EPHEMERIS
Ephemeris is updated every few days, then archived at the end of each month
October 31, 2024: I have circled back around for another viewing of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. An amiable sort of cha-cha tempo (in the score if not in my head) takes me from scene to scene. There is the opener wherein a helicopter with randy journos onboard ferries a statue of Jesus (and its weighty shadow) to some destination in Rome, to the Vatican, I suppose. In the course of things, we arrive at the scene (just prior to the famous Trevi Fountain episode) in which Anita Ekberg wanders the streets with a kitten on her head. It is a brief passage of infinite charm, if nothing else, as I have just read somewhere that the ‘impossibly buxom’ starlet could not act to save her life. The hapless Marcello, doing the starlet’s bidding, is off looking to buy milk for the kitten at a late hour. A morning-after punch-up ensues between Marcello and a hack who once played Tarzan (and was Ekberg’s post-Tarzan significant other in the film). A few misadventures later, and we are in a church. Steiner is at the organ having at Bach. Who is Steiner?
It is not an inconsequential question. Apparently, some years back, Lunar and I had a conversation about the man. Lunar tells me that I took the view that Steiner was a monster. (Nolo contendere, I say, unsure as to what I am charged with.) Whereas he, Lunar being Lunar, saw Steiner as anything but. Steiner’s creation, as Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana tells me, no beached sea monster – as per the film’s finale – in sight, is owed to one of the movie’s scriptwriters Tullio Pinelli. (Seems that the man went to school with Cesare Pavese, the Italian novelist, who would commit suicide in a Turin hotel room in the year 1950. He had been disillusioned with communism and Stalin. There was a woman in the picture....) At any rate, as soon as the scene in which we are introduced to Steiner appears on the screen, a question pops into my thoughts from a place in my brain marked Mischief.
So then, what question? We had best invite ourselves to an evening’s gathering of cognoscenti at Steiner’s place. This passage in the film has always struck me as one made of pretentious gits, male or female, showing off their tenuous grasp of life. Steiner, good host that he is, seems morose underneath it all. A recording of a thunderstorm is being played, and Steiner looks thoughtful. As if he were Zeus wondering what he has got himself into. We are put in the presence briefly of his perfect children and perfect wife. Steiner will come to shoot his children, and he will terminate himself with a shot to the temple, his perfect wife out shopping. Marcello, to some extent, idolizes Steiner for having seemingly worked through a few nagging conundrums such as life throws at us. Hence Steiner has been living a meaningful and happy existence. Marcello will now crater as the obvious becomes apparent, and he will drink a lot. What meaningful existence? What happiness? The universe began as a singularity. Does this add anything to the debate?
Again, which question? Has it ever been answered? Is it answerable? That is, we will assume, however briefly, that Steiner’s monstrous act was a question, not a declaration of futility, not sheer perversity. All along, I have been reading a critique of Dostoyevsky’s early work by one Joseph Frank. (A citation for this work, with a quote, is below.) I had, without really meaning to, flipped to the end of the book, and here was David Foster Wallace in the guise of an appendix or afterword. My eyes picked out some words that more or less signified that our so-called writers of serious fiction are writing unserious fiction. I advised myself, “Get back to this when you get to it, if that makes any sense. For now, just finish reading what Frank has to say.” Here, it is perhaps worthwhile to recall that Wallace also committed suicide. (I was consigning some thoughts for this post to a notebook whilst in my local. Across the aisle, and a table down from me, a rather hefty woman was absorbed by the device in her hand splashing electronic light against her face. Sunglasses perched on her head. She had the look of a ‘player’. That is to say, whatever her personal ‘issues’ may or may not have been, her learning curve was taking her to a command of them. She had ‘solved’ everything. Even the sun in the sky was fake news. It was her daughter, equally hefty, that gave me pause, she diving into a mountainous heap of fries, boredom consuming her face as well as past episodes of self-loathing and depression. It was that obvious. And no, this has nothing to do with the problem of Steiner or with anything else for that matter, and then again, perhaps it does.)
Let us once more into the breach. If Steiner was posing a question, which one might it be? In the moment that I put all this to myself, my eyes drifted past the two women at their table to a TV screen on the wall. News footage of Gaza. I recalled that Marcello, in answer to a question asked him by the officer investigating Steiner’s shocking deed of murder-suicide, surmised that perhaps Steiner had been afraid. Afraid of what? Afraid of ‘us’. Yes. Perhaps. Which might not mean all that much in the long run, but then you look at the news footage and then you are served yet other Trump perpetrated outrage, and you are left to ask, the galaxies separating from one another at an increasing rate of speed, who will remember and who will care? A thousand years later, give or take a mass atrocity or two, and we do remember the Cathars. That they believed in not one but two gods was a bridge too far for the established church, and consequently, some extirpation went on in good old Languedoc. I will wager that a thousand years from now and Gaza will be remembered similarly somewhere on this planet even if hell has frozen over on the Sahara.
Postscript I: Carpenter
Postscript II: Lunar has told me that a poet he knew, working in a bookshop near his own, said of David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest that it was pharmacology, not literature. Lunar himself chucked it in a third of the way through the work. He had only consented to read it so as to make a friend happy. She was not made happy, her nihilism her only operating gear. On the other hand, Lunar read Wallace’s book of essays Consider the Lobster and found it ‘admirable’. He thinks Wallace probably had a good head on him but there was this element of nihilism [in the man] (Lunar admitting here that he could be wrong about this) which seemed a fast-track to his suicide. ‘Either that or he imploded.’ Lunar went on: ‘My archaeological chapter is a mess. This may be because I am depending too much on verbatim [???], but there is something I am aiming at, how the Bronze Age site I visited, the empty shells of houses on the island, the ruined cottage of the last bard in the traditional sense lived, how they all occupy the same continuum, those being the places from whence the stories come because at their centre were fires, fires where now there are TVs.’ Damn. I guess it had to happen. Something poetical. Even with a word like continuum. It does happen sometimes. There is no accounting for time or place or ambience. Meanwhile, I will own that it has never occurred to me – the misnomer that the Big Bang is, given that when it occurred, there was no air about in which sound might register. The Big Whiff? The Large Swoosh? The Immense Pfft? Einstein at play with bubble-gum?
Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champagne-Urbana, and solidly in the Big Bang fold as in, yes we are, we are the Bang itself or what has become of it: ‘As for tying DFW [David Foster Wallace} to any of this, that's anyone's guess. I briefly dated an English professor at Illinois State University where Wallace taught; she told me she became a good friend of his, but never wanted to add any more than that [to our conversations], which was kind of weird. Also odd that Wallace criticized modern fiction. He could write some good brief nonfiction, magazine-article type stuff, although the manner in which he structured some of that writing strongly suggested a disheveled, disorganized mind. His fiction works are virtually unreadable. "Infinite Jest," (taken from Shakespeare) for which he's best known, is, I'd say, the very worst fiction I have ever read. It's what, 900, 1,000 pages? After about 100 I debated whether my copy should go back on the shelf or in the trash. Extremely rare I stop reading any book. Its 100s of pages were merely a pile of mental discombobulation. He became a kind of cult figure, I guess because he committed suicide. But as Harold Bloom once noted, he couldn't think and he couldn't write. That's not to say he wasn't brilliant in some ways. Just that his brain was hopelessly crippled by too many [???] aggressors.’ I take it that Drake did not much care for Wallace, though he adores the sci-fi of the 1950s. Whether that would include The Fly (1986, with Jeff Goldblum) as homage, as a nod at the oeuvre I cannot say. But then Drake inadvertently or deliberately on purpose goes and coins a new word. Said word is ‘schmultz’. Says Mr Drake: ‘But film in America is nothing more than a commodity subject to market pressures. That means the general public, and that means mediocrity. Ergo, schmultz.’ We return to regular broadcasting.
Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘I like that: schmultz. Perhaps we’ll need a new wing for the local library so as to accommodate the work of ‘schmultz’.
Quote-a-thon: It’s not hard to see why Dostoyevsky chose hope and faith over reason, and why he often showed in his later novels those who were unable to do as foundering in madness or committing suicide. Just saying. Not that we will here endorse a presidential candidate. From Joseph Frank’s Lectures on Dostoyevsky, Princeton University Press, 2020.
What?
No Proust? Department: Consider this post an aside, one spoken at
some variance from the usual exegesis of things Proustian in prevous posts.
But what to do, in the meantime, when ball players (World Series microphones
in their faces) come off Rilkean? Beats me.
October 28, 2024: So Albertine falls from a horse, and of a sudden, she is dead. We are moving right along in The Sweet Cheat Gone, volume six of Proust’s seven volume opus. But somehow the news does not come off very Proustian. It is almost too tidy a solution to a problem, if there is a problem, as to what to do with the woman plot-wise. But Proust is not a ‘plot’ man, and there it is: one reason why I admire the man’s writing. It does look like Albertine’s death is going to reconfigure things. Where? In the young Marcel’s jealousy-addled ‘interiority’, or that which sometimes palls on me, for all of my admiration for Proust, and the thought occurs, with respect to the young Marcel: “For God’s sake, man, will the endless examination of every scrap and iota of your being ever take a breather?” Interiority: boon or curse? (I had a friend once whose every other word coming at me used to be ‘interiority’, to which my only response this side of amiability was: “I guess you like French literature.”)
Bizarre though, that episode wherein the young Marcel brings a girl-toddler up to his apartment and has her sit on his knee and then gives her money. At some point the girl’s parents get wind of it; they complain to the police who then bring the young Marcel in for an interview, and there will be further questions when it is discovered that Albertine had been his live-in…. “Is Proust doing a Lewis Carroll on me?” or so I asked myself. As remarked in previous posts, I have been made aware of some ‘literary’ people who regard Proust as ‘creepy’ at times. Perhaps there is justification after all. In any case, the episode came and went.
One is not always as attentive as one should be when doing some serious reading. I confess there have been times when I find myself zoning out in a block of Proustian prose, not a paragraph break in sight. Still, even when I suspect Proust is writing off the cuff, barreling along in a steeplechase with hardly a hitch, and there is the sense of every sentence being so ‘measured’ that when one comes to … …. for the force which girdles the earth many times in a second is not electricity, but pain… one inwardly exclaims: “Good lord, an outbreak of hyperbole.” Moreover, Proust insists that we flatter ourselves when we confuse ‘experience’ with habit and so, one is not really as experienced as one might think; one is merely habituated, hence not all that knowledgeable. His view of human relations is not particularly rosy, though not necessarily pessimistic. It is like looking into a gemstone while turning it between one’s thumb and forefinger, and seeing it all: light and clarity and the impenetrably dark.
Now say that music is music. Well, one is both right and wrong. Beethoven is not Lionel Ritchie, though Bach is closer to Coltrane than Thelonius is to Buddy Holly and John Fahey to an organ grinder. I think I just opened myself up to charges. The moonlight dematerializing the world… Now that gets me back on track. The sentence which contains those words jumped out at me from behind some Proustian hedge or other, and for a moment, everything I had ever read in my life hung in the balance. Perhaps a touch of Debussy here suits the mood… But then, unrelated topic, and everyone I know, including myself, feels their anxiety levels rising. The election, don’t you know. And based on a few news clips I have seen, might I be granted leave to ask: “For sheer volume of vileness, has there ever been its equal in the American annals?” I make reference to yesterday’s Madison Square Garden demolition derby of hate and other poisons wherein it seems the Donald was not wearing a helmet. They have become mantras in my mind perpetually sounding off, or that, one, people want to be bad; and two, crazy is as crazy does.
