September 2024

September 15, 2024: Early this morning, I read in an on-line posting that, if we take a look back over the past five years (and why not ten or twenty?), it has been breath-taking, what we have lived through. I will not itemize all the events that have made for serial craziness, but it has had the feel of living life inside a film being fast-forwarded and frog-marched, to boot, and to what end? Will the reel come flying off its spool? The other day, I walked into my local bookstore. In the speakers was the sound of a trumpet: one discrete note after the other. Right. Miles Davis, I thought to myself, a few bars of something I had not heard in years. What was the album? Something to do with Spain?

It stopped me in my proverbial tracks, that trumpet. It stopped time, everyone and everything around me in slow-motion. And I feel more affinity for strings than I do brass. I went home. Over the course of the next day or so, and with the word ‘Homeric’ banging away in my head with respect to something unrelated to the music just heard (or was it, after all, related?), I listened to ‘Sketches of Spain’, read some literature treating with the album. As if I were the last person to know of it, I read that the Canadian Gil Evans was behind all the orchestration, and that he died in Cuernavaca which is certainly not Toronto in January. I also read review-ese that, to my mind at least, had nothing to do with the music in question. It was all about people showing that they had a grasp of what they evidently had no grasp of. But then, it was the internet. Cloaca. And this post shows that I have yet to walk away from that. If not the internet, into what does one place one’s faith? Faith. Is that not one of those words that has been, by way of ‘discourse’, absolutely discredited, if not obliterated, and expunged from the language of the 21st century?

Speaking of which … words: spindleshanks. I believe I have never before encountered ‘spindleshanks' until Proust-Moncrieff put it on the page for me to wonder at in The Captive, volume number five in Proust’s seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu. Daddy longlegs then. Close on its heels – ‘phizog’, an expression that one reads on a face, presumably a human face. As when Harris baited, and Trump did not just bite, he chomped. He swallowed whole, and there was phizogging all across the nation. I read the word phizog and thought: "There it is: Proust-Moncrieff fooling around." And then I read, as if set up for it: … …. ignoring the greetings of late-comers so indelicate as not to realize that it was now the time for High Art. Oh, ain’t it ever thus?

And I thought, well, a 'straight' man goes and critiques a woman and consequently cops a charge that he is sexist. A not so straight man critiques a woman and demonstrates superior understanding. Is the difference in the follow-through? Is it all in the times in which we live? No doubt, for the ‘straight man’, sex and romantic love are impediments to understanding any damn thing, let alone the female psyche, but sometimes Albertine, though she is ‘present’ enough on Proust’s pages, seems but a foil to the young Marcel, hardly a woman in her own right, although she has more life to her than were she conceptualized in a screen treatment for a police procedural, and she is directed to go and buck against the thought-patterns of the male bastion of the force. A young friend wrote to tell me that Genet adored Proust whom he read in prison, but that, in my friend’s opinion, what exercises my friend’s generation is not sorrow but shame. Shame over what? The inability to feel sorrow? And as of this moment, you would be right: this has nothing to do with Genet reading Proust in prison. Nothing to do with female empowerment. With cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, where, apparently, immigrants are eating them à la mode… I have walked into at least three shops (stationary store, poor man’s super-mart, the corner depanneur) in the past twenty-four hours wherein I was asked if I have pets. I answered: ‘squirrels and house sparrows, a few sentient succulents, but otherwise, no, no pets’. Not even a goldfish? No, ma’am. None, sir.

On occasion, I curse myself for setting myself the task of re-reading the whole of Proust. It sometimes sits heavy on one, the I-I-I-Me-Me-Me of the never-ending disquisition on X,Y and Z, but then, at times, one is rewarded for hanging in. A long, long passage on music and aesthetics in general… has nothing whatsoever to do with a plot line… Even so, I could care less about a plot, Vinteuil’s septet a vehicle for how love gets to be love or some facsimile thereof, but that if Proust's young Marcel is going to speculate non-stop about how M. de Charlus views the curl athwart Charlie Morel’s brow (as he tucks his violin into a passage of Vinteuil), therein, by way of hyper-awareness on the young Marcel’s part, is a high road to discombobulation. Music then, and a couple of generalities: emotion moves faster than thought. Music is so much more profound, cuts so much more deeply than mere logic, than reams of analysis, recognizes more connections, picks out more patterns more quickly and more completely… It is nothing that I have not known before, but to have it written down as Proust wrote it down, this does not happen every Friday night, and never twice on Sundays. Lunar, writing me, referred to Miles Davis’ trumpet as a ghost trumpet.

