Exposition, Development, Recapitulation

I think there's something to be said for the idea that Modernism stands at the beginning of the third of three great ages of human existence: the one preceding the awareness of consciousness, which Julian Jaynes puts at about the time of Homer; then a long age which is characterized by the long slow crescendo of human consciousness; and then a third age that begins with the awareness of the awareness of consciousness.

Well, perhaps Modernism is really best understood as a logical development of the Renaissance, whose “moment” is the true beginning (as if a single moment can define it) of this third age. But if you draw a rough analogy to the development of an individual human, maybe it would be:

1: Human life unaware of consciousness. Infancy-childhood: human history up to the Renaissance. (Sorry, Age of Pericles; I know you really belong later; you jumped the gun.) Prehistory.

2: Human life aware of consciousness. Adolescence: human history Age of Pericles-Modernism. History.

3: Human life aware of the consequences of the awareness of consciousness. Adulthood: Modernism on. Will there be an early senescence? Probably. Metahistory, or Historicism.

This looks like college-student late-night talk, I know. And it’s influenced by a book many think of as dubious, Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977). Jaynes, an American psychologist who published no other book, held consciousness to be a cultural construct, not an autonomous function of the individual human “mind.” (Those are precautionary quotes; let’s not take up the question of “mind” here.) As I recall — I read the book a long time ago, and haven’t revisited it — he takes care not to fix an exact date or cultural “moment” at which this construct appears; but he does identify it, in the Mediterranean context, with the Homeric age, arising between the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Jaynes cites evidence for his hypothesis in linguistic and economic models, among others, and finds in psychological evidence of our own time parallels to the historical (and prehistorical) patterns of unconsciousness, consciousness, and their interfaces. I found his discussions persuasive; and am particularly interested now to read scientists arguing for the abrupt big changes that can determine human behavior, collectively (politically) as well as individually. Nassim Taleb, in The Black Swan, discusses such cataclysms in the economic sphere; the research geologist Dave Wahl, in the current issue of Terrain, discusses them with respect to climatological changes. (Taleb; my earlier blog on Taleb ; Wahl.)

Historicism is inevitably recursive. I’ve always loved Francis Ponge’s description of recursive irony — he cites Maurice Ravel's La Valse — as typical of periods "when rhetoric, dying, examines itself.” (Lane Dunlop's translation, in Soap [London: Jonathan Cape, 1969]; in the original Ce genre est particulier aux epoques ou la rhetorique est perdue, se cherche: [Le Savon: Paris: Gallimard, 1967]). [Cited in my article “What's the Matter with Today's Experimental Music? Organized Sound Too Rarely Heard,” Notes, December, 1993.]

To continue woolgathering: there may be a parallel between all this and the inevitable process which finds "art" declining from Religion to Art to Entertainment. (See Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ; and see also Wikipedia on Walter Benjamin. Come to think of it, Benjamin himself should be added to Jaynes, Cage, Duchamp, and many others as a seminal organizer of aware-or-consciousness consciousness.)

Washington D.C.

Washington, DC, April 8 2009—

LINDSEY TOOK IT in mind to fly out here for a week of mostly sightseeing, and why not: It's cherry-blossom time. Springtime, except that it's colder than, well, your cliché's as good as mine.
The flight was bare-bones except for the first-rate in-flight entertainment, on Virgin America; made interesting only once, when about halfway across Kansas a somewhat blowzy-looking young woman asked the flight attendant how much longer to landing, and, when told it would be another two and a half hours, checked into one of the restrooms and lit up a cigarette.
Since we were sitting in the last row, we overheard a bit of the action, beginning with the attendant knocking on the door and telling the woman to put it out. Twice she asked where the cigarette was, and apparently got two different answers. She ordered the woman out, to no avail. Finally the attendant opened the door and ordered the woman back to her seat. Apparently the cigarette butt was found; we didn't have to make an unscheduled landing. Nor, far as I know, was the woman ever put in handcuffs, though they were mentioned.

***

At the bus stop, next morning, two women were conversing quietly. I asked, as much to make conversation as for the information, if the bus we were waiting for would indeed take us to the Metro station. The seated woman assured me it would. Vous êtes française, I asked. Non, mais je parle français, she answered, je suis égyptienne, tous les égyptiens parle très bien beaucoup des langages. Tous les égyptiens, de toutes classes, I asked, Ah oui mussieu, she said, Je vous assure.

***

The Metro runs fast, frequent, and deep. I walked up ninety-seven steps at the Bethesda Metro station, and eighty-eight steps back at our Wardman Woodley Park station, and in both cases I was walking up an escalator that was moving uphill itself, otherwise Sisyphus only knows how many steps I'd have climbed. That and the bracing cold and the long urban walks should keep me in shape.

***

Dinner last night, as noted yesterday at Eating Every Day, at Obelisk, a favorite restaurant of mine. I think it was fifteen or twenty years ago I first ate there, when in town on an NEA panel. I ate there twice that trip, and at least once each of the remaining two years of the panel. It's an Italian restaurant with, in those days, a three-course format with a choice from two alternative appetizers, main courses, and desserts. The price is now double — $70 — and an antipasto and a cheese course added; we were also presented with three alternatives for each course (except antipasto and cheese). An interesting wine list (all Italian) and good grappas and other liquore round out the offerings. You can converse in the comfortably furnished dining room, and the service is attentive and friendly without the least intrusion.

