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Lonely tonight, unearthing Breton's Jeunes Cerisiers Garantis Contre Les Lièvres.
I can't speak or understand spoken French worth a fig anymore, but there's just enough for reading Breton with the right hand held lightly over the English translation on the facing page, pale fingers taking on a flushed pink in the lamplight, over pale blue paper - light cerulean, I whisper, probably because of the "cer" in "cerisiers". Dried cherry petals, creasing in the joints, moving away when a word escapes me - a neat inversion, relinquishing the grasp in order to capture the meaning.
I like the necessity of unearthing the phrase in this case. Can't swiftly sweep the eye like a mariner searching the water - I have to reach my hand down into the tidepool of each word, feel its root, conjugate its skeleton.
Anthropologist of the mummified ibis.
Momie d'ibis qui appelle la fusion incessante des créatures imparfaits.
It gives the surrealist language - which, when read in one's native tongue can sometimes feel like torn paper folded paper sharp edge and a closed eye - a certain fumbling tenderness. Like reaching out for your lover in the dark, unsure for a moment if you've encountered ilium or elbow, pale fingers mapping the bone beneath the skin. It permits a fumbling and tender memory precisely because it requires such attention, because that attention removes the precious cloy from the act of remembering (sitting alone in bed - MON DIEU! pathetic, dude).
Lorsqu'il m'est donné du t'approcher à nes plus te voir
Immobiles sous son paupières pour toujours. |
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One does not consider oneself vain, until one begins to grow ugly. |
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Absentmindedly clicking about on the tutoring pages of Craig's List, I find the following service offered by a biology tutor:
One on one individualized lesions ensure comprehension.
If I can provide tailored gaping knife wounds to guarantee performance I will be a step up on this sap. |
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Mar. 19th, 2009 @ 11:28 pm
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The Morning News is currently breaking down the book-world, bracket-style, in the annual Tournament of Books, and I am starting to wonder - am I the only person who actually enjoyed reading Bolaño's 2666? The second round, it's blasting through the competition, behemoth-like, but all of the reviews cite the weight, the starpower, the masterpiece-ism, and demur "despite the tedium." Cruising for a bruising, aiming for a maiming: setting it up for that late-round TAKEDOWN by some slighter manuscript. That critical waltz, "it's the point, it's the point", three/four time, Swanlake arms brushing aside "I actually thought it was Boring As Fuck" with grand flourishes of "I appreciate the Intention". Perhaps it's naive of me, but despite the fact that I recognized each great tombstone of intent, I also LIKED it. I attribute it to:
1) I am the person who enjoys the mornings when the alarm clock blares o! hideous rooster and interrupts a dream, and you blindly mash the snooze with sleepnumbed paw and fall back into a dream that isn't anything to do with the first but the subconscious threads it in, and repeat. again. again. (thank god I am not living with someone because honestly, intolerable for the observer.)
2) I read so quickly when the prose draws me into its currents perhaps my very speed turns tedium-induced-trance into pure trance, blurred landscape from a New England Acela. The Latin-American authors do this very well, I've noticed, those loonnng sentences, whitecapped river with bits of flotsam you can cling to, memorizing the slippery knots in the wood the grain, before slipping under again.
3) Different landscape. Duders you don't KNOW from tedium until you have read seven Cell papers in a single day. |
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"Since science is strange, a strange beast, which seeks its lair in the most absurd places, and works according to meticulous plans that from the outside can only appear inscrutable and sometimes even comic, so much like aimless wanderings do they seem and instead they are geometrical hunting trails, traps laid with cunning art, and strategic battles before which one may stand astonished... spoken with a cold certitude but also, one might have said, with a hint of tenderness, a complete absurdity, for a man of science, but not completely incomprehensible if only one could see inside his head."
from Alessandro Baricco Ocean Sea |
| » Simply Charming |
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I find the grocery store to be harrowing. Yes, yes, the glut of choices and branding and mad consumerism has been discussed ad nauseum but my GOD how many toilet papers there are. The single rolls, wrapped in cricklepaper, bodega staple, mass up like Helm's Deep slashed purple and teal; you have double-roll, double-ply, double-roll-double-ply (getting EXPONENTIAL here), quilted quadruple quilted (do you remember those old commercials where tiny cartoon grandmothers actually hand-stitched each square with tinier needles, arthritic fingers plied towards the comfort of your double-cheek? Agh.)
