To write or not to write? — On the blackening of paper — An Essay by Jerzy Stempowski

 

(by Jerzy Stempowski)

Writing is not new to me, but I have never had much conviction for it as a way of spending one’s time. I have always had the feeling – and today I have it more than ever before – that this kind of occupation requires of me some kind of purpose, justification even. I suspect that I am not alone in these feelings, and that it is this lack of justification – more than any opportunistic consideration – which has motivated writers to evaluate their work in terms of social utility.

I have spent much of my childhood and youth among people who wrote, edited and generally devoted themselves to other literary occupations. These rarely led to any notable results. In our times, such activities are probably an unintended consequence of the existence of the printing press and paper factories, which, like all machines in general, must never be allowed to idle.

From my early acquaintance with the mechanism of writing and printing, I have come to the conclusion that there is no need at all to increase the already vast production of printed word. Even the most assiduous reader can never exhaust the reading program he has set for himself. I thus considered my refraining from the blackening of paper very meritorious.

I began writing late, in the thirty-sixth year of my life, for unexpected reasons, in a period of my life especially poor in other diversions. Looking at the matter today, I am not at all sure that I would have begun writing, had I only had the opportunity to occupy myself in a more systematic manner with music or to undertake a distant journey. Such diversions would probably have come to bore me, but perhaps could have lasted long enough to occupy the time I had in their absence used to try my pen instead.

Though it is perhaps somewhat tactless to say this in a book which may well be read by the literati, writing has always been the occupation of the minorum gentium. Although those ruling Dei Gratia have from time to time taken up the occupation in moments of remorse at the disappointing results of their ruling; as have ministers fallen out of favor; ambassadors compelled to live on meager pensions; and deputies denied further mandate by their people, upstaged by a better demagogue, and awaiting the beginning of a new electoral campaign; yet, the main body of the writing profession have always been people seeking in the written word a kind of compensation for everything which had been denied to them by life, or which could never have been allowed by life to anyone.

The ability to put marks on paper has always carried within it the latent possibility of something bordering on black magic: the ability to produce fiction with which to bedazzle the experimenter. In my youth I saw dadaists gluing onto the wall with great unction words cut out form newspaper and mixed up randomly in a hat. Out of these words there emerged something like poetry, full of unexpected associations. Surrealists took these possibilities seriously, experimenting with so-called écriture automatique .

Since even totally randomly placed marks can cause striking surprises, how much more so can words polished by the virtuosi of writing! Words assembled by them detach themselves from their relationship with the author and begin their own, autonomous life, like precious stones, talismans or fetishes, promising imaginary fortunes and jealously tucked into memory.

L’étoile a pleuré rose au cœur de tes oreilles,
L’infini roulé blanc de ta nuque à tes reins
La mer a perlé rousse à tes mammes vermeilles
Et l’Homme saigné noir à ton flanc souverain.

(The star has wept rose-colour in the heart of your ears,
The infinite rolled white from your nape to the small of your back,
The sea has broken russet at your vermilion nipples,
And Man bled black at your royal side.

As translated by Oliver Bernard: Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems (1962) ]

The power to create such verbal formulas which even decades, even centuries later occupy our attention and leave indelible traces on all hours that follow, is perhaps equal to the power to command. And this is how it has been honored, because those who had acquired this power have in all times received honors equal to leaders and rulers. And therefore Martial is probably mistaken, when he makes an aside in a story about a shoe-maker suddenly made rich, blaming his parents for having given him literary education alone: at me litterulis stulti docuere parentes (“but the foolish parents taught me letters”). At any rate, Martial, and Horace, and all those who came in their wake down to our own Tuwim, were all bursting with pride at their magical command of words, so modestly sometimes called the poetic craft.

However, all this holds only for poetry. Prose does not draw its strength from this magical power, but from the clarity of thought ordering the chaos of phenomena. The magic of words is here a secondary matter. Even rhetoricians all agree that the most eloquent is he who has the most important thing to say, were he to speak with the most barbarian of dialects. The need to order and master surrounding phenomena with our thoughts appears to be autonomous: it does not compel any direct impulse to write. The need to propagate one’s thoughts and to impose them on others is something altogether different, the best proof of which is the fact that it appears to foster neither clarity nor honesty of expression. The central contradiction of all prose-writing lies in, on the one hand, the desire to show off one’s clarity of thought and, on the other, every other possible motivation for writing.

Emerging out of silence, the silence which seems to be the correct attitude of thought, constitutes, in a sense, a denial of thought’s central ambition. It also requires the use of words, which are an uncertain medium, at times too resistant, at other times too fluid, subject to rules different from the laws of thought and often producing during manipulation unexpected jarring noises and hot sparks.

To work with words, especially the written word, which can neither truly convey hallucination nor express rational reasoning, requires one to give up many ambitions, but mainly to simplify oneself to the level of a cook who, knowing nothing of either chemistry or physiology, in the noble simplicity of heart, mixes in his pot ingredients brought in from the market.

That I am like Nagai Sensei

One of the most striking things in Nagai’s diaries:  he never misses anyone.  I’m like him.  My happiest days of childhood were those spent at home when family was out — I returned from school but my parents were still at work and I was left alone to listen to the radio, read, draw, and play.  But when there were people at home, my favorite activity was to go and play in the woods — almost always alone.

