply language and probably not just verbal 'correspondence' either.
.....But actualized language, set free under the sign of a radical individuation, which at the same time stays mindful of the limits drawn by language, the possibilities opened by language.
.....This Ever-yet of poems can only be found in a poem by someone who does not forget that he speaks from the angle of inclination of his very being, his creatureliness.
.....Then a poem would be-- even more clearly than before-- the language-become-form of a single person and, following its inmost nature, presentness and presence.

--Paul Celan

2010-10-12T08:24:00.003-04:00

Posting on a major literary figurehead is always a daunting task, but even more so if the writer addresses a catastrophic period in history. So this is what was placed upon me when thinking about what I wanted to pass along about Paul Celan. Born into a Jewish family in Eastern Europe, Celan bore witness to the atrocities of World War II while in his younger 20's, the most cataclysmic being the deportation and eventual killing of his parents. After the war, Celan continued to write in his native German tongue but eventually resided as an exile in Paris, where he continued to live until his suicide by drowning in April of 1970.

During and immediately following World War II, Celan’s poetry ended up containing some of literature strongest verse capable of properly reflecting the war and the Holocaust. To such an extent, I defer posting further and simply advise that the poetry needs to be read if there’s a continuing interest. However, Celan’s later poetry I feel comfortable posting about as there occurred changes with both style and content. And this would relate to what Celan held onto most in order to confront the horrors he witnessed during the war:

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for that was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.”

I’d say that what Celan is referring to there is perseverance. The life instinct itself channeled through language. But Celan’s poetry did not become clearer and more focused after the war, but towards the opposite– increasingly abstract. But there was a minimalist approach as well, which signifies a striving towards an attempt for clarity amidst its owns ‘lack of answers’ and ‘terrifying silence’. Even if Celan could not believe in the world around him, he could continue to believe in the importance of language. Because of this, Celan felt a need to transform the German language either into something new entirely, or to recapture Germany’s incredible lyrical tradition. Probably both as Celan’s primary goal was to defy the ways in which Germany had used language during his lifetime.

There are movements in contemporary poetry which focus the lingual techniques used by social systems. I had thought of these schools as interesting, but not anything I would want to spend much time on. However, after reading and thinking about Celan, I can see the importance in always analyzing (and criticizing if need be) how language is used. As Celan realized, language is directly tied to our basic will for life. Taken to the next step, language reflects and shapes how we live. The most obvious example would be how politicians and religious leader’s speak, but the implications could extend whenever a word is spoken, heard or written. What we say and how we say it always matters.

2010-10-10T18:29:00.002-04:00

Now I have something to say about these things. I don't know if it's similar to this, or if its dissimilar. But similar and dissimaler are quite similar in the end, so it can't be much different from that. But be that as it may, let me try to say it:

Being a beginning. Being not yet beginning to be a beginning. Being not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. Being being. Being nonbeing. Being not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Being not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Then suddenly, being nonbeing. And when it comes to being nonbeing, I don't know yet what's being and what's nonbeing.

There now: I've spoken. But I still don't know whether it was being spoken or nonbeing spoken.

--Chuang Tzu (trans. by David Hinton)

2010-10-09T15:51:00.001-04:00

From Bill Laswell's project, Tabla Beat Science.

2010-10-07T19:19:00.002-04:00

Amygdala.

'What does it mean?'

'Nothing. It's a location. It's the dark aspect of the brain.'

'I don't--'

'A place to house fearful memories.'

'Just fear?'

'We're not too certain of that. Anger too, we think, but it specializes in fear. It is pure emotion. We can't clarify it further.'

'Why not?'

'Well-- is it an inherited thing? Are we speaking of ancestral fear? Fears from childhood? Fear of what might happen in old age? Or fear if we commit a crime? It could just be projecting fantasies of fear in the body.'

'As in dreams.'

'As in dreams... though sometimes dreams are not the result of fantasy but old habits we don't know we have.'

'So it's something created and made by us, by our own histories, is that right? A knot in this person is different from a knot in another, even if they are from the same family. Because we each have a different past.'

'I don't think we know yet...'

'It sounds Sri Lankan, the name.'

'Well, check its derivation. It doesn't sound scientific.'

'No. Some bad god.'