American modernity reverses the adage: invention is the mother of necessity. I want I want I need. (When I was in a fourth grade play, I performed Shel Silverstein's 'I must have that pony' poem to such pitch-perfect acquisitive brattiness that other parents shot mine sympathetic glances for months.)
The attendant anxiety is a documented phenomenon in psychology and marketing: trade-off aversion: standing in the greenlit aisles at eight at night doubled over with the agony of elaborately evaluating angel softness vs. smug environmentalism but a chapped asshole vs. enough toilet paper to reach to the moon and back if only it could withstand the shrapneled satellites and space vacuum (could it? they only ever show that sterile blue water). We flick to half-remembered commercials - those grandmothers, or the awful Charmin' bears. My GOD, who thought THAT was a good idea? laying a sheen of pastel children's book illustration over pure scatology in terrifying double-ply? Shall I be jealous of those bears, in their mint green spring green meadow, who want only one type of TP, unquestioned? It's soothing when expelling the rough(age) buttplug post-hibernation. It makes me ill, standing in that aisle. Bugbear, indeed.
The normal intellectuo-aesthetic criteria - the ones we are good at implementing - don't apply. Like John Barth? It introduces no necessity for arch, postmodern toilet paper. "Is this sufficient for wiping your ass? What does it reflect?*
*When I was a boy I took a shit beneath the boardwalk in Ocean City, mirrored the teeming crowd, girls vomiting on the Cyclotron." The nihilists? "Peristalsis begins and ends with death; each contraction of the bowel eases one closer to one's own end. Tearing a square, withering a tree." Paradox? "You do not want this toilet tissue." Does. Not. Compute.
When my brother was little, he would run down the shelves, behind the toilet paper, knocking a few violently into the aisles, the visual six-gun salute of branding transformed into a literal volley. I'd welcome such a poltergeist at this point - here, I'll buy the ones that kneecapped me.
Toss one in, the one on sale, certain it doesn't matter but still anxious. We must buy toothpaste next. Is this whitening mouthwash wonderful? Is it significant? Is it what we need?
Mar. 10th, 2009 @ 09:44 pm
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| » Wikipedia Names Your Band |
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This particular meme provides undue amounts of entertainment. Couldn't stop at one - the number of times synchrony prevails is very pleasing.
The way it works is a random Wiki article provides the name, the end of a random quotation provides the album titles, and a random Flickr photo the artwork.
The original:
( Read more... )
Feb. 26th, 2009 @ 10:51 pm
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| » Lepidopterism |
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There has been a dead moth on the back of the piano for months. For some reason, I always expect moths to smell of mothballs (they don't). I don't want to throw it out, for some reason, wings coiled around the abdomen like a cigar and its black black eyes. It reminds me of the summer afternoon when strange people sat down at our table to drink their gold summer beers, everybody wanted to sit outside, it was hot gold light, we were so effortlessly in love and a dead moth fell down from the roof onto the table, into a skim of condensation. The dust from its wings floated off, slightly, and they joked about waiter-there's-a-moth-in-my-beer (no extra charge, we're out of flies) and in a vast tenderness I wanted to pick it up and tuck it away in my bag, take it home. If you spread the wings of a dun moth there is a pale tender gold hindwing. The moth fell off tonight, into the space between the back of the piano and the chair rail, while I was playing Mozart. There are, I suppose, much worse fates for a dead moth.