Literature in the Polish mind

“Since the 18th century, perhaps even earlier, the Polish society has not had an aristocracy, or any other leading group with a particular moral authority.  The kind of discussion in which each generation sorts out its moral and aesthetic values, personal and social manners, could not take place at court (as it did in Spain of Cervantes or in France of Louis XIV), nor in the salons of the title or ultra-rich elites.  These discussions have moved in our case into the territory of literature.  Hence comes the great significance and luminosity of Mickiewicz and Żeromski.  This special quality our literature shares with several others:  Russian, Ukrainian, etc.  Thanks to it, our literatures possess that kind of duality typical of folk art, whereby the utilitarian is not separated from the artistic.  This kind of utilitarian-artistic ambivalence is a profound quality of entire modern Polish literature.”

Stempowski’s words (from a 1937 letter to Dąbrowska) are a good clue to the special unction with which Polish intellectual elites treat the matters of literature:  literature appears to them as a debate on things all-important, on ultimate values. Literature and its interpretation are serious business.

*

There are other aspects to the special place of literature in the Polish mind:  during the entire period of partitions (1795-1918) literature was the only way to hang on to the national language (as national language was gradually being pushed out of schools by the occupying powers) — and this gave literature the air of a life-preserving activity, without which the nation would cease to exist.  Literature became, literally, a matter of life and death.

In shaping the present-day role of literature in the Polish mind, communist occupation 1945-1989 has played perhaps the most important role.  The party launched a vast program of literary patronage in order to buy support among the elites (expecting at least lukewarm public support in return for publication and promotion).  The party explained this patronage as an essential part of the socialist project of creating the new man.  On this theory, literature was supposed to help transform people’s aspirations and channel them towards the new life.  Unsurprisingly, Polish literary figures were only too eager to embrace an ideology which ascribed them special consciousness-forming powers.

The ideology proved to have an unexpected consequence for the communists when  the very people they had imagined they had bought began to publish in samizdat form books which the communists had banned (or merely refused to publish).  The samizdat publishers published and circulated this literature because they had accepted the communist theory that literature was all important as a mind-shaping vehicle:  being so important, it was too important to be subjected to political interference and had to be rescued.  Political opposition in Poland was to a very large extent — literary.

*

Out of this engagement an odd ideology began to arise.

Just as the occupying power’s interference with polish language education during the partitions (1795-1918) was seen as an existential threat, so was the communist interference with literature during 1945-1989.  While the former was an existential threat to the language, and therefore the nation as the speakers of it; communist control of literature was seen as a threat to something else, something ill-defined, sometimes described as “free-thinking” (which would have been correct), but more often as “spirit” or “culture”.  Communist control began to be identified with Ortega y Gasset’s “verical barbarian invasions”: an attempt to stamp out the past (which to some extent it was) — and therefore national traditions (believed to be a foundational and fundamental to the nation).  On this ideology, literature — good literature, correct literature — preserved national traditions and therefore the nation.  Thus literature became, once again, a matter of national survival.

Readers of my other blog will be struck by how closely this situation resembles what had happened in China where Chinese literature became identified with Chinese culture and Chinese culture with humanity — uncultured/unlettered humans being barbarians — not fully human.  Preserving and cultivating literature became in China coterminous with preserving humanity and therefore, in a certain sense, life.

This perception fit nicely with the American postwar ideology beamed into Poland via Radio Free Europe and western-printed samizdats and which promoted “Western values”.  By these, Americans meant democracy, personal liberty, and capitalism — all good values of course, but none of them especially Western, certainly none of them very ancient in the West — but which Polish literati readily accepted adding to it — as could be expected of literary thinkers — Polish, Graeco-Roman, and French classics.  Today, the American postulates — personal liberty, democracy, capitalism — have largely been attained in Poland but Polish literary figures continue to fight for culture and the classics and are puzzled why the release of political and economic liberty has not led to an explosion of interest in Martial, Horace, Rabelais, Voltaire and such like.  Surrounded by aggressive pop-culture they once again feel in the midst of a vertical barbarian invasion and called upon to save the nation.

In the blazing tropical heat of summer, another abandoned palace along the shore

In the blazing tropical heat of summer, another abandoned palace along the shore; a magnificent building with four meter ceilings, four corner towers, a grand split staircase in front, and a circular carriage way in front of that.  Tropical trees in the garden gone wild.  My eye imagines a panning shot — like the opening of Il Gattopardo, but a little different — with the eye moving along the road, looking in through the wrought iron fence and trees, the main approach slowly opening up before the eye, then through the gate and into the park.  As the camera approaches faintly music can be heard, music and voices, laughing, chatting.

On choosing colors and that less isn’t always more

I am repainting my apartment.  With 7 rooms facing three cardinal directions, I have color options and have been discussing them with Zenobia.  Our discussions have usually ended in her stated objection to my recommended color on the grounds that it was “too strong”.  I am familiar with her objection — when I first began experimenting with color 15 years ago, I too tended to timid whites and off-whites.  Only subsequent experience has shown that strong colors do not disturb the dweller as long as they are good.  In other words, it isn’t the intensity or saturation of the color that determines the resident’s comfort.  Something else does.  I was reminded of this fact last night while watching a film with richly colored, yet absolutely gorgeous Italian Renaissance interiors.

