“…there is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on PLATO’S secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no “Bible,” nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic—but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life—a Greek life which he repudiated—without an Aristophanes!”
—Neitzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Berenice Abbott by Walker Evans ca 1930. Even at this age she saw the genius of Atget when no one else could.
We do great injustice to Iscariot, in thinking him wicked above all common wickedness. He was only a common money-lover, and, like all money-lovers, didn’t understand Christ; — couldn’t make out the worth of Him, or meaning of Him. He didn’t want Him to be killed. He was horror-struck when he found that Christ would be killed; threw his money away instantly, and hanged himself. How many of our present money-seekers, think you, would have the grace to hang themselves, whoever was killed?
—From John Ruskin Lecture, The Crown of Wild Olive
“If you were like him, you would be a great artist.”
In Francoise Gilot’s Life with Picasso she tells of how another of Picasso’s ex-lovers used to write huge letters haranguing him everyday, when she wasn’t stalking him. And she would often include a picture of Rembrandt and write, “If you were like him, you would be a great artist.” Gilot says this used to trouble Picasso a lot. But it sounds like it would be a useful service to everyone.
“VANITY bids all her sons be generous and brave,———-and her daughters chaste and courteous.———-But why do we want her instructions?———-Ask the comedian who is taught a part he feels not———-
Is it that the principles of religion want strength, or that the real passion for what is good and worthy will not carry us high enough———-GOD! thou knowest they carry us too high———-we want not to be,—but to seem——-”
—from a Laurence Sterne sermon, 1764
‘A poem is the realised love of desire that has remained desire.’
OR
‘The poem is the realised love of desire still desiring.’
René Char
In the fourteenth century the great Welsh prince Owain Glyndŵr dreamt of creating two studia generalia in Wales on the model of other medieval Catholic universities. War and his ‘Disappearance’ scuppered that dream and the cost to Wales has been incalculable. In the 1880’s the desire to create a University in North Wales was immense and willed by a huge diversity of its people. Three thousand Penrhyn slate quarrymen contributed to the cost by having a fixed deduction taken off their weekly wages. The same quarrymen who, fewer than 20 years later, would strike for 3 years on no pay because of such poor working conditions(deeply impacting British labour and trade union development.) In the village of Pentraeth on Anglesey each household, without exception, contributed to the university scheme. Many other villages did the same. There was simply a very real desire to create a centre of higher learning. Glyndŵr’s dream was being made reality by the dreams of the local people. Coleg Bangor was founded in 1884. This month two of my cousins are starting courses there and I’m proud of them and all the people who gave to its foundation.
’„, in þe apparaile of a pore man and pilgrymes lyknesse
Many tyme god hath ben mette.’
—from William Langland’s Piers Plowman, ca. 1390
(þ is the middle english letter for ‘th’. ð was also replaced by ‘th’. Ben Johnson in his English Grammar(1640) was mad as hell with the trend to use ‘th’ for both these letters, which he said had needfully different sounds. But þat is the way ðings rolled.)
Drawing and poem by David Jones
You can hear the silence of it;
you can hear the rat of no-man’s-land
rut-out intricacies,
weasel-out his patient workings,
scrut, scrut, sscrut
harrow out-earthly, trowel his cunning paw;
redeem the time of our uncharity, to sap his own amphibious paradise.
You can hear his carrying-parties rustle our corruptions through the
night-weeds – contest the choicest morsels in his tiny conduits,
bead-eyed feast on us; by a rule of his nature; at night-feast on the
broken of us. Those broad-pinioned;
blue-burnished, or brinded-back;
whose proud eyes watched
the broken emblems
droop and drag dust,
suffer with us this metamorphosis.
—extract from In Parenthesis, 1937. The drawing is Dugout Rats, 1916; made whilst in the trenches of the Somme.
