aqui. de John G. Neihardt.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Entropy (" of music which emerged at intervals from a howling darkness of discordancy")
"a factor of quantity that is a function of the physical state of a mechanical system", no Webster Dictionary, diz David Seed no volume crítico sobre Thomas Pynchon (na colecção-bíblia crítica e útil de Bloom), daqui.
Entropy
Thomas Pynchon, um dos cinco contos em Slow Learner.
(que se lê todo aqui. apenas Entropy aqui.)
Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. . . . We must get into step, a lockstep toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.
- Tropic of Cancer
DOWNSTAIRS, Meatball Mulligan's lease-breaking party was moving into its 40th hour. On the kitchen floor, amid a litter of empty champagne fifths, were Sandor Rojas and three friends, playing spit in the ocean and staying awake on Heidseck and benzedrine pills. In the living room Duke, Vincent, Krinkles and Paco sat crouched over a 15-inch speaker which had been bolted into the top of a wastepaper basket, listening to 27 watts' worth of The Heroes' Gate at Kiev. They all wore hornrimmed sunglasses and rapt expressions, and smoked funny-looking cigarettes which contained not, as you might expect, tobacco, but an adulterated form of cannabis sativa. This group was the Duke di Angelis quartet. They recorded for a local label called Tambú and had to their credit one 10" LP entitled Songs of Outer Space. From time to time one of them would flick the ashes from his cigarette into the speaker cone to watch them dance around. Meatball himself was sleeping over by the window, holding an empty magnum to his chest as if it were a teddy bear. Several government girls, who worked for people like the State Department and NSA, had passed out on couches, chairs and in one case the bathroom sink.
This was in early February of '57 and back then there were a lot of American expatriates around Washington, D.C., who would talk, every time they met you, about how someday they were going to go over to Europe for real but right now it seemed they were working for the government. Everyone saw a fine irony in this. They would stage, for instance, polyglot parties where the newcomer was sort of ignored if he couldn't carry on simultaneous conversations in three or four languages. They would haunt Armenian delicatessens for weeks at a stretch and invite you over for bulghour and lamb in tiny kitchens whose walls were covered with bullfight posters. They would have affairs with sultry girls from Andalucía or the Midi who studied economics at Georgetown. Their Dôme was a collegiate Rathskeller out on Wisconsin Avenue called the Old Heidelberg and they had to settle for cherry blossoms instead of lime trees when spring came, but in its lethargic way their life provided, as they said, kicks.
At the moment, Meatball's party seemed to be gathering its second wind. Outside there was rain. Rain splatted against the tar paper on the roof and was fractured into a fine spray off the noses, eyebrows and lips of wooden gargoyles under the eaves, and ran like drool down the windowpanes. The day before, it had snowed and the day before that there had been winds of gale force and before that the sun had made the city glitter bright as April, though the calendar read early February. It is a curious season in Washington, this false spring. Somewhere in it are Lincoln's Birthday and the Chinese New Year, and a forlornness in the streets because cherry blossoms are weeks away still and, as Sarah Vaughan has put it, spring will be a little late this year. Generally crowds like the one which would gather in the Old Heidelberg on weekday afternoons to drink Würtzburger and to sing Lili Marlene (not to mention The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi) are inevitably and incorrigibly Romantic. And as every good Romantic knows, the soul (spiritus, ruach, pneuma) is nothing, substantially, but air; it is only natural that warpings in the atmosphere should be recapitulated in those who breathe it. So that over and above the public components - holidays, tourist attractions — there are private meanderings, linked to the climate as if this spell were a stretto passage in the year's fugue: haphazard weather, aimless loves, unpredicted commitments: months one can easily spend in fugue, because oddly enough, later on, winds, rains, passions of February and March are never remembered in that city, it is as if they had never been.
The last bass notes of The Heroes' Gate boomed up through the floor and woke Callisto from an uneasy sleep. The first thing he became aware of was a small bird he had been holding gently between his hands, against his body. He turned his head sidewise on the pillow to smile down at it, at its blue hunched-down head and sick, lidded eyes, wondering how many more nights he would have to give it warmth before it was well again. He had been holding the bird like that for three days: it was the only way he knew to restore its health. Next to him the girl stirred and whimpered, her arm thrown across her face. Mingled with the sounds of the rain came the first tentative, querulous morning voices of the other birds, hidden in philodendrons and small fan palms: patches of scarlet, yellow and blue laced through this Rousseau-like fantasy, this hothouse jungle it had taken him seven years to weave together. Hermetically sealed, it was a tiny enclave of regularity in the city's chaos, alien to the vagaries of the weather, of national politics, of any civil disorder. Through trial-and-error Callisto had perfected its ecological balance, with the help of the girl its artistic harmony, so that the swayings of its plant life, the stirrings of its birds and human inhabitants were all as integral as the rhythms of a perfectly-executed mobile. He and the girl could no longer, of course, be omitted from that sanctuary; they had become necessary to its unity. What they needed from outside was delivered. They did not go out.
"Is he all right," she whispered. She lay like a tawny question mark facing him, her eyes suddenly huge and dark and blinking slowly. Callisto ran a finger beneath the feathers at the base of the bird's neck; caressed it gently. "He's going to be well, I think. See: he hears his friends beginning to wake up." The girl had heard the rain and the birds even before she was fully awake. Her name was Aubade: she was part French and part Annamese, and she lived on her own curious and lonely planet, where the clouds and the odor of poincianas, the bitterness of wine and the accidental fingers at the small of her back or feathery against her breasts came to her reduced inevitably to the terms of sound: of music which emerged at intervals from a howling darkness of discordancy. "Aubade," he said, "go see." Obedient, she arose; padded to the window, pulled aside the drapes and after a moment said: "It is 37. Still 37." Callisto frowned. "Since Tuesday, then," he said. "No change." Henry Adams, three generations before his own, had stared aghast at Power; Callisto found himself now in much the same state over Thermodynamics, the inner life of that power, realizing like his predecessor that the Virgin and the dynamo stand as much for love as for power; that the two are indeed identical; and that love therefore not only makes the world go round but also makes the boccie ball spin, the nebula precess. It was this latter or sidereal element which disturbed him. The cosmologists had predicted an eventual heat-death for the universe (something like Limbo: form and motion abolished, heat-energy identical at every point in it); the meteorologists, day-to-day, staved it off by contradicting with a reassuring array of varied temperatures.
But for three days now, despite the changeful weather, the mercury had stayed at 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Leery at omens of apocalypse, Callisto shifted beneath the covers. His fingers pressed the bird more firmly, as if needing some pulsing or suffering assurance of an early break in the temperature.
It was that last cymbal crash that did it. Meatball was hurled wincing into consciousness as the synchronized wagging of heads over the wastebasket stopped. The final hiss remained for an instant in the room, then melted into the whisper of rain outside. "Aarrgghh," announced Meatball in the silence, looking at the empty magnum. Krinkles, in slow motion, turned, smiled and held out a cigarette. "Tea time, man," he said. "No, no," said Meatball. "How many times I got to tell you guys. Not at my place. You ought to know, Washington is lousy with Feds." Krinkles looked wistful. "Jeez, Meatball," he said, "you don't want to do nothing no more."
"Hair of dog," said Meatball. "Only hope. Any juice left?" He began to crawl toward the kitchen. "No champagne, I don't think," Duke said. "Case of tequila behind the icebox." They put on an Earl Bostic side. Meatball paused at the kitchen door, glowering at Sandor Rojas. "Lemons," he said after some thought. He crawled to the refrigerator and got out three lemons and some cubes, found the tequila and set about restoring order to his nervous system. He drew blood once cutting the lemons and had to use two hands squeezing them and his foot to crack the ice tray but after about ten minutes he found himself, through some miracle, beaming down into a monster tequila sour. "That looks yummy," Sandor Rojas said. "How about you make me one." Meatball blinked at him. "Kitchi lofass a shegitbe," he replied automatically, and wandered away into the bathroom. "I say," he called out a moment later to no one in particular. "I say, there seems to be a girl or something sleeping in the sink." He took her by the shoulders and shook. "Wha," she said. "You don't look too comfortable," Meatball said. "Well," she agreed. She stumbled to the shower, turned on the cold water and sat down crosslegged in the spray. "That's better," she smiled.
"Meatball," Sandor Rojas yelled from the kitchen. "Somebody is trying to come in the window. A burglar, I think. A second-story man." "What are you worrying about," Meatball said. "We're on the third floor." He loped back into the kitchen. A shaggy woebegone figure stood out on the fire escape, raking his fingernails down the windowpane. Meatball opened the window. "Saul," he said.