--from Anil's Ghost; Michael Ondaatje

2010-10-06T18:41:00.004-04:00

From wikipedia: Buduruwagala is an ancient buddhist temple in Sri Lanka. The complex consists of seven statues and belongs to the Mahayana school of thought. The statues date back to 10 century AD. The gigantic Buddha statue still bears traces of its original stuccoed robe and a long streak of orange suggests it was once brightly painted. The central of the three figures to the Buddha's right is thought to be the Buddhist mythological figure-the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. To the left of this white painted figure is a female figure in the thrice-bent posture, which is thought to be his consort-Tara.

2010-10-05T18:47:00.002-04:00

An April, 2000 Salon review of Anil's Ghost addresses the morally demanding task Ondaatje had with writing in his usual poetic mode while also finding a way to responsibly address the atrocities of Sri Lanka's civil war:

Ondaatje has set himself a daunting problem: to write a narrative about a matter of extreme moral gravity, keep it as clean and unsentimental and straightforward as the subject requires and also make it a poem, get it off the ground. He doesn't always succeed, but when he does, the liftoff is almost palpable. The mystique of archaeology, that lifelong love affair with the past, is beautifully and enigmatically brought to life. His description of the painting of the Buddha's eyes -- which he symbolically equates with the redemptive act of writing, along with the disciplines of both forensics and archaeology -- is a tour de force.

And it does work, very well. Cultural artifacts are the historial records for mankind's past as well as signposts for the future. They are of human behavior but at the same time, outside as well. They are both immediate and distant. And these are the same qualities an author needs to balance in a narrative text in order to adequately write about horrific historical events, in order to keep it from being over factual (cold and lifeless) or heavyhanded (sentimental).

2010-10-04T12:10:00.002-04:00

If you have never read a Michael Ondaatje book, be sure to add one to your ‘to be read’ pile. He is simply amazing at so many levels. The amount of depth he brings into a narrative written largely in a simplistic but poetic mode is marvelous. Rather than formal chapters, Ondaatje instead relies on brief sections that can be anywhere from two paragraphs to a page or two, and each of those sections often reads like an individual poem. The language is so focused and condensed, a reader naturally picks up on all the suggested implications to extend beyond the immediacy of the text. I enjoy Ondaatje’s writing style so much, I sort of which every work of contemporary fiction was written in this style!

For Anil’s Ghost, a native of Sri Lanka returns home after a fifteen year absence and does so in her capacity as a forensic anthropologist in order to investigate possible human rights violations connected to the country’s civil war in the 80's and 90's. However, rather than focusing upon historical specifics for the war, Ondaatje interweaves the personal lives of his characters as well as the ancient cultural artifacts of Sri Lanka. Cave paintings, statues of Buddhas and abandoned monasteries exist side by side with mass grave sites, exhumed skeletons and dangerous political intrigue. Both then analyzed by characters who are simultaneously working through the usual personal traumas of love and family.

Anil’s Ghost is an excellent example of writing that is simultaneously intimate and universal. Always Ondaatje is providing the necessary details to fully grasp the lives of his characters, the history behind Sri Lanka and the massive difficulties that arose during the civil war. But, the method of writing used to incorporate the details is such that it could be applicable to another time, culture and cast of characters. Meaning, humans will always be imbedded into cultural history and subjected to the conflicts of their time. And they will also always be going through their own life challenges while in the midst of these contexts. Obviously, a civil war is an extreme that is ripe for literary drama, but the equation for his narrative is applicable to anyone anywhere. Read the book not to just understand Anil and Sri Lanka’s violent past, but to better understand yourself and the violence, or possibility of violence, in your present.

2010-10-03T19:26:00.002-04:00

Quietness
--Rumi

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

2010-10-02T17:19:00.002-04:00

The final ten minutes for the film, Koyaanisqatsi.

2010-09-30T18:21:00.003-04:00

True: accidents are departures, and departures are accidents. The angel becomes visible at the magical moment of departure, and it is then that we perceive the real meaning of the turmoil called life. Only then can we ever go back home.

--from 'The New Life'; Orhan Pamuk

2010-09-29T18:43:00.004-04:00

[Illustration to Dante's Divine Comedy, Pardiso; Gustave Doré]

"What would you be willing to do to reach the world in the book?" she asked.

Her face was pale, her hair light brown, her gaze gentle; if she was of this world, she seemed to have been drawn from memory; if she was from the future, then she was the harbinger of dread and sorrow. I gazed at her without being aware of gazing, as if I were fearful that if I looked at her too intently the situation would become real.

