Month: September 2008

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Existential Kangaroo

Upon your conception of the single individual all your descriptions will be based, all your science established. For this reason, the human sciences, philosophy, ethics, psychology, politics, economics, can never be sciences at all. There can never be an exact science dealing with individual life. L’anatomia presuppone il cadavere; anatomy presupposes its corpse, says D’Annunzio. You can establish an exact science on a corpse, supposing you start with the corpse and don’t and don’t try to derive it from a living creature. But upon life itself, or any instance of life, you cannot establish a science.

–D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo

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Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives

To collect is to create a meaningful set of objects. The meaning resides in the way the pieces in the collection call attention to one another. By understanding the dialogue between members of a collection, we discover what the collector wants to show us about the objects and the world. Perhaps for this reason, it is often said that a collection is the reflection of the taste of its creator. Indeed, a collection is the collector’s convictions rendered concrete in inter-related acts of acquisition. When the collection is displayed, these convictions are intersubjectively accessible, hence, open to appreciation and criticism.

. . . . [C]ollecting is essentially a compensation for prior disappointment and an illusory comfort in the face of an uncertain future. Collecting serves this role particularly well, it seems, because its repetitive structure allows the individual to repeat the tension-reducing act of acquisition when the satisfaction induced by the previous act fades. The meaning of the process of collecting resides in the “momentary undoing of frustrating neediness but is felt as an experience of omnipotence. Like hunger, which must be sated, the obtainment of one more object does not bring an end to the longing. Instead, it is the recurrence of the experience that explains the collector’s mental attitude. The compelling concern to go in search, to discover, to add to one’s store, or holding, or harem, is not generated by conscious planning. Rather, every new addition, whether found, given, bought, discovered, or even stolen, bears the stamp of promise and magical compensation” (p. 13). In a similar vein, Muensterberger locates the origins of the urge to collect in the child’s reliance upon objects as “symbolic substitutes” for the parent. The acquisitive bent of the collector is derivative of the “grasping and clinging” of the infant.

Werner Muensterberger – Book Review: Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives – Philosophy and Literature 20:2.

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Listen to James Joyce read from FINNEGANS WAKE!

joyce1.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object).

Recording of Joyce reading from “Anna Livia Plurabelle” in Finnegans Wake. Soak up the weirdness.

You are listening to: Book I, Chapter 8, pages 213.11-215.11. [I’ll try to find the slightly longer version of this recording that goes up to 216.5, the end of both Chapter 8 and Book I — “Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stern or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!” — The end of the chapter is my favorite part, especially how he reads it!]

[N.B. – “213.11” denotes page 213, line 11 in the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition (with an Introduction by John Bishop).]

“The text is that of the first edition of Finnegans Wake published by Faber and Faber, London, and The Viking Press, New York, 4 May 1939″ (FW xxix).

Surrender the need to be master of everything! I find Bishop’s Introduction incredibly reassuring:

“. . . any reader can enter Finnegans Wake and find something to absorb him – as long as he or she doesn’t expect to find it all in one place or, complementarily, understand everything else that appears around it. It is even possible to argue, with this same logic, that Finnegans Wake may be more accessible to the common reader than Ulysses – or, for that matter, War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past – since one doesn’t need to comprehend it as a totality to profit from it or enjoy it. Students of literature in particular, accustomed as they are to understanding most words in every sentence of every prose work they read, are apt to experience frustration in reading a text constructed along these lines, where it can sometimes seem that one is doing extremely well if one makes sense of only a sentence or two on a single page. If however, one surrenders the need to be master of everything – or even most things – in this strange and magnificent book, it will pour forth lots of rewards.”
(FW ix)

[Read the actual Finnegans Wake/”Anna Livia Plurabelle” text BELOW:]
Continue reading →

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The Informer :: A Lover’s Discourse

The Informer

informateur / informer

A friendly figure whose constant role, however, seems to be to wound the amorous subject by “innocently” furnishing commonplace information about the loved being, though the effect of this information
information is to disturb the subject’s image of that being. (Barthes 138-139)