"Sort of wet out," Saul said. He climbed in, dripping. "You heard, I guess."
"Miriam left you," Meatball said, "or something, is all I heard."
There was a sudden flurry of knocking at the front door. "Do come in," Sandor Rojas called. The door opened and there were three coeds from George Washington, all of whom were majoring in philosophy. They were each holding a gallon of Chianti. Sandor leaped up and dashed into the living room. "We heard there was a party," one blonde said. "Young blood," Sandor shouted. He was an ex-Hungarian freedom fighter who had easily the worst chronic case of what certain critics of the middle class have called Don Giovannism in the District of Columbia. Purche porti la gonnella, voi sapete quel che fa. Like Pavlov's dog: a contralto voice or a whiff of Arpège and Sandor would begin to salivate. Meatball regarded the trio blearily as they filed into the kitchen; he shrugged. "Put the wine in the icebox," he said "and good morning."
Aubade's neck made a golden bow as she bent over the sheets of foolscap, scribbling away in the green murk of the room. "As a young man at Princeton," Callisto was dictating, nestling the bird against the gray hairs of his chest, "Callisto had learned a mnemonic device for remembering the Laws of Thermodynamics: you can't win, things are going to get worse before they get better, who says they're going to get better. At the age of 54, confronted with Gibbs' notion of the universe, he suddenly realized that undergraduate cant had been oracle, after all. That spindly maze of equations became, for him, a vision of ultimate, cosmic heat-death. He had known all along, of course, that nothing but a theoretical engine or system ever runs at 100% efficiency; and about the theorem of Clausiús, which states that the entropy of an isolated system always continually increases. It was not, however, until Gibbs and Boltzmann brought to this principle the methods of statistical mechanics that the horrible significance of it all dawned on him: only then did he realize that the isolated system - galaxy, engine, human being, culture, whatever — must evolve spontaneously toward the Condition of the More Probable. He was forced, therefore, in the sad dying fall of middle age, to a radical reëvaluation of everything he had learned up to then; all the cities and seasons and casual passions of his days had now to be looked at in a new and elusive light. He did not know if he was equal to the task. He was aware of the dangers of the reductive fallacy and, he hoped, strong enough not to drift into the graceful decadence of an enervated fatalism. His had always been a vigorous, Italian sort of pessimism: like Machiavelli, he allowed the forces of virtù and fortuna to be about 50/50; but the equations now introduced a random factor which pushed the odds to some unutterable and indeterminate ratio which he found himself afraid to calculate." Around him loomed vague hothouse shapes; the pitifully small heart fluttered against his own. Counter-pointed against his words the girl heard the chatter of birds and fitful car honkings scattered along the wet morning and Earl Bostic's alto rising in occasional wild peaks through the floor. The architectonic purity of her world was constantly threatened by such hints of anarchy: gaps and excrescences and skew lines, and a shifting or tilting of planes to which she had continually to readjust lest the whole structure shiver into a disarray of discrete and meaningless signals. Callisto had described the process once as a kind of "feedback": she crawled into dreams each night with a sense of exhaustion, and a desperate resolve never to relax that vigilance. Even in the brief periods when Callisto made love to her, soaring above the bowing of taut nerves in haphazard double-stops would be the one singing string of her determination.
"Nevertheless," continued Callisto, "he found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate metaphor to apply to certain phenomena in his own world. He saw, for example, the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street: and in American 'consumerism' discovered a similar tendency from the least to the most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos. He found himself, in short, restating Gibbs' prediction in social terms, and envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy, would no longer be transferred, since each point in it would ultimately have the same quantity of energy; and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease." He glanced up suddenly. "Check it now," he said. Again she rose and peered out at the thermometer. "37," she said. "The rain has stopped." He bent his head quickly and held his lips against a quivering wing. "Then it will change soon," he said, trying to keep his voice firm. [meu sublinhado. a pensar que subestima sobranceiramente o resto do mundo, talvez por andar chamuscada dessas torres altaneiras]
Sitting on the stove Saul was like any big rag doll that a kid has been taking out some incomprehensible rage on. "What happened," Meatball said. "If you feel like talking, I mean."
"Of course I feel like talking," Saul said. "One thing I did, I slugged her."
"Discipline must be maintained."
"Ha, ha. I wish you'd been there. Oh Meatball, it was a lovely fight. She ended up throwing a Handbook of Chemistry and Physics at me, only it missed and went through the window, and when the glass broke I reckon something in her broke too. She stormed out of the house crying, out in the rain. No raincoat or anything."
"She'll be back."
"No."
"Well." Soon Meatball said: "It was something earth-shattering, no doubt. Like who is better, Sal Mineo or Ricky Nelson."
"What it was about," Saul said, "was communication theory. Which of course makes it very hilarious."
"I don't know anything about communication theory."
"Neither does my wife. Come right down to it, who does? That's the joke."
When Meatball saw the kind of smile Saul had on his face he said: "Maybe you would like tequila or something."
"No. I mean, I'm sorry. It's a field you can go off the deep end in, is all. You get where you're watching all the time for security cops: behind bushes, around corners. MUFFET is top secret."
"Wha."
"Multi-unit factorial field electronic tabulator."
"You were fighting about that."
"Miriam has been reading science fiction again. That and Scientific American. It seems she is, as we say, bugged at this idea of computers acting like people. I made the mistake of saying you can just as well turn that around, and talk about human behavior like a program fed into an IBM machine."
"Why not," Meatball said.
"Indeed, why not. In fact it is sort of crucial to communication, not to mention information theory. Only when I said that she hit the roof. Up went the balloon. And I can't figure out why. If anybody should know why, I should. I refuse to believe the government is wasting taxpayers' money on me, when it has so many bigger and better things to waste it on."
Meatball made a moue. "Maybe she thought you were acting like a cold, dehumanized amoral scientist type."
"My god," Saul flung up an arm. "Dehumanized. How much more human can I get? I worry, Meatball, I do. There are Europeans wandering around North Africa these days with their tongues torn out of their heads because those tongues have spoken the wrong words. Only the Europeans thought they were the right words."
"Language barrier," Meatball suggested.
Saul jumped down off the stove. "That," he said, angry, "is a good candidate for sick joke of the year. No, ace, it is not a barrier. If it is anything it's a kind of leakage. Tell a girl: 'I love you.' No trouble with two-thirds of that, it's a closed circuit. Just you and she. But that nasty four-letter word in the middle, tha's the one you have to look out for. Ambiguity. Redundance. Irrelevance, even. Leakage. All this is noise. Noise screws up your signal, makes for disorganization in the circuit."
Meatball shuffled around. "Well, now, Saul," he muttered, "you're sort of, I don't know, expecting a lot from people. I mean, you know. What it is is, most of the things we say, I guess, are mostly noise."
"Ha! Half of what you just said, for example."
"Well, you do it too."
"I know." Saul smiled grimly. "It's a bitch, ain't it."
"I bet that's what keeps divorce lawyers in business. Whoops."
"Oh I'm not sensitive. Besides," frowning, "you're right. You find I think that most 'successful' marriages — Miriam and me, up to last night — are sort of founded on compromises. You never run at top efficiency, usually all you have is a minimum basis for a workable thing. I believe the phrase is Togetherness."
"Aarrgghh."
"Exactly. You find that one a bit noisy, don't you. But the noise content is different for each of us because you're a bachelor and I'm not. Or wasn't. The hell with it."
"Well sure," Meatball said, trying to be helpful, "you were using different words. By 'human being' you meant something that you can look at like it was a computer. It helps you think better on the job or something. But Miriam meant something entirely — "
"The hell with it."
Meatball fell silent. "I'll take that drink," Saul said after a while.
The card game had been abandoned and Sandor's friends were slowly getting wasted on tequila. On the living room couch, one of the coeds and Krinkles were engaged in amorous conversation. "No," Krinkles was saying, "no, I can't put Dave down. In fact I give Dave a lot of credit, man. Especially considering his accident and all." The girl's smile faded. "How terrible," she said. "What accident?" "Hadn't you heard?" Krinkles said. "When Dave was in the army, just a private E-2, they sent him down to Oak Ridge on special duty. Something to do with the Manhattan Project. He was handling hot stuff one day and got an overdose of radiation. So now he's got to wear lead gloves all the time." She shook her head sympathetically. "What an awful break for a piano-player."