I had thought to compare Proust and Balzac when it comes to writing on money and its effect on the various social classes, but perhaps, another time. At least in Pere Goriot, Balzac does not linger on anything much except perhaps when it comes to brutality of the psychological kind (he almost seems to revel in it, as when he buries Goriot in humiliation after humiliation, Goriot nonplused: he has his reasons). What would Balzac have made of Trump? Perhaps the answer is a nugget to be found in one of his 90 plus novels, to be traded in for a bunch of Shakespeare.

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar has been rambling around in the northernmost reaches of England. The Northumberland coast. Romanesque cathedrals. Castle ruins. Hadrian’s Wall. ‘The first known letter written by one woman to another in all of Europe, basically a "Come to my party" invite. … …. [plus] a lot of nasty stuff on both sides between the Scots and the English but…’ And he writes: ‘Laura Loomer is a new voice to me and from what I have just seen I think keep her in - she may destroy Trump.’

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, which it is a command post on some stretch of an invisible defensive wall, speaking of L Loomer: ‘One comparison is William McKinley and Mark Hanna, as you can gather from the attachment. Another is George W. and his "brain" Karl Rove. Bill Clinton's Dick Morris. POTUS rarely made a move without consulting him and his polling. I recall that in George Stephanopoulos' book about his years in the Clinton WH he wrote that no one had more power over the prez than Morris, whom Stephanopoulos hated so much he recounted having waited impatiently to meet him at a D.C. restaurant, thinking, "Where IS that cocksucker" — a line I'll never forget…. …. And Trump? Whomever he talked with last. [As for the Trump-Harris debate and the fallout from it], only a "soupcon of schadenfreude" [on your part]? Mine was bountiful.’

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Homeric? Are you serious? So then, you must mean Homeric as memorable, or that the poems (the Iliad-Odyssey tandem) existed to serve memory, not TV ratings, not linguistic bravado. And so, were simple when simplicity sufficed, and complex when complexity was needed, you know, to make sense of a morass. Don’t mind me, I’m in another mood. Loomer-Trump? Braun-Hitler? Do we feel repelled by the latter couple for the fact that they were an item, given what had been going on? Do we feel even a hint of sympathy for a pair of fantasists who probably held hands and were full of regrets in their last moments? Is there another sit-com in the offing? Does Melania get the chinaware? I read somewhere that the carpet stank in Trump’s office. Surely, it was one of those gaslighting things. Homeric, eh? Alright then, when do we rumble? The ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ (composed by Rodrigo, a blind man, in 1939)… it was the music Miles Davis bobbed and weaved through with his trumpet in 1960. You being a guitar player, I went and looked up Ana Vidovic (and yes, there ought to be a diacritic mark over the 'c'). She played a solo version of that music on her guitar. Her phizog was all bemused smile as she played it through without a hitch. As if she were born to play the piece. Whether she meant it or not, whether she was terrified or not, I read serenity on her face. And that’s all you’ll get from me for the nonce. It’s currently 18 celsius on the island, and it’s clouding up for showers. Later.’

September 7, 2024: If a person sidles up to me and tells me they are a house sparrow, then house sparrow it is. Hands down. I could exhaust all the philosophers in my attempt to ratify the judgement call, but all the logic I need is this: I spent too many years driving and dispatching taxicabs to argue or ever wish to argue with the customer. Dead-ends in communication occur. How best get from A to B? It is the only ethical and moral consideration there is in a universe without godly or moral suasion. And yet, should the likes of a Trump cross my path in some slithering fashion, and he tell me that he is a polished speaker and a man of intellectual refinement who has lost his way, I would direct him to the nearest porta-potty, and all home truth, say, “There’s your niche.” (Of a sudden, I have the Piazzale Lareto, Milan, April 29, 1945 in mind, and which notable (along with some members of his fan club) was hung there by the ankles while, on the same day, Dachau was being liberated. But then, at this point in time, there is a certain prime minister and his snipers and a problem he has got called Gaza. In any case, haunting imagery all around.)

