Thursday, 4 February 2016
Chris Garneau - "Lucioles" (El Radio (2009))
A French and English female version of Drs P., judging by the way she sings (she sings way better, but music wise, it is somewhere between a music box and his kind of song)
Monday, 1 February 2016
Sunday, 31 January 2016
meretricious persiflage
(appearing in D.H. Lawrence's "Women in love"
meretricious persiflage: "apparently attractive but actually valueless small talk"
meretricious persiflage: "apparently attractive but actually valueless small talk"
Jonathan Franzen - "How to be alone" (essays)
Great reading, even though I must often reread every other sentence, and look up words I thought I knew (and often, still know, but its essence just a feeling, never a proper description in my mind.)
* * *
In Death and Life, Jacobs also quoted Paul Tillich, who believed that the city, by its very nature, "provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely; the strange." Familiarity, whether of chain stores or of cookie-cutter subdivisions, erodes the autonomous intelligence and, in a weird way, undermines privacy. In the suburbs, I'm the stranger; I feel exposed. only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself."
* * *
In Death and Life, Jacobs also quoted Paul Tillich, who believed that the city, by its very nature, "provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely; the strange." Familiarity, whether of chain stores or of cookie-cutter subdivisions, erodes the autonomous intelligence and, in a weird way, undermines privacy. In the suburbs, I'm the stranger; I feel exposed. only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself."
John Crowley - "Endless Things"
Amazing fourth and final book, and I have no clue on how to describe it. Wonderings, musings. Books and the world. His amazing diction and style. Not something to be spread out over months, but to be read, quickly, days and weeks.
* * *
(they are in bed, talking. at some point, a short flashback, then they continue talking.))
The first time they'd shared this bed - after a couple of drinks at the Sandbox, and well after they'd first begun to consort often - she had seemed unsettlingly cagey. She kept breaking off, or slipping away, to change the radio, or fool with the heat; and she kept talking - not about what was going on right there between them, but about other things, general remarks, questions about life, his life, his thoughts. So tell me. He wondered if it were some kind of test, see if he could keep up his concentration, or his attention to her. He was about to ask if maybe she'd rather just stop, and talk, but just then a sort of smothered fire within seemed to burst softly, and she pressed hard into him; she ceased to say words, only sounds, sounds that seemed, somehow, like further admissions, hard to make at first and then more willingly made.
((now))
She laughed a low laugh, her tummy rolling beneath his hand.
...
"That's what my book was about. How if you change the way ahead, the way behind changes too."
"Seems kind of obvious," she said.
It seemed so when she said it; it was obvious, or at least a commonplace. More than one history of the world; one for each of us. A bright moment arriving when you choose a new way into the future, which illuminates a new past, the backward way, at the same time. Everybody know. It had been true all along.
"Because, you know," she said, "You can't step in the same river twice. You ever hear that?"
"Nope," he said, pressing her now meaningfully downward to supine, enough talk. "News to me."
* * *
So he had had his own secrets and unsayable things, things out of which a double life is made, as his father's and his mother's lives were made of them. Sometimes laid deep like mines or bombs (he thought you'd have to explain this to young people nowadays, who didn't live such lives, probably) so that you had to proceed with care along your way, not come upon them unexpectedly or at the wrong time, at a juncture, and have them explode.
Homo, viator in bivio, the Latin Church declared, offering to help. man, voyager on forking paths. There's no provision, though, for going back, is there, back over the thrown Y switches of our lives, the ones that shout our little handcar off its straight way and onto the way we took instead, as in the silent comedies that Axel loved: no way to go back and fix the thing broken, or break the silence that later exploded. An infinite number of junctures lies between us and that crisis or crux, and passing back again across each one would generate by itself a further juncture, a double infinity, an infinitesimal calculus; you'd never get back to there, and if you could you'd never return again to here where you started from: and why would you need to go back in the first place except to learn how to go on from right here, to go on along the way you have to go?