I used to say I had five favorite restaurants. Three of them are now history, but Obelisk and Chez Panisse remain.

Discursive wit

THE BAD NEWS FIRST: Jonathan Williams has died. A fine obit on Ron Silliman's blog brings this to my attention: one of Ron's many virtues is his care to alert the community to such events, which grow, alas, more frequent.

I really know of Williams through only one of his many books, The Magpie's Bagpipe [San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982], a selection of essays. I bought it (used) in 1985, in Capitola of all places, after having opened it at random and read

The large armadillo-=like lady who rattles her bracelets and clicks her compact two minutes before the end of Das Lied von der Erde is not my friend. It is from her million-headed inattentions and carelessnesses that I have tried to remove myself by going to Carnegie Hall to hear Gustav Mahler's song-symphony. Yes, "I too know that the blackbird is involved in what I know," said Wallace Stevens, and I'll add armadillos, but that is something quite different. The lady, then, must be a friend of John Cage's, who once told me he hated all music except his own, and who now tells me that perhaps the noises of the environment are more interesting…

["Surely Reality is More Interesting"]

Elsewhere:

It was Walter Pater's contention that "all arts aspire to the condition of music." Ezra Pound agreed and insisted that poetry atrophies when it gets too far from musc. Goethe declared that architecture was just frozen music. And Arthur Dove gives us a clarification (and alarming complication) in notes to his exhibition at Stieglitz's the Intimate Gallery (1929):

There is no such thing as abstraction.

It is extraction, gravitation toware a certain direction, and minding your own business.

If the exact be clear enough its value will exist.

It is nearer to music, not the music of the ears… the music of the eyes.

["Some Speak of a Return to Nature— I Wonder Where They Could Have Been"]

And so on. You see from this that Williams rambles; his is a large play-space; he turns phrases memorably. Discursive wit is my ice-cream. Now Williams is gone, though The Magpie's Bagpipe is still up there on the shelf, between Emmet (Sweethearts, Something Else Press, 1968) and William Carlos (various). So Jonathan Williams is not really gone: but I wish I had met him while he was closer.

---

THE GOOD NEWS: To Mills College last night, there to see a solo presentation by Margaret Fisher, dancer, choreographer, video producer, author; stage director of my opera The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even when its first act was produced at Mills in 1984; a strong and handsome woman of immense intuitive intelligence and patient expression. (And, I must add, a longtime friend.)

The Ensemble Room of the Mills Music Building (which is otherwise being extensively reconstructed) was packed, and a number of faces there were familiar from years ago, from the 1970s and '80s. There were four items on the program:

• A silent viewing of stills from the opera: photographs by Margaret and by Larry Neff, with members of the cast in Cynthia DuVal's memorable costumes (see some of these online). Twenty-five years, nearly, since that production: I really should "finish" that opera one of these days! (Why? Duchamp didn't "finish" the Large Glass…)

• Letters of Duchamp, the striking 1994 twelve-minute video record of the live production of that name, a longer three-act strictly choreographic treatment which I suspect was planned for the central scene of the opera, Act II scene 3, but whose music relied only on my first piano sonata (Bachelor Machine, since there's no recording or even synthesization of the rest of the score. Malic molds, chocolate grinder, bicycle wheel, the marvelous Eliane Lust playing a piano on a platform slowly towed across the stage by strongman Jerry Carniglia…

• a new piece, Heaven's Dark Side: the body, a vocalized meditation on etymology, opposition, and resolution. Nearly half an hour long, this featured Margaret mostly unseen on a balcony above the stage (bride-space from Duchamp?) declaiming, in an exaggerated Georgia accent, a text contemplating Light and Darkness, occasionally wandering into a fictionalized birdsong Sanskrit and a "chiselled" quasi-pedantic Latin. I was particularly struck by her fastening on the Latin word caelum, which she divides into two cells -lum, relating to luminous, illuminate and so on) and cae-, relating to caecus, "blind".

This sends me online where I learn (among much else) that

Cælum is a Latin word meaning both "sky, heaven" and "tool with a sharp beveled point, used in engraving or carving stone." (You'll sometimes see this latter definition over-simplified to "chisel.")

and I begin to wander into uncertain fields: the heavens (celestial, cielo, ciel) as caesura between dark and light, blindness and vision; though the skies themselves are in fact dark half the time, or were before the modern invention of light pollution.

The middle of this piece, Heaven's Dark Side: the body, was in fact seen: Margaret stood perhaps ten minutes on her right leg, her left knee bent, her hands and arms dancing in insectlike motions, while she continued her dispassionate but strangely accented sermon, a Yoga Bride-preacher in a celestial (ceiling) pulpit; and then it was dark again, and she continued; we'd been enlightened, and were then returned to our normal state of enlightenment…

• A thirty-minute video, Exquisite Corpse, a "surreal" (for lack of slower accuracy I'll use that word) video-story recounting seven tales spun, exquisite-corpselike, in a Haifa bomb-shelter, with a magnificent score by Robert Hughes. I can't say enough about this piece; in fact I can't say much: I have to see it again, and again. It is intelligent, and fascinating, and enterprising, and rich and deep, and, I think, Important. It has discursive wit, and I want a copy; I hope it finds distribution.