"I would do anything," I said.

She gazed at me sweetly, a hint of a smile on her lips...

"What do you mean by anything?" she asked me.

"Everything," I said and fell silent, listening to my heartbeats.

I don't know why but I suddenly had an image of long journeys that seemed endless, the deluges of myth and legend, labyrinthine streets that vanish, sad trees, muddy rivers, gardens, countries. If I were to embrace her one day, I must venture forth to these places.

--from The New Life, Ohan Pamuk

2010-09-28T19:17:00.001-04:00

From Orhan Pamuk's 2006 Nobel Prize Lecture:

The starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his room with his books.But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people's stories, other people's books, other people's words, the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people's stories and books.

2010-09-27T11:54:00.003-04:00

Ohmar Pamuk’s The New Life is one of those books that plays out on several levels. First would be story of a 23 year old going through the trials of obsessive love while attempting to find his path in the world. His journey begins with a special book that is known for radically changing the life of anyone who may read its pages, an infatuation over a beautiful woman and then their road trip adventure that results after embarking on a search for the woman’s former love. This is the main story that is sold on the book’s jacket, and probably the reason why this was a huge seller in Pamuk’s native country of Turkey.

While that sounds like a clear enough narrative plot, Pamuk interjects the text with too many blind alleys, false identities and storylines that simply fade rather than come to any conclusion. With this, the novel can be read as a work of meta fiction which explores the concepts which are understood to provide the appropriate structures for fiction. Kafkaesque would be apropos, especially when the mystery behind the magical book brings in a cast of assassins and various characters who may or may not be who they say they are. And towards the end, Pamuk tips his hat to other authors such as Jules Verne, Rilke and Dante to bring in an exploration that doesn’t just deconstruct traditional narrative, but brings to light the reasons why people are drawn to literature. Just what are they seeking? And, after one seeks, what is there actually to be found in books? Do angels really exist for poets? For the imagination?

The third major level at which The New Life could be read involves the main character being a stand in for Turkey itself. While Turkey’s culture and history is anything but new, its placement in the modern world is and like a 23 year old, no one knows for sure which direction might be taken. At the center of the matter would be the tension between Western and Eastern cultures and various characters are used to embody the social groups that arise from this ongoing conflict: modern progressives, Islamic fundamentalists, national militants, student radicals, etc. But its not just world view differences, but modern progress itself. Centuries old traditions meat Coca-Cola, hamburgers and bus accidents.

Many, many bus accidents for that matter. From which characters stumble out only to take on the identity of the dead person that was once their lively seat mate. Would that be considered the new life? Would such a new life be internal or external? Both? Such are the questions Pamuk asks his readers to consider.

2010-09-26T20:16:00.001-04:00

The Window
--Robert Creeley

Position is where you
put it, where it is,
did you, for example, that

large tank there, silvered,
with the white church along-
side, lift

all that, to what
purpose? How
heavy the slow

world is with
everything put
in place. Some

man walks by, a
car beside him on
the dropped

road, a leaf of
yellow color is
going to

fall. It
all drops into
place. My

face is heavy
with the sight. I can
feel my eye breaking.

2010-09-25T20:37:00.004-04:00

Position Is Where You Put It, No. 1

I always try to find a youtube video on Saturday that might, however loosely, relate to the week's posts. But that gets hard to do with poetry. So I realized that I needed to start making my own videos. Using The Window by Robert Creeley as inspiration, experimental film installations will be made from placement of the camera in fixed positions and allowed to capture whatever might enter into the frame. The setting and composition will visually reflect qualities of the poetry referenced earlier in the week.

2010-09-23T18:21:00.003-04:00

Jewels and After
--Laura Riding

On the precious verge of danger
Jewels spring up to show the way,
The bejewelled way of danger,
Beautied with inevitability.

After danger the look-back reveals
Jewels only, dangerlessness,
Logic serened, unharshed into
A jewelled and loving progress.

And after danger's goal, what jewels?
Then none except death's plainest,
The unprecious jewels of safety,
As of childhood.

2010-09-22T18:33:00.003-04:00

Earth--Laura Riding

Have no wide fears for Earth:
Its universal name is 'Nowhere'.
If it is Earth to you, that is your secret.
The outer records leave off there.
And as it seems, it is,
A seeming stillness
Amidst seeming speed.