Publicly stated preference for timid wall colors, wide-spread as it is, has three possible sources:

1.  Poverty of experience, a.k.a. “the poor Richard’s habit”.  Poor people — and socialism has made nearly all of us poor — tend to spend a lot of time in spaces whose color is “public” (i.e. not determined by their studied likes and dislikes).  And public colors — such as colors of rental units or shops or offices — are utilitarian.  The person choosing the color determines that the walls don’t have to be liked, but they must not offend.  Whites and off-whites are unnoticeable, can be counted upon not to offend, and are therefore preferred by owners/decision makers interested in crowd-control.  Most of us spend most of our time in such interiors.  We don’t know any other color schemes and assume that the status quo must somehow have been proven superior — because it is wide-spread.  (Cf:  “Fiat Punto must be the best car in the world because it is most widely owned”).

2.  French-historical-ideological.  The best-known rule of thumb concerning taste is “less is more” (and its opposite, meant as a scathing criticism, that “more is more” — i.e. “more is bad”).  It is the programmatic summation of Marie-Antoinette’s neoclassicism, associated with Louis XVI and Empire epochs.  (It is ironic that this queen — the mother of what she thought was virtuous return to simplicity in style — has become in the public mind, falsely and only as a result of maliciously mendacious revolutionary pamphleteering, the symbol of decorative excess).  The classical style is not a bad style in itself — pearly grey, white, baby-blue with occasional, sparing gold or silver accent is a color scheme that works reasonably well and in many climes.  (It was Chopin’s favorite scheme and some find it in his music). Its success therefore may not be entirely due to the terrifying success of other French ideas of the turn of the eighteenth century.

But it isn’t a rule:  anyone who has spent any time at all in Italy, Turkey, India, China or South East Asia would have had the opportunity to see other, richer, more intense color schemes which also work well.  Some — not all — are outright gaudy, dripping with intense color and ornament without being in the least disturbing. Much gaudy design does fail, but certainly not all of it.  It appears therefore that some gaudy colors, or some combinations of colors, or combination of color and decoration, do work, and therefore whether much, or little, more or less, is not a reliable aesthetic rule.  One is certainly not wrong in identifying some gaudy decoration as a failure, but in light of all those gaudy schemes that work — anyone who doubts it ought to visit a few Roman palaces — it is a theoretical failure to ascribe the aesthetic failure of those designs which do fail to the intensity of their colors.

The French neoclassical color-scheme, adopted later by much northern Europe, has remained in force in France until present day.  One can usually tell a Frenchman by the color of his tie or his scarf:  the colors are “French” — they are “understated” — i.e. tend towards the pale — but studiedly beautiful.  French TV and French internet pages are instantly and unmistakeably recognizable as French and are generally very pleasing to the eye.  Costumes in films like Princesse de Montpensier are a feast for the eye.

Compared to the French, other practitioners of color-classicism are not as successful:  in Germany, French neoclassicism mutates into a kind of institutionalism (dull navies, dark browns and steel greys) — which are not so much a choice of color (one cannot possibly choose those colors out of preference) as an avoidance of color.  It strikes one as a kind of helplessness.  It is as if, not knowing what to choose, but strictly told to avoid “more”, the poor German chose the least he could find, eliminating, in his search for refinement, all pleasure.  Don’t blame the poor German layman:  at one point architects began to make the same mistake, declaring all decoration a sin.

All is not well with the human race:  we are susceptible to glib formulas (“quantity becomes quality”, etc.); it is easier to parse a sentence than to introspect and see how we really feel; a catchy phrase can easily override any clear evidence of sensory input.  And introspecting about sensory input — looking at things and taking stock of how they make us feel — is actually very difficult.  It is a skill which requires both a talent (totally absent in some) and practice:  a connoisseur is only as good as the sum total of everything he has seen.

Having said all this in the interest of disproving the “less is more formula”, I now hasten to add that there may be a strong objective reason for the strength of the neoclassical color scheme in northern Europe and it is:

3.  Natural light.  Although many people whom I tell this refuse to believe me, there is a marked difference in quality of light between the temperate and the more southerly climes.  Paris looks fine in its beige and grey because it is where it is; it would look awful in Tuscany where one has to paint himself like Siena in order to look good (and like Naples even further south).  Roman walls in Poland would no doubt look dark and depressing on most days when there is so little light; but Polish walls in Istanbul would look washed out.

This effect isn’t limited to sunlight.  Years spent as a fashion consultant on international scale — and looking at women of all shades and colors — has taught me that pinko-greys like myself look better in French pale colors with finer patterns; while women and men of more decisive hue look better in more saturated colors and bolder patterns.  That pale Frenchmen reside where the sun is lukewarm and darker Italians where the sun is stronger is a lucky historical accident:  it makes it possible for each to choose a color and pattern scheme which suits him and his native sunlight simultaneously.

Having said all which, my apartment lies south; it is surrounded by lemon trees and rosemary bushes; it looks out over the glittering sea called, on account of its color, The Sea of Straw; in a city whose light was best described in an article by Lawrence Weschler in an essay on another city, one located in exactly the same climate and nearly the same geographical conditions, an essay entitled “Light in LA”.  My apartment’s walls can afford a little color.

Reading Heike Monogatarii one is struck by the cabotine mediocrity of the characters

Reading Heike Monogatarii is bloody grim business.  Not on account of the blood and guts, no, one expects that in an epic, but… on account of the cabotine mediocrity of the characters.