Melville and Dana on music

Having begun reading Herman Melville's White-Jacket, in the Library of America edition, I see a couple of notes taken while reading his Redburn, nine years ago, on the subject of, of all things, music. One doesn't think of Melville as an author interested in music. But such was the extent to which music was an integral part of ordinary daily life, 150 years ago, that even an author specializing in the South Sea islands, or ordinary seamen's lives on the main, found it both necessary and interesting to comment on it. From the LOA edition, page 273:

Now, music is a holy thing, and its instruments, however humble, are to be loved and revered. Whatever has made, or does make, or may make music, should be held sacred as the golden bridle-bit of the Shah o Persia's horse, and the golden hammer, with which his hoofs are shod. Musical instrumentts should be like the silver tongs, with which the high-priests tended the Jewish altars--never to be touched by a hand profane...

And there is no humble thing with music in it, not a fife, not a negro-fiddle, that is not to be reverenced as much as the grandest architectural organ that every rolled its flood-tide of harmony down a cathedral nave. For even a Jew's-harp may be so played, as to awaken all the fairies that are in us, and make them dance in our souls, as on a moon-lit sward of violets:

And he goes on to discuss the possible origins of music's power "that so enters, without knocking, into our inmost beings, and shows us all hidden things", and so on.

And, further on, p.303:

So one night, on the windlass, [Harry] sat and sang; and from the ribald jests so common to sailors, the men slid into silence at every verse. Hushed, and more hushed they grew, till at last Harry sat among them like Orpheus among the charmed leopards and tigers...

THERE'S A MARVELOUS PASSAGE in Two Years Before the Mast (which book incidentally Melville cites approvingly in White-Jacket, when he rounds Cape Horn) describing a songfest ashore, somewhere down near Pt. Mugu I think, with sailors singing their native songs, English and German, French and Spanish, and none so compellingly as the Italians, whose entire sensibility seems centered on song.

Two Years Before the Mast, chapter XX
Leisure--News From Home--"Burning the Water"

After we had been a few weeks on shore, and had begun to feel broken into the regularity of our life, its monotony was interrupted by the arrival of two vessels from the windward. We were sitting at dinner in our little room, when we heard the cry of "Sail ho!" This, we had learned, did not always signify a vessel, but was raised whenever a woman was seen coming down from the town; or a squaw, or an ox-cart, or anything unusual, hove in sight upon the road; so we took no notice of it. But it soon became so loud and general from all parts of the beach, that we were led to go to the door; and there, sure enough, were two sails coming round the point, and leaning over from the strong north-west wind, which blows down the coast every afternoon. The headmost was a ship, and the other, a brig. Everybody was alive on the beach, and all manner of conjectures were abroad. Some said it was the Pilgrim, with the Boston ship, which we were expecting; but we soon saw that the brig was not the Pilgrim, and the ship with her stump top-gallant masts and rusty sides, could not be a dandy Boston Indiaman. As they drew nearer, we soon discovered the high poop and top-gallant forecastle, and other marks of the Italian ship Rosa, and the brig proved to be the Catalina, which we saw at Santa Barbara, just arrived from Valparaiso. They came to anchor, moored ship, and commenced discharging hides and tallow. The Rosa had purchased the house occupied by the Lagoda, and the Catalina took the other spare one between ours and the Ayacucho's, so that, now, each one was occupied, and the beach, for several days, was all alive. The Catalina had several Kanakas on board, who were immediately besieged by the others, and carried up to the oven, where they had a long pow-wow, and a smoke. Two Frenchmen, who belonged to the Rosa's crew, came in, every evening, to see Nicholas; and from them we learned that the Pilgrim was at San Pedro, and was the only other vessel now on the coast. Several of the Italians slept on shore at their hide-house; and there, and at the tent in which the Fazio's crew lived, we had some very good singing almost every evening. The Italians sang a variety of songs--barcarollas, provincial airs, etc.; in several of which I recognized parts of our favorite operas and sentimental songs. They often joined in a song, taking all the different parts; which produced a fine effect, as many of them had good voices, and all seemed to sing with spirit and feeling. One young man, in particular, had a falsetto as clear as a clarionet.

The greater part of the crews of the vessels came ashore every evening, and we passed the time in going about from one house to another, and listening to all manner of languages. The Spanish was the common ground upon which we all met; for every one knew more or less of that. We had now, out of forty or fifty, representatives from almost every nation under the sun: two Englishmen, three Yankees, two Scotchmen, two Welshmen, one Irishman, three Frenchmen (two of whom were Normans, and the third from Gascony,) one Dutchman, one Austrian, two or three Spaniards, (from old Spain,) half a dozen Spanish-Americans and half-breeds, two native Indians from Chili and the Island of Chiloe, one Negro, one Mulatto, about twenty Italians, from all parts of Italy, as many more Sandwich Islanders, one Otaheitan, and one Kanaka from the Marquesas Islands.