Postscript I: Carpenter
Postscript II: Lunar and more lamentations, be they justified or not, or that he went to the ‘premiere of an Iranian film’. Fifteen people in attendance. Which brings us to, in Lunar’s words, ‘the death of interest in things that only thirty years ago would have pulled a full house - and I suspect the director will be languishing in an Iranian prison any minute now. It was extremely violent, extremely unhinged, and pointing to things your Iranian friend raised [in your rooftop exchange of views], clubs with everybody snorting coke, life in the fast lane. This, however, was more Dostoevsky than Martin Amis.’ … …. Yes, I had a conversation with an Iranian woman on a rooftop. We had a view of the splendorous autumn colours all around us. She was telling me that the more the regime attempts to control sexual behaviour, the more the air one breathes over there reeks of it – of sexuality… …. But now it is in Lunar’s mind to ask: ‘What to do with the watches &c years after their owners' deaths?’ We are in the midst of an existential crisis at the core of western civilization, but that there is existential crisis and then there is existential crisis. Perhaps, as per Wim Wender’s Perfect Day, a fine cinematic effort, German-Japanese production, in light of fascistic idiots and unclaimed personal effects, one needs to lip synch for a while along to some Nina Simone while at the wheel of one’s vehicle, so as to put any number of bummers behind you.
Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champlain-Urbana – and he has yet to meet a baseball he likes – reports: ‘I knew I was using the wrong terminology — middle anything — as I wrote it. Yes, it [baseball] certainly transcends socioeconomic classes. By Middle America my fleeting thought was simply iconic America. But I mussed it up by throwing class into the mix. And than, self-contradictorily, I've nothing against iconic America… [At any rate], I was so ill-educated about baseball, the first time I ever had to step to the plate was in the 6th grade, new school. My "team" thought I'd be a star player; I was pretty solid and I guess muscular-looking by then. I got to the plate and had no idea whatsoever how to hit that goddamn ball. My teammates were aghast and I was embarrassed half to death. I can still recall a vision of that godawful moment in my youth. Maybe it contributed to my forthcoming anti-social, or I'd say anti-societal, behavior. Baseball was, as you know so well, as Middle American as Middle America can get. So in a way, that humiliating afternoon at the plate likely caused my lifelong detestation of all things middle-class in America.’ … …. Drake then. But I cannot tell you if the man’s ‘lifelong detestation of all things middle-class in America' led him in his youth to Beat poetry and ‘Fuck God’ buttons, and all manner of else, which, in retrospect, seems to have led a great many lives pretty directly to the middle classes and the appropriate sinecures. Hang on though, wait a minute: the man aims to pile on. Late-breaking: how the Sunday rally was indeed vile [with its sea of handheld devices like polyps], but that Trump goes and insults the people whose votes he needs while Harris gains among white voters in the northern, rust-belt states. 'Only Trump could be so politically [obtuse]. Now if Harris would just stop talking policy, entirely, and go for Trump's throat instead, [full lock-on] she might just pull off a victory. She's getting horrendously bad advice from her campaign staff — not a good sign of leadership.'
Postscript
IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Who’s this friend of yours? Magnolia?
Whose word to the wise is, in the event of a Trump victory, the only sensible
thing to do is to drink oneself to death? Rock on. Otherwise, look, running
late. I suppose that, soon enough, we’ll all be howling at the moon
either from relief or in mournful song. Or what’s the old buzz (by way
of your man there John Donne)? Love would sometimes contemplate, sometimes
do. Off to see an orthopedist….’
October 22, 2024: I had a dream about poetry. In which dream a long poem, just published, was to be celebrated. A number of people were to read passages from the poem as a fine way to spend an evening. A friend was to be one of those readers. Now here was a man deeply versed (no dream pun intended) in all that truly matters in literature. But when it came his turn to read, someone (this someone resembled Lenin a little – lean and hungry look, goatee) commandeered the podium. Over some objections to this maneuver, he argued that his was the better understanding of the poem. And so he read, and so my friend heckled. To solve the impasse a fat woman, presumably having shouldered the Lenin figure aside, began reading from the epic. However, she only added to the tensions in the room, reading as if she had a claim to be the poem’s author. She was anything but, and she continued to read as if it were therapy for her weight problem. One might ask, "Sound familiar?" One might ask, but then questions of pigeon-holing arise, and one might be on the hook for rudeness.
I had yet another poetry dream of late, one to go hand in hand with the dream cited above and with the dream remarked on in the post previous. To wit, a jeep had stalled in an intersection, three stoners in the vehicle, all of them wasted, barely, if at all conscious. A passerby, so as to alleviate the traffic jam building up in all directions, popped the hood, and in addition to smoke rising from the engine, one could see a stack of books – on the driver’s side, if that has any dream world significance. The titles were unseen, but they seemed to indicate that the three stoners were very likely poets caught in some crack of a time-space continuum or some such nonsense. One did not know what to think. Was one to feel hopeful about poetry and the world’s state, seeing as there was a Johnny-on-the-spot attending to the stalled engine? Or was one to take away from the situation the sense that we and poetry and the world are truly up against it? I woke, the dream ‘having done its thing’. Arsinoe popped into my mind. (Think Cleopatra’s ambitious sister.) How did things look from her perspective, Rome top dog and Egypt looking for a sniff? But this sounded too much like a make-work project and I let the thought slide.
Apart from the rather active dream life, I have started in on Proust’s The Sweet Cheat Gone, one of the best ever book titles in the annals of literature. It is volume six of Proust’s seven volume opus À la recherche du temps perdu. Sometimes I accuse myself of lunacy for having decided, earlier in the year, to read Proust in the round, as it were, that is, to reread the works entire. What I remember most from a previous reading years ago is a scene in which, bombs falling on Paris, M de Charlus is skulking about, looking for a ‘fix’, a sexual encounter, and that here is human nature at its most basic. I suppose I am wondering if that notion will hold up as I gradually close in on that scene, if indeed there is such a scene and my memory is not playing tricks.