In Book Two, emperor Go-Shirokawa, retired so that he could plot re-taking of power from the safety of the temple, talks openly about his dream of overthrowing the Heike at a drinking party.  Participants — imperial sympathizers without any especially great commitment to the cause — when in their cups perform sarugaku – “monkey turns” — humorous drunken dances with improvised jokes on the theme of “Heiji” — a play on words, meaning both “Heike clan” but also “wine bottles”; perhaps to please the emperor (he’s quite powerless but still controls some lucrative patronage); perhaps to express their own frustrations with the way the Heike have monopolized comfortable sinecures; but mainly because… they are drunk.  “There are too many Heiji here!  What shall we do with all these Heijis? Knock them over!”  And in a drunken showing-off, they vie to decapitate wine bottles with bare hands.

A few days later, having sobered up one of the participants of the plot gets cold feet and — reports them.  All are arrested; some are murdered immediately, some gruesomely, others are sent into exile in commutation of a death sentence, to be murdered there anyway.

One, before being arrested manages an interview with the emperor begging him for aid.  The emperor basically washes his hands — denies any knowledge of the “plot” — but cries into his sleeve to demonstrate his powerlessness.

Perhaps the most terrifying is the story told to summarize the incident:  another Heike malcontent passed up for an office — one not present at the party — followed good advice of a Heike friend:  he went for on a pilgrimage to Heike Kiyomori’s favorite temple; having worshiped there with great show of piety and expense and befriended the priests, he made sure a report of it got to Kiyomori.

“Why on earth would he go all the way there?”  Kiyomori asked flabbergasted on hearing the report.  “Because he’d been passed over in his attempt to secure an appointment.  In his disappointment he wished to obtain guidance at a temple he respects on whether or not to enter priesthood.”  “Very commendable of him”, said Kiyomori, pleased that a Kyoto court official would travel all the way to Hiroshima to worship at his favorite temple, demoted his son from the post in question and appointed the (former) malcontent.

“What a splendid strategy!” continues the poet.  “And what a pity the others have not tried a clever trick like this instead of plotting senseless revolt, which destroyed them and brought countless suffering to their women and dependents!”

For all the poetry, the paintings, the brocades, all the moon and cherry-blossom viewing parties, all the Chinese scholarship and all the biwa playing, twelfth century politics at the Chrysanthemum court were not any more sophisticated than the politics of a second rate advertising agency today.  If there has been any improvement, it is that we don’t slit people’s throats at the drop of a pin.

Not that we don’t want to.

More about Kalimantaan!

I take back everything I have said about Kalimantaan! in the first moment of frustration.  I found it impossible not to go back, and ended up reading right through the end, breathlessly.  The vision of 19th century Sarawak is very powerful — convincingly accurate — the smells, the sights, the climatic phenomena, the way the heat feels — I feel transported back to South East Asia and suspect the author must have first hand knowledge of the place.

The story, based on the life of the White Rajah of Sarawak, starts out as a not terribly convincing historical narrative but about halfway through gains psychological depth with the introduction of the main heroine and her internal life (Barr — Rajah Brooke — the male hero who opens the novel is, one feels, a little difficult for the author to grasp, as he would be to the rest of us, I suppose); and as it turns into a poignant tragedy, a richly reflection-provoking narrative.

But the main asset of the book, and the reason to read it, is the style, which seems a little stilted at first, but grows on one:  it is poetic, rhythmic, in parts iambic. (I discovered its delight — with a sudden jolt of recognition — when turning to reading the book right after seeing a Shakespearean play).  Unlike Shakespeare’s, the language of Kalimantaan! is not a natural language, but it is beautiful.

The story-telling technique is intentionally convoluted, shadowy, partly obscured, turning often to long, parallel, metaphorical sentences, requiring close reading to keep track of the the happenings — it is a delightfully pleasing exercise for those who, like me, feel challenged by a little difficulty, who don’t like to be explained everything.

I admire the author for three more things:  having published a reading guide for the novel (unavailable, alas); not being all over internet (in fact, no public information about her seems available); and not turning out a novel every year to follow on her initial success.  If another novel comes from her, it will definitely be worth reading.  (As Pamuk’s is not, alas).

If I have a complaint about the novel is the picture of the Europeans in Sarawak which, being sympathetic, presents even the one vagabond in an agreeable light; while in my personal experience, the region is full of disagreeable human refuse dropped from the first world but lording it over the “dumb natives”.  The unsavory sort were as common in the nineteenth century as they are now:  Conrad calls Almayer and Willems — with evil sarcasm — “these two fine specimen of the superior race”.

Salazar became a dictator because he was educated

Salazar became a dictator because he was educated.  Not overly brilliant — he got his doctorate without ever having to submit a thesis — but overly brilliant was not required:  Portugal had but one university at the time; and five hundred students in it.  Later in life, the man often complained that he had no elites to fall back on.  Hitler and Mussolini, he said wistfully, have competent people they can entrust their policies to and can themselves concentrate on formulating strategy; I have do everything myself.  (Felipe Ribeiro de Meneses, Salazar).

Over an evening meal with a group of writers and artists, one told us that there was a weakness in Portuguese arts throughout history.  “Naturally there are some that are good, but few real greats in any of the arts.” (Paul Buck, Lisbon).

 

That men’s dislike for an intelligent woman is as nothing compared to the hate she engenders in women

Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon are in afterlife as they were in life — a set of opposites.