Feb. 25th, 2009 @ 10:45 pm
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| » (No Subject) |
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Titian-haired wet-dog roaming the streets (wag). In the rain the damp grey stones steal the sky, steelsky, everywhere stones. Walk faster, coat against the cold, pulling black fur tighter over eyes (melancholy, black dog). Walk faster
(who is the third that walks beside us? when I count
1
2
but look up ahead.) There are many answers, each inhabiting the grey-cloaked body in turn. Shifting bodies & stony sky.
I walk, 1, 2, and there is never enough time and there is always too much. Two calendars war beneath the neat grid, plumed heads chewing a grey cloak. Lash the slowwalking beast who plods along tramples the stones with 1 2 feet, lashing the beat. Metronome with the leadgrey head tick talk, speak, creature. Tell me, why is there always too much time and never enough? Whipsaw, Wednesday (Ash Wednesday, ashgrey Wednesday) and nothing has been done and you are so far away. Tell me.
Time is only time, and no time to sit still. The metronome dogs us.
Time is a three-headed dog whose faces bite each other. One rapid, one slow, one a greg(orian)arious spokesman.
Call me Lupa and I will hold you tenderly to my breast, my gemini.
Are you calling me, like, a total. prostitute? Mixing a lot of etymologies, here, aren't you. I am callipygian, if I might toot my own tuchus.
_____
So much of what we experience assumes foreknowledge. Spoilers, previews, bookjackets, overheard conversations, reviews, past experiences, advice, pilots, Wikipedia entries, guides, précis, omens, recommendations, security breaches, trial balloons, ballooming in the steelgrey sky. This predication is dangerous: false: it implies we will always be warned. Not for the true things, the secret things, matters that keep us up nights, cut to the bone, reach to the cellcenter. We don't know. I don't know.
Ex: What does this molecule do beneath our skin?
What color is it? (Nanotechnology suggests: grey)
or
Who is the third that walks beside you?
_____
Quickcut between bodies. You are multiformed, I am too, so must be this third. Jump, skip to my you, my darling. I'm breathless in 1960, Jean-Pierre Léaud with his Sinatra sneer (jump back), hair gamine though now it likes to tangle (all Pre-raphaelite: jump back!). Hipster Botticelli, they say, as I shake out my bangs. Hipster Anna Karenina, black fur pulled tighter over my eyes. The train schedules restructure themselves on the board, making quick clicking sounds. I'm jumping down to the city. Pacing through commercials and music videos and film (jump forward) it's a fragmented world. Things fall apart, the center et cetera (cut/splice).
Our molecules do it, too, those ones that I can't foresee, or the ones we know. We're cognizant of it, the cut and splice of RNA (AHR, EN, AAAAY, vowels too long to capture the quick snake snacking itself). Cut to the consonants, and understand the best you can.
_____
O keep the Dog far hence... or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
Be careful, for digging can cut.
Dirty fingernails. Be humble. I have inherited the earth but o how many fossils. I do not wish to dig too deep, what long white bones are so easily uncovered. Long pale bodies lain on the dark red earth. My fingernails are broken and short beneath my white gloves. How can I dig so deep, so tenderly, at this small world - jumping between pathways, Frost-bit, two roads, diverge, discover - and shy back here, where we live?
In every unwilling ignorance there is a core of willful ignorance. Expect nothing (la la). Enucleate. Erase.
I AM LAZARUS COME FROM THE DEAD COME BACK TO TELL YOU ALL I SHALL TELL YOU ALL.
Shh, creature. There are corpses better left buried, though I am named for Bloom.
_____
Melancholy is a grey dog, but it can still bite, but rejects these sinews, but the bones are white.
Feb. 18th, 2009 @ 11:55 pm
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| » A Primer for Listening to Messiaen |
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(Informal poll: do you pronounce it "prih-mer" or "pry-mer"?)
Remember what it's like to touch a lover, a boy(girl)friend, a spouse, after an absence? Knees jut, chins bounce like falling gently onto a carpet from hands and knees. There is a slight adjustment, a refamiliarizing with the already-familiar. The bones are a different ivory.