And I am reading along in Proust. Without benefit of a transitional paragraph, young Marcel’s jealousies with respect to Albertine fall away. M. de Charlus, tragic buffoon, takes over in The Captive, is centre stage. For a moment, I am annoyed. But then Charlus would not be one of the great characters in literature without being tragically and comically what he is: frustrated gay man with high intelligence and a command of arts and culture. So, house sparrow it is, if with noble pedigree and a chamber pot for a hat. I will even put up with Proust lecturing me as to what a strange world the world of Charlus is, and what strange laws govern it. And what Virgil has to do with it, and Theocritus, and Plato too, and any directory of the titled and entitled nobility. Still, it is as if he were writing of a long extinct animal’s behaviour based on a pile of old bones and dodgy DNA, when he writes of Charlus. (Even so, the use of the word concatenation five or six times over the course of three or so baronial pages – Charlus being a baron, this is a bone I would pick with Proust, or with Proust-Montcrieff, seeing as Montcrieff was one of Proust’s early translators, and his is the translation I am keeping to and swearing by.

Otherwise, continuing to read Proust is tantamount to wearing an old work shirt for comfort, though there is nothing plebian in Proust’s writing, not even when he is on about maids and midinettes and chauffeurs and waiters and such. He was what he was – a snob, even if an amiable one who had no wish to think ill of anyone though he had his catty side. (I say this, knowing little of the man’s life, and not wanting to know more; just that it is the picture of an author that I piece together after four volumes read thus far and working on the fifth, À la recherche du temps perdu topping out at seven volumes.) I am not reading Proust to be wowed by verbal bravura. I have come to, and am holding to, the following considerations: the man had something to say. He honoured the notion that literature is a conversation. He had a sense of humour. What else would I need? Whom else? William Burroughs? Celine? Cormac McCarthy? Padded shoulders? Dickens and plaid?

… …. for there is no one we appreciate more than a person who combines with other great virtues that of placing those virtues wholeheartedly at the service of our vices.

There may or may not be such things as universal truths, but the words just quoted above (from Proust’s The Captive) do come close to such entities. At any rate, Charlus, the young Marcel, and Brichot have been on the approach to the house of the Verdurins (where a cultured evening and a concert are to be obtained), and this being Proust, the approach is taking forever. But perhaps, and were the book a movie, it would be a suitable opportunity for some extended flashback, and Proust, stealing thunder from Balzac, does take the bull by the horns so as to say that there is in Paris a sort of spoken newspaper more terrible than its printed rivals, and would that include social media? Say what, you guys inside-the-Beltway? If the human heart (with or without the brain) is the acme of evolution, then at the heart of the human heart is gossip, innuendo its glide path, and all else is a side dish, and you can feed the leftovers to the servants. So then evolution: either an endless vista of prairie grass or Balzac’s empire of love populated by social climbers, as when, 1990s, and Pink Pedal-Pushers, seated at a bar on Westmount’s (Montreal) high street, used to declaim to mildly alarmed lawyers that social-climbing is the only legitimate human activity there is, so, once more unto the breach, dear friends, and again and again and again….