Heavens unseen, or only seen,
Dark or bright space, unearthly space,
Is a time before Earth was
From which you inward move
Toward perfect now.

Almost the place it is not yet,
Potential here of everywhere--
Have no wide fears of it:
Its destiny is simple,
To be further what it will be.

Earth is your heart
Which has become your mind
But still beats ignorance
Of all it knows--
As miles deny the compact present
Whose self-misunderstanding past they are.
Have no wide fears for Earth:
Destruction only on wide fears shall fall.

2010-09-21T22:05:00.002-04:00

As to what the special concerns of poetry are, the tradition provides no definitions. It presents itself as the definition of them, with the burden of proof put upon the poet of justifying the implicit meaning of the tradition as the union of the highest human concerns within the bounds of poetic expression. Thus it is that the general human weakness of want of distinctness of conception of the highest human concerns has been endowed in poetry with supplementary strength: poetry, that is, identifies commitment to its mode of expression with a commitment to exclusive preoccupation with these concerns, and in so doing represents itself as a plane of sensibility on which spiritual height of being is concretely realizable. In choosing my role of poety, I recognized this traditional allocation by poetry to itself of an area of experience of an immediate, absolute, life-purifying quality of spirituality, and I accepted poetry without reservation as having demarcated this area of potentially occupiable in distinct forms of consciousness, real functions of being, exactly congruous translation of the occupation of it into words.

--Laura Riding

The same could be applied to any tradition which relies upon regular practice for its worth and existence, such as painting, music, meditation, writing, yoga, reading, nature observation. And I would agree. These can embody the practioner with a form of spirituality. That which we do, is who we are. And the more focused and the more demanding for what we do, the more absorptive it can be for the practitioner.

2010-09-20T11:50:00.006-04:00

A while back I read a list of authors John Ashbery reads in order to kick-start his poetic imagination and among those listed was Laura Riding (Jackson). And I can see why. Often Riding’s poetry is just as confounding (and frustrating) as Ashbery’s. But at the same time, with captivating language that pulls you into its playfulness even if after several reads you are left with large gaping holes of confoundment. Though, maybe that’s part of the point.

Riding was born in 1901 and studied at Cornell, after which she connected with various literary and intellectual types and allowed her the freedom to proceed with her own personal theories on poetry and its artistic practice. In reading her works, the earlier poems tend to be shorter and more lyrical, and therefore, more abstract. And these are the poems that she is more known for, at least from what I was able to find on the internet. While ‘meaning’ is difficult at times, it is noticeable that she makes great use of opposites, such as:

grand - small
self - nonself
being - nonbeing
vision - blindness
certainty - uncertainty
knowledge - ignorance
comprehension - confusion

However, her later poems tend to be longer and work more as philosophical inquiries rather than dynamic lyrical expressions. And the philosophy continues working with opposites to move towards a poetic viewpoint which embraces paradox, finds the edges where two opposites might meet and how they can then regenerate, affirm and negate one another. The result is poetry that both invigorates itself through oppositional tension, but at the same times, reaches a transcendent equilibrium. Albeit, at a cerebral level rather than emotive.

If I tried to explain her poetry much more, I would inevitably fall into personal subjectivity. The absorptive and reactive experience of the poetry directly by each individual reader being what counts. Although, its worth pointing out that she was about fifty years ahead of her time and would have been surrounded with many agreeable colleagues during the 1970's when the move was made from modernism to post-modernism. But I suspect she was largely unheard of outside of her own circles during her life.

2010-09-19T18:16:00.001-04:00

[Basket of Fruit; Caravaggio, 1597]

2010-09-18T16:17:00.000-04:00

The amazing title sequence for the 1962 adaptation of Nelson Algren's novel, A Walk on the Wild Side (via Issa's Untidy Hut).

Algren said of A Walk on the Wild Side, "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives."

2010-09-16T18:47:00.003-04:00

...that you only know a fragment of what happens to you and that when you believe yourself capable of explaining or recounting what has happened to you up until a particular date, you do not have sufficient information, you do not know what other people's intentions were or the motivations behind impulses, you have no knowledge of what is hidden: the people closest to us seem like actors stepping out in front of a theater curtain, and we have no idea what they were doing only a second earlier... Likewise, we know nothing about the events at which we were not present and the conversations we did not hear, those that took place behind our back and mentioned us or criticized us or judged us and condemned us. Life is compassionate, all lives are, at least that is the norm, which is why we consider as wicked those people who do not cover up or hide or lie, those who tell everything that they know and hear, as well as what they do and think.