Meatball had abandoned Saul to a bottle of tequila and was about to go to sleep in a closet when the front door flew open and the place was invaded by five enlisted personnel of the U.S. Navy, all in varying stages of abomination. "This is the place," shouted a fat, pimply seaman apprentice who had lost his white hat. "This here is the hoorhouse that chief was telling us about." A stringy-looking 3rd class boatswain's mate pushed him aside and cased the living room. "You're right, Slab," he said. "But it don't look like much, even for Stateside. I seen better tail in Naples, Italy." "How much, hey," boomed a large seaman with adenoids, who was holding a Mason jar full of white lightning. "Oh, my god," said Meatball.
Outside the temperature remained constant at 37 degrees Fahrenheit. In the hothouse Aubade stood absently caressing the branches of a young mimosa, hearing a motif of sap-rising, the rough and unresolved anticipatory theme of those fragile pink blossoms which, it is said, insure fertility. That music rose in a tangled tracery: arabesques of order competing fugally with the improvised discords of the party downstairs, which peaked sometimes in cusps and ogees of noise. That precious signal-to-noise ratio, whose delicate balance required every calorie of her strength, seesawed inside the small tenuous skull as she watched Callisto, sheltering the bird. Callisto was trying to confront any idea of the heat-death now, as he nuzzled the feathery lump in his hands. He sought correspondences. Sade, of course. And Temple Drake, gaunt and hopeless in her little park in Paris, at the end of Sanctuary. Final equilibrium. Nighwood. And the tango. Any tango, but more than any perhaps the sad sick dance in Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat. He thought back: what had tango music been for them after the war, what meanings had he missed in all the stately coupled automatons in the cafés-dansants, or in the metronomes which had ticked behind the eyes of his own partners? Not even the clean constant winds of Switzerland could cure the grippe espagnole: Stravinsky had had it, they all had had it. And how many musicians were left after Passchendaele, after the Marne? It came down in this case to seven: violin, double-bass. Clarinet, bassoon. Cornet, trombone. Tympani. Almost as if any tiny troupe of saltimbanques had set about conveying the same information as a full pit-orchestra. There was hardly a full complement left in Europe. Yet with violin and tympani Stravinsky had managed to communicate in that tango the same exhaustion, the same airlessness one saw in the slicked-down youths who were trying to imitate Vernon Castle, and in their mistresses, who simply did not care. Ma maîtresse. Celeste. Returning to Nice after the second war he had found that café replaced by a perfume shop which catered to American tourists. And no secret vestige of her in the cobblestones or in the old pension next door; no perfume to match her breath heavy with the sweet Spanish wine she always drank. And so instead he had purchased a Henry Miller novel and left for Paris, and read the book on the train so that when he arrived he had been given at least a little forewarning. And saw that Celeste and the others and even Temple Drake were not all that had changed. "Aubade," he said, "my head aches." The sound of his voice generated in the girl an answering scrap of melody. Her movement toward the kitchen, the towel, the cold water, and his eyes following her formed a weird and intricate canon; as she placed the compress on his forehead his sigh of gratitude seemed to signal a new subject, another series of modulations.
"No," Meatball was still saying, "no, I'm afraid not. This is not a house of ill repute. I'm sorry, really I am." Slab was adamant. "But the chief said," he kept repeating. The seaman offered to swap the moonshine for a good piece. Meatball looked around frantically, as if seeking assistance. In the middle of the room, the Duke di Angelis quartet were engaged in a historic moment. Vincent was seated and the others standing: they were going through the motions of a group having a session, only without instruments. "I say," Meatball said. Duke moved his head a few times, smiled faintly, lit a cigarette, and eventually caught sight of Meatball. "Quiet, man," he whispered. Vincent began to fling his arms around, his fists clenched; then, abruptly, was still, then repeated the performance. This went on for a few minutes while Meatball sipped his drink moodily. The navy had withdrawn to the kitchen. Finally at some invisible signal the group stopped tapping their feet and Duke grinned and said, "At least we ended together."
Meatball glared at him. "I say," he said. "I have this new conception, man," Duke said. "You remember your namesake.
You remember Gerry."
"No," said Meatball. "I'll remember April, if that's any help."
"As a matter of fact," Duke said, "it was Love for Sale. Which shows how much you know. The point is, it was Mulligan, Chet Baker and that crew, way back then, out yonder. You dig?"
"Baritone sax," Meatball said. "Something about a baritone sax."
"But no piano, man. No guitar. Or accordion. You know what that means."
"Not exactly," Meatball said.
"Well first let me just say, that I am no Mingus, no John Lewis. Theory was never my strong point. I mean things like reading were always difficult for me and all - "
"I know," Meatball said drily. "You got your card taken away because you changed key on Happy Birthday at a Kiwanis Club picnic."
"Rotarian. But it occurred to me, in one of these flashes of insight, that if that first quartet of Mulligan's had no piano, it could only mean one thing."
"No chords," said Paco, the baby-faced bass.
"What he is trying to say," Duke said, "is no root chords. Nothing to listen to while you blow a horizontal line. What one does in such a case is, one thinks the roots."
A horrified awareness was dawning on Meatball. "And the next logical extension," he said.
"Is to think everything," Duke announced with simple dignity. "Roots, line, everything."
Meatball looked at Duke, awed. "But," he said.
"Well," Duke said modestly, "there are a few bugs to work out."
"But," Meatball said.
"Just listen," Duke said. "You'll catch on." And off they went again into orbit, presumably somewhere around the asteroid belt. After a while Krinkles made an embouchure and started moving his fingers and Duke clapped his hand to his forehead. "Oaf!" he roared. "The new head we're using, you remember, I wrote last night?" "Sure," Krinkles said, "the new head. I come in on the bridge. All your heads I come in then." "Right," Duke said. "So why-" "Wha," said Krinkles, "16 bars, I wait, I come in - " "16?" Duke said. "No. No, Krinkles. Eight you waited. You want me to sing it? A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces, an airline ticket to romantic places." Krinkles scratched his head. "These Foolish Things, you mean." "Yes," Duke said, "yes, Krinkles. Bravo." "Not I'll Remember April," Krinkles said. "Minghe morte," said Duke. "I igured we were playing it a little slow," Krinkles said. Meatball chuckled. "Back to the old drawing board," he said. "No, man," Duke said, "back to the airless void." And they took off again, only it seemed Paco was playing in G sharp while the rest were in E flat, so they had to start all over.
In the kitchen two of the girls from George Washington and the sailors were singing Let's All Go Down and Piss on the Forrestal. There was a two-handed, bilingual morra game on over by the icebox. Saul had filled several paper bags with water and was sitting on the fire escape, dropping them on passersby in the street. A fat government girl in a Bennington sweatshirt, recently engaged to an ensign attached to the Forrestal, came charging into the kitchen, head lowered, and butted Slab in the stomach. Figuring this was as good an excuse for a fight as any, Slab's buddies piled in. The morra players were nose-to-nose, screaming trois, sette at the tops of their lungs. From the shower the girl Meatball had taken out of the sink announced that she was drowning. She had apparently sat on the drain and the water was now up to her neck. The noise in Meatball's apartment had reached a sustained, ungodly crescendo.
Meatball stood and watched, scratching his stomach lazily. The way he figured, there were only about two ways he could cope: (a) lock himself in the closet and maybe eventually they would all go away, or (b) try to calm everybody down, one by one. (a) was certainly the more attractive alternative. But then he started thinking about that closet. It was dark and stuffy and he would be alone. He did not feature being alone. And then this crew off the good ship Lollipop or whatever it was might take it upon themselves to kick down the closet door, for a lark. And if that happened he would be, at the very least, embarrassed. The other way was more a pain in the neck, but probably better in the long run.
So he decided to try and keep his lease-breaking party from deteriorating into total chaos: he gave wine to the sailors and separated the morra players; he introduced the fat government girl to Sandor Rojas, who would keep her out of trouble; he helped the girl in the shower to dry off and get into bed; he had another talk with Saul; he called a repairman for the refrigerator, which someone had discovered was on the blink. This is what he did until nightfall, when most of the revellers had passed out and the party trembled on the threshold of its third day.