In any case, Proust is one of those authors who has plenty of opinions and is not shy about expressing them in the course of his ‘narratives’. He is forever telling you which end is up in human relations as are man and man, man and woman, woman and woman, and there always the boy-child and the girl-child, and the beasts of the field, and Melville’s whale. He is at it immediately on the first page of The Sweet Cheat Gone. I cannot speak for the French but in English the sentence is rather prosaic, tres bald, but a bit poignant as in: How ignorant we are of ourselves. A sentence that precedes the one just quoted and which contains some relevant particulars: … …. as I compared the mediocrity of the pleasures that Albertine afforded me with the richness of the desires which she prevented me from realizing… …. And bear in mind that Albertine was gone and you would think the young Marcel would be over the moon, but apparently he was not. So now Albertine was everything to him, not just some nothing. For all that, the young Marcel retained presence of mind: The first thing to be done was to make my anguish cease at once. &c. A few pages later and we come upon this: … …. The fact that our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate instrument for grasping the truth, is only a reason the more for beginning with the intellect, and not with a subconscious intuition, a ready-made faith in presentiments… …. You can argue it out amongst yourselves as to what is meant by those words. Because it would seem that … …. In order to form an idea of an unknown situation our imagination borrows elements that are already familiar and for that reason does not form any idea of it… …. And verily … …. each man has his own way of being betrayed, as he has his own way of catching cold… …. But that the penny had dropped: Albertine was off somewhere in the wind, going going gone, and all the various ‘selves’ that comprised the young Marcel’s personality had to be informed of the fact… …. To each of them I had to relate my grief, the grief which is in no way a pessimistic conclusion freely drawn from a number of lamentable circumstances, but is the intermittent and involuntary revival of a specific impression, come to us from without and not chosen by us. And sometimes, even when one thinks Proust is beginning to pall, and is using words just for the sake of using words, the man nails the reader and all the weight of 300,000 years of human consequence falls on said reader.
Postscript I: Carpenter
Postscript II: Lunar seems to have about his place some very green absinthe of which Magnolia partook last night, Magnolia a wandering knight-errant who, along with his beloved, appeared in London, knocked on Lunar’s door, and a merry time was had. Somehow Kirsty Gunn the novelist figures in all this, but then I am name-dropping and so, a slap on my wrist and a promise not to do so again. Lunar goes on to say that to acquire ‘a patina of pop culture’ is one of the perils of academic success. Olé, olé, olé. (As in the soccer chant.) And how can one resist a writer with Pogue as a middle name, this in reference to Robert Pogue Harrison's The Dominion of the Dead? James Sutherland-Smith follows up by saying that he thinks the Hellenistic poets were the first 'literary' poets, [and then] 'the Romans picking up on the likes of Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes and Leonidas of Tarentum'… …. And, I am a name-dropping hound.
Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, turn right at Peoria and do a dogleg veering south, says that he admires Alex (Alexander the Great) just for his guts. Never mind his psychopathy. Says our man in Havana: ‘He [Alex] also allowed the locals to maintain their cultural ways, as I recall. But I'm no great reader of Alex histories. Returning from the store just now, Gatorade and protein in hand, I had the news on and if Biden had been within swinging distance I'd be locked up.’ Here a command of language failed Mr Drake, a rare occurence, he going on now about ‘atrocities’, Gaza and Ukraine, and the worth of Sullivan and Blinken – not so much, Putin a paper tiger, what a bunch of ‘pussies’. Well, one flails about. One hears about the sin of despair. Catholics believe in forgiveness; Jews believe in guilt. (An observation, meant to be semi-humorous, from the flick Angels in America. It may well have nothing to do with anything.) Whatever the reasons for this war (in Gaza), whatever the rationales with respect to all the players, after a year or so of the horrors, they all seem pretty chewed up by now, unrecognizable. It is a double-tiered marathon. The one side is breathing heavy; the other side has no breath.
Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: He has nothing to share with us for the moment, as he is ‘inundated with info/reports/updates/news/data and all manner of blah blah.’ He would feel compelled to retreat into the bush and lie under a tree and, well, who knows, maybe it [would] drop its leaves over him and he would have a good long hibernation. (We had been talking bear cults of the ursine kind.) He would feel compelled and yet, the thing is, on his island he is already there – in the bush, so to speak. So, best not to talk to him about the election, one supposes. Or movies made about hellfire ‘spawn’, Satan a clown partial to maggot-infested pizza slices - there's the decline of the empire for you. Or that a casting director messed up when he or she got some boy-brat to play the part of Alexander the Great, and if there was any greatness in the man, it would have had to have come from his generals.
Postscript V:
Shee's dead; And all which die/To their first Elements resolve;/And wee were mutual Elements to us...
From John Donne's poem, The Dissolution, seeing as, in light of remarks above, it caught my eye. John Donne: 1572-1631.
October 17, 2024: Marcel Proust’s The Captive (volume five of the seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu) is winding down. It looks like Albertine is going to do a runner, that is, leave the young Marcel in the lurch, sucking air. She had been, as it were, his mistress, sex slave, nemesis. Me, I feel myself invaded by an unwelcome presence as I read along. Succubus or other order of unwelcomeness, the presence is an interviewer for an ultra-right news channel who gets off on bullying his interviewees. In other words, I find myself oddly hyper-critical of what it is I am reading, these last few pages of The Captive, The Fugitive (or, better title, The Sweet Cheat Gone) to follow. Unfair.
Well, I have been reading Proust for the better part of a year. Perhaps, I ought to give the prose a rest. Sentences go in one ear, and, after a while, they come out the other. For instance: It seems that events are larger than the moment in which they occur and cannot be entirely contained in it. A commonplace observation, when you think on it, but no less true for that, an American election coming up, the republic perhaps mortally wounded, and I am not referring to the Third Republic of France. … …. in which I had awoken like a young Adam faced for the first time with the problem of existence, of happiness, and not bowed down beneath the accumulation of previous negative solutions. Was the man in group therapy? The quotes, of course, are from Proust, and the other day it had seemed to me that reading the man was like standing in the deepest part of a cave, ancient drawings on the walls of animals and stick people, and the silence, and the awe, and the dread.