Of all the analysis being rushed out in response to the riots nothing has been written that sounds as honest and full as the riot girls on the bbc radio show who said, ‘We’re just showing the rich people that we can do what we want.’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14458424) Apart from being a lovely clear sentence with a great rhythm (joke, but true) the line’s form and content is in unity. Something in them resonates and they have the words to express it.
The political and journalistic class don’t. Think about Cameron or Miliband, every time they start making a point about morality. Suddenly a little rupture opens up between the words and the meaning. The words seem to shrink. It is the overpowering feeling of modern British moral talk—a disconnect. The concepts get articulated but only the mouth is engaged, the rest of the body is numb. Or a faint engagement of the heart, a remnant of what is desired. And it is the most common feeling I’ve had while reading the commentators and listening to the politicians. A speech that tries to find words for sentiments that don’t really have any belief. Calling society sick when they mean that they themselves are in robust health but an underclass is ill and in need of their corrective. Why is none of them saying ‘we are sick…’? That shift in language would suddenly give someone a genuine voice—a full bodied voice. A speech whose burden would be shared by a community, a people, a history, a Fall.
Some deeper problems in Britain are being articulated in these articles, not in the meaning of the sentences but in the ever diverging paths of the words and their feelings.
“For a LION roars HIMSELF compleat from head to tail.”
A line from ‘A Song to David’ by Kit Smart, 1760
From an Aharon Appelfeld interview:
Tikkun: Talk about your writing process.
Appelfeld: First you have a narrative and a melody that is a leitmotif. If you’re following this leitmotif, you’re speaking with melody. You’re following that melody. According to the melody, you are changing.
From Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer:
Cheppity cheppity chep chep. Chep. Silence. Cheppity chep chep. Chep.
It starts as an evil turn of events. There is a sense of urgency. Something has to be done. Let us please do something about it. Then it is a colour, a very bad colour that needs tending to. Then a pain. But there is no use: it is a sound and it is out there in the world and nothing can be done about it. Awake.
Cheppity cheppity chep chep. Chep. Silence.
We may propose as fairly certain that, in the strongest sense, transgression only begins to exist when art itself becomes manifest, and that the birth of art fairly closely coincided, in the Reindeer Age, with the tumultuous outbreak of play and festival announced by these cave-painting figures, vying with one another in energy and exuberance that attain fullest expression in the game of birth and death played on stone.
-Bataille, Lascaux; or the Birth of Art
[I wouldn’t read it if you haven’t seen it.]
Saw the new Malick flick The Tree of Life a few days ago. It managed to leave me quite moved and also quite exasperated. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it fails as a work of art. Of all Malick’s films it must be the greatest failure and whereas before he has flirted with sentimentality, here he just wades in. He has always shown faith in the story telling aspect of film making but here he suddenly decides that pretty images are a substitute for deep truths. In fact the first half of the film is Malick’s retelling of the beautiful moment in the Book of Job where God answers all the explanations being made in His name by men, and asks, ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?[…]When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?’ etc. Malick now thinks that filming a load of sublime looking things will substitute for that moment when the Lord spoke. The writer of the Book of Job knew his descriptive powers were woefully insufficient. Malick doesn’t.
(That pretty much all of the reviews in the press have missed the Job angle entirely is further proof that our culture has cut itself off from its foundations. But it’s cool, as a simplistic realism now resonates twice before having the measure of all things.)
Malick, after that strange beginning, starts to use the narrative element of films extremely well. There are moments of subtle beauty when the boy at the centre of the film is confronted by concrete elements of good and evil and his response is confusion. But Malick here captures that confusion in nuances particular to the ability of story-telling film. This despite his consistent montage to glory in the form of pretty light that keeps weaving its way in. Malick’s stated intent to explore the dichotomy between grace and nature is given life by these gestures and actions in the film that didn’t need his explicit hints.