Upstairs Callisto, helpless in the past, did not feel the faint rhythm inside the bird begin to slacken and fail. Aubade was by the window, wandering the ashes of her own lovely world; the temperature held steady, the sky had become a uniform darkening gray. Then something from downstairs — a girl's scream, an overturned chair, a glass dropped on the floor, he would never know what exactly - pierced that private time-warp and he became aware of the faltering, the constriction of muscles, the tiny tossings of the bird's head; and his own pulse began to pound more fiercely, as if trying to compensate. "Aubade," he called weakly, "he's dying." The girl, flowing and rapt, crossed the hothouse to gaze down at Callisto's hands. The two remained like that, poised, for one minute, and two, while the heartbeat ticked a graceful diminuendo down at last into stillness. Callisto raised his head slowly. "I held him," he protested, impotent with the wonder of it, "to give him the warmth of my body. Almost as if I were communicating life to him, or a sense of life. What has happened? Has the transfer of heat ceased to work? Is there no more ..." He did not finish.
"I was just at the window," she said. He sank back, terrified. She stood a moment more, irresolute; she had sensed his obsession long ago, realized somehow that that constant 37 was now decisive. Suddenly then, as if seeing the single and unavoidable conclusion to all this she moved swiftly to the window before Callisto could speak; tore away the drapes and smashed out the glass with two exquisite hands which came away bleeding and glistening with splinters; and turned to face the man on the bed and wait with him until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion.
- -
para ver: Recent American Writing.
cada vez que muda de forma, perde qualidades.
ainda sob efeito, o conto mais excitante que li nos últimos meses. vendo do mesmo modo ou particularmente -não. continuação de Beckett, a literatura da exaustão, os meus musings em torno do cânone, minorias, mania de sermos melhores do que ervas [se destróis intelectualmente, o corpo continua nos seus desígnios de erva, em frente, quase sempre a escapar aos teus assassínios], os silêncios de Cage, a personagem feminina, a obsessão, incomunicabilidade, humano, degradação, sociedade capitalista-mercantilista-enfim_consumista. big bang into nothingness e universo. "Well? Shall we go? - Yes, let's go. - they do not move".
mas estão aqui, ainda. ou aqui: gazing.
Monday, November 29, 2010
"vales un pedacito de alma que no cambié por un lago de esmeraldas!..:"
um salto à Trama, a nova na mesma rua mas um pouco mais acima (as livrarias não se medem aos palmos) para passear por autores hispano-americanos. vim com Bioy Casares, Juan Rulfo, Ernesto Sábato, José Donoso e Miguel Angél Asturias na lista babélica. com a nota de The Book Depository, free delivery worldwide. e com um rabisco na Rayuela: várias ideias de paraíso perdido. já me tinha esquecido do que gosto de ver um livro com setas sublinhados notas desenhos traços e crescimento de post-it's.
ainda para mais: três velas de parabéns.
a propósito de unhas:
prefiro limar os neurónios. se bem que o instrumento, o antigo, de cartão rosado, exerça uma certa atracção. porém, na verdade, vou mais por aqui (numa manhã Bobby Darin).
"Des hommes et des dieux", Xavier Beauvois
muito a dizer sobre estas imagens (Caravaggio), sobre estas caras, sobre este pensamento. o mal e o bem, os homens e os deuses. definitivamente o meu cinema. curiosidade: numa sala que normalmente está a seis-dez pessoas, encontrei hoje vinte. metade delas eram religiosos à procura dos seus deuses.
na Slant.
no Independent.
no Mubi.
no Cinescene.
no Ípsilon, com a qual concordo totalmente.
"Christ at the column", Caravaggio.
e a origem do guerrilheiro ferido: (a perspectiva)
Cristo Morto de Mantegna.
ainda a ler: Des hommes et des images... une éthique du visible.
("colle son visage contre la toile, comme s’il s’agissait du corps d’un de ses patients, mais d’un patient qui serait, en vérité et pour lui, le soignant; il caresse l’image de sa joue et approche son regard du corps souffrant de l’homme, plaçant son oeil exactement à la hauteur du téton du Christ comme s’il allait téter l’image de Dieu fait homme ; de l’invisible rendu visible ; image-mère, image-corps auprès de laquelle l’oeil vient se nourrir de la présence … Oralité du regard.")
e Des hommes et des Dieux, les couleurs.
aqui aussi.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
the great American novel
"I'm sure I'm not a great writer in Norman Mailer's light, but then I don't want to be a great writer in Norman Mailer's light. I neither satisfy his idea of greatness nor mine". Bellow on Mailer on Bellow em Conversations with Saul Bellow, daqui.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Revolutionary Letter #60
by Diane di Prima
Look to the cities, see how 'urban renewal'
tears out the slums from the heart of town
forces expendable poor to the edges, to some
remote & indefensable piece of ground:
Hunters Point, Lower East Side, Columbia Point
out of sight, out of mind. & when bread riots come
(conjured by cutting welfare, raising prices)
the man wont hesitate to raze those ghettos
& few will see. & fewer will object.
- -
não faz mal nenhum dizer que adoro Diane. um pouco deste Revolutionary Letters, aqui.
fall 1953 - kraft cheese spreads on pepperidge farm bread for lunch,
this at work while doing latin, i was reading vergil i think, i worked in the
credit department of a large sugar company.
em Dinners and Nightmares.
Revolutionary Letter #54
by Diane di Prima
How to become a walking alchemical experiment
eat mercury (in wheat & fish)
breathe sulphur fumes (everywhere)
take plenty of (macrobiotic) salt
& cook the mixture in the heat
of an atomic explosion.
Friday, November 26, 2010
no
departamento dos grandes primeiros parágrafos. entre maioria e ditas minorias vou notando movimentos opostos, o que vai no sentido da pulverização em imagem que seria desfocada, distorcida, de dentro para fora, e o que vai no sentido macro, concentração, definição, nitidez objectiva. também tenho vindo a reencontrar o dito cânone e como surgiu e a sua história. a manutenção deste cânone é insuportável.
- -
"It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!"
Ralph Ellison em Invisible Man
- -
na estrada: saímos de São Francisco, passagem por LA e saída em direcção às vinhas e aos pomares californianos que se estendem sem fim, no território de Steinbeck (que ouvi Mexia dizer que era o sul? acho que ouvi), terra mestiça de sangue índio latino e asiático (que ouvi dizer 'curiosamente asiáticos em San Fran', acho que ouvi dizer e admirei-me). mais do que isso, assusto-me de pensar que tenho os mesmos pré-pensamentos dirigidos a outras paragens. é preciso assentar lá os pés, nas pedras ou no pó da estrada, cheirar a humidade do ar. todos os julgamentos são sumários, talvez.
de resto: as receitas foram vencedoras. a sopa de castanhas excelente em puré ou antes dele. o molho de cranberry combina na perfeição com o Ruby do Porto e canela, e como o stuffing se dá bem com a broa portuguesa. faltou unicamente o cornbread, para a próxima, e a massa da tarde não foi amassada por mim, o que foi pena, mas retomo essa falta em breve. o recheio, ao qual acrescentei as nozes que vi desfilar diante de mim durante dez anos, foi da receita Baked. falhei o cornstarch mas julgo que não fez grande diferença. acompanhando, belo tinto de Évora de 2006. com lenha e lareira a espantar tristezas, melancolias e outros desânimos.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
s/n
o primeiro thanksgiving, de um ponto de vista, como o último, como um de muitos. mas este foi meu.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
beats
"[A] Woman from the audience asks: "Why are there so few women on this pannel? Why are there so few women in this whole week's program? Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?" And [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: "There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the 50's if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were a female your families had you locked up. There were cases, I knew them, someday someone will write about them."
from Steven Scobie's account of the Naropa Institute tribute to Ginsberg, July 1994.
do livro Women of the Beat Generation. entre o não haver mulheres e o locked up a dificuldade está em escolher. depois de ter encontrado a mulher de LeRoi Jones e a filha de Kerouac no muito bom The Portable Beat Reader. entre women e girls vão umas braçadas.
mas
o que é que eu fui fazer?