In the course of the most recent reading in Proust, a word popped into my head: decouplage. I figured it was not a proper word, that I had coined it, feeling whimsical. I had somehow wanted to see the young Marcel-Albertine rupture as being the very stuff of the air we have been breathing since Gilgamesh, or that, every minute somewhere in the world couples are decoupling even as Trump as Be-bop Meister, as Terpsichore in drag, is doing the hokey-pokey in Pennsylvania, voters looking on, and that state may never be the same. Turns out decouplage is a proper word after all, if in French, as dècouplage, and it has something to do with economics and with what nation-states do to or with one another (unprintable?), and all I have wanted to do with this post is rescue the word ‘autumn’, a once beautiful word, from literariness.
The other night I dreamed The Kingfishers, the poem by Charles Olson, one of those 'breakthrough' poems, American idiom. My understanding of the poem was being questioned by a pair of examiners, and the truth was that I had no idea what the poem meant, as when I first read it in my late teens and came away dismayingly bewildered. One of the examiners, an old woman, looked very severe. The other, a man of similar age, motioned that they were wasting their time with me. They should move on. Fair enough. I woke from the dream thinking it was just a garden variety anxiety dream. A worse fear was that I might have to reread the poem just to get myself right with it, if possible. Should I follow one chore up with another? Ought I then read The Cypria, a Greek epic (a sort of prequel to The Iliad) which dealt with Troy et al as did Homer’s epics? Most of The Cypria is lost to us but it was well known in the ancient world. But moving on...
Look, a human handprint on a cave wall perhaps marked the first moment of human ascendancy over the rest of our fellow creatures. So what did the Bruniquel Cave turn up with respect to Neandertals? Early, early instances of art and religion. Benign cannibalism, so to speak, as when the living ate their dead so as to acquire what had been their virtues. Could be that was what Trump was doing – as he danced – somewhere down deep in the primordial-est part of his brain. Moving on:
The date
of any given piece of oral literature is the day on which it was last recited
or on which it was reduced to writing. Reduced. Ominous sounding. From
Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics, Rhys Carpenter.
Reduced, as in killed off, perhaps. There has been a tug of war in me since
I can remember between the ‘literary’ and the notion that literariness
is hazardous to the soul and to literature itself. ‘Writing’ has
certainly wreaked havoc on the memory function.
Postscript I: Carpenter
Postscript II: Streams of consciousness, Lunar mode: ‘You talk about anomalies, well, this site is like nothing else in the British Isles, yielding the only prehistoric mummies in these parts, hints of child sacrifice, a dog cult, absolutely nothing in keeping with the rest of the archaeological scene. They are not Egyptian-style mummies either but composite mummies, comprised of parts taken from different bodies. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, caveman. … …. Biden is a bona fide idiot. I have to assume his sending American troops to help "defend" Israel is supported by Kamala Harris as well. Such are my fears of her presidency, a combination of inexperience and inherited unthinking pro-Israeli sympathies. It is okay to kill Palestinians. I do not applaud the deaths of four Israeli soldiers but where in God's name is the balance? The IDF is literally destroying Lebanon just as it has already done with Gaza. So either way, Trump or Harris, America is about to fall into the Big Trap. And who knows what Iran is planning. Israel will win but it will be only for the time being. The Crusaders must have been bewildered when their hold on Outremer came to a close after 300 years. ... ....’ Well then just now, breaking news: the Hamas organizer of the raid on Israel, October 7 of last year, has been killed. Apparently. Fine. Innocent blood on his hands, he most likely deserved his fate. Now what of the extremist leaders on the Israeli side who have been mowing the lawn in Gaza to the tune of 42,000 dead souls all the while? I have just heard a commentator comment that when one mows the lawn, the grass comes back greener, stronger, healthier, lusher. So then, the grass will have to be burned away so that it will not have to be mown and raked anymore. Place your bets. We return you to the program in progress … …. ‘Just back from an exhibition of Ukrainian modernist painting and the sheer dynamic, the wedding of something like Cubism to folk art, tremendous colour palettes, and then the cold water splashed in the face when you look at the death dates of those artists - 1937/8 - and there you have it, the Stalinist purges, death sentences for those who were not even given a chance to adopt the socialist realist style. The exhibition ends most depressingly with a small room of some of that stuff and there are even a couple of paintings where even there the artists tried to circumvent the dictates. It is what our current morality police would do if given the chance and given the chance they will be especially brutal [on] those of real talent. I want to round up the morality police and and and... If we submit to them, we have lost ourselves. There's the difference between 1937 and 2024: imposed censorship and the censorship that is entirely voluntary in nature. The cave and bit of routine cannibalism are by far preferable.’
Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana some three thousand years after the Sea Peoples, the Mycenaeans among them, unsuccessfully attacked Egypt: ‘At any rate, I tend to think "no" about a more soulful existence 50 years ago. Young people were still (in the early 70s) trying to grasp a greater soulfulness in a world torn by needless carnage abroad. But is the world not torn today as well? It's not doing much about it, but neither did it do much 50 years ago. If universal souls there are, they seem pretty damn inert, to the point of uselessness. … …. As [an] aside — you mentioned Yeats. I had a bad taste of the man once I read the background to his Slouching, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." He was one of the latter. … …. Yeats supported the protocol-fascist paramilitary organizations in Germany after WW I. From a master’s thesis I found this morning (and did I write it?): "Yeats never officially identified himself as a Fascist though he indeed aligned himself with Fascists and with Fascism from the beginning of the political movement until late in his life."' The man cannot remember a thesis he wrote? I hope he knows where his keys are.
Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Yeats, eh? I dunno. I still like the man’s poetry. Conundrum: why are the most ardent anti-fascist poets such jerks as people? So stuck on themselves. You have an answer? Aren’t you good for anything? (True enough: the MAGA gauleiter types aren’t exactly charming.) So, you’re sniffing up the Homeric winds again. What can I tell you? But I like that bit where Circe (in The Odyssey) is described as being nowhere remotely Greek but all Brothers Grimm, her sense and sensibility strictly deep forest, not salt air. Which would make her story way older than anything else in the poem. Whatever that could possibly mean to us, if anything. I’ve had a hankering for red licorice. I shan’t succumb. And for a fine brandy, too. I just might succumb. Get a load of that guy saying Trump’s not a fascist; he’s a fighter. I’d put them both in the ring with Achilles the Sleaze or Hulk the Hogan at least. I can stop anytime now. You want I should stop? Must’ve mislaid my lithium compounds….’