Old-fashioned girl? What is an old-fashioned girl? Lunar, in his heart of hearts, believes such a creature still exists. But first:

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: And Lunar will not give me any satisfaction today ‘with respect to the moral universe or its absence.’ He does not care to ‘sound fusty’. A book he is writing has already taken him 15 rounds and beyond, and he has barely gotten past the opening bell. ‘A pretty Turkish-American girl shot dead by Israeli forces, just one of many pretty girls and children that have been killed by them, but nevertheless my blood boils and I am trying hard to resist prejudice.’ Words like ‘aggressive attitude’, ‘ersatz form of strength born of arrogance’, ‘being fed all the hardware they can use by other countries with their own guilt complexes’, period, end stop, no doubt... One's bona fides will be checked. That pretty girl, though, she haunts me. Trump and his fellow creeps and their female sidekicks – I do not see from the photos that the faces of those women shine with freedom’s afterglow.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana and affiliated stations: ‘You raise an interesting point and one I have long struggled with: the tension between stream of consciousness and ego insertion.’ We had been talking novel-writing. Or was it the writing of essays? Or… feuilletons which were the printed (newspaper) page’s equivalent of a little night music… Or CNN… Dana Bash interviews? But are truth and prime time compatible items? Right. Prime time. What was I thinking?

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: ‘Hey, I was in a bookstore off-island recently and in it, in addition to all the books, I came across a revolving display of reading glasses. It really threw me for a loop. For a moment my brain froze. Then the inevitable drop of the penny. Books. Reading. Eyes. Reading glasses. Ah, my brain was still viable. Could still discern connections between notions. I went up to the owner at her desk. She knew what was coming, but I said anyway, “Who would’ve thunk it? Did you thunk it?” She blushed. It’s been a while since I paid for a book as I get quite a few of them gratis from the Recycling Depot on my island, but in honour of a woman having thunk it, I shelled out ten bucks for a used copy of Solzhenitsyn’s August, 1914. Why that book? Well, I was afraid you’d ask. Something to do with all the Proust you’ve been going on about day and night. Needed a change. Hark, the revolution. Prose poems in the midst of stream of consciousness and ego insertion. Will I read the thing? Buying the book was a sort of gesture one makes in the face of dark days and the indifference to any kindness that are those days, no matter what flies or doesn’t by way of, what, ideation. Later, on the ferry, a woman told me she was an old-fashioned girl. Was raised that way and had no regrets. What was an old-fashioned girl to her? Someone who has a care for the community in which she finds herself. But she didn’t elaborate lest she drown in a dam-burst of pieties.’

September 4 , 2024: The Scottish poet George Mackay Brown figures large in recent communications I have had with a couple of people. A book he authored some time ago in collaboration with the photographer Gunnie Moberg inspired an old friend of mine (a balladeer) to transport herself and her family from Vancouver, B.C. to the Orkneys where she lived for quite a while until moving to Wales. This was half a century ago. The aforementioned poet also figures in a book another friend of mine is writing on the Scottish islands. My balladeer friend (I have known her since the 60s) died in her sleep the other night, and in the wake of her death, hitherto unsuspected connections between her and other people in my life have come to light. Life sometimes works like that. More on this later.

Otherwise, the young Marcel (in Proust’s The Captive, fifth volume of his seven volume À la recherche du temps perdu) at last refers to himself as a voluptuary. As I read this bit of news, a voice in me, in a spate of sarcasm, was then audible to my ears: “Oh my God, he nailed it.” Soon after the word ‘midinette’ occurred which is not a word one hears these days, a word that signifies ‘shop girl’ or ‘a fashionable but vacuous young woman’. You see, the young Marcel and his Albertine both lusted after young women, and as we speak, the young Marcel is still contemplating breaking off with her, his jealousy of her desires wearing him down. He wants to devote himself to Art. Devotion to Art requires… well, apparently it requires solitude. The thing is, he is beginning to suspect that Art and the apparent transcendence Art engenders in the soul is all one vast, gross mirage. He may or may not have a change of heart on this in pages to come. He already suspects that the author-publisher-editor nexus is a swindle – usually at the expense of the author.