(à maneira de Bellow, esta frase poderia definir a minha vida, ou o pesadelo de um morning after contínuo)
cerelac
não faço greve (mas também estou solidária e tal) falar é fácil, mas o facto de saber que há fome, de ver. [crise, qual crise, dizia a mulher dondoca. nas grandes superfícies, disse ele, compram-se menos mercearias. mas as pessoas levam farináceos, cerelac] nestes últimos dois dias as nuvens e a serra têm-se transfigurado em formas assombradas, névoa e negro, e tenho pena de não poder por lá andar aplicando as dez regras. transparente e as cores vivas, até molhadas. entre aqui e o norte, penso, há diferença de uma semana ou duas na vida das árvores. aqui ainda carregadas de folhas amarelentas e acastanhadas, a caminho de serem mosto ou seja qual for o destino que lhes dão. última semana de Novembro.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
pedras de novo, mas outras
Apologia pro Vita Sua
R. A. Ammons
I started picking up the stones
throwing them into one place
and by sunrise I was going far away
for the large ones
always turning to see never lost
the cairn's height
lengthening my radial reach:
the sun watched with deep concentration
and the heap through the hours grew
and became by nightfall
distinguishable from all the miles around
of slate and sand:
during the night the wind falling
turned earthward its lofty freedom and speed
and the sharp blistering sound muffled
toward dawn and the blanket was
drawn up over a breathless face:
even so you can see in full dawn
the ground there lifts
a foreign thing desertless in origin.
"The words, several"
Hart Crane
for Slater Brown
by Robert Creeley
(1968)
1.
He had been stuttering, by the edge
of the street, one foot still
on the sidewalk, and the other
in the gutter...
like a bird, say, wired to flight, the
wings, pinned to their motion, stuffed.
The words, several, and for each, several
senses.
-------"It is very difficult to sum up
briefly..."
---------It always was.
(Slater, let no come home.
The letters have proved insufficient.
The mind cannot hang to them as it could
to the words.
There are ways beyond
what I have here to work with,
what my head cannot push to any kind
of conclusion.
But my own ineptness
cannot bring them to hand,
the particulars of those times
we had talked.)
"Men kill themselves because they are
afraid of death, he says..."
The push
---------beyond and
into
2
Respect, they said he respected the
ones with the learning, lacking it
himself
---------(Waldo Frank & his
6 languages)
---------------What had seemed
important
While Crane sailed to Mexico I was writing
(so that one betrayed
-----------------------himself)
He slowed
-------------(without those friends to keep going, to
keep up), stopped
----------------------dead and the head could not
go further
-----------without those friends
Hart Crane.
---------------Hart
Gothenburg, NE
"(...) the drivers, two young blond farmers from Minnesota, were picking up every single soul they found on that road - the most smiling, cheerful couple of handsome bumpkins you could ever wish to see, both wearing cotton shirts and overalls, nothing else; both thick-wristed and earnest, with broad howareyou smiles for anybody and anything that came across their path."
Kerouac em On the Road
(Gothenburg delivers!)
(Don't Think) acaba
sempre pela tentação do auto-aprisionamento.
Ten Golden Rules
1. Take your camera everywhere you go
2. Use it any time – day and night
3. Lomography is not an interference in your life, but part of it
4. Try the shot from the hip
5. Approach the objects of your Lomographic desire as close as possible
6. Don't think (William Firebrace)
7. Be fast
8. You don't have to know beforehand what you captured on film
9. Afterwards either
10. Don't worry about any rules
(of Lomography)
decidiu-se
afinal por um mini-thanksgiving, with a Portuguese twist.
talvez sopa. turkey (crust de broa). green beans. cranberry sauce (porto e canela). mash. apple pie. maybe cornbread. para breve: sorte e saúdinha.
e para o espírito. nothing to be thankful for? think again.
"Fault Lines", George Giorgiou
Monday, November 22, 2010
para quem ama as pedras
(diria, como eu), é urgente conhecer os inukshuk dos Inuit canadianos, embora não só eles os tenham construído nas zonas gélidas (ar límpido, vida, verde fundo). funcionais, mas vejo-os como me sinto someone was here.
linhas ou sulcos
procurando imagens para os fins mais profissionais possíveis acabo por esbarrar com cenas da vida privada. o que envelheci no último ano e meio tem poucos precedentes no passado, talvez uma vez apenas em que visitei as quedas Inadaptadas. tempo de revisão, catalogação e acima de tudo actualização de objectivos.
outer limits of
"Reed drew from a range of literary sources beyond the New York School, including the Beats and the French Symbolist poets Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud, poets who placed primacy on the expression of the immediate sensations of human experience. Just as Reed’s lyrics informed a succession of musicians during the 1970s and the decades that followed, his literary influences seemed contagious as well: David Johansen of the New York Dolls compared his own songwriting to the poetry of Rimbaud; Patti Smith, whose debut album Horses remains the defining "art-punk" record, channeled Baudelaire and Rimbaud; Richard Hell and the Voidoid’s punk anthem, "Blank Generation," was modeled on Rod McKuen’s poem "Beat Generation"; and founding Television member Tom Verlaine changed his name in tribute to the French poet Paul Verlaine. Beyond poetic influence, many of the musicians that emerged from the early New York punk scene also published their own collections of verse, including books by Patti Smith, David Byrne, and Sonic Youth members Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore.
The Velvet Underground’s legacy is defined by many things: their noisy sound, their intelligent cynicism, and a long list of criminally great songs. The famous saying about the band is that only 100 people heard them, but all 100 started their own bands. However, the Velvet Underground's most enduring contribution to music, arguably, is the world made possible by their lyrics. As David Bowie has said, "The nature of [Reed’s] lyric writing had been hitherto unknown in rock...he supplied us with the street and the landscape, and we peopled it.""
from here.
you
a vida mutilada do homem moderno, Denis Roche
"Chez Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch et plus encore Siegfried Kracauer, le collage est considéré comme symptomatique d’un Zeitgeist, tout particulièrement dans l’opération de montage cinématographique. Ère moderne de la déliaison, de la fin des « grandes articulations naturelles » et du « désordre non maîtrisé du monde », elle est celle qui voit la « démythologisation » de cette société capitaliste anti-naturelle. Le montage/collage engendre une nouvelle forme de lecture dialectique du monde, fondée sur une rationalité qui re-dispose « la vie mutilée de l’homme moderne »."
(...)
"œuvre poétique radicale de Denis Roche, Dépôts de savoir et de technique (Fiction & Cie, Seuil, 1980), dans lequel ce dernier expérimente la technique du cut-up. Repérant dans ce travail de composition poétique et d’échantillonnage un palimpseste photographique (« Clicks’n cuts », comme l’annonce le chapitre)"
uma leitura de Dispositifs/dislocations, de Olivier Quintyn, aqui.
um bootleg de Denis Roche, em .pdf., aqui-
For Love is an affection
That finds the heart through th’ eyes,
Then, by a way of fluxion,
Runs out between the thighs.
ou
Love is a sentiment
Which, through the eyes, invades the heart
And, as a kind of effluent,
Flows out from a lower part.
a que chama parêntesis.
a ver se (3)
"What makes Borges's stance, if you like, more interesting to me even than, say, Nabokov's or Beckett's, is the premise with which he approaches literature. In the words of one of his editors: "For [Borges] no one has claim to originality in literature; all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing archetypes." Thus his inclination to write brief comments on imaginary books: For one to attempt to add overtly to the sum of "original" literature by even so much as a conventional short story, not to mention a novel, would be too presumptuous, too naïve; literature has been done long since. A librarian's point of view! And it would itself be too presumptuous if it weren't part of a lively, relevant metaphysical vision, slyly employed against itself precisely to make new and original literature. Borges defines the Baroque as "that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its possibilities and borders upon its own caricature." While his own work is not Baroque, except intellectually (the Baroque was never so terse, laconic, economical), it suggests the view that intellectual and literary history has been Baroque, and has pretty well exhausted the possibilities of novelty. His ficciones are not only footnotes to imaginary texts, but postscripts to the real corpus of literature.*
[* It is true that he asserts in another place that the possibilities of literature can never be exhausted, since it is impossible to exhaust even a single book. However, his remark about the Baroque includes the attempt to exhaust as well as the hypothetical achievement of exhaustion. What's more, his cardinal themes and images rather contradict that passing optimism -- a state of affairs reminiscent of the aesthetics of Tlön, where no book is regarded as complete which doesn't contain its counterbook, or refutation.]
This premise gives resonance and relation to all his principal images. The facing mirrors that recur in his stories are a dual regressus. The doubles that his characters, like Nabokov's, run afoul of suggest dizzying multiples and remind one of Browne's remark that "every man is not only himself. . . men are lived over again." (It would please Borges, and illustrate Browne's point, to call Browne a precursor of Borges. "Every writer," Borges says in his essay on Kafka, "creates his own precursors.") Borges's favorite third-century heretical sect is the Histriones -- I think and hope he invented them -- who believe that repetition is impossible in history and who therefore live viciously in order to purge the future of the vices they commit; to exhaust the possibilities of the world in order to bring its end nearer.