Received: Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics, Rhys Carpenter, University of California Press, 1962
Felicitations Department: Happy 81st birthday shout out to Eric Orsmby, last of the gentleman poets, amateur naturalist, feuilltonist, ballroomj dancer, and Arabic scholar all rolled up in one linebacker's physique.
October 11, 2024: I can hear the breezy tune to which these words are sung: Getting to know you, getting to know all about you. (From the ‘King and I’, the musical.) The Julie Andrews voice I associate with such showtime has always been a torture to me. You would think that, in rendition sessions, they would pipe that voice, and it is borderline shrill, and, in addition, so earnest, through their speakers rather than heavy metal grunge when they aim to crack a ‘terrorist’ open. In any case, in this instance, here the ‘you’ of the lyrics is not ‘some other person’; it is oneself. Man, woman, what have you, does anyone in any real sense, ever come to understand their natures?
If people do routinely come to know what makes them tick (beyond certain primal drives and needs), it surely requires a lot of time for even some minimal acquaintance, perhaps a lifetime’s worth of Q&A and scuffling about for what boots it at deep levels of the psyche. So much for instant identity, for all those identities one might believe one has at one’s disposal as merely get in the way of true reckonings. And which of those identities are actually hostile to one’s well-being, as per a scene from Men in Black? Will Smith (soon to be Agent J), auditioning, as it were (as part of a rapid-fire response exercise), for a government post, must demonstrate his skills at determining which of the pop-up creepy-crawlies about to receive the discharge of his weapon is the real threat to public safety. And it is the pop-up which appears the most innocuous, the least alien.
Moreover, Proust, in The Captive (volume five of his seven volume opus À la recherche du temps perdu) writes that not observation so much as experience of pleasure and pain is the only knowledge worth fussing over. I am prepared to quibble with the man on this count even as I cut him some slack: his life did not extend into our age of surveillance cameras and security checks and drones and satellite monitors and God knows what else, the Hubble telescope, hence, how could he know anything, how could he reach any conclusion about X,Y, and Z except by the sloppy process of inference? How could he make any claim to ‘knowledge’? But I am also inclined to take his point: if ‘understanding’ anything has any point in any life, if happiness is to have any traction in the course of a life, it is to be reached by successfully (metaphor alert) sailing through something like the Symplegades (you may recall a pair of rocks that guard the entrance to the Bosphorus in Greek myth). It is to say that, to get anywhere, one is obliged to navigate between the two rocks which are likely to close upon a sailor making the attempt, the one rock being pleasure and the other pain, or so I would have it in my fanciful notions of echolocation.
The young Marcel and Albertine (as I read along in The Captive) are having the ‘conversation’. They will agree to part ways, to never see each other again. The high-level talk the young Marcel is having simultaneously with himself and Albertine invites the digressionary: he will go on about Thomas Hardy, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy et al, saying that each author essentially wrote but one book despite all the books credited to their names; or that his favourite composer Vinteuil wrote the same piece of music over and over, no matter the variations to be had between all the pieces he did compose, and perhaps ‘genius’ is obsessive &c. Is the man saying that were he a serial romancer, and he might well be that, he would be wooing the same woman repeatedly? One minute Albertine is of no interest to the young Marcel and in the next he is wild for her, especially when he contemplates the fact that he cannot control her, and what it is he cannot have of her is what drives him to ‘love’ her; and to be sure, one thing he cannot have with her are her intimacies with girls. And yet, if she herself does not ‘love’ her ravisher, she certainly likes him well enough, and perhaps, fleeting thought, enjoys the fact of his jealousy except when it renders him tiresome. And he walks into her room (there in his mother’s abode), and there she is on the bed in the moonlight, and, upon waking, she throws her arms around his neck in some fit of enthusiasm or other that is genuine, is far from faked; that is some kind of joy that only young women seem to have the knack for, and so what if she (unintentionally) drives him mad and his knees churn like something buttery …. Or what if she decides to ‘pre-empt’ and she herself part ways with the young Marcel and all his machinations, the wanker? So polite, yes, and relentless. The other thing that keeps sticking in my mind, burned out cliché that it is: wars always come back to haunt the aggressor.
I meant to discuss the effects of music on someone or other, myself most likely, and in my notes I see I have scribbled Beethoven, Duke Ellington, blues hollers, Puccini arias, and, who knows where I thought to go with it all? I must have had on the brain Proust’s discussions of Vinteuil and his violin sonata to end all violin sonatas…. (The image I have in mind, whipped up by some music or other, seemingly at random, is autumn and yellow leaves, a scarf around one’s throat…. Have you not noticed? It has come to be that time of year.) I had also meant to say ‘showing some leg in Lebanon’. I had meant to get at the essence of what is meant by ‘skank’. I suggest that ‘genocide’ is too soft, to UN-ish a word with which to describe what goes on in Gaza. The word to employ is ‘extermination’. Would Proust have had the patience for any other word choice? However the goings-on are characterized in the West Bank and Gaza, self-defense does not fit the bill. It is more akin to book-pulping, bulldozers the tool of choice, to be followed by new ‘acquisitions’ once the shelves have been cleared, or the land divested of its vermin.
Postscript I: Carpenter
Postscript II: Lunar. He would say that the universe desperately needs to adjust its hearing aids. It has more than one? ‘We went to “Fidelio” last night and although the first half was superb and the singing good the second half was marred by idiocy such as one has come to expect in that theatre of huge egos and empty brains. There was a huge projection onto the back of the stage of people in the audience, one of whom was swigging a bottle of water. All this during the most moving scene when Fidelio comes to rescue Florestan. Who in the fuck are these people, these numbskulls with "ideas" in their heads?’ … …. ‘Janusz in Montreal has died. He'd been in hospital "drying out" for a month, came home, hit the bottle again and collapsed in the bathroom, Danuta not even noticing his absence. A stupid life stupidly lived.’ ... .... The one thing about Lunar: he is always quotable, even in his most aggravated Cyrano mode.
Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana and all the sweet-nothings its traffic lights whisper into a pilgrim’s ear: But facts are a sorry thing when stacked up against the avalanche of lies coming from the right. Jesus. The man, generally upbeat even when up against it in both a personal and public way, has been despondent of late. The election is not supposed to be this ‘too close to call’, no matter if the polls may mislead or are wrong-headed. Drake eschews sloganeering and cynicism, but when I say that people want to be bad, and we know from whom they are getting their permission, their ‘by all means, knock yourselves out, you baddies’, and no matter what hurricanes do to them or play-off losses or Jewish space lasers, nothing is going to put a dent in the party they mean to have – Drake will raise a hand and suggest I am sailing too close to the Wagnerian. Götterdämmerung? What? For pissants on opioids? The hoi polloi hoarding their lotto stubs? The ‘I’m gonna nail yo ass’ gents whom Obama would lecture on how they should exercise their voting privileges? Who is going to educate whom? I suppose we will be enlightened at some curtain raiser or other sooner rather than later. Shiver me timbers.
Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Hey, man. Nothing going here. I’m Graham Greene-ing myself into oblivion. I am confused. Was there a moral universe once? Should I have been Dante Alighieri-ing all this time, thrown in some Omar Khayyam? Do you remember the stonemasons in Jude the Obscure? Should I buy a Prius?’ The man has got me there. I look out the window. Autumn leaves. Non-literary. The shadows they throw against a brick wall.
Quotable?
Therefore
I’ll give no more; But I’ll undoe
My world by dying; because love dies too.
From His Nibs John Donne whom a gypsy woman from Brooklyn introduced me to, way back when, packing Donne, Plato, and six-packs in the trunk of her DeSoto.
October 5, 2024: People want to be bad. All the dogs are out. Carnage is the new MacBurger in town, although it is the same old hamburger, if with extra cheese. In an apparent non-sequitur, I will now say that in the flick Candy (1968) Richard Burton gives what is the best, spot-on send-up of a poet in the history of film, such as renders Omar Sharif’s portrayal of Zhivago almost endearing, never mind how Depp played Johnny Wilmot. It was not for laughs. The rest of the film is a hit and miss affair. The rest of the film strikes me as forgettable. (I tuned out at the point where James Coburn plays up a demented surgeon….) Speaking of poets and weekend brain doctors, though I do not believe he is Welsh, Foulard, after a long, long silence, has advised me that he has written a spate of poems in homage to Vincent van Gogh. Most poems that would have paintings as subject matter generally fizzle out before the first stanza hits the ground running for lack of oxygen, but these verses seem hellbent on proving me wrong. If you doubt me, you may consult poems and consider the sunflowers.
Otherwise, like I said, people are wanting depravity for breakfast (they cannot even wait for the sun to go down), with a side order of race hate. While I am not a feel-good sort of guy, and despise moral ascendancy games, hate is poison pure and simple, no ifs, ands, and buts about it. History, if you know any history at all, says as much in every other word. History may be written by the winners, but hey, I am guessing that you can read between the lines.
Moreover, you disdain the libs? Well then, take it upon yourself to sanction it, or that some aggrieved entity or other would go and bomb medical facilities in Beirut. In addition to which, you might spread it around, as did Dance-for-Me Marjorie Taylor Greene doing an encore (she had hit comic paydirt with respect to Jewish space lasers), or that Biden can snap his fingers and make a hurricane happen, thereby bringing on the need for disaster relief, the funds of which will go to illegal immigrants who will then vote for You-Know-Whomever. Is it not bottomless, the extent to which perfidy takes possession of the ‘liberal’ mind? He might be whatever you wish him to be on a scale of one to ten, but that Biden is Merlin is a stretch.
You wish to ‘own’ a puling libtard? Well, let us see, you might applaud certain high spirits in the West Bank as would rough up wannabe capitalists there, as would trash the shops, howl and hoot like squads of frat rats or budding engineers, and post it all on social media, hi mom. You might get envious: how certain parties are permitted to go about and abuse detainees, seeing as you cannot do it in Cincinnati. Say they spread such a patsy belly-flat on the ground. Say they spray his naked buttocks with some no-name chemical. Say they invite a dog to have at it, as if the dog were a Pavlovian mascot wanting his reward for services rendered. Say you have doubts. Is it possible, interspecies rape? But that it would even be discussed, described, and again, posted on social media – that scores a thumbs-up emoji or two. Where is Jonathan Swift when you need one? I say as much to a friend. He responds that war dehumanizes. Boys will be boys. And girls? No, not girls, too. In another country halfways bonkers-mad, where you are exercising your right to mad dog behaviour, against all evidence to the contrary, you will assert the election (any election) is, was, and shall ever more be rigged; you will have already done an Aleister Crowley on a congresswoman’s desk. Take that, spawn of Satan! And of course you are going to lie about all your pranks and misdeeds and accuse the opposition of lacking humour, and failing that, you will say, “Well, we’re only doing what they’ve been doing, and we do it ever so much better.”
Perhaps, Jonathan Swift aside, I will go for Jerry Lewis and the comic whine. Or that it has been true for decades, how the denizens of Palestine occupy the lowest ranking on humanity’s totem pole. Why not make it interesting? Let us say it is now someone else’s turn for that distinction, just as, at the UN, the Security Council presidency is parcelled out on a monthly basis amongst the member states. Even America may step into the newly emerged breach. Can play the victim card every night on TV, and anchorpersons furrow brows and try not to appear glassy-eyed as they explore their shrinking consciences and dissipating consternation. But lest I come it petty here, let me say there has been only one Jonathan Swift; no point in endeavouring to out-Swift the Swift, and I will deactivate, remove my finger from the laugh track button.