--from When I was Mortal, Javier Marias

Agree? A question for thought only. Marias' writing is dark, cynical at times, but it is truthful, and there is light as well-- an appreciation for life, if you move away from the center-weights of his stories.

2010-09-15T15:30:00.004-04:00

[The Ray; Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, 1728]

Flavorpill: A lot of literature tackles unanswerable questions and subjects — what is the purpose of writing for you?

Javier Marías: I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to “answer” things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore — often blindly — the huge areas of darkness, and show them better. So in my opinion it does not really matter if subjects are unanswerable (all of them are, possibly), as literature is not expected to solve riddles or mysteries, but just to show them — perhaps putting them in a slightly new light, perhaps calling attention to overlooked aspects of them.

(source)

2010-09-14T20:52:00.000-04:00

A reoccurring situation in When I was Mortal is distant observation, such as from a resort or motel balcony, in the stands of a race track, through a window at night, from a darkened room into a lit room... just to name a few. And connected in some way or another with the detachment, more often than not, would be a murder. Appropriately, Marías never provides graphic descriptions of the deaths, or even accounts for them directly on the page. They too occur with the reader, like the observers, distanced, and the technique creates multiple effects. I could name a few, but it would be better to simply point out that each story uses this type of situation for different reasons. Although, central might be the characters’ desires to either connect or disconnect with the people that are being observed. From the story, Flesh Sunday:

I tried to focus on someone on the beach, to pick someone out, but there were too many people to be able to remain faithful to anyone in particular, I panned across the beach with the binoculars, I saw hundreds of children, dozens of fat men, scores of girls (none of them topless, that's still fairly rare in San Sebastian), young flesh and old flesh, children's flesh which is not yet flesh and mother's flesh which is somehow more fleshly for having already reproduced itself. I soon grew tired of looking and went back to the bed where Luisa was lying down, I kissed her a few times, then returned to the terrace, and again peered through the binoculars. Perhaps I was bored, which is why I felt slightly envious when I saw that two rooms down to my right there was a man, also armed with binoculars, who had them trained on one particular spot....I wondered enviously, I wanted to fix my gaze on something too, it's only when you rest your gaze on some-thing that you really relax and become interested in what you're looking at..........

2010-09-13T12:02:00.011-04:00

Javier Marías is a well known fiction writer in Spain, but this is the first book of his that I have read. I will certainly be reading more. And as this is the initial go around, it’s a bit difficult to post on because of my not being familiar with his style of writing and usual themes. But I’ll do my best.

When I was Mortal is a collection of short stories, often quite brief and each written for other publications, such as magazines and journals. While originally published separately, when collected the stories form a stylistic and topical cohesiveness that, if I had not guessed otherwise, were written with the intent of being originally published together in a single book. In many respects, the stories resound and counter off of one another, not unlike individual soloists performing in a requiem, each with their own tale to tell.

The stories have the romantic elements of noir and the gothic, but settings remain largely prosaic and with characters who are only just on the fringe of urban humdrum. Slightly unique and a bit out of the ordinary, but not to be necessarily regarded as extreme, especially when it comes to the emotions they may be experiencing. In many respects, everyday people. Which is what makes the murders so intriguing. Haunting as well. The hint of death floats elusively in and out of the narratives and without build up or dramatic climax and at times, only alluded to in the few bare clues Marías supplants into his minimalist pages. And explanations aren't provided. The fun begins and ends in the mystery.

While the stories are dark and morbid (when is ‘murder most foul’ not?), Marías is capable of subtly infusing his stories with philosophical contemplations on the nature of life and death. Moreover, by exposing the frailty of human life, and human relations at that, his stories equally garner appreciation for life and its inevitable mortality. The title story being a great example, and easily the strongest in the collection. If you find yourself in a bookstore and have a half hour free, I’d highly recommend reading it.

After all the pages were read, which would include two told from the perspectives of ghosts, the title, When I was Mortal, resounds with echoing sighs of nostalgia and regret. For those of us that are still lucky enough to be mortal, such moribund whispering inverses into an affirmation of life when heard around the edges of Marías' writing.