The writer he most often mentions, after Cervantes, is Shakespeare; in one piece he imagines the playwright on his deathbed asking God to permit him to be one and himself, having been everyone and no one; God replies from the whirlwind that He is no one either: He has dreamed the world like Shakespeare, and including Shakespeare. Homer's story in Book IV of the Odyssey, of Menelaus on the beach at Pharos, tackling Proteus, appeals profoundly to Borges: Proteus is he who "exhausts the guises of reality" while Menelaus -- who, one recalls, disguised his own identity in order to ambush him -- holds fast. Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise embodies a regressus in infinitum which Borges carries through philosophical history, pointing out that Aristotle uses it to refute Plato's theory of forms, Hume to refute the possibility of cause and effect, Lewis Carroll to refute syllogistic deduction, William James to refute the notion of temporal passage, and Bradley to refute the general possibility of logical relations. Borges himself uses it, citing Schopenhauer, as evidence that the world is our dream, our idea, in which "tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason" can be found to remind us that our creation is false, or at least fictive.
The infinite library of one of his most popular stories is an image particularly pertinent to the literature of exhaustion: The "Library of Babel" houses every possible combination of alphabetical characters and spaces, and thus every possible book and statement, including your and my refutations and vindications, the history of the actual future, the history of every possible future, and, though he doesn't mention it, the encyclopedia not only of Tlön but of every imaginable other world -- since, as in Lucretius's universe, the number of elements and so of combinations is finite (though very large), and the number of instances of each element and combination of elements is infinite, like the library itself.
That brings us to his favorite image of all, the labyrinth, and to my point. Labyrinths is the name of his most substantial translated volume, and the only current full-length study of Borges in English, by Ana Maria Barrenechea, is called Borges the Labyrinth-Maker. A labyrinth, after all, is a place in which, ideally, all the possibilities of choice (of direction, in this case) are embodied, and -- barring special dispensation like Theseus's -- must be exhausted before one reaches the heart. Where, mind, the Minotaur waits with two final possibilities: defeat and death or victory and freedom. The legendary Theseus is non-Baroque; thanks to Ariadne's thread he can take a shortcut through the labyrinth at Knossos. But Menelaus on the beach at Pharos, for example, is genuinely Baroque in the Borgesian spirit, and illustrates a positive artistic morality in the literature of exhaustion. He is not there, after all, for kicks; Menelaus is lost, in the larger labyrinth of the world, and has got to hold fast while the Old Man of the Sea exhausts reality's frightening guises so that he may extort direction from him when Proteus returns to his "true" self. It is a heroic enterprise, with salvation as its object -- one recalls that the aim of the Histriones is to get history done with so that Jesus may come again the sooner, and that Shakespeare's heroic metamorphoses culminate not merely in a theophany but in an apotheosis.
Now, not just any old body is equipped for this labor; Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth becomes in the end the aptest image for Borges after all. Distressing as the fact is to us liberal democrats, the commonalty, alas, will always lose their way and their soul; it is the chosen remnant, the virtuoso, the Thesean hero, who, confronted with Baroque reality, Baroque history, the Baroque state of his art, need not rehearse its possibilities to exhaustion, any more than Borges needs actually to write the Encyclopedia of Tlön or the books in the Library of Babel. He need only be aware of their existence or possibility, acknowledge them, and with the aid of very special gifts -- as extraordinary as saint- or herohood and not likely to be found in The New York Correspondence School of Literature -- go straight through the maze to the accomplishment of his work.
- - -
a terceira parte de um ensaio basilar do pós-modernismo, de John Barth. esperando que os investigadores de direitos não o expulsem daqui. (as primeiras duas partes nos posts anteriores)
a ver se (2)
One of the modern things about these two writers is that in an age of ultimacies and "final solutions" -- at least felt ultimacies, in everything from weaponry to theology, the celebrated dehumanization of society, and the history of the novel -- their work in separate ways reflects and deals with ultimacy, both technically and thematically, as for example Finnegans Wake does in its different manner. One notices, for whatever its symptomatic worth, that Joyce was virtually blind at the end, Borges is literally so, and Beckett has become virtually mute, musewise, having progressed from marvelously constructed English sentences through terser and terser French ones to the unsyntactical, unpunctuated prose of Comment C'est and "ultimately" to wordless mimes. One might extrapolate a theoretical course for Beckett: Language after all consists of silence as well as sound, and mime is still communication ("that nineteenth-century idea," a Yale student once snarled at me), but by the language of action. But the language of action consists of rest as well as movement, and so in the context of Beckett's progress, immobile, silent figures still aren't altogether ultimate. How about an empty, silent stage, then, or blank pages* [An ultimacy already attained in the nineteenth century by that avant-gardiste of East Aurora, N.Y., Elbert Hubbard, in his Essay on Silence, and much repeated to the present day in such empty "novelties" as The Wit and Wisdom of Lyndon Johnson, etc.] -- a "happening" where nothing happens, like Cage's 4'33" performed in an empty hall? But dramatic communication consists of the absence as well as the presence of the actors; "we have our exits and our entrances"; and so even that would be imperfectly ultimate in Beckett's case. Nothing at all, then, I suppose; but Nothingness is necessarily and inextricably the background against which Being, et cetera. For Beckett, at this point in his career, to cease to create altogether would be fairly meaningful: his crowning work; his "last word." What a convenient corner to paint yourself into! "And now I shall finish," the valet Arsene says in Watt, "and you will hear my voice no more." Only the silence Molloy speaks of, "of which the universe is made."
After which, I add on behalf of the rest of us, it might be conceivable to rediscover validly the artifices of language and literature -- such far-out notions as grammar, punctuation. . . even characterization! Even plot! -- if one goes about it the right way, aware of what one's predecessors have been up to.
Now, J. L. Borges is perfectly aware of all these things. Back in the great decades of literary experimentalism he was associated with Prisma, a "muralist" magazine that published its pages on walls and billboards; his later Labyrinths and Ficciones not only anticipate the farthest-out ideas of The Something Else Press crowd -- not a difficult thing to do -- but, being excellent works of art as well, they illustrate in a simple way the difference between the fact of aesthetic ultimacies and their artistic use. What it comes to is that an artist doesn't merely exemplify an ultimacy; he employs it.
Consider Borges's story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote": The hero, an utterly sophisticated turn-of-the-century French Symbolist, by an astounding effort of imagination, produces -- not copies or imitates, but composes -- several chapters of Cervantes's novel.
It is a revelation [Borges's narrator tells us] to compare Menard's Don Quixote with Cervantes's. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):
. . .truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, the future's counselor.
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "lay genius" Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, the future's counselor.
History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin.
Et cetera. Borges's story is of course a satire, but the idea has considerable intellectual validity. I declared earlier that if Beethoven's Sixth were composed today, it might be an embarrassment; but clearly it wouldn't be, necessarily, if done with ironic intent by a composer quite aware of where we've been and where we are. It would have then potentially, for better or worse, the kind of significance of Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans, the difference being that in the former case a work of art is being reproduced instead of a work of non-art, and the ironic comment would therefore be more directly on the genre and history of the art than on the state of the culture. In fact, of course, to make the valid intellectual point one needn't even recompose the Sixth Symphony, any more than Menard really needed to re-create the Quixote. It would have been sufficient for Menard to attribute the novel to himself in order to have a new work of art, from the intellectual point of view. Indeed, in several stories Borges plays with this very idea, and I can readily imagine Beckett's next novel, for example, as Tom Jones, just as Nabokov's recentest was his multivolume annotated translation of Pushkin. I myself have always aspired to write Burton's version of The 1001 Nights, complete with appendices and the like, in ten volumes, and for intellectual purposes I needn't even write it. What evenings we might spend discussing Saarinen's Parthenon, D. H. Lawrence's Wuthering Heights, or the Johnson Administration by Robert Rauschenberg!
The idea, I say, is intellectually serious, as are Borges's other characteristic ideas, most of a metaphysical rather than an aesthetic nature. But the important thing to observe is that Borges doesn't attribute the Quixote to himself, much less recompose it like Pierre Menard; instead, he writes a remarkable and original work of literature, the implicit theme of which is the difficulty, perhaps the unnecessity, of writing original works of literature. His artistic victory, if you like, is that he confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work. If this corresponds to what mystics do -- "every moment leaping into the infinite," Kierkegaard says, "and every moment falling surely back into the finite" -- it's only one more aspect of that old analogy. In homelier terms, it's a matter of every moment throwing out the bath water without for a moment losing the baby.