1.         Gustave, Leon, and Richard form a group; Urbain, Claudius, Etienne, and Ursule, another; Abel, Gontran, Angele, and Hubert, still another (I borrow these names from Paludes <Gide>, which is the book of First Names). However, Leon happens to meet Urbain, who gets to know Angele, who knew Leon slightly anyway, etc. Thus is formed a constellation; each subject is called upon to enter into relations, one day or another, with the star remotest from him and to become involved with that particular star out of all the rest: everything ends by coinciding (this is the precise impulse of A la recherché du temps perdu <Proust>, which is, among other things, a tremendous intrigue, a farce network). Worldly friendship is epidemic: everyone catches it, like a disease. Now suppose that I release into this network a suffering subject eager to maintain with his other a pure, sealed space (consecrated, untouched); the network’s activities, its exchange of information, its interests and initiatives will be received as so many dangers. And in the center of this little society, at once an ethnological village and a boulevard comedy, parental structure and comic imbroglio, stands the informer, who busies himself and tells everyone everything.

Ingenuous or perverse, the Informer has a negative role. However anodyne the message he gives me (like a disease), he reduces my other to being merely another. I am of course obliged to listen to him (I cannot in worldly terms allow my vexation to be seen), but I strive to make my listening flat, indifferent, impervious.

2.         What I want is a little cosmos (with its own time, its own logic) inhabited only by “the two of us.” Everything from outside is a threat; either in the form of boredom (if I must live in a world from which the other is absent), or in the form of injury (if that world supplies me with an indiscreet discourse concerning the other). By furnishing me insignificant information about the one I love, the Informer discovers a secret for me. This secret is not a deep one, but comes from outside <Bunuel: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie>: it is the other’s “outside” which was hidden from me. The curtain rises the wrong way round-not on an intimate stage, but on the crowded theater. Whatever it tells me, the information is painful: a dull, ungrateful fragment of reality lands on me. For the lover’s delicacy, every fact has something aggressive about it: a bit of “science,” however commonplace, invades the Image-repertoire.

[From A Lover’s Discourse, by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard]

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“Show me whom to desire” :: A Lover’s Discourse

induction / induction

The loved being is desired because another or others have shown the subject that such a being is desirable: however particular, amorous desire is discovered by induction. (Barthes 136-137)

1.         Shortly before falling in love, Werther meets a young footman who tells him of his passion for a widow <Werther> : “The image of that fidelity, that tenderness, pursues me everywhere, and as though scorched myself by that fire, I faint, I fail, consuming myself.” After which there is nothing left for Werther to do but to fall in love in his turn, with Charlotte. And Charlotte herself will be pointed out to him, before he sees her; in the carriage taking them to the ball, an obliging friend tells him how lovely she is. The body which will be loved is in advance selected and manipulated by the lens, subject to a kind of zoom effect which magnifies it, brings it closer, and leads the subject to press his nose to the glass: is it not the scintillating object which a skillful hand causes to shimmer before me and which will hypnotize me, capture me <Freud>? This “affective contagion,” this induction, proceeds from others, from the language, from books, from friends: no love is original. <La Rochefoucauld> (Mass culture is a machine for showing desire: here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves. <Stendhal>)

The difficulty of the amorous project is in this: “Just show me whom to desire, but then get out of the way!”: Countless episodes in which I fall in love with someone loved by my best friend: every rival has first been a master, a guide, a barker, a mediator.

2.         In order to show you where your desire is, it is enough to forbid it to you a little (if it is true that there is no desire without prohibition). X wants me to be there, beside him, while leaving him free a little: flexible, going away occasionally, but not far: on the one hand, I must be present as a prohibition (without which there would not be the right desire), but also I must go away the moment when, this desire having formed, I might be in its way: I must be the mother who loves enough (protective and generous) <Winnicott> , around whom the child plays, while she peacefully knits or sews. This would be the structure of the “successful” couple: a little prohibition, a good deal of play; to designate desire and then to leave it alone, like those obliging natives who show you the path but don’t insist on accompanying you on your way.

STENDHAL: “Before love is born, beauty is necessary as a sign, it predisposes to this passion by the praises we hear bestowed upon whom we will love” (On Love).