This is what it's like to open Messaien on the music stand after a time away. It wasn't a question of practice, or the winterwarm brandy; I'd just played a Chopin with the same surety and brio (despite frozen-fingered flub and liquid slur contrary to marking). Fingers reached the wrong interval like thighs open to the wrong degree, just missing contact with the skin, or just impending it.
(It's funny, in a way, that I think of him like this, marmoreal man with his themes of religion, war, redemption, purity of colour.)
Messiaen spans that difficult wavelength, more classical than Cage, more modern than Mendelssohn. And for so many people I've known, the piano music is most difficult despite (because of?) the comparative simplicity. Multivoiced, but uni-instrumented. But you can start to find the themes: just listen.
Listen.
2. Chant dextase dans un paysage triste - Pierre-Laurent Aimard [Piano]
(I am unsure of the interpretation of this one but it's the only one I can find.)
By spanning the twentieth century he creates a dissonance but also the key. Classical, jazz, the atonal modern: in some passages you hear it: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Listen.
Synthesis, and synaesthesia: like many of us, here, he had an easy slip-n-slide between stimuli: (from the notes from Quartet for the End of Time: "In my dreams, I hear and see ordered chords and melodies, known colors and shapes...; a roundabout compenetration of superhuman sounds and colors. These swords of fire, this blue-orange lava, these sudden stars: there is the tangle, there are the rainbows!")
Birdsong. When ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dignam and I were at the Turangalîla Symphonie at Carnegie Hall, I waited for it, and it appeared, feathering down from the gilt ceiling, up from the flutes, and I wanted to say HA. "The birds are the opposite to Time," he says, and they appear, rubato, joyful, accelerated.
And let yourself touch it. Messiaen bristles, sharp-flat-natural, religion-war-nature, but there is always a tender place, beneath the chin. If you listen, you can find it, the place on the neck of the beloved that opens beneath your lips, the ear. Fingers unlock. Doors open.
Jan. 22nd, 2009 @ 11:01 pm
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| » The only tragedy |
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"Oh god, is that...............................................................? Oh shit. Twinsies.
Jan. 21st, 2009 @ 10:26 pm
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| » Important directions |
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My eyeliner instructs me:
"Be the girl with the eyes."
I'll get right on that.
At the coffee shop, printed on a container of liquid sugar: "Discard after 30 days."
Sharpied in underneath: "Date opened: 1/5/09 Discard date: 2/28/09"
I want that information very much right now, says Ashbery. I can't have it and that makes me angry.
Jan. 12th, 2009 @ 11:43 pm
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| » (No Subject) |
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Lately, I've noticed, we are all uncommonly unhinged by our texts. Perhaps this is a function of exhaustion, from the holidays (post-traumatic exhaustion) or the new year (preemptive exhaustion). Perhaps it is a function of the New Year itself, an uncomfortable lapse, 2009 lapping the chops of 8, the fact that we all know in some unlit place within ourselves that despite the calendar's circle and the earth's orbit we are now spinning dark in a previously untrod void of space. You Are Here, but here ain't where it just was, is it? Like 6, we are afraid because 7 8 9. Spin back.
Electrons. A phyllofax. Eggs florentine, and before that, a roast chicken.
thelican posts about her books, mentioning apophenia, and I remember the other night at Patsy's Pizzeria, looking down at the detritus of a salad and seeing a face and only being able to recall the word prosopagnosia which in this case and this case only is a strange antonym for the desired word, and I ate the quirked carrot eyebrow with my fingers to destroy the false pattern and the false word and my fingers slicked with olive oil. Destroying the nonexistent, what a patsy.
Almost everything I read lately is about the constant deciphering and translation between text and life. Which informs which. An old short story of mine, Bolaño's 2666, Gibson's Pattern Recognition, even the dreadful pink Free Book from the dreadful bookstore called, uninspiredly, Chloe Does Yale about a Yale Daily News sex columnist. Perhaps every book is sort of about that, in its way.