Another way of describing Borges's accomplishment is with a pair of his own terms, algebra and fire. In one of his most often anthologized stories, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, he imagines an entirely hypothetical world, the invention of a secret society of scholars who elaborate its every aspect in a surreptitious encyclopedia. This First Encyclopedia of Tlön (what fictionist would not wish to have dreamed up the Britannica?) describes a coherent alternative to this world complete in every respect from its algebra to its fire, Borges tells us, and of such imaginative power that, once conceived, it begins to obtrude itself into and eventually to supplant our prior reality. My point is that neither the algebra nor the fire, metaphorically speaking, could achieve this result without the other. Borges's algebra is what I'm considering here -- algebra is easier to talk about than fire -- but any smart cookie could equal it. The imaginary authors of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön itself are not artists, though their work is in a manner of speaking fictional and would find a ready publisher in The Something Else Press. The author of the story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, who merely alludes to the fascinating Encyclopedia, is an artist; what makes him one, of the first rank, like Kafka, is the combination of that intellectually serious vision with great human insight, poetic power, and consummate mastery of his means -- a definition which would have gone without saying, I suppose, in any century but ours.
Not long ago, incidentally, in a footnote to a scholarly edition of Sir Thomas Browne, I came upon a perfect Borges datum, reminiscent of Tlön's self-realization: the actual case of a book called The Three Impostors, alluded to in Browne's Religio Medici among other places. The Three Impostors is a nonexistent blasphemous treatise against Moses, Christ, and Mohammed, which in the seventeenth century was widely held to exist, or to have once existed. Commentators attributed it variously to Boccaccio, Pietro Aretino, Giordano Bruno, and Tommaso Campanella, and though no one, Browne included, had ever seen a copy of it, it was frequently cited, refuted, railed against, and generally discussed as if everyone had read it -- until, sure enough, in the eighteenth century a spurious work appeared with a forged date of 1598 and the title De Tribus Impostoribus. It's a wonder that Borges doesn't mention this work, as he iseems to have read absolutely everything, including all the books that don't exist, and Browne is a particular favorite of his. In fact, the narrator of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius declares at the end:
. . .English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue Hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn-Burial.*
* Moreover, on rereading Tlön, etc., I find now a remark I'd swear wasn't in it last year: that the eccentric American millionaire who endows the Encyclopedia does so on condition that "The work will make no pact with the impostor Jesus Christ."
This "contamination of reality by dream," as Borges calls it, is one of his pet themes, and commenting upon such contaminations is one of his favorite fictional devices. Like many of the best such devices, it turns the artist's mode or form into a metaphor for his concerns, as does the diary-ending of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or the cyclical construction of Finnegans Wake. In Borges's case, the story Tlön, etc., for example, is a real piece of imagined reality in our world, analogous to those Tlönian artifacts called hrönir, which imagine themselves into existence. In short, it's a paradigm of or metaphor for itself; not just the form of the story but the fact of the story is symbolic; the medium is (part of) the message.
Moreover, like all of Borges's work, it illustrates in other of its aspects my subject: how an artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work -- paradoxically, because by doing so he transcends what had appeared to be his refutation, in the same way that the mystic who transcends finitude is said to be enabled to live, spiritually and physically, in the finite world. Suppose you're a writer by vocation -- a "print-oriented bastard," as the McLuhanites call us -- and you feel, for example, that the novel, if not narrative literature generally, if not the printed word altogether, has by this hour of the world just about shot its bolt, as Leslie Fiedler and others maintain. (I'm inclined to agree, with reservations and hedges. Literary forms certainly have histories and historical contingencies, and it may well be that the novel's time as a major art form is up, as the "times" of classical tragedy, Italian and German grand opera, or the sonnet-sequence came to be. No necessary cause for alarm in this at all, except perhaps to certain novelists, and one way to handle such a feeling might be to write a novel about it. Whether historically the novel expires or persists as a major art form seems immaterial to me; if enough writers and critics feel apocalyptical about it, their feeling becomes a considerable cultural fact, like the feeling that Western civilization, or the world, is going to end rather soon. If you took a bunch of people out into the desert and the world didn't end, you'd come home shamefaced, I imagine; but the persistence of an art form doesn't invalidate work created in the comparable apocalyptic ambience. That is one of the fringe benefits of being an artist instead of a prophet. There are others.) If you happened to be Vladimir Nabokov, you might address that felt ultimacy by writing Pale Fire: a fine novel by a learned pedant, in the form of a pedantic commentary on a poem invented for the purpose. If you were Borges you might write Labyrinths: fictions by a learned librarian in the form of footnotes, as he describes them, to imaginary or hypothetical books. And I'll add that if you were the author of this paper, you'd have written something like The Sot-Weed Factor or Giles Goat-Boy: novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author.
If this sort of thing sounds unpleasantly decadent, nevertheless it's about where the genre began, with Quixote imitating Amadis of Gaul, Cervantes pretending to be the Cid Hamete Benengeli (and Alonso Quijano pretending to be Don Quixote), or Fielding parodying Richardson. "History repeats itself as farce" -- meaning, of course, in the form or mode of farce, not that history is farcical. The imitation, like the Dadaist echoes in the work of the "intermedia" types, is something new and may be quite serious and passionate despite its farcical aspect.
This is the difference between a proper, "naïve" novel and a deliberate imitation of a novel, or a novel imitative of other kinds of documents. The first sort attempts (has been historically inclined to attempt) to imitate actions more or less directly, and its conventional devices -- cause and effect, linear anecdote, characterization, authorial selection, arrangement, and interpretation -- have been objected to as obsolete notions, or metaphors for obsolete notions: Alain Robbe-Grillet's essays For a New Novel come to mind. There are replies to these objections, not to the point here, but one can see that in any case they're obviated by imitations-of-novels, for instance, which attempt to represent not life directly but a representation of life. In fact such works are no more removed from "life" than Richardson's or Goethe's epistolary novels are; both imitate "real" documents, and the subject of both, ultimately, is life, not the documents. A novel is as much a piece of the real world as a letter, and the letters in The Sorrows of Young Werther are, after all, fictitious.
One might imaginably compound this imitation, and though Borges doesn't, he's fascinated with the idea. One of his more frequent literary allusions is to the 602nd night in a certain edition of The 1001 Nights, when, owing to a copyist's error, Scheherazade begins to tell the King the story of the 1001 nights, from the beginning. Happily, the King interrupts; if he didn't, there'd be no 603rd night ever, and while this would solve Scheherazade's problem, it would put the "outside" author in a bind. (I suspect that Borges dreamed this whole thing up; the business he mentions isn't in any edition of The 1001 Nights I've been able to consult. Not yet, anyhow: After reading Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, one is inclined to recheck every semester or so.)
Borges is interested in the 602nd night because it's an instance of the story-within-the-story turned back upon itself, and his interest in such instances is threefold. First, as he himself declares, they disturb us metaphysically: When the characters in a work of fiction become readers or authors of the fiction they're in, we're reminded of the fictitious aspect of our own existence -- one of Borges's cardinal themes, as it was of Shakespeare, Calderón, Unamuno, and other folk. Second, the 602nd night is a literary illustration of the regressus in infinitum, as are many other of Borges's principal images and motifs. Third, Scheherazade's accidental gambit, like Borges's other versions of the regressus in infinitum, is an unage of the exhaustion, or attempted exhaustion, of possibilities -- in this case literary possibilities -- and so we return to our main subject.
(...)
a ver se (1)
The Literature of Exhaustion
John Barth
um ensaio publicado pela primeira vez na Atlantic em 1967 e que surgiu posteriormente, com algumas notas, na colectânea crítica do autor, The Friday Book. (não ficaria deslocado ler The Making of a Writer, este sim livre, ou seja, gratuito).
"The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths.
"You who listen give me life in a manner of speaking. I won't hold you responsible. My first words weren't my first words. I wish I'd begun differently." John Barth, Lost in the Fun House.
I want to discuss three things more or less together: first, some old questions raised by the new "intermedia" arts; second, some aspects of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose fiction I greatly admire; third, some professional concerns of my own, related to these other matters and having to do with what I'm calling "the literature of exhausted possibility" -- or, more chicly, "the literature of exhaustion."
By "exhaustion" I don't mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities -- by no means necessarily a cause for despair. That a great many Western artists for a great many years have quarreled with received definitions of artistic media, genres, and forms goes without saying: Pop Art, dramatic and musical "happenings," the whole range of "intermedia" or "mixed-means" art bear recentest witness to the romantic tradition of rebelling against Tradition.