Another pleasant afternoon in these parts, and the hibiscuses are fat and smug with it, as we have crossed into October, and not yet encountered resistance. Here on the terrasse of my local, an elderly woman verging on obesity, has just polished off a huge lunch with all the relish of a condemned prisoner, and she, her appetite treated with, now calculates the odds for her continued survival. She is sitting there thoughtful. Some patron from inside has walked out to the flowers to pronounce them lovely and a thought just interrupted my thought-flow like a jumping spider: he is morally upright, so he wants the world to know, and yet, the odds are he has a sex slave in his basement. Another woman at another table, entrenched in middle age, is displaying her toes for the sun and the breezes, and to publish the fact that nothing about her is condemned. Had she the money, and I believe she has some, she could out-Paris Hilton Paris Hilton, one hand tied behind her back. I spent the morning composing a bit of music on my guitar, borrowed a few notes from ‘Hard Times Killing Floor Blues’ so as to work up a somewhat mournful caprice a la Faure or John Fahey. I had Gaza in mind. It satisfies a need in me, I have to say, and I will leave it at that. Apologies for going all soft, and for seeming to choose sides. I say again, everybody wants to be bad. This is the world so many people have been wanting, and now they have got it, be you MAGA, Israeli, Hezbollah, Hamas, be you a Bidenophile or Biden phobic; be you an Iranian still seething over what the Shah got up to, once the Yank and Brits had propped him up with a few cushions. Be you be you be you… and so it goes. War and revenge in Gaza? How about so many gangs of kids with all the latest military hardware, with jets to fly, having themselves a lark?
At a certain point in The Captive (volume five of Proust’s seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu) Proust as the young Marcel invites the reader to appraise his sanity. Sexual jealousy has bent it. He seems to suggest that, along with cancer and saturation bombing, sex-jealousy is the worst thing that can happen to a human being, and that an author might take a time-out and say as much could testify to sane and deliberative thought-sequencing on his or her part. And then to go and liken love to a mathematical theorem that can only be debated on mathematical terms… Perhaps here the ground is a little unsteady, and who has the patience for scrawling infinitely myriad equations on a vast cosmic chalk board? But that, chalk-less, he or she wrote a perfect poem and nobody came…. This, too, seems to reflect the sorry state of the world in which we boogie about as bunker busters blow smoke rings in the air.
In any case, it is looking like the young Marcel’s rupture (I almost wrote ‘rapture’) with Albertine will take forever, as has been the way of it with all the supper parties and soirees and visits to the opera hitherto. One minute the young Marcel would break with the wench; the next minute, and breaking with her is but a ruse so as to ‘control’ her all the more and to elicit from her some truth, not metaphysical truth so much as, well, a true statement of fact. Is she or is she not sleeping with girls? Is she or is she not spending time on the A-train recruiting fresh prospects? Is he an immature ass for believing that he really needs to know? Is he to marvel over the fact that the human mind is so staggeringly perverse? Or will a shrug suffice? The answer is a deep one. Yes, she sleeps with girls. Yes, she is mercenary, but no, she is not that mercenary, though yes, it might be considered a bit dodgy, shacking up with the young Marcel in his mother’s apartment, and she may or may not be conveniently on a world cruise. Could be that Proust is right, and that, at the bottom of human relationships, especially the sexual ones, you will find nothing but farce. Otherwise, we are most likely talking full-out sadism.
Postscript I: Carpenter
Postscript II: On top of the fact that the Black Dog has been breathing on Lunar, dinner with a good friend of his did not go well, eliciting this response: was it the most depressing evening of his life? So far as I understand it, it was, between friend and friend, one of those end-of-the-world conversations, or that, at best, we have only got a decade left, nary a joke, a witticism, anything to relieve the gloom in sight. “My God, the fights we used to have, but then the laughter too, one of the most dynamic friendships of my life. … …. We spent only two hours together, the first hour over pizza where we were being pushed at by TWO waiters to finish [toute de suite]. Great Neapolitan pizza, the best in London maybe, but I'm never going back there. The sheer absence of grace, all for the increased profit margin. This is what is happening now, one is timed. Going to a restaurant was once a form of grace, was it not?” Yes, come to think of it, and along with everything else, any number of X-factors have gone graceless…. And this: “Any bets Israel determines the outcome of the US election? What a spectacle, everybody rushing to kiss Netanyahu's arse. Wasn't the warning just two weeks ago that with Israel hitting Lebanon he might cause all-out war and now that he's done it there is only applause? Anybody remember Gaza? The opera house last night and another lousy production. The audience went wild which shows just how ignorant audiences have become. One rarely sees the deeply knowledgeable folk of old but that is because they have died [out]. Opera is for nouveau riche dumbfucks now.” And that is a wrap and it has been epochal, seeing as Lunar hardly ever resorts to language as foul as 'dumbeffers'.
Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, which is surrounded by battlements and a moat: … …. ‘and the US warned that a direct attack against Israel “will carry severe consequences for Iran." Against ISRAEL [?]. When did Israel become our 51st state? Ukraine is much closer to us in Western "values," and that nation we have largely let dangle on a rope. But Israel? Send in the [Keystone cops].’ Well, true enough, Drake sometimes gets testy and querulous. Too many peanut butter sandwiches for supper repasts.
Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: Look, the man is taking yet another breather from A&E and frontline journalism. Cut him some slack. He is going by the theory that the less he knows, the better. He is second-guessing that theory, or that there is never any end to knowing. When in doubt, he reads Confessions of an English Opium Eater in German, as he is a bright boy.
A Fine Pair of Lines Department, from John Donne:
Stand still,
and I will read to thee
A Lecture, Love, on love’s philosophy….
I imagine the
poet was at his breakfast, having at some marmalade and a crumpet, the logo
on his coffee mug a CBC retro design, or ‘Genius’ or ‘Holy
Ghazal, Batman’, and then the lines popped into his head. All the rest
was gravy.