The film has other real strengths. Through this exploration of power and grace the work begins to weigh heavily with the dominance of power. Grace can hardly find breath; but it just survives. In traditional Christian language this is, obviously, the Fall. And Malick gives it a real presence in the film. The fact that grace, or love, is powerless in the face of this heavy power but persists and is always there as a choice and hope is an example of an honest portrayal of the Christian world in contrast to the average efforts in film. Jesus’ only means in the world was love. He was crushed by the mechanisms of power. As it was then, so it is now. And as Malick makes sure we get a bit too clearly, ‘The only way to happiness is to love.’
What is strange about the experience of this film is that despite the gaudy crap you actually leave the film with a sense of falleness that is quite deep and resonant. It feels at times like two sensibilities are at work making the thing. The guy who thinks nice light on Austin lawns will fill us with awe at Glory and the guy who has a real ability to make solid film narrative speak distinctively.
Robert Bresson said that a film is brought to life again in the editing room, and you feel with this one it could be pretty great with a huge cull.
“Whatever you write it’s always a catastrophe. That’s the depressing thing about the fate of a writer … All you deliver is a bad, ridiculous copy of what you had imagined … It’s especially hard in the German language, because that language is wooden, clumsy, disgusting. A terrible language that kills anything light and wonderful. The only thing one can do is sublimate that language with a rhythm to give it musicality.”
Thomas Bernhard interview, quoted in a Josipovici article.
“Being speaks German.”
Heidegger
Hmm.
‘The sole raison d’etre of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover.’
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel
What a length Rubens has the three men dying together in. Close to each other, too, in a strange, intimate triangle.
‘Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it. That’s what killed my father, English romanticism, that and 1930 science. A line for my notebook:
Explore connection between romanticism and scientific objectivity. Does a scientifically minded person become a romantic because he is a left-over from his own science?’
From Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.
‘The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?’
-Kierkegaard
A new Uni set up by Dawkins, A.C. Grayling, Niall Ferguson and others is promising to give a top class education in the arts and humanities for a huge price. This despite the fact that almost all of the profs involved have tin ears for anything really alive in the arts. Students are more likely to gain a series of simplistic prejudices that they can learn, just as easily, by absorbing the popular philosophy of the day. Although they will probably have elevated their crude philosophies to the level of actual reality by the end of their three years.
Only a bunch of stunted intellects would come up with that crap name, too.
(Expect Ian McEwan to join team Enlightenment. Encouraging the students to embrace his dull entertainment-prose as if it is an antidote to the pop nihilism he is raging against.)
‘When he was buried, my soul reposed in peace and quiet and in such a fragrance of blood that I could not bear the idea of washing away that blood which had flowed from him onto me.’
Saint Catherine of Siena
Stravinsky talking about Ravel after hearing he turned down the prestigious Prix de Rome: “He rejected it but his music accepts it.”
‘Dialogue, when it is really open to the other, when it is goodwill that is not some vague expectation but an active desire to receive, to listen, to admit the universe of another, could not proceed to its ultimate conclusions without the sacrifice of one of the partners: that is to say, without repudiating itself as dialogue. Truly to engage in a dialogue would be to question one’s own being through the information that comes from another. It is to accept the risk that the other might remold us in his image and destroy all that makes us what we are.’
-Raymond Carpentier quoted in Kevin Hart’s The Dark Gaze. (Friendship is accepting that risk.)
‘…friendship is the truth of the disaster.’ (Blanchot letter to Bataille)
In The Coming Community, Agamben recounts the following, as told by Walter Benjamin to Ernst Bloch: “The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”
St John points and the text by him says: ‘He must increase, I must decrease.’
Rowan Williams, Open to Judgment
Neither reading nor writing, nor speaking-and yet it is by those paths that we escape what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone. Generosity of the disaster. There death, and life are always surpassed.
— Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
Kafka letter to friend Max Brod
Photograph depicting inscriptions carved by prisoners in the Beauchamp Tower, Tower of London, by Sir Benjamin Stone, 1898 (via Victoria & Albert Museum)
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