Today, we have become more comfortable with maps, codes, Enigma no longer. De-lete, add a re- to deconstruction, endless cycle, game of telephone, reaching the beginning at a new point in space and in time. The surrealists cut up their exquisite bodies of work as an act of subversion more than anything else, inimage as anti-image. Finding the chaos in the order. We try to do it both ways. Intertex(t)ed. Is it possible that every book contains within itself every other book? Aw naw, the Chimp Fallacy, man, the typewriter is obsolete as the idea of codes being contained within the oil-slicked metalheft of rotors and pushbuttons anyway.
But still, I spinechill at each recurring exposition of this idea. Is it possible that this text was created so that he could find her? Is it possible that this text was created in order to freak me out? Recursive. Cursive. Shit.
Jan. 5th, 2009 @ 08:40 pm
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| » more coincidence |
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Yesterday, leaving the South Bronx on the way back to Connecticut by car, missing the green left-turn-arrow for the third time, my window opening on the median filled with muddy pigeons and empty bottles, uncertain whether this endless turn is even going to get me to the correct expressway, I think, the signage in the South Bronx TRULY SUCKS.
Today, picking up Absurdistan on the way to the laundromat because I am making even less headway against the Pynchon than I was against the green arrow, scrabbling muddily in the median, I find:
"This is a book about love. But it's also a book about geography. The South Bronx may be low on signage, but everywhere I look, I see the helpful arrows declaring YOU ARE HERE.
I Am Here.
I Am Here next to the woman I love. The city rushes out to locate and affirm me.
How can I be so fortunate?
Sometimes I can't believe that I am still alive."
Dec. 29th, 2008 @ 10:06 pm
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| » (No Subject) |
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Sometimes our lives are graced by occurrences that, if put into a novel or short story, would be dismissed as hackneyed and strained metaphor.
dignam arrived one evening in early October, walking to my house up the long street from the train station, carrying four strangely and beautifully coloured calla lilies. Lacking a tall enough vase, I trimmed the stems, put each in its own glass bottle, and never touched them again. Nearly three months later, ONE OF THEM IS STILL ALIVE. I see it every morning when I wake up. It makes me happy, winethroated improbable lily.
Dec. 28th, 2008 @ 11:13 pm
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| » (No Subject) |
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Jumping the meme wagon, via grashupfer
List 10 books you have on your bookshelf that you think nobody else on your friends list has on theirs.
*Caveat: because of the collective erudition/ponciness of the f-list, this is merely the books LEAST LIKELY to appear in someone's bookshelf*
Tertium Organum by P.D. Ouspensky. He thought it was the third major philosophical synthesis. In actuality, it makes VERY LITTLE SENSE.
Mad Science in Imperial City by Shanxing Wang. Prose-poem-like exploration of the shatteredges in Venn diagrams created by being a scientist and a poet, a Chinese citizen in the modern world.
The Natural Philosophy of Love by Remy DeGourmont. Bought in a used bookshop in Vermont, mostly due to a table of contents consisting of descriptions like "THE MECHANISM OF LOVE: The apparent immorality of Nature - Sexual ethnography - The form and duration of coupling in divers mammifers - Pain as a bridle on sex - Maidenhead - The mole - Mania of attributing human virtues to animals - The modesty of elephants - Fish species with a penis."
Awake! A Reader for the Sleepless an anthology including uh myself. Which is why I suspect nobody has it, and because I never gave it to dignam because it is TERRIBLE.
Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy by Mark Dion. More of a coffee table book, but it's on my bookshelf so I suppose it counts.
Chaos, Gaea, Eros by Ralph Abraham. Pseudoscience, pseudomysticism, bought before I was a "real scientist" and relegated to the shelf with the cobbled together vase of Heironymous Bosch's hell-triptych panel. Maybe it has some decent insights, in retrospect. Can't remember.