* * *
A light wind, able to stir the yellow fog but not at first to disperse it. A wind young and inexperienced, learning its uses and its work, but so far aimless; a wind that had been borne along with the world's great slow-marching airs and atmospheres from west to east, from Albion to the Middle Sea and over the Bavarian mountains, wondering, wandering. As it blew more steadily over the White Mountain, the day grew clearer. ot the light of day: what the day was great clearer, though not at once to everyone, and to some not at all.
A little wind. The first wind bears in the time, an angel said to John Dee, and the second bears it away again.
The protestant soldiers on the heights felt it first, lifted their heads and noses to it, to see from which quarter it blew. The various unearthly powers ranked behind them felt it too, and turned from the battle, to see who or what was coming through from the rear. No zephyr they knew. They were astonished then to be picked up and swept away by it, one by one, as by a broom, right out of the to-be and back into the once-was forever. All in a moment those powers were gone, were nothing - for they had all along really been nothing, less than nothing, mere signs, mere phantasmata, and no help now to the human soldiers, left with only their human commanders, standing on an insignificant little hill outside a contested city in the middle of Europe at the start of another battle in another war. Their warm mammalian breath condensed on the damp cold air. They thought how short life is, and how little worth is the promise of Heaven. On the other side the same, as in a mirror. Then the first wave of Catholic pikemen, crying out as though for their mothers, advanced against the Protestant left.
...
That little wind went away from the ghastly battlefield, growing just a little less little as it went, though few still could feel it. Nothing hindered it, perhaps because of its small size - it was no more than a breeze, really, a breath, the puff of air that comes in at the thick small windows of desert dwellings to touch a cheek and say that the simoom might be coming, or might not; hardly wind enough to cover with sands the tombs and temples that its mother had before uncovered. Yet it blew "far and wide"; there wouldn't be anywhere it didn't enter in, rattling the windows of the present and scattering the dealt cards of the past, pushing closed the doors of opened books and scrambling the sense of their indexes and prolegomena. Finally its baby breath, propelled by those fat cheeks, separated the a from the e in every word where they were joined, or suppressed one and left only the other, like conjoined twins that can't survive together, encyclopedias of aerial etheric demons in Egypt. Nobody noticed. And then with a little laugh it blew itself out, bowling up its own nonexistent fundament and drawing all of itself in after.
* * *
According to Dr. Pons, though, it was actually just the opposite. To him, physical matter had no real existence at all; it wasn't different from human, or divine, ignorance. It was an illusion, in fact a hoax. The slightest and smallest human emotion felt by the inward incarcerated soul is more real than any aspect of materiality. And more real in turn than all those emotions, all tears and laughter and love and hate, are the conceptions of the mind - Beauty, Truth, Order, Wisdom - which give to materiality whatever form and worth it has. Most real of all is the world beyond nature and even Mind: the real Without, utterly out of reach, the real of the Fullness and God.
What Kraft had learned, in those first joyous labors of imagination long ago, was that, different as Dr. Pons's inverted universe might be from what is in fact the case, it is necessarily very much like the world inside a work of fiction.
All the myriad material things that we, in our universe, touch and use and love and hate and depend on - our food, our flesh, our breath; cities and towns, roads and houses - in a book these things have no true reality at all. They're just nouns. But emotions are quite real; there are tears of things, and they are really shed, and real laughs laughed. Of course. And in a book intellectual order is the most real of all, the governing, sustaining reality - the Logos, the tale issuing from its absent, its hidden Author.
They, those pretend people in their factitious world, they owe their embodiment, their circumstance of being caught in unreal souls and bodies, to an upheaval that happened before the beginning of space and time (their space and time): a dissatisfaction, a troubling of a single soul's primal economy, a soul startled into awareness by a girlish or a boyish question: if things were different from the way they are, what would they be like?
More, even more: the most precious and only truly real thing within each of the conscious beings who had been made to inhabit Kraft's little world (well, not the hylic mob, the mere names, the spear carriers and extras) was their share of the original undivided consciousness from which they sprang - that is, his own. Into which, when their work is done, they are gathered again at last: when their false world is closed up, and shelved.