[From A Lover’s Discourse, by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard]

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The Unknowable :: A Lover’s Discourse

The Unknowable

inconnaissable  /  unknowable

Efforts of the amorous subject to understand and define the loved being “in itself,” by some standard of character type, psychological or neurotic personality, independent of the particular data of the amorous relation. (Barthes 134-135)

1.         I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other (“I know you-I’m the only one who really knows you!”); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other’s origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.

(Of everyone I had known, X was certainly the most impenetrable. This was because you never knew anything about his desire: isn’t knowing someone precisely that-knowing his desire? I knew everything, immediately, about Y’s desires, hence Y himself was obvious to me, and I was inclined to love him no longer in a state of terror but indulgently, the way a mother loves her child.)

Reversal: “I can’t get to know you” means “I shall never know what you really think of me.” I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

2.         To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion. To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god; I shall never manage to solve the question the other asks me, the lover is not Oedipus. Then all that is left for me to do is to reverse my ignorance into truth. <Gide> It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.

3.         Or again, instead of trying to define the other (“What is he?”), I turn to myself: “What do I want, wanting to know the other?” What would happen if I decided to define you as a force and not as a person? And If I were to situate myself as another force confronting yours? This would happen: my other would be defined solely by the suffering or the pleasure he affords me.

GIDE: Speaking of his wife: “And since it always requires love in order to understand what differs from you . . .” (Et nunc manet in te).

[From A Lover’s Discourse, by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard]

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Susana Soca :: J. L. Borges

With slow love she looked at the scattered
Colors of afternoon. It pleased her
To lose herself in intricate melody
Or in the curious life of verses.
Not elemental red but the grays
Spun her delicate destiny,
Fashioned to discriminate and exercised
In vacillation and in blended tints.
Without venturing to tread this perplexing
Labyrinth, she watched from without
The shapes of things, their tumult and their course,
Just like that other lady of the mirror.
Gods who dwell far-off past prayer
Abandoned her to that tiger, Fire.

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]

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The Passive Voice :: Rafael Campo

Imagine why a man likes being fucked.
Imagine how my cock likes being sucked.
Imagine making love to me, my friend.

In English class, my teacher told us not
To use the passive voice; “it’s weak,” he said.
There was an older man who sometimes knocked

At my back door; I’d think of him in bed
And wonder if he’d like to make it break.
Imagine making love to him, my friend,

Until your mother finds your door unlocked.
Imagine what it’s like slowly to bend
Beneath another man’s gigantic cock–

The pleasures of the asshole aren’t discerned
By many English teachers (mine was like
The handsome man I’d like to love instead)–

Imagine telling him. Of course, he’s shocked,
But after several weeks a note he sends:
“Imagine why a man likes being fucked,”

It says, and inexplicably so sad,
“Imagine how my cock likes being sucked.”
In high school, no one seems to understand

This kind of love. It could be called dumb luck
Or disappointment, what happened in his bed;
Imagining why men like being fucked,

After his gentle, upright cock, I spent
The night in tears while in his arms I rocked.
Imagine making love to me, my friend.
Imagine why a man likes being fucked.

— By Rafael Campo

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Asylum :: Rafael Campo

Demented underneath the moon, I watch
The street conduct electric sparks tonight,
These cars, their headlights, energy in flight–

Skyscrapers precarious as men in heels.
This night, it seems more glamorous than real.
Demented underneath the moon, around

Another corner, ten men beat the pan
Of shiny, pooling blood another man
Has made for them, his whole life’s work: these men

Identified another queer. The moon
Demented underneath fleeting stars,
Demented, shining on speeding cars,

Dissolves upon my tongue. It tastes like force.
It tastes like blood, saliva, teeth. I’d curse,
But I’m demented. Underneath the moon,

The moonlight makes perfection out of me.
The men are beating on their drum. Their drums
Are poverty and ignorance, so painfully

Made lucid. Once, I really saw the moon.
It hurt. And underneath it all the world
Was busy, furious, bent to the loom.