Of the two contemporary Heian court ladies — ladies in waiting of rival empresses — the world likes Murasaki better.  Judging by existing publications — both of the originals and the various translations, retellings, commentaries and spin-offs — Murasaki outsells Shonagon about 1200 to 1.

You won’t be surprised to know, then, that Murasaki bores me — she’s a kind of Jane Austen — but   I love Sei Shonagon — who really has no European equivalent.  (Neither Simone de Beauvoir, nor Susan Sontag had quite the literary talent or the aesthetic insight.  Perhaps Marguerite of Navarre — of Heptaméron — is the closest Western parallel).

Sei Shonagon was a damn intelligent woman, exceedingly well educated, aesthetically sensitive, with a true literary gift; an intellectual and spiritual giant condemned to the insignificant role of a lady in waiting in a world run by diverting courtiers and dim-witted muscle-men; and to falling in love with men half her IQ; and therefore, perhaps, even more hard-headed, stubborn, and proud and given to nasty sarcasm and poking cruel fun at human stupidity than she was born to be; and generally disliked by the mob now as she was disliked then:  men, it is said, dislike an intelligent woman; the truth is, that men’s dislike for an intelligent woman is as nothing compared to the hate such a woman engenders in women.

Camille Claudel

Rodin’s talent is grossly exaggerated.  His drawings of the Balinese ballet illustrate the point:  that the figures are graceless should clinch the point but a surprisingly large number of people don’t notice and argue — how else?  relativistically! — “perhaps it is graceless to you“, etc. (meaning, “other people might like it and who are you to disagree”, etc.). Indeed:  they don’t mind his other stuff, why should they notice that his Balinese sketches are all ugly?  But, more to the point, and damning beyond any shadow of a doubt:  Rodin’s sketches of the Balinese are wrong:  no such pauses are allowed in Balinese dance.  (This is not a matter of opinion; it is a fact; and I happen to be an expert judge). So, there you have it, QED.

(Oh, you don’t get it, someone will say, no doubt, “that’s Rodin’s vision“. But this is, precisely, my point:  the vision thing is — defective).

Now, Rodin, like all nineteenth century European art, is ugly, convoluted, violent, and above all, overrated. It is a function of the age — that tiresome, dull age of purposeful hard work; nineteenth century discovered purpose and merit; but also the people — the new men who came up from the bottom to dictate the style.  People whose ancestors have had nothing to do with art for ten thousand years and who have never needed the cognitive apparatus required to recognize it.  People who got up by figuring out a faster way to get the grain to the market, or a way to screw some colored people out of a natural resource.  People who did that 14 hours a day 7 days a week.  What would they know about art?  What they liked was stories of sweat, commitment, passion, powerful emotions, and — meaning.  Lots and lots of meaning.  Purpose.  Manon.

Yeah, they liked Manon.

Camille Claudel the film does not make any of this more palatable.  Conversations about art oscillate between incomprehensible (see “how the artist’s mind ranges beyond our powers of comprehension?”) and trite (“she has the soul of a man!”) — and back again.  The love story is just like any other love story, illustrating plainly that Rodin and Claudel, at any rate, were no different from the rest.

(Which is, precisely, my point).

And throughout:  ugly sculpture (misshapen bodies, twisted in some nightmarish agony, covered with warts, parts missing), people wearing ugly clothing badly, dull colors, wet clay, murk, dirty streets of Paris.

Why look at this at all?  Is it telling me something valuable and worth knowing about love?  No.  About Rodin?  I was happy not to know.  So, why?  So many people worked so hard, spent so much time and money, to waste 40 minutes of my time.

I have to get better at identifying drivel early — so that I can kill it earlier.

I am making progress.  Last Tuesday I identified — and killed — Marquise after 8 minutes.

Holy cannole! People in this city look mentally retarded!

Like Nagai Kafu at my age, I don’t get out much these days; and I have developed a rather good technique of averting my gaze when I do; but sometimes I do take a look, through omission, out of absent mindedness.

It happened today and — I was struck by a powerful realization:  the people in this city — look mentally retarded!

Not severely.  Mildly enough that on a sunny day, with a pleasant breeze carrying the smell of blooming oranges, or very fine salty sea-spray, you don’t notice.  But when you look closer, it is obvious:  they are retarded.

This explains everything:  the stores, the service, the economy, the government. The crisis, the permanent economic underdevelopment.  Everything.

That books are maps

This isn’t your place is perhaps a better way to translate Pan tu nie stal than the literal You weren’t standing here, I suppose. The title — a rude interruption aimed at correcting a stranger — refers to the several reviews in this collection of essays.  Some are funnily cruel — suggesting via the title that they are rudely inappropriate and uninvited blunts the edge.

The book is intensely funny in places — mainly on account of the language games — the OuLiPo transformations of the first sentence of Proust; the dragon terminology; the brilliant translation of the cheese monger section from a Zola novel.  This can only be done in Polish.  No language affords this kind of pleasure.  The discussion of Lem’s Robot Fairytales proves the point.

The book reviews are very good.

The literary plays — such as when author tries to identify the particular Warsaw Opera singer who may have been the lady mentioned in some Sherlock Holmes story; or proposes that Appolinaire might have been the son of a character from a Prus novel delight me less — they are not funny enough not to feel like a waste of time.  The two essays about the authors’ intense love of books remind me of some people I have met who appear to live the same way.