Cryptozoology: Against Time Place Scale by Mark Bessire. Trying to preempt repetition is really thrusting forth a nerdy sector of my bookshelf.
The Cubist Infant by Justus Ballard. Tiny, tiny book. Has some lovely sentences but overall absurd.
I am starting to reach, here, because I don't feel like crawling on the floor to find the forgotten titles of stupid popular science books, so
Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares by Andre Breton. I borrowed it from my mother for so long that I felt horrid, let her believe she lost it, and bought her a new one. I hide it, slim volume that it is, inside a Collected Roethke when she visits.
La Belle Captive by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Based on (and accompanied by) Magritte paintings. Lovely. I have never seen the movie; I don't want to be disappointed.
Sep. 25th, 2008 @ 11:42 pm
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| » The Satire-icon |
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I don't make a habit of posting about politics, and I am too tired to compose a cogent argument for why this is apropos (not that it entirely needs it), but within the first few pages of The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter we get:
"Fabricius Veiento has already spoken very cleverly on the errors committed in the name of religion... But are our rhetoricians tormented by another species of Furies when they cry, "I received these wounds while fighting for the public liberty; I lost this eye in your defense: give me a guide who will lead me to my children, my limbs are hamstrung and will not hold me up!" Even these heroics could be endured if they made easier the road to eloquence; but as it is, their sole gain from this ferment of matter and empty discord of words is, that when they step into the Forum, they think they have been carried into another world. And it is my conviction that the schools are responsible for the gross foolishness of our young men, because, in them, they see or hear nothing at all of the affairs of everyday life, but only pirates standing in chains upon the shore, tyrants scribbling edicts in which sons are ordered to behead their own fathers; responses from oracles, delivered in time of pestilence, ordering the immolation of three or more virgins."
"And, as designing parasites, when they seek invitations to the tables of the rich, have in mind nothing except what will, in their opinion, be most acceptable to their audience - for in now other way can they secure their ends, save by setting snares for the ears - so it is with the teachers of rhetoric, they might be compares with the fisherman, who, unless he baits his hook with what he knows is most appetizing to the little fish, may wait all day upon some rock, without the hope of a catch."
What, then, is there to do, indeed.
Sep. 16th, 2008 @ 12:11 am
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| » I am the one who makes you real; let us embrace |
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Perhaps the longest and most fatalistic sentence on love ever penned, from Blaise Cendrars' Moravagine:
"Love is masochistic. These cries and complaints, these sweet alarms, this anguished state of lovers, this suspense, this latent pain that is just below the surface, almost unexpressed, these thousand and one anxieties over the loved one's absence, this feeling of time rushing by, this touchiness, these fits of temper, these long daydreams, this childish fickleness of behaviour, this moral torture where vanity and self-esteem, or perhaps honour, upbring and modesty are at stake, these highs and lows in the nervous tone, these leaps of the imagination, this fetishism, this cruel precision of the senses, whipping and probing, the collapse, the prostration, the abdication, the self-abasement, the perpetual loss and recovery of one's personality, these stammered words and phrases, these pet-names, this intimacy, these hesitations in physical contact, these epileptic tremors, these successive and ever more frequent relapses, this more and more turbulent and stormy passion with its ravages progressing to the point of the complete inhibition and annihilation of the soul, erasure of the brain and even the desiccation of the heart, this yearning for ruin, for destruction, for mutilation, this need of effusiveness, of adoration, of mysticism, this insatiability which expresses itself in hyper-irritability of the mucous membranes, in errant taste, in vasomotor or peripheral disorders, and which conjures up jealousy and vengeance, crimes, prevarications and treacheries, this idolatry, this incurable melancholy, this apathy, this profound moral misery, this definitive and harrowing doubt, this despair - are not all these stigmata the very symptoms of love in which we can first diagnose, then trace with a sure hand, the clinical curve of masochism?"
The repetition, short phrases strung together in fevered commas, superficially subverts, flips the ardent monologue of the lover. The interspersal of the psychiatrist narrator's jargon, the coolly medical conclusion, takes it sideways - almost Lynchian, a darkstretching lateral probe.