2010-09-12T18:04:00.001-04:00

[Owl; Graham Sutherland]

2010-09-11T13:27:00.002-04:00

Auggie (Harvey Keitel) and Bob (Jim Jarmusch) talking and smoking in Blue in the Face. Raymond Carver died of lung cancer at age 50.

2010-09-09T19:45:00.003-04:00

My Crow
--Raymond Carver

A crow flew into the tree outside my window.
It was not Ted Hughe's crow, or Galway's crow.
Or Frost's, Pasternak's, or Lorca's crow.
Or one of Homer's crows, stuffed with gore,
after the battle. This was just a crow.
That never fit in anywhere in its life,
or did anything worth mentioning.
It sat there on the branch for a few minutes.
Then picked up and flew beautifully
out of my life.

2010-09-08T18:36:00.003-04:00

The Current
--Raymond Carver

These fish have no eyes
these silver fish that come to me in dreams,
scattering their roe and milt
in the pockets of my brain.

But there's one that comes--
heavy, scarred, silent like the rest,
that simply holds against the current,

closing its dark mouth against
the current, closing and opening
as it holds to the current.

2010-09-07T19:55:00.006-04:00

[Paris Through The Window; Marc Chagall]

Romanticism
--Raymond Carver

The nights are very unclear here.
But if the moon is full, we know it.
We feel one thing one minute,
something else the next.

2010-09-06T16:06:00.002-04:00

This past weekend Michigan had its first batch of cool weather that was more autumn than summer. With it, dreary days where the sun was only a wild rumor or a quickly fading memory. Not exactly the sort of weather that makes for a fun Labor Day holiday weekend, but pitch perfect for reading Raymond Carver. Friday night after an ok dinner and a beer, I headed out to drink some coffee, dark roast, toting All of Us in hand, and a pop lyric was whispering in the back of my head: “Hell darkness my old friend….”

While I’ve read all of Carver’s fiction, I have not read his poetry. To be honest, I didn’t even know he had a collection out there, so I was pretty excited when I found a copy on the shelves at the local library. And I was even more surprised to find out that the poetry was written towards the end of Carver’s life and not at the start of his writing career, as is the usual case when you find out a fiction writer also has poetry available. So I knew I had in my hands a body of work that would need to be reckoned with.

If Carver’s short stories are closer kin to poetry than fiction, than the reverse is true as well. Each poem reads like a story, only you have to provide the surrounding details yourself. But because Carver’s diction is so emotively intimate-- where a period or a comma can and will only go ’there’, and this sentence needs to be short, this one long-- the poems are poetic in that it’s the voice speaking the language that guides with mood and tone, whereas Carver’s fiction relies upon placement of selective details to create the drama. So, when sitting down with Carver’s poetry, saying that its like sitting down with an old friend is about it.

The subject matter is largely personal with many working as either autobiographies or self mythologizing. In particular, Carver’s difficulties with alcoholism, the painful experiences involved with his first marriage, and then the joy he found in his second wife, Tess. But equally involved are the universal matters of love, humiliation, death, solitude, loneliness, unspoken frailties, pity, and, of course, sadness. Lots of unrelenting sadness. But if you have ever read anything of Carver’s, you already knew that.

2010-09-05T19:59:00.000-04:00

[Gateway to September; Charles Burchfield]

2010-09-04T15:50:00.000-04:00

2010-09-02T23:26:00.004-04:00

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

--from 'Tender is the Night', F. Scott Fitzgerald

2010-09-01T19:20:00.003-04:00

"Oh--oh--oh--oh
Other flamingoes than me,
Oh--oh--oh--oh
Other flamingoes than me--"

Life is fun with Dick-- the people in deck chairs look at us, and a woman is trying to hear what we are singing. Dick is tired of singing it, so go on alone, Dick. You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

--from Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

2010-08-31T14:34:00.005-04:00

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
....Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
....Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
....And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
........Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
............But here there is no light,
....Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
........Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

--from Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats

ND: Actually I wanted to get closer to Fitzgerald’s style really...... I don’t mean to suggest some kind of transfer of technique, more like ‘what does he make you realise or see about writing or life?’ ‘What does he make you more true to?’ A conscience trues you somehow, straightens something out in the heart or the head--or it complicates you in a useful way. On the theme of conscience though, what do you think Keats does for Fitzgerald?