I do like books myself, but not nearly as much.  Other things have mattered in my life as much, perhaps more:  travel; dance-drama; classical live-music; paintings; textiles.  Though at times I have read as much as 1200 pages a week, books have been more a source of knowledge and an aid to thinking than a matter of unalloyed pleasure.  I do have a reading habit, but it isn’t especially strong:  I can go a week without reading if I am doing something else.

A list of my favorite books, if I had to draw up one, would be headed by Dawkins, Pinker, Popper, Russell, Nietzsche, Castaneda; a certain accounting textbook; a certain book on Jesuits in China; a history of the Sung Dynasty; some books on art and art history, especially those dedicated to technique; three books on textiles; de Zoete on dance in Bali.  In short, facts, rather than fiction.  With a touch of how-to.

Books as guides to the world and one’s life within it.  I am not likely to spend much time wondering how Pym relates to Poe; or how fiction interacts with reality.  To me, the relationship of books to reality is straightforward:  books are maps.

 

Salammbo

Although the internet contains massive amounts of information on all sorts of things, on some topics it is entirely useless.  Kaga yuzen, for instance, sports half a dozen postage-stamp sized, out-of-focus photos in dead colors.  The topic of English translation of Salammbo — nothing.

Good reads is instructive:  on the 45 pages of comments on Salammbo, mostly from English-speaking readers, one sees repeatedly the story of persons who had begun reading the book many years ago, could not make it past page 10, then recently picked it up again and crunched it breathlessly in a few days in a delirium of pleasure.

I notice this regularity because it was my case also.

Yet, not one of those reporting this story on Good Reads suspects that the experience may be a function of translation — the first one bad, the second one good – even though, all you need to do to see the point, is to see the first 10 pages of the ugly translation posted on Gutenberg.  If you can get through that far.

(I can’t remember which translation of Salammbo had given me my delirium of pleasure, but seem to remember it was a Penguin, which would, presumably, make the translator A. Krailsheimer.  Can anyone confirm?)

OK, so the readers don’t notice why they like or dislike a book.  How about the translators or the publishers?  Should not Penguin tell us why they have chosen to publish a new — by my count possibly seventh — translation of the book?  Yet, they do not.  Why not?  The story does not deserve to be told?  Does not promote the product?  Internet users are too dumb to geddit?

*

Although the translation may be the real reason why many pan the book, it is nevertheless interesting to observe how many of them say they pan it because it is unlike Madame Bovary.  Yes, people do like Madame Bovary (and — believe it or not — Pride and Prejudice), and on Good Reads they tell us why — the reasons are what Madame has and Salammbo, they say, does not:  a) psychology, b) romance.  As there actually is romance in Salammbo (just not to sort Madame’s lovers love), we can safely discard reason b and conclude that readers who like Madame Bovary but dislike Salammbo must specifically like the psychological insight of Madame.

Which is fine if you’re into the inner workings of provincial housewives.  If you are not, there is always Salammbo, with her verbal orgy of description:  of textures, colors, smells, scents, jewels, fabrics, weapons, hairstyles, beasts, palaces.  It is an aesthete’s paradise: if you like heavy brocades and don’t care that they don’t have readily analyzable internal life (i.e. your own is quite enough for you) you will like Salammbo.  But do get the right translation.

(Or read the original?)

*

If Good Reads is any guide, the distinction between Madame Bovary and Salammbo might well be the distinction between the ethical (“meaning”) and the aesthetic (“sensual pleasure”) views (if I understand Either/Or correctly).  If so, a search through the very good abebooks.co.uk — by appointment, Sir G’s preferred purveyor of out-of-print matter — provides a useful handle on the relative statistics:  for every sixty-seven copies of Madame Bovary available for sale, there are three Salammbos.  (Only one of those is the Krailsheimer).

Which explains in a way, if nothing else does, why our cities look the way they do and why most people are OK visiting shopping malls.

Tracing fog

I was not going to read Sebald ever — on the strength of who recommended him; until a positive review in The Economist of the documentary (Patience, After Sebald) changed my mind and convinced me to try.  I ordered both the book and the film, the book arrived first and, and so I read it, but the reading soon became largely clinical:  I could not get what was so great about it but persisted in reading because I was curious to figure out what others liked.  I concluded the task was impossible:  the liking of Sebald, like train-spotting, is for radically different brains.

When the documentary arrived, I tried it and it began promising enough with various people explaining their fascination with Rings of Saturn — well, I thought, I will now know what it is all about.  Alas, I ended up turning it off after about 2o minutes:  for although I understood every word of it, yet I understood nothing of it — the words, like the bars of a Brahms piano piece, did not coalesce into a coherent whole.  One person was explaining how she was fascinated by the contrast of three photos:   of a mass of dead fish; of the scales of a herring; and a battlefield of World War I.  I wanted to know what went on there, she said with emphasis, twice.  Her search appears not to have produced any results, however.  Another speaker breathlessly recounted his discovery of how walking in East Anglia is walking through unstable element — sand, marsh, fog. (Amazing).

I finally had to give up when a passage from Sebald himself told me in deadpan Germanic accents how he was very interested in tracing how fog appears in different works of literature.

There it was: fog.  The metaphor for the whole thing.

That all films about artists are a failure

Yesterday I turned off (and dumped) Copying Beethoven; today, Goya in Bordeaux.  When is the last time I have seen a good film about an artist?  Impromptu?  And that only because it was a comedy.

