Landscape with impassable mountains

For a time, the high valley was shrouded in cloud, and for the length of an afternoon they gazed out of the huge panoramic windows, set on two sides of an equilateral triangle, looking out over a milky lake. Having determined to clarify their relationship, after eight hours of talk, their thoughts were already enormously preoccupied with getting through time, with such practical approaches as dining, putting on walking gear, taking an excursion, anything of a straightforward nature.

-Shall we order coffee?
-Yes, please, she replied.

She was grateful to him. The essential thing, he said, is to get back to simple things. If they were both single-celled creatures, say, or oysters, they would know what to do in the rhythm of ebb and flow, that is to say they would open up during high tide so that suspended particles could flow into them, and close up at low tide in order to dry out.She is not an oyster, though, and he is not the sea.

During the course of their afternoon conversation, in which they had planned to analyze their situation and the murky swamplands of their sexual habits, their emotions underwent a change. The mere fact that they were now hungry changed things; having being occupied with each other for eight hours, even in this imperfect manner, they felt that they would surely find a way out before long, some solution as uncomplicated as' let's have dinner now'. In the long run, this was a source of trust, even if matters between them went unresolved. They proposed to talk to each other in this way, a mountain retreat, every year. It may have no purpose, they said, but it's warming.

Everyone has his own magic words
They seem to have no meaning
Let them but flit through memory, though,
And the heart rejoices and weeps........

from The Devil's Blind Spot: Tales from the New Century, Alexander Kluge

Love is colder than death

Lessons of Darkness

3. Cinema verite confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbearable.
4. Fact creates norms and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and their is such a truth as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can only be reached through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of cinema verite resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
10. The moon is dull. Mother nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don't you listen to the song of life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species- including man- crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

from Herzog on Herzog

Artur Aristakisyan's Ladoni

Finally, a few words about Aristakisyan. I mean, I overcome my reserve, I give in to the blogging way, of talking about Artur Aristakisyan, about Ladoni, about Palms, about a certain hallucination, a certain dream, a kind of metaphor, of politics, of movie or film or dream or idea or everything alltogether, about Aristakisyan, of the fringes, about fringes, of certain mirrors shown to certain authorities, of confrontation, about confrontation.

A film or documentary, a poetic mirage, an anarchic offering, a messianic