CJ: It’s a good question....... Fitzgerald obviously loved the poetry. The choice of Tender is the Night as a title for the big novel, is, as the academics would say, no accident. Already there is a lovely start to the line. Obviously the cadences of Keats, especially the Odes, are important. He had a sense that the Odes are beautifully cadenced. Above all they’re prose constructions on a high level. They’re prose constructions that are poetically arranged, poetically charged, but the argument is clear throughout, as Fitzgerald’s argument always was. It’s not so much that he decorates but that all the decoration contributes to the architecture. Fitzgerald’s prose is poetic in that sense and he copied a lot of that from Keats and the other poets....

As far as I can see, there is a shared smoothness of style. And I’m not attempting to suggest that Fitzgerald learned that from Keats, more that there’s an attraction to Keats because Keats talks that way naturally and so does Fitzgerald. But it’s not only smoothness, there’s also that love of sensual excess...... Both Keats and Fitzgerald are great at leading you to an abyss of feeling, only to demonstrate that the feeling is beyond anyone’s reach. Porphyro and Gatsby are left helpless when faced with these feelings, and so are we. But just in terms of style really, the way things melt, that melting, dissolving thing. That’s one of the key things that struck me when reading Gatsby anyway. It’s so fluid in the way that Keats is.

[from Talking About F. Scott Fitzgerald at ClifeJames.com]

2010-08-30T12:44:00.005-04:00

Fitzgerald begins his last, and possibly best, novel, Tender is the Night on the veneered shores of the Cote d'Azur, where we meet a prideful psychiatrist named Dick Diver, his exotic and lovely wife, Nicole, and a budding 18 year old actress named Rosemary Hoyt, currently touring around Europe with her mother after the grand success of her first major movie production.

What could be more refined and elegant than the mingling of a man of accomplished stature with two beautiful women and one of the bejeweled crowns of Europe? When considering that the time is after World War I and just before the rise of Hitler, that Nicole was a psychiatric patient of Dick’s in her late teens and Rosemary, at this point in her life, only comprehends the world at the level of its glamorized exterior, a lot more.

Dick Diver plays the penultimate insecure Alpha male who’s stature it seems is only built up for the purpose of others finding benefit from watching it collapse as a result of top heavy hubris. Nicole, who when initially met by Dick, was a traumatized young woman and largely living within a sanatorium. Such a helpless young thing, greatly in need of Dick Diver’s guiding hand. Only, when she finally grows into a fully integrated person, a new dawn sheds light on the sacrifice that was made from living under an embrace that, while compassionate, was limited to protection only, “It had been a hard lesson but she had learned it. Either you think– or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.” Not unlike Nazi Germany.

So while Nicole was constructing an identity separate from the traumas of her past, it would only be inevitable that Dick would find himself not only removed to irrelevancy, but also possibly realizing that to give love also means to be loved, which Nicole was incapable of doing because of her self-perception of helplessness. Hence, enter Rosemary. But while it is questionable if Dick ever learned that one can’t give love without equally receiving love, he still suffered the ramification for not doing so. Dick was smart enough to recognize that the much younger and inexperienced Rosemary was not available for a long lasting relationship, but was without insight for his subsequent move towards even unhealthier means for feeding his collapsed ego– hard drink, half-baked career aspirations, social contentiousness, and even blunt physical aggression.

In the end, while the reader watches Diver collapse further into male-impotence, the reader also witnesses the transformation of Nicole and Rosemary into two individuals that understand the importance of taking command of oneself in order to establish a healthy relation with the world and others. In contrast, Dick always wanted to command the world rather than himself, initially under the self delusion of altruism and later, through brute force.

While my tone in this post is a bit flip, Fitzgerald consistently maintains an empathetic relation with his characters. Dick Diver was tragically limited to the social trappings of the male ego. While you don’t feel sad for him, you do pity him. Send in the chorus. Conversely, Nicole could be seen as being at fault as well. At what point could she have stopped playing the helpless maiden and taken control of herself in order to put an end to the resentment against Dick? To give love rather than be an empty and porous receptacle for love? For Rosemary, well, she was fortunate to begin compounding some valuable life experience, as you will if you also read Tender is the Night.

I'll be back in a week............

2010-08-21T11:31:00.000-04:00

[Navaro Rapids; Ando Hiroshige]

2010-08-20T11:36:00.001-04:00

"And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself? Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast."

--Saul Bellow (via whiskey river)