The speaker hasn't been jilted - there is no bile or bitters to dilute the treatment. It discomfits because there is no sense that he has ever been in (romantic) love, and reading, one recognizes the symptoms like a first-year medical student diagnosing himself in every DSM entry. The language sneaks past your defenses, unlocking with the lyric and inoculating logic with the clinical. Written while Freud and Jung were at their zeniths, it co-opts to catchword you into credence.
Much of the book is gleefully vile, and so more than anything I've read so far, the passage elicits the message: we are all monsters caught in the crossection of modernity. Moravagine himself recollects his sexual awakening: "Soon an egg, a stovepipe could excite me sexually... The sewing machine was, as it were, the plan of a courtesan, a mechanical demonstration of the prowess of a chorus girl." You are in love, and so you are monstrous, a cog in the vast biopsychological machine of love, at once atavistic and a juggernaut.
I am left with the decidedly un-lyric thought: this, more than anything, Creeps. Me. Out. In a darkened room I will myself to recall the idyll, the unsinister kiss, the sunlit park. Although we all know there are beetles in this loam, under the turf, between the roots: "You are the abyss of light. You are a blade of grass magnified a thousand times."
Aug. 19th, 2008 @ 10:30 pm
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| » Sexy miss, translation |
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Add to the list of phrases that should mean cunnilingus:
"Donner sa langue au chat(te)"
which gives the lyrics
"C'est pas ma faute/ quand je donne ma langue au chat"
an entirely new meaning.
):
Aug. 5th, 2008 @ 04:55 pm
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| » Girl, you'll be a woman soon |
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"I woke up laughing and terrified both, because I thought that the thirty-year old man I am today was aping and ridiculing the callow juvenile I once was, while he in turn was aping me and, by the same token, each of us was aping himself."
So says Witold Gombrowicz, not one page into Ferdydurke, neatly capturing the problem of the I. We are multivalent creatures, here, lumping ourselves through the dark wood, sprouting I-stalks.
It's tricky for the writer: voice-splitting, the grafting of the root. "I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson;" one Borges confesses, "he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me."
The internet I - iterations, interactions - approximates the artist's conundrum (how democratic). iMac, iTunes, iLike: the iI. Clever man.
In translation: into English, the I elongates, grows phallic, a tower whose top may reach unto heaven and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered (neat excision of the semicolon, texttweak, perpetrated by the current I, drunk with typographic power). The Anglosaxon I was capitalized c. 1250, while I began to be capitalized c. 1983, each of us emerging, extending, naméd.
The I is both the most reliable narrator (Descartes loaded up according to de grocery list unobserved and unobservable by the Other) and the least reliable (inaccuracy of reporting, failure of omniscience, paranoia, relativity). And that's assuming a stable I (monolith) - but I'm saying there're more M's to modify It (morph/mutate). As Horacio Castellanos Moya's narrative in Senselessness streams on, his Me acquires hangers-on, the broken syntax of the indigenous I's he copyedits weaving into his own. Long sentences meander around him, rush down gullies, propel his paranoid flight, and at the end: the voice of another: sentences like gunfire: "Everybody's fucked. Be grateful you left," and he's validated. Condensed. Sometimes one takes on the I of another to suit himself. R. Kelly emerges from closet after closet, tailoring the narrative as he goes. R. u Kelly? or is you another I, fumbling with the shoe-rack in a labyrinth of closets, one behind the other?
Perhaps one reason we give the memoirist such a hard time is that he threatens our crumbling monuments with his unreliability.
Similarly, there is no I train. If it were late, or running on the wrong track, it could cause a citywide existential crisis.
I've got I's only for you, you say, wrymouthed. The I becomes the I that is in you, lain bare like a spine.
The last laugh? There is no Ferdydurke.
Jul. 22nd, 2008 @ 08:26 pm
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