The divine Alban Berg

Not all Lindsays’ recordings of Haydn are equally perfect.  Their Op. 33 and Op. 54 have an ugly, screechy, scratching sound. This may perhaps be due to poor sound engineering; but the tempi definitely are not.  I thought I would never hear myself say such a thing, but Kodaly play op. 54 better; and Borodin op. 33.

The undisputed masters of all string quartet repertoire which they have ever deigned to play are of course the Alban Berg:  even from the exalted heights of Borodin, Kodaly, Lindsays and Mosaiques, one can at best glimpse only their feet floating high up in the sky.  What a pity they have recorded so little Haydn — opting instead for all of Beethoven.  One is thankful of course that they have — Die Grosse Fuge had never — and will never again — sounded so good, but what a pity not to have op. 20 or op. 33 by their hand.

The fault is no doubt the producers’ –who probably think Beethoven is serious stuff, but Haydn “inconsequential” (people’s power of perception never penetrate the surface, polish is detrimental to popularity).

Kremer’s ensemble is very good — why does he not record more than the Seven Last Words?

Literature is humbug, art is where it’s at

Lukasiewicz also disappoints.

It is interesting to note that one could have divined this from the title — “How to be a great artist on the example of Thomas Mann” — which is gimmicky, indicating a kind of concept book, along the lines of “How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer”.  I have never yet read a well done concept book.  Experience suggests that perhaps one simply cannot be done.  Let that be a lesson for the future.

(A man on a rampage in the world of culture has constantly to judge a work by its cover so as to avoid a bad one — the disappointment, the loss of time — and clutches for the strangest of clues to help him choose.  Weirdly, some very odd clues do work:  there is no reason to think that just because Kiarostami makes good films, and he is Iranian, another Iranian film maker might make good movies, too, yet this is precisely how I discovered Makhmalbaf.  Here is to irrational clues).

The truth is more prosaic:  the title lies.  It is attached not to a concept book (one written to answer the title’s challenge), but to a series of essays which had been written for a number of different occasions.  For republishing they may have been rewritten somewhat — a line added here another there — to make it seem that they are all about the process of creation (which is envisioned in the stolid, 19th century manner, complete with metaphors of birth and Genesis).  I say that these lines must have been inserted later because many essays do not add up to a sensible whole: and no surprise: it is impossible to transmute an essay about management of cod fisheries into an essay about the great inflation phase of the Big Bang by adding a sentence here or there.

Not, at any rate, coherently.

Which is perhaps why the title is a valid give away.  A haphazard book which does not hold together needs to rely on a good title to give it shape.  Bad books need good titles more than good ones.  Good ones can be titles anything.  Death in Venice, for instance.

Mainly, the book fails the purpose set forth in its introduction.  It starts by observing, truly, that

one reads the Buddenbrooks, one reads Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Doktor Faustus, not necessarily in that order, but one reads them.  A few, perhaps a dozen years later, one reads them again and it is, of course, a completely new reading.  Later, on some occasion, for instance when a quotation is needed, on reaches out for the book, leafs through, finds the passage, but in the meantime one has fallen for it again, and one reads it, all the way to the end.  And this repeats.  After the nth time, one would like to be able to answer for oneself the question just what it is that grips us in this manner when we read Thomas Mann.

But the observations that follow are sadly of the usual literary-critical sort:  a kind of game of free association: this reminds the author about Schoppenhauer and that about Goethe and that again about Hauptmann.  In chapter X of Y character Z says “good morning” which are, funnily enough, the same words spoken by character W in chapter V of T.  Etc.

Either Lukasiewicz mistakes what she likes about Mann; or what she likes about Mann — what “pulls her in” — is not what pulls me.  Because I freely associate no matter what I read or hear.  Ergo, what pulls me into Thomas Mann — literally sucks me in — cannot be my ability to free associate about it.

Indeed, the best I have been able to say about what sucks me into Thomas Mann is that it is written strongly — some of the most amazing passages in The Magic Mountain for me are the descriptions of the most ordinary things — meals — second breakfast the room is “white with milk”; covering oneself with a blanket; the taste of a Maria Mancini.  Mann can write about a man walking in the street, putting one foot after the other, and I will read it with burning cheeks.  The hackneyed answer is that the cause is style — but what about it?  If there is any point to aesthetics it is to try to identify the causes of why something works.  I am unable to think aesthetically about Mann.  I don’t understand how the style does it.

In the center of the book is a concept essay:  the Magic Mountain Alphabet, with 25 mini chapters with titles like “A as in Mr Albin” and “B as in bobsleys”.  A touching concept — a pseudo-systematization of knowledge, the very essence of play.

A similar dictionary has once been written about Slowacki with a entry “ladder” describing at length how Slowacki has once, while on holiday in Switzerland, snatched the love letter of a young girl and ran from her up a ladder, while she chased him threatening to tell what she had seen in the garden.  It ended in a blow away sentence:  “But none of this matters; what matters is this:  the ladder, Slowacki upon it, and before him, in all its glory, the shining mirror of Lake Leman.”  The whole story, in other words, was a head-fake, a set up.  So such concepts can work provided one does have 25 interesting things to say about the book.  As it is, Lukasiewicz has only four or five.