And then we are brought around to Vermeer’s View of Delft. One of Proust’s characters – the novelist Bergotte – has always admired the painting and believes he knows it by heart, as it were. He comes to see it one last time and realizes there are parts of the painting he has never quite noticed, in particular a ‘yellow patch of wall’. Of a sudden he visualizes a ‘celestial pair of scales’. In the one pan is his life; in the other that yellow patch of wall. It symbolizes what he ought to have written. It tells him that no matter what he writes, he will always feel there is this something else that he should have written. He then dies of a stroke. Need I paint some moral out of this? From there I switched to Balzac. I read that ‘living the patriarchal life requires slaves’. These words were put into the mouth of a proper, contrarian villain (who might have been lifted from Dumas). I then began to compare the savour of Balzac opera box scenes with those of Proust. With the one man you get near metaphysical disquisitions on wealth, station, personality, dress apparel, beauty all filtered through effusions of scent and whatever poetry is hanging about in the air. With the other ‘it is all in your face’. I will leave you to sort between the two. … …. “Gladly,” she said. ”If you really feel drawn to her so quickly, your love affairs look very promising. There’s Monsieur de Marsay in Princess Galation’s box. Madame de Nucingen is on the rack, she’s heartbroken. There’s no better moment to tackle a woman—especially a banker’s wife. Those ladies from from the Chaussée d’Antin all love revenge.” … …. With a patch or two of dialogue like this, who needs HBO?

Postscript I: Carpenter

Postscript II: Lunar: ‘Let's not talk about what is happening in Germany. And let's not talk about the fate of those six Israeli hostages. There is too much hatred in the air to be able to breathe normally.’ And then, Lunar continuing: ‘clairsentience’ as opposed to clairvoyance. [Yes? No?] The Battle of Culloden, 1746. Attached to which is the story of three women. … …. ‘A grandmother, daughter and granddaughter fleeing from the slaughter after the battle. I have been struggling ever since because I have some distant memory of this kind of thing, shared historical memory linked to the ability to identify extremely distant relatives, but all my searches on the internet for what this might be have led nowhere except into the realms of New Age junk thinking. I can't remember why the story seems familiar. Gypsies are supposed to have this clairvoyance though some of it is fake. Presumably Travellers too. Any ideas?’ No, sorry, I have none. But that the only part of Jungian theory I still take seriously is the notion of the collective unconscious which is a form of memory, which brings this post back to my friend who just died. Her balladeering was serious memory-work, and I see her in a somewhat Homeric light, that she had committed to memory 300 ballads, and with a little prompting, she could whip out 300 more….. Lunar again: ‘Have you ever known any hobos? I am struggling with my memories of one who showed up at my parents' place. I can just about "see" him and I think he appeared a few seasons running. He did some work, was fed and paid although it was when we didn't have money. I seem to remember him as abiding by a strict code, i.e. yes, he would take food but not a bed in the house. Not all hobos were as honourable of course, just as not all people are, but I have been trying to draw connections between this man and the Highland Travellers who also travelled about doing seasonal work. I don't [know]what to make of the Kamala interview in that she seems to be speaking from both sides of her mouth about Israel. When is somebody going to have the courage to say enough's enough to them.’ … ….

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana: ‘While eating my 1:30pm breakfast of black cherry yogurt and cinnamon-drenched instant oatmeal, I watched "Death Takes a Holiday," 1934. After two days on earth as a mortal Death remarks to a character that people seem to lead their lives in "futile and empty" ways. That hurt.’ No comment. Some words speak just fine for themselves without need of add-ons.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado. ‘Right. “The Great Silkie”. I used to play a guitar arrangement of the melody though I can’t sing worth a damn. It meant something to me, maybe because I’ve lived on this island for a century or so. So it seems. Anyway, what you’re saying is that your friend had ingenious ways of making chords on her Washburn, as her hands were messed up due to thalidomide poisoning. Which was a scandal of the medical kind. Had a beer the other night. It really left me tipsy. Must be losing my tolerance... Hmmmm.’ Yes, that is what I am saying. And I never heard anyone make more out of the standard approaches (bass notes) to the G chord or C chord or any of the other first position chords….

Postscript V: Rowan Hill, balladeer: A link to the only album she ever made, as she refused to go commercial for fear of losing her voice (her soul). People would say she was exceedingly silly in this. Perhaps. Perhaps not. What you will hear she recorded in her 70s when her voice had lost some of its clarity, but even so, there is still quite a voice at work here.

Rowan Hill