...
In subsequent years and subsequent books he had sometimes wondered if he might somehow send them a message, one of them or some of them; awaken them to their own condition, to this peculiar reversal of what we out here, most of us anyway, call reality most of the time. To speak into the ears of one soul at least the commandment, the suggestion, the hope of waking.
* * *
(they are in bed, talking. at some point, a short flashback, then they continue talking.))
The first time they'd shared this bed - after a couple of drinks at the Sandbox, and well after they'd first begun to consort often - she had seemed unsettlingly cagey. She kept breaking off, or slipping away, to change the radio, or fool with the heat; and she kept talking - not about what was going on right there between them, but about other things, general remarks, questions about life, his life, his thoughts. So tell me. He wondered if it were some kind of test, see if he could keep up his concentration, or his attention to her. He was about to ask if maybe she'd rather just stop, and talk, but just then a sort of smothered fire within seemed to burst softly, and she pressed hard into him; she ceased to say words, only sounds, sounds that seemed, somehow, like further admissions, hard to make at first and then more willingly made.
((now))
She laughed a low laugh, her tummy rolling beneath his hand.
...
"That's what my book was about. How if you change the way ahead, the way behind changes too."
"Seems kind of obvious," she said.
It seemed so when she said it; it was obvious, or at least a commonplace. More than one history of the world; one for each of us. A bright moment arriving when you choose a new way into the future, which illuminates a new past, the backward way, at the same time. Everybody know. It had been true all along.
"Because, you know," she said, "You can't step in the same river twice. You ever hear that?"
"Nope," he said, pressing her now meaningfully downward to supine, enough talk. "News to me."
* * *
So he had had his own secrets and unsayable things, things out of which a double life is made, as his father's and his mother's lives were made of them. Sometimes laid deep like mines or bombs (he thought you'd have to explain this to young people nowadays, who didn't live such lives, probably) so that you had to proceed with care along your way, not come upon them unexpectedly or at the wrong time, at a juncture, and have them explode.
Homo, viator in bivio, the Latin Church declared, offering to help. man, voyager on forking paths. There's no provision, though, for going back, is there, back over the thrown Y switches of our lives, the ones that shout our little handcar off its straight way and onto the way we took instead, as in the silent comedies that Axel loved: no way to go back and fix the thing broken, or break the silence that later exploded. An infinite number of junctures lies between us and that crisis or crux, and passing back again across each one would generate by itself a further juncture, a double infinity, an infinitesimal calculus; you'd never get back to there, and if you could you'd never return again to here where you started from: and why would you need to go back in the first place except to learn how to go on from right here, to go on along the way you have to go?
* * *
A light wind, able to stir the yellow fog but not at first to disperse it. A wind young and inexperienced, learning its uses and its work, but so far aimless; a wind that had been borne along with the world's great slow-marching airs and atmospheres from west to east, from Albion to the Middle Sea and over the Bavarian mountains, wondering, wandering. As it blew more steadily over the White Mountain, the day grew clearer. ot the light of day: what the day was great clearer, though not at once to everyone, and to some not at all.
A little wind. The first wind bears in the time, an angel said to John Dee, and the second bears it away again.
The protestant soldiers on the heights felt it first, lifted their heads and noses to it, to see from which quarter it blew. The various unearthly powers ranked behind them felt it too, and turned from the battle, to see who or what was coming through from the rear. No zephyr they knew. They were astonished then to be picked up and swept away by it, one by one, as by a broom, right out of the to-be and back into the once-was forever. All in a moment those powers were gone, were nothing - for they had all along really been nothing, less than nothing, mere signs, mere phantasmata, and no help now to the human soldiers, left with only their human commanders, standing on an insignificant little hill outside a contested city in the middle of Europe at the start of another battle in another war. Their warm mammalian breath condensed on the damp cold air. They thought how short life is, and how little worth is the promise of Heaven. On the other side the same, as in a mirror. Then the first wave of Catholic pikemen, crying out as though for their mothers, advanced against the Protestant left.