The night before the vessels were ready to sail, all the Europeans united and had an entertainment at the Rosa's hide-house, and we had songs of every nation and tongue. A German gave us "Och! mein lieber Augustin!" the three Frenchmen roared through the Marseilles Hymn; the English and Scotchmen gave us "Rule Britannia," and "Wha'll be King but Charlie?" the Italians and Spaniards screamed through some national affairs, for which I was none the wiser; and we three Yankees made an attempt at the "Star-spangled Banner." After these national tributes had been paid, the Austrian gave us a very pretty little love-song, and the Frenchmen sang a spirited thing called "Sentinelle! O prenez garde a vous!" and then followed the melange which might have been expected. When I left them, the aguardiente and annisou was pretty well in their heads, and they were all singing and talking at once, and their peculiar national oaths were getting as plenty as pronouns.

I can't find my copy, so I set the above here from the Project Gutenberg edition. Reading it, I see that Dana goes on to a fascinating description of national types and their languages. All this was apparently interesting enough to strike Dana as worth writing about; but was also normal enough to have been apparent to him. It's odd to think that the United States was more open to this kind of contemplation in the 1830s than it is today, 180 years later, but there it is:

The next day, the two vessels got under weigh for the windward, and left us in quiet possession of the beach. Our numbers were somewhat enlarged by the opening of the new houses, and the society of the beach a little changed. In charge of the Catalina's house, was an old Scotchman, who, like most of his countrymen, had a pretty good education, and, like many of them, was rather pragmatical, and had a ludicrously solemn conceit. He employed his time in taking care of his pigs, chickens, turkeys, dogs, etc., and in smoking his long pipe. Everything was as neat as a pin in the house, and he was as regular in his hours as a chronometer, but as he kept very much by himself, was not a great addition to our society. He hardly spent a cent all the time he was on the beach, and the others said he was no shipmate. He had been a petty officer on board the British frigate Dublin, Capt. Lord James Townshend, and had great ideas of his own importance. The man in charge of the Rosa's house was an Austrian by birth, but spoke, read, and wrote four languages with ease and correctness. German was his native tongue, but being born near the borders of Italy, and having sailed out of Genoa, the Italian was almost as familiar to him as his own language. He was six years on board of an English man-of-war, where he learned to speak our language with ease, and also to read and write it. He had been several years in Spanish vessels, and had acquired that language so well, that he could read any books in it. He was between forty and fifty years of age, and was a singular mixture of the man-of-war's-man and Puritan. He talked a great deal about propriety and steadiness, and gave good advice to the youngsters and Kanakas, but seldom went up to the town, without coming down "three sheets in the wind." One holyday, he and old Robert (the Scotchman from the Catalina) went up to the town, and got so cozy, talking over old stories and giving one another good advice, that they came down double-backed, on a horse, and both rolled off into the sand as soon as the horse stopped. This put an end to their pretensions, and they never heard the last of it from the rest of the men. On the night of the entertainment at the Rosa's house, I saw old Schmidt, (that was the Austrian's name) standing up by a hogshead, holding on by both hands, and calling out to himself--"Hold on, Schmidt! hold on, my good fellow, or you'll be on your back!" Still, he was an intelligent, good-natured old fellow, and had a chest-full of books, which he willingly lent me to read. In the same house with him was a Frenchman and an Englishman; the latter a regular-built "man-of-war Jack;" a thorough seaman; a hearty, generous fellow; and, at the same time, a drunken, dissolute dog. He made it a point to get drunk once a fortnight, (when he always managed to sleep on the road, and have his money stolen from him,) and to battle the Frenchman once a week. These, with a Chilian, and a half a dozen Kanakas, formed the addition to our company.

(Kanaka was the usual name for Hawaiian natives in Dana's day.)

I'm reading White-Jacket now, and it, too, astonishes me with the intelligence — meaning both brain-power and quantity of information — and the sense of communality expressed by the most ordinary of seamen on a navy frigate a century and a half ago. That, and, of course, the durability, the strength and patience. What a long way we've come since then.

Mount Analogue

IN 1968 I BOUGHT, second-hand, spurred by what information I no longer recall, a copy of the Vincent Stuart edition of Roger Shattuck's translation of René Daumal's Mount Analogue: An Authentic Narrative. It came to mind again a few weeks ago in a conversation with grandson Simon, 18, who has been climbing mountains in Ecuador. I'm no mountain climber: the closest I've come to the sport was an ascent of Chamechaude, in the French pre-Alps, back in 1976: but mountains are in mind right now, as I'm contemplating a stroll in the Alps this summer.

Chamechaud, seen from the north, 1976

So I took Mount Analogue down from the shelf the other night and read through it again. It's such a strong, brilliant, clear book that virtually every detail I'd recalled from 1968, as well as the general quality of the book, came right back into focus. Daumal was, some think, the finest French author of his time; certainly the most promising. Born in 1908, possessed of a brilliant mind, he was publishing by the time he was twenty. By then he'd experimented with all sorts of drugs, had internalized everything the Parnassiens and Symbolists could offer him, had begun serious study of Indian thought and literature. From then on his principal physical battles were with tuberculosis, and he died in 1944, only 36 years old, in mid-sentence: Mount Analogue is incomplete.