A catalogue I received some time ago in the mail, for example, advertises such items as Robert Filliou's Ample Food for Stupid Thought, a box full of postcards on which are inscribed "apparently meaningless questions," to be mailed to whomever the purchaser judges them suited for; also Ray Johnson's Paper Snake, a collection of whimsical writings, "often pointed," the catalogue assures us, and once mailed to various friends (what the catalogue describes as The New York Correspondence School of Literature); likewise Daniel Spoerri's Anecdoted Typography of Chance, "on the surface" a description of all the objects that happen to be on the author's parlor table -- "in fact, however. . . a cosmology of Spoerri's existence."
The document listing these items is -- "on the surface," at least -- the catalogue of The Something Else Press, a swinging outfit. "In fact, however," it may be one of their offerings, for all I know: The New York Direct-Mail-Advertising School of Literature. In any case, their wares are lively to read about, and make for interesting conversation in fiction-writing classes, for example, where we discuss Somebody-or-other's unbound, unpaginated, randomly assembled novel-in-a-box and the desirability of printing Finnegans Wake on a very long roller-towel. It is easier and more sociable to talk technique than it is to make art, and the area of "happenings" and their kin is mainly a way of discussing aesthetics, really; of illustrating more or less valid and interesting points about the nature of art and the definition of its terms and genres.
One conspicuous thing, for example, about the "intermedia" arts is their tendency to eliminate not only the traditional audience -- those who apprehend the artist's art (in "happenings" the audience is often the "cast," as in "environments," and some of the new music isn't intended to be performed at all) -- but also the most traditional notion of the artist: the Aristotelian conscious agent who achieves with technique and cunning the artistic effect; in other words, one endowed with uncommon talent, who has moreover developed and disciplined that endowment into virtuosity. It is an aristocratic notion on the face of it, which the democratic West seems eager to have done with; not only the "omniscient" author of older fiction, but the very idea of the controlling artist, has been condemned as politically reactionary, authoritarian, even fascist.
Personally, being of the temper that chooses to rebel along traditional lines, I'm inclined to prefer the kind of art that not many people can do: the kind that requires expertise and artistry as well as bright aesthetic ideas and/or inspiration. I enjoy the Pop Art in the famous Albright-Knox collection, a few blocks from my house in Buffalo, like a lively conversation; but I was on the whole more impressed by the jugglers and acrobats at Baltimore's old Hippodrome, where I used to go every time they changed shows: not artists, perhaps, but genuine virtuosi, doing things that anyone can dream up and discuss but almost no one can do. I suppose the distinction is between things worth remarking and things worth doing. "Somebody ought to make a novel with scenes that pop up, like the old children's books," one says, with the implication that one isn't going to bother doing it oneself.
However, art and its forms and techniques live in history and certainly do change. I sympathize with a remark attributed to Saul Bellow, that to be technically up-to-date is the least important attribute of a writer -- though I would add that this least important attribute may be nevertheless essential. In any case, to be technically out of date is likely to be a genuine defect: Beethoven's Sixth Symphony or the Chartres cathedral, if executed today, might be simply embarrassing (in fact, they couldn't be executed today, unless in the Borgesian spirit discussed below). A good many current novelists write turn-of-the-century-type novels, only in more or less mid-twentieth-century language and about contemporary people and topics; this makes them less interesting (to me) than excellent writers who are also technically contemporary: Joyce and Kafka, for instance, in their time, and in ours, Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges. The intermedia arts, I'd say, tend to be intermediary, too, between the traditional realms of aesthetics on the one hand and artistic creation on the other. I think the wise artist and civilian will regard them with quite the kind and degree of seriousness with which he regards good shoptalk: He'll listen carefully, if noncommittally, and keep an eye on his intermedia colleagues, if only the corner of his eye. Whether or not they themselves produce memorable and lasting works of contemporary art, they may very possibly suggest something usable in the making or understanding of such works.
Jorge Luis Borges will serve to illustrate the difference between a technically old-fashioned artist, a technically up-to-date non-artist, and a technically up-to-date artist. In the first category I'd locate all those novelists who for better or worse write not as if the twentieth century didn't exist, but as if the great writers of the last sixty years or so hadn't existed. Our century is more than two-thirds done; it is dismaying to see so many of our writers following Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Balzac, when the question seems to me to be how to succeed not even Joyce and Kafka, but those who succeeded Joyce and Kafka and are now in the evenings of their own careers.* [Author's note, 1984: Did I really say this remarkably silly thing back in '67? Yup, and I believed it, too. What I hope are more reasonable formulations of the idea may be found in the Friday-pieces "The Spirit of Place" and "The Literature of Replenishment," farther on.] In the second category -- technically up-to-date non-artists -- are such folk as a neighbor of mine in Buffalo who fashions dead Winnies-the-Pooh in sometimes monumental scale out of oilcloth stuffed with sand and impales them on stakes or hangs them by the neck. In the third category belong the few people whose artistic thinking is as au courant as any French New Novelist's, but who manage nonetheless to speak eloquently and memorably to our human hearts and conditions, as the great artists have always done. Of these, two of the finest living specimens that I know of are Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges -- with Vladimir Nabokov, just about the only contemporaries of my reading acquaintance mentionable with the "old masters" of twentieth-century fiction. In the unexciting history of literary awards, the 1961 International Publishers' Prize, shared by Beckett and Borges, is a happy exception indeed.
(...)
"Gran-tu-Molani", again and again
esta não é uma nação da melancolia.
BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE
Jack Kerouac
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
- -
a par com os Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
s/n
as aparências sempre iludiram, mas nem tanto. as caras e as mãos vão largando sinais do fundo do lago, as pedras verdes vêem-se por entre os limos e desnudam-se finalmente em tempo de seca. como ossos à mostra por fim.
largo agora o ruído e os grunhos do rei da chuva e começo a estrada paradigma de uma geração. And this was really the way that my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic no to tell. no auge do império. para olhar com a ideia do final dos impérios, da Clara, que durante muito tempo perpetuam liturgias, ocas, por não reflectirem um poder real mas apenas a sua lembrança.
pâte à tartiner au chocolat
as receitas americanas incluem muitos outros ingredientes, como quase sempre. as francesas menos e também esta, belga. 200 gr negro, 200 gr manteiga sem sal, 1 lata leite condensado, 2 colheres de sopa de avelã tostada e picada. em banho-maria para derreter o chocolate e juntar os outros ingredientes pela mesma ordem. para durar quinze dias em ambiente seco e fresco. de The Food and Cooking of Belgium.
figura de estilo
Da excelente Five Dials, aqui o último número em .pdf.
- - -
Similes, including comparisons, from a page in Raymond Chandler’s notebooks.
1. As cold as Finnegan’s feet
2. As cute as a washtub
3. As much sex appeal as a turtle
4. As cold as a nun’s breeches
5. As French as a doughnut (i.e. not French at all)
6. As clean as an angel’s neck
7. As shiny as a clubwoman’s nose
8. High enough to have snow on him
9. So tight his head squeaks when he takes his hat off
10. Lower than a badger’s balls
11. Longer than a round trip to Siam
12. Smart as a hole through nothing
13. A face like a collapsed lung
14. A mouth like a wilted lettuce
15. A nose like a straphanger’s elbow
16. His face was long enough to wrap twice around his neck
17. He sipped like a hummingbird drinking dew from a curled leaf
Saturday, November 20, 2010
James Welling
Agony (1981) e a série de tecidos ou os unique photograms.
aqui
"DG So your work is a documentation of your behavior, and the photographs become about what you’re looking at. By extension, then, there’s nothing for viewers to ascribe a narrative to other than their own reaction to what they’re looking at, which is what you were looking at. There’s no other player, no other subject: it’s just the picture, the view and the viewer. I’m wondering how conscious you are of setting that up and what you are looking to push. People think of your work as very formal and cool, but I’ve been getting other feelings from looking at it.
JW Charlotte Rampling gave an interview in which she talks about how she has no idea what’s she’s doing with her face or her body when she’s acting. There’s that sense that she’s completely outside herself. I often feel that way when I make a photograph. I prefer photographing emotional things. Maybe they don’t appear emotional at first glance… On the other hand, I do like to control things, and that’s probably the formal aspect that you mention."
entrevista, aqui na Bomb.
que corta tanto como a Balibar de Pedro Costa.
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