— By Rafael Campo

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Parable of the Palace :: J. L. Borges

That day, the Yellow Emperor showed the poet his palace. They left behind, in long succession, the first terraces on the west which descend, like the steps of an almost measureless amphitheater, to a paradise or garden whose metal mirrors and intricate juniper hedges already prefigured the labyrinth. They lost themselves in it, gaily at first, as if condescending to play a game, but afterwards not without misgiving, for its straight avenues were subject to a curvature, ever so slight, but continuous (and secretly those avenues were circles). Toward midnight observation of the planets and the opportune sacrifice of a turtle permitted them to extricate themselves from that seemingly bewitched region, but not from the sense of being lost, for this accompanied them to the end. Foyers and patios and libraries they traversed then, and a hexagonal room with a clepsydra, and one morning from a tower they descried a stone man, whom they then lost sight of forever. Many shining rivers did they cross in sandalwood canoes, or a single river many times. The imperial retinue would pass and people would prostrate themselves. But one day they put in on an island where someone did not do it, because he had never seen the Son of Heaven, and the executioner had to decapitate him. Black heads of hair and black dances and complicated golden masks did their eyes indifferently behold; the real and the dreamed became one, or rather reality was one of dream’s configurations. It seemed impossible that earth were anything but gardens, pools, architectures, and splendrous forms. Every hundred paces a tower cleft the air; to the eye their color was identical, yet the first of all was yellow, and the last, scarlet, so delicate were the gradations and so long the series.

It was at the foot of the next-to-the-last tower that the poet — who was as if untouched by the wonders that amazed the rest — recited the brief composition we find today indissolubly linked to his name and which, as the more elegant historians have it, gave him immortality and death. The text has been lost. There are some who contend it consisted of a single line; others say it had but a single word. The truth, the incredible truth, is that in the poem stood the enormous palace, entire and minutely detailed, with every illustrious porcelain and every sketch on every porcelain and the shadows and the light of the twilights and every unhappy or joyous moment of the glorious dynasties of mortals, gods, and dragons who had dwelled in it from the interminable past. All fell silent, but the Emperor exclaimed, “You have robbed me of my palace!” And the executioner’s iron sword cut the poet down.

Others tell the story differently. There cannot be any two things alike in the world; the poet, they say, had only to utter his poem to make the palace disappear, as if abolished and blown to bits by the final syllable. Such legends, of course, amount to no more than literary fiction. The poet was a slave of the Emperor and as such he died. His composition sank into oblivion because it deserved oblivion and his descendants still seek, nor will they find, the word that contains the universe.

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Mildred Boyer]

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Paradiso, XXXI, 108 :: J. L. Borges

Diodorus Siculus tells the story of a god, broken and scattered abroad. What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?

Mankind has lost a face, an irretrievable face, and all have longed to be that pilgrim — imagined in the Empyrean, beneath the Rose — who in Rome sees the Veronica and murmurs in faith, “Lord Jesus, my God, true God, is this then what Thy face was like?”

Beside a road there is a stone face and an inscription that says, “The True Portrait of the Holy Face of the God of Jaen.” If we truly knew what it was like, the key to the parables would be ours and we would know whether the son of the carpenter was also the Son of God.

Paul saw it as a light that struck him to the ground; John, as the sun when it shines in all its strength; Teresa de Jesus saw it many times, bathed in tranquil light, yet she was never sure of the color of His eyes.

We lost those features, as one may lose a magic number made up of the usual ciphers, as one loses an image in a kaleidoscope, forever. We may see them and know them not. The profile of a Jew in the subway is perhaps the profile of Christ; perhaps the hands that give us our change at a ticket window duplicate the ones some soldier nailed one day to the cross.

Perhaps a feature of the crucified face lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died, was erased, so that God may be all of us.

Who knows but that tonight we may see it in the labyrinth of dreams, and tomorrow not know we saw it.

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Mildred Boyer]

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The Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 94 – E.L. Doctorow

The Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 94.

2000, running time: 11:52

Interesting and funny (fragment of a?) live interview.

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Proust in Bed :: J. D. McClatchy

The Paris Review – “Proust in Bed”.

Twisted and hilarious, poem about Proust, read by poet. Who could ask for anything more?