Perhaps it could never have been completed. The mountain of the title is enormous, dwarfing Everest, situated in the South Pacific, unknown because of its capacity of bending space, thus rendering it both invisible and insensible to instruments. It provides the link between Earth and what one could be forgiven for calling Heaven, and its difficult ascent, available only to superbly conditioned adepts, has a physical property of reinforcing an egoless desire for Transcendence.

The novel describes the plans of the author and, even more important, one Father Sogol to outfit an expedition to the mountain. Eight explorers meet to discuss its probably location, then set out, with four crewmen, on the yacht Impossible, to find it. Sogol combines science and logic to succeed in the search; we visit the island; we learn of the unique communities that have grown up on its shores; we begin the ascent — and then the manuscript fails us.

But it doesn't matter. Sogol is so striking, the descriptions so detailed and winning, and the mood and humor of the book so serene and, in a word, good, that in its imperfect state Mount Analogue is perfect enough.

Several online reviewers have mentioned Jules Verne in describing this book. Oddly, Verne never came to my mind, though I enjoyed Verne hugely when I was a boy. Instead I thought of Melville's Mardi, similarly philosophical and idealistic; and of Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus, whose central figure, Martial Canterel, may have inspired aspects of Daumal's Father Sogol.

I thought of Duchamp, too: the artist's language-play and absurd physics — think of infra-mince, the impossibly small values like the weight of sighs — prefigure Sogol. (And, of course, draw on Roussel.) Daumal was a ’pataphysicien, often a very amusing one; but he was also extraordinarily earnest, without ever lapsing into sermonizing.

My edition of Mount Analogue carries a fine introduction by its translator, who notes

[Daumal] had to struggle with the temptation to which poets are prone: the tendency to conceive of life and reality entirely through language. Mount Analogue, in its simplicy of expression and universality of meaning, probably represents Daumal's ultimate reckoning with the problem of language, vehicle and obstacle.

And in fact, early on, Daumal refers to the subject:

The different branches of symbol interpretation had for a long time been my favourite field of study… Furthermore, I had an alpinist's passionate love of mountains. The convergence of these two contrasting areas of interest on the same object, the mountain, had given certain passages of my article [a study of the symbolic significance of the mountain in ancient mythologies] a lyric tone. (Such conjunctions, incongruous as they may appear, play a large part in the genesis of what is commonly called poetry; I venture this remark as a suggestion ot critics and aestheticians who seek to illuminate the depths of that mysterious language.)

The description of Father Sogol's studio is meticulous and striking: it's festooned with hanging scraps of paper on which are written

a veritable encyclopedia of what we call "human knowledge". A diagram of a plant cell, Mendeleieff's periodic table…, the keys to Chinese writing, a cross-section of the human heart, Lorentz's transformation formulae,…

and so on for an entire paragraph. Sogol thinks and speaks while pacing among these pendant notes, with

an exceptional faculty for seeing ideas as external objects and for establishing new links between ideas which appeared totally unrelated.

Daumal reveals certain laws and principles: that of considering a problem as solved, in order to get sufficiently past the problem to be able to deduce its solution. And the "chameleon law," according to which behaviour is governed by "inner resonance to influences nearest at hand."

Daumal got up from his writing-desk, we're told, in the middle of that final incomplete sentence, to answer his door: a friend was visiting to encourage him (knowing of his illness and likely impending death) to draw up some notes describing his plans for the book's conclusion. They are included in this edition, and one of them answers the perennial question, Why climb?

Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. In climbing, always take note of difficulties along the way; for as you go up, you can observe hem. Coming down, you will no longer see them, but you will know they are there if you have observed them well.

…

When you strike off on your own, leave some trace of your passage which will guide you coming back: one stone set on another, some grass weighted down by a stick. But if you come to an impasse or a dangerous spot, remember that the trail you have left could lead people coming after you into trouble. So go back along your trail and obliterate any traces you have left. This applies to anyone who wishes to leave some mark of his passage in the world.

A delicious book, firm and thoughtful and detailed, humorous and poignant (without intended poignancy, bien entendu!), exceptionally wise, aware of its antecedents and careless (and innocent, as far as I know) of followers. I can't imagine being without my copy.

The Shock of Recognition

LOOKING IT UP ON THE INTERNET I find (as I should have known) that the phrase originated, apparently, with Herman Melville (which makes me think my next reading should be Melville: I'm gradually working my way toward Moby-Dick). Hugh Blackmer's website tells me that what Melville actually wrote, in his essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses" was

…genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round

It's worth reproducing the entire paragraph, in fact, because it builds so beautifully to that final observation

And now, my countrymen, as an excellent author, of your own flesh and blood,--an unimitating, and perhaps, in his way, an inimitable man--whom better can I commend to you, in the first place, than Nathaniel Hawthorne. He is one of the new, and far better generation of your writer. The smell of your beeches and hemlocks is upon him; your own broad prairies are in his soul; and if you travel away inland into his deep and noble nature, you will hear the far roar of his Niagara. Give not over to future generations the glad duty of acknowledging him for what he is. Take that joy to yourself, in your own generation; and so shall he feel those grateful impulses in him, that may possibly prompt him to the full flower of some still greater achievement in your eyes. And by confessing him, you thereby confess others, you brace the whole brotherhood. For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

All this comes to me in the course of writing to a friend, Alvaro Cardona-Hine, in the wake of re-reading his childhood memoirs The Half-Eaten Angel and A History of Light. About the latter I wrote, on a website called Goodreads,

Continuing the lyrical poignancy of The Half-Eaten Angel, this slim collection of prose-poem love-letters by a precocious twelve-year-old boy reads like healthy Colette. Full of the wonder of awakening. An example: "The day you came through my door, my own private door, wearing the furiously white light of your certainty, I had no need for more world, all the world I ever wanted to taste I would taste through you."