...
That little wind went away from the ghastly battlefield, growing just a little less little as it went, though few still could feel it. Nothing hindered it, perhaps because of its small size - it was no more than a breeze, really, a breath, the puff of air that comes in at the thick small windows of desert dwellings to touch a cheek and say that the simoom might be coming, or might not; hardly wind enough to cover with sands the tombs and temples that its mother had before uncovered. Yet it blew "far and wide"; there wouldn't be anywhere it didn't enter in, rattling the windows of the present and scattering the dealt cards of the past, pushing closed the doors of opened books and scrambling the sense of their indexes and prolegomena. Finally its baby breath, propelled by those fat cheeks, separated the a from the e in every word where they were joined, or suppressed one and left only the other, like conjoined twins that can't survive together, encyclopedias of aerial etheric demons in Egypt. Nobody noticed. And then with a little laugh it blew itself out, bowling up its own nonexistent fundament and drawing all of itself in after.
* * *
According to Dr. Pons, though, it was actually just the opposite. To him, physical matter had no real existence at all; it wasn't different from human, or divine, ignorance. It was an illusion, in fact a hoax. The slightest and smallest human emotion felt by the inward incarcerated soul is more real than any aspect of materiality. And more real in turn than all those emotions, all tears and laughter and love and hate, are the conceptions of the mind - Beauty, Truth, Order, Wisdom - which give to materiality whatever form and worth it has. Most real of all is the world beyond nature and even Mind: the real Without, utterly out of reach, the real of the Fullness and God.
What Kraft had learned, in those first joyous labors of imagination long ago, was that, different as Dr. Pons's inverted universe might be from what is in fact the case, it is necessarily very much like the world inside a work of fiction.
All the myriad material things that we, in our universe, touch and use and love and hate and depend on - our food, our flesh, our breath; cities and towns, roads and houses - in a book these things have no true reality at all. They're just nouns. But emotions are quite real; there are tears of things, and they are really shed, and real laughs laughed. Of course. And in a book intellectual order is the most real of all, the governing, sustaining reality - the Logos, the tale issuing from its absent, its hidden Author.
They, those pretend people in their factitious world, they owe their embodiment, their circumstance of being caught in unreal souls and bodies, to an upheaval that happened before the beginning of space and time (their space and time): a dissatisfaction, a troubling of a single soul's primal economy, a soul startled into awareness by a girlish or a boyish question: if things were different from the way they are, what would they be like?
More, even more: the most precious and only truly real thing within each of the conscious beings who had been made to inhabit Kraft's little world (well, not the hylic mob, the mere names, the spear carriers and extras) was their share of the original undivided consciousness from which they sprang - that is, his own. Into which, when their work is done, they are gathered again at last: when their false world is closed up, and shelved.
...
In subsequent years and subsequent books he had sometimes wondered if he might somehow send them a message, one of them or some of them; awaken them to their own condition, to this peculiar reversal of what we out here, most of us anyway, call reality most of the time. To speak into the ears of one soul at least the commandment, the suggestion, the hope of waking.
David Mitchell - "The Bone Clocks"
Very nice read about the life of Holly Sykes, the people around her, and the raging war of Atemporals vs Carnivores, the first century old souls reincarnating, the latter evil Anchorites who siphon off some life'soul stuff from mere mortals to stay alive.
I did enjoy it, and the end was properly bleak - though a deus ex machina tacked on -, but was I truly gripped by the big meta fight? No. The human characters meant more than those Horlogists and Anchorites. Which a book club might reveal to be exactly the point, perhaps.
I did enjoy it, and the end was properly bleak - though a deus ex machina tacked on -, but was I truly gripped by the big meta fight? No. The human characters meant more than those Horlogists and Anchorites. Which a book club might reveal to be exactly the point, perhaps.
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