It is perhaps inevitable that books about literature have to disappoint.  After all, their authors, one assumes, would rather write literature if they could; the fact that they do not betrays them as de minorum gentem.  This is perhaps why one of the most famous writers on earth today in private confesses that “literature is humbug, art is where it’s at”.

Severed heads that germinate

In an entertaining article by this name, Derek Freeman undertakes to explain why Dyaks take heads.

Unsurprisingly it turns out — to assure fertility.

(Everything the primitive man ever does — or thinks about — it would seem — is fertility.  Is this why we call him primitive — or is it just the imagination of the anthropologists that is?)

How does Freeman arrive at his conclusion?  Not by asking the Dyaks themselves, who, he says, were not very helpful in establishing this conclusion (p. 234).  Rather, he argues by way of Greeks and Romans who thought that sperm originates in the brain (not an especially wild assumption, if you consider male behavior carefully) and descends into the genitals through the spinal column.

As a group of English scholars once said:  and therefore a witch.*

Freeman’s refusal to take a no for an answer is important if only because other anthropologists suffer from the same misconception:  homo is sapiens, according to the profession, and therefore all his actions must arise from thought.  To coin a phrase, thought germinates action.  In fact, the business stands the other way up:  man acts and only then thinks up good reasons for doing so.

The actual reason why Dyaks take heads stares Freeman in the face on the pages of his own article, but, a true scientist that he is, he does not notice.  The reason is, in short, that the taking of heads assures that” the forest will abound with wild animals” (p. 237).  Which it sure does:  every head taken means one less competitor for food.  Head-taking is an early form of environmental protection.

*

Incidentally, the article mentions another anthropological argument:  that of McKinley, that heads are taken as a way of “winning souls for humanity” by “the ritual incorporation of the enemy as a friend”, the enemy’s head being chosen as a “ritual symbol of social personhood”.  I have news for McKinley:  the reason why heads are the preferred trophy world over is that the head is the only proof positive that the victim is really 100% dead.

For all this, it is a brilliant article; the description of the ngelampang ceremony, in which the daughters of the god petulantly ask to be given a head, an infant whose head is about to be taken confides in his mother that he “dreamt of being bitten by a huge and threatening snake, from which his head hurts even more than if it had been struck against an upstanding stump” (to which the mother answers “I fear my child that you are about to be speared and your head about to be carried off in a cane container”), the taken head is rocked gently like a baby and sung lullybies to, and when it is let slip out of its wrappings and dropped on the floor, it causes the women of the long house to jump up in (pretended) revulsion — the ceremony has all the precious worth of all superstructure — which is not, as per Marx, the weed grown upon economics, but weed grown on the evolved, mechanical, unconscious, hard-wired behavior.  (The explanation; perhaps the justification; but not the reason).

One only wishes the description provided more details of lighting, dress, colors, music.  Life and ideology are alright, but theater, well, that’s really interesting.

__________

*Cf. proof that if she floats, she is made of wood (or maybe a duck), Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail

Two reflections on Coriolianus

Coriolianus stirs two reflections:  first, on the man’s excessive pride, which ruins his otherwise promising career.

I, too, am a victim of destructive pride:  so many projects and relationships have been crossed out because they offended, because they were judged beneath me.  My  retirement is as much a result of the aesthetic repugnance at the world as of my inability to act in it — a kind of paralysis brought on by pride.

But this is not necessarily a loss:  Coriolianus does not become consul, so what?  I do not miss what I have not achieved in the world because — pride helps me see it — these are worthless, airy things.  To be a consul is to rule over (i.e. receive submission and adulation) of men who are beneath us anyway.  To concern oneself with what others think is to stoop.  The consulship here is a metaphor for all socially recognized achievement.

Such is not the nature of Coriolianus’ pride:  it is, as it were, a cut below: he does worry about what others think; and when he is banished, he takes revenge; in the end he dies because he insists on reminding the Volskis that he had once beaten them.  In short, to Coriolianus, what others think matters — and so he dies.  (If analogy has any power to compel effect, I shall live forever).

Second, the motherhood.  Coriolianus dies as he lives — as many men live, perhaps most — to please his mother.  Why does this feel like a loss?  If one chooses an active life, one will have to please someone — the Roman people, the critics — the object of one’s pleasing might as well be his mother, provided she’s not too old and isn’t going to die early leaving one purposeless halfway.

What puzzles is the mother:  what motivates her?  Social-climbing, perhaps:  she will achieve a higher position in Rome if she can maneuver her son into consulship; failing that, by saving Rome from his wrath.  Yet, when she comes to beg of him to spare the city, she must understand his standing in the Volskian camp and realize that if he relents, the Volskians will kill him.  Does she not care?

On Beauty

There is a fundamental problem with “On Beauty”:  and it is illustrated by the instance of “Bach sounding like a sewing machine sometimes”:  Mothersill isn’t an connoisseur of the arts she uses as her examples — and is therefore bound to misunderstand how one perceives or evaluates beauty in those arts, and therefore — in general.

Perhaps there are two fundamental problems with it:  the second being that although I think I have come to understand a good deal about value judgments in art — certainly more than the book’s author does — yet I no longer care to share what I have learned — and therefore to put it in writing, and therefore to systematize it; and therefore my knowledge — experience is the better word, as the skill isn’t sufficiently explicit — will remain inchoate, felt and practiced, but unconceptualized, undescribed, untheorized, untaught.

Aesthetics shall remain in darkness.