(Goodreads seems to be a sort of Facebook for readers; it's my impression so far that it's visited mostly by intelligent and literate women, the sort we used to call "housewives," intent on enlarging their community of books. I'll get in trouble for having written this.)

I THINK ABOUT THAT WORD "shock" and wonder the extent to which Melville thought about it. The word always brings two things immediately to mind: the sensation of a pulse of electricity, as I felt it when, ten years old, I accidentally stuck an index finger into an empty light-bulb socket while scrambling around among the rafters of the communal laundry building in the small Oklahoma town we were spending that year in; and the sight and even more the smell of ricks of hay we'd cut in our pasture the following year, hay we'd mowed with scythes and raked by hand and stacked in sheaves to dry in the California sun.

I think Melville likely knew only the second of these senses in 1850; that and another sense, the disarray (itself really an orderly kind of disarray, for as my grandson likes to point out "nothing can be truly random") of a head of hair, or one's emotions on having been suddenly confronted with something. My Macintosh dictionary tells me the word is from the

mid 16th cent.: from French choc (noun), choquer (verb), of unknown origin. The original senses were [throw (troops) into confusion by charging at them] and [an encounter between charging forces,] giving rise to the notion of [sudden violent blow or impact.]

I'm sure Melville uses the word in all these senses; and they all arose in my consideration this morning of an imaginary conversation among Alvaro, another friend Henry Bridges, and myself, a conversation centering on Alvaro's paintings, which I wrote about here last Saturday. (That's Henry's portrait of me up at the top of this post.)

Henry visited last Saturday, when my mind was full of enthusiasm for Alvaro, and I read some passages from The Half-Eaten Angel to him, and when he was home again, Henry I mean, he looked up Alvaro's work on his website, and then wrote to me his feelings about Alvaro's work, and I forwarded that to Alvaro, who then wrote to me, which set me to thinking further about all this and trying to develop this imaginary conversation, a difficult one to transcribe here as I've not secured permissions from either Henry or Alvaro to reproduce their comments. So I can only repeat a few of my own, as I'd written them to Alvaro:

I am excited; excited by [Henry's] prose, by his re-statement in words of your statements in paint, and by a sudden "shock of recognition," to use Melville's phrase… recognition of my own feeling about your work explained to me as I had never "understood" it before. So your painting, and Henry's description of his reception of it, opens that little creaky door in that not-often-visited corner of my mind. But what does he mean?

I think he writes first of the spaces within your paintings (which are the spaces your paintings themselves enter in order to re-state them), spaces clearly defined by your color fields and their edges ("tiles," he calls them). He then mentions a sort of dialectic that appears between the literal images in your paintings, the animals or birds or what have you, and the quality of the paint-handling that presents those images, which (at least in Henry's mind, and in mine too) produce work in which not only the images are images, but the way those images are limned are also images, images that intensify by transcending the more literal images.

And then, best of all, that dialectic not only emerges clearly itself, but the clarity with which it emerges defines, in pictorial or painterly ways, a vision of clarity, what Henry calls "a heightened sense of clarity". This "opens up ... space to ... the imagining mind", which is your mind, and Henry's, and mine. And then, "to state it differently," he lapses into a kind of poetry… similar to your own poetry as I find it in The Half-Eaten Angel and A History of Light….

All this has to do with what Joan Retallack called continuity and contiguity, as I wrote about that a few days ago; I suppose Retallack's an unknowing participant in this conversation. And, come to think about it, this kind of imaginary conversation, web-based and disjunctive, is the kind of community that I was thinking of in response to Ron Silliman's thoughts on the Community of Poets.

I suppose in a century or two, if we're given them, the human consciousness will become a sort of meta-consciousness, the Jungian concept of racial memory will become a more evident and verifiable species awareness, originally facilitated by this Internet which may one day leave its present technological grounding behind and exist instead, and simply, in a neural network the humans of that day will take for granted, as we take language and gesture for granted.

And then there will be no more Continuity and Contiguity; all will be merged in one splendid Awareness, and with any luck we'll hardly need to talk about it any more, let alone think about it, and we can get back to simple pleasures of daily life.

Blood on the Dining-Room Floor

DETECTIVE STORIES are not my favorite genre, though in remote antiquity I raced through the Dorothy Sayers list, and there was a time, forty years ago, when we enjoyed watching Perry Mason, god save us.

Going through the Stein shelves, though, I reflected that I'd never read Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, and got it down to look it over. It's a curious book, written in 1933 after a six-month writer's block, an extraordinarily rare even in Stein's life. I read it because I had just read Monique Truong's novel The Book of Salt, whose central figure is the Vietnamese cook Stein and Toklas employed for years at about that same time.

Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is "about" a couple of mysterious events, one involving the unexplained death of a local hotel-keeper, in and around the town of Bilignin, where Stein and Toklas had taken a country house for their summers. We visited that house in the summer of 1974, when it was empty. The gates were unlocked, so we simply walked into the property, not daring to enter the house of course, but walking around behind to a terrace overlooking a magnificent view west across the valley below; to the north in the distance a hilltop castle.

It's a quiet village, hardly more than a few farmsteads and a cemetery to the south, and here, in 1933, Stein and Toklas settled into the country summertime routine you may know best from Wars I Have Seen, which recounts daily life there. Recently the Bilignin house has taken on a darker side: Stein apparently obtained the lease through the assistance of Bernard Faÿ, later a collaborator in the Vichy government; somehow she and Toklas, hardly Aryan, were left alone there throughout World War II.

But that's in the future: at the time of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor Stein was undergoing a writer's crisis. Having begun writing relatively conventionally in 1903 and '04 with Q.E.D. and Fernhurst,, unpublished and unknown until 1950, she moved to her more ruminative style in her first early masterpiece, Three Lives, finished in 1906. In the next two years The Making of Americans finished off any conventional fictional narrative interest in her writer's mind, and her immersion in Cubism, as it was being evolved by her friend Pablo Picasso and his colleague Georges Braque, permanently influenced her own work. The first published examples of this were her portraits of Picasso and Matisse, in Alfred Stieglitz's review Camera Work, in 1912; Tender Buttons, written that year and published in 1914, is perhaps the early peak of this style.

Stein continued the style through the plays and portraits of the 'teens and '20s, gathered in Geography and Plays(1922) and Operas and Plays(1932), but continued to meditate in her writing on writing itself, in Useful Knowledge(1929) and How to Write(1931).

Then came the interruption of the celebrated Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas(1933), which made her popular and led to her return to a lecture tour of the United States in 1934 and 1935. I think this sudden fame and popularity combined with her dedication to her craft and her awareness of the lasting significance of the Cubist moment — which precipitated a deep divide between abstraction and representationalism among writers as well as painters and composers — had something to do with the crisis that resulted in Blood on the Dining-Room Floor.

In any case, in that book Stein returns to a Cubist sort of interpenetration of two planes: one of meditation on the act of writing; the other the observations, seen and overheard, of ordinary events of daily life — in this case, in a small village in the French countryside.

Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is probably best read twice: once quickly through, on its own terms; then again with thought given to various annotations. The edition I have was published by the Creative Arts Book Company (Berkeley) in 1982 in an edition with a helpful afterword by John Herbert Gill; it has been made available on the Internet. The first time through you'll perhaps be irritated and/or bored; this is a frequent response to Stein's writing. One reads a new book (new to the reader, I mean) burdened with the experience of all that prior reading, and most of that prior reading is pretty commonplace. Not the content of the texts, perhaps; but certainly the form or style. Even Henry James remains "difficult"; not that many readers go past, say, Mrs. Dalloway.

But I find Blood on the Dining-Room Floor a charming book, read not terribly closely, say in bed. The crime, if it was a crime, let alone its perpetrator, never really appears; the entire affair's presented as if a matter of village gossip, narrated through innuendo and arched eyebrow, certainly not laid out in at-first-and-then sequential narrative.

A closer reading introduces two major matters of interest: Stein's technique — what you might call composition as composition — and the significance of that technique as a witness to the intellectual revolution of her time, a revolution that is still proceeding and has yet to be noticed, let alone understood, by the vast majority of readers.

Among the other Internet annotations of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, Craig Dworkin's Five Words In A Stein, addresses the first of these matters. I like it, partly because I'm drawn to language-play. Dworkin makes a case, and the pun's intended, for reading Blood as a text influenced by Stein's early family language, presumably as German as it was English; and he's alert, perhaps too alert, to subtle implications of the words and phrases that occupy Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, as restless guests occupy a country hotel. (Or refugees occupy an occupied zone.)

The second matter is the subject of Joan Retallack's Writers – Readers – Performers / Partners in Crime (published in How2, vol. 1 no. 6, Fall 2001), a paper given within a colloquy on "The Politics of Presence: Re-reading the Writing Subject in “Live” and Electronic Performance, Theatre and Film Poetry." Where Dworkin concentrates on a reading, even a deciphering of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, though, Retallack goes much further, using Stein's book as a launch pad for an interesting sketch of a proposal, that while

…literature is an engagement with possible forms of life — as all language games (written or spoken or performed) must be

the fact remains that

…the explosion of forms that we've seen throughout the 20th century… poses difficulties for traditionalists — e.g., narrators of coherency, tidy story-tellers as guardians of logics of identity and convention.

The next sentence is crucial:

Ther narrator of continuity is (albeit often unawares) at odds in a world whose vulnerabilities have more to do with contiguity. Contiguity is the spatial dimension of coincidence.

Stein's crisis, in the months before Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, was born of the mutual incompatibility of "narrative coherence" and awareness of contiguity, particularly of the dislocating Cubist appearance of contiguity. Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is a meditation on the disruption of daily life that is a constant characteristic of daily life. (It's tempting to consider the dialectic between Toklas as daily life and Stein as meditation; Stein's nightly writing "miracle" as quotidian and Toklas's morning typing as a completion, almost a repair, of the interruption which is Stein's work.)