[Originally appeared in Issue 125, Winter 1992, of The Paris Review.]

“Silliness is the soul’s sweetmeat.”

Proust in Bed
– J. D. McClatchey

Through the peephole he could see a boy
Playing patience on the huge crimson sofa.
There was the turkey, the second-best
Chairs, the old chipped washstand, all his dead parents’
Things donated months ago
“To make an unfortunate
Crowd happy” at the Hôtel
Marigny, Albert’s brothel,
Warehouse of desires
And useless fictions-

For one of which he turned to Albert
And nodded, he’d have that one at cards, the soon-
To-be footman or fancy butcher.
He’d rehearsed his questions in the corridor.
Did you kill an animal
Today? An ox? Did it bleed?
Did you touch the blood? Show me
Your hands, let me see how you  . . .
(Judgment Day angel
Here to separate

The Good from the Bad, to weigh the soul . . .
Soon enough you’ll fall from grace and be nicknamed
Pamela the Enchantress or Tool
Of the Trade. Silliness is the soul’s sweetmeat.)
One after another now,
Doors closed on men in bed with
The past, it was three flights to
His room, the bedroom at last,
The goal obtained and
So a starting-point

For the next forbidden fruit-the taste
Of apricots and ripe gruyère is on the hand
He licks-the next wide-open mouth
To slip his tongue into like a communion
Wafer. The consolation
Of martyrs is that the God
For whom they suffer will see
Their wounds, their wildernesses.
He’s pulled a fresh sheet
Up over himself,

As if waiting for his goodnight kiss
While the naked boy performs what he once did
For himself. It’s only suffering
Can make us all more than brutes, the way that boy
Suffers the silvery thread
To be spun inside himself,
The snail-track left on lilac,
Its lustrous mirror-writing,
The mysterious
Laws drawn through our lives

Like a mother’s hand through her son’s hair . . .
But again nothing comes of it. The signal
Must be given, the small bedside bell.
He needs his parents to engender himself,
To worship his own body
As he watches them adore
Each other’s. The two cages
Are brought in like the holy
Sacrament. Slowly
The boy unveils them.

The votive gaslights seem to flicker.
Her dying words were “What have you done to me?”
In each cage a rat, and each rat starved
For three days, each rat furiously circling
The pain of its own hunger.
Side by side the two cages
Are placed on the bed, the foot
Of the bed, right on the sheet
Where he can see them
Down the length of his

Body, helpless now as it waits there.
The rats’ angry squealing sounds so far away.
He looks up at his mother-touches
Himself-at the photograph on the dresser,
His mother in her choker
And her heavy silver frame.
The tiny wire-mesh trap doors
Slide open. At once the rats
Leap at each other,
Claws, teeth, the little

Shrieks, the flesh torn, torn desperately,
Blood spurting out everywhere, hair matted, eyes
Blinded with blood. Whichever stops
To eat is further torn. The half-eaten rat
Left alive in the silver
Cage the boy-he keeps touching
Himself-will stick over and
Over with a long hatpin.
Between his fingers
He holds the pearl drop.

She leans down over his bed, her veil
Half-lifted, the scent of lilac on her glove.
His father hates her coming to him
Like this, hates her kissing him at night like this.

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Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote :: J. L. Borges

Weary of his land of Spain, an old soldier of the king sought solace in Ariosto’s vast geographies, in that valley of the moon where misspent dream-time goes, and in the golden idol of Mohammed stolen by Montalban.

In gentle mockery of himself he conceived a credulous man who, unsettled by the marvels he read about, hit upon the idea of seeking noble deeds and enchantments in prosaic places called El Toboso or Montiel.

Defeated by reality, by Spain, Don Quixote died in his native village around 1614. He was survived only briefly by Miguel de Cervantes.

For both of them, for the dreamer and the dreamed, the tissue of that whole plot consisted in the contraposition of two worlds: the unreal world of the books of chivalry and the common everyday world of the seventeenth century.

Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony. Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad’s haunts or Ariosto’s vast geographies.

For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

Devoto Clinic, January 1955.

[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Mildred Boyer]