The Moment of Cubism, to use John Berger's apt and memorable formula, was a historical moment on the scale of the Enlightenment, the expression of a handful of visionaries who refused to let convention or authority (and the two are politically synonymous) cloud their eyes as they looked at a world of human consciousness (and subconsciousness) that had changed. Language, whether verbal, pictorial, or musical, always reflects the "interruptions" of such moments. ("Interruption" in quotes, because it's an interruption that connects.) A fascinating example of this was posted the other day on Mark Liberman's Language Log: time and distance themselves have changed in the human consciousness, as is testified by the history of our words.

I can't think of a more pleasant way of entering a contemplation of all these matters than a reading of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor. It's already led me to Useful Knowledge, and soon back via Geography and Plays, I suspect, to the Geographical History of America. In which case I'll report back here.

Concrete and abstract

VAS YOU DER, SHARLIE?

If I heard that once from my dad, by the time I was ten years old, I must have heard it a million times. Only this morning do I learn the source: Jack Pearl, a radio comic "Best known for playing Baron Munchhausen on radio in the 1930s and popularized the expression "Vas you dere, Sharlie?" to the the point where it became a household phrase."

I'm reading Geert Mak's In Europe, a splendid account of a year's journey (1999) across Europe, geographically, from Spain to Stalingrad, and across the twentieth century, chronologically, from the cousins who ruled the continent (Edward, Wilhelm, Alexander and so on) to... well, I'm not sure; I've only read to the center so far; to the adoption of the Euro, I think.

One of the things that makes me so enthusiastic about this book is Mak's inclusion of many first-person accounts. A journalist as well as a historian, Mak goes out of his way to talk to strangers. He looks up a few logical interview subjects too, of course; one of the most poignant to me so far is a grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm, who recalls the old man as a friendly old grandfather in his Dutch garden long after his dreams crashed at Versailles.

But Mak also talks to beggars and butchers, children and churchmen, to find out how things look to them; look to them in the moment, in 1999; and looked to them in the pivotal times of that amazingly pivotal century: World War I, Versailles, the roaring '20s (a phrase too American for Mak to have used), the Great Depression and the buildup to World War II, that war itself in its surprising evolution -- the more surprising to an American reader (and recent viewer of Ken Burns's documentary) for its European viewpoint.

Just now I've been reading about the Holocaust. It was no simple matter. For one thing, mass exterminations were not exclusively Nazi in origin: we know of course about Stalinist examples (though they haven't figured much so far in Mak's book), but who knew about the Lithuanian Nationalists' mass executions of 3800 Jews in 1941? (Look here.)

All this is the more fascinating for my having recently read Farewell to Marienburg, a first-person memoir by Claus Neumann, who was born in East Prussia (now Poland) in 1929 and came to adulthood in Nazi Germany. Claus lives near me; we met a few weeks ago at a local author's panel; I like him very much and admire his book -- like my own recent books, I suppose, it is an amateur's book in the best sense, a book written out of reflection and an urge to understand, not out of mastered knowledge and the urge to instruct others.

Claus maintains that he had no idea of the Holocaust until the end of the war, when liberating troops revealed the camps to their neighbors. This, even though he was perforce a member of the Hitler Youth. I believe him, partly through the persuasiveness of his writing, partly because even a slight acquaintance reveals an utterly guileless and sympathetic man. Yet Mak is equally persuasive in his account of the thousands of Germans -- and citizens in such German-occupied countries as France, the Low Countries, Norway and Denmark, and the countries within the Eastern Front -- who had to have been complicit in one way or another.

Part of the resolution of this conflicting evidence lies of course in Neumann's youth at the time. He was protected by his parents from knowing too much; certainly from understanding more than was avoidable from the fragmentary evidence that may have been whispered.

More, though, is resolved by considering the nature of ignorance, by the protective ability of the human mind to set evidence aside, to refrain from knowing or understanding, particularly if one is preoccupied by daily problems of one's own survival. This consideration is a special quality of Geert Mak's book: perhaps a scholarly journalist is the best possible writer to speculate on the subjects of awareness, observation, understanding, expression as they interrrelate in the accidents of daily life.

* * *

Six friends are just returned from a trip to Turkey (four in one group, a couple in another); and this morning Giovanna mentions she's been thinking about an intriguing aspect of Turkish grammar: there are two past tenses, one for things and events one's seen for oneself, the other for things and events one knows about only at second hand.

(I wonder if this shows up in other languages; and if perhaps it's related to the French system of past tenses, one of which is purely literary as I understand it, not used in everyday speech.)

This throws into a different perspective the current flap in Turkey over Congress's resolution condemning the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey early in the last century -- at a time, in fact, when such killings were apparently in vogue worldwide: if Congress is to resolve against all such historical pogroms it won't get much more done before Christmas.

We tend to condemn in the abstract things we don't care to deal with -- or, let's be generous, can't readily deal with -- in the concrete. Darfur rages; Congress frets about the 1920s. Oddly, we can and do suppress the evidence of our own eyes, but are persuaded by the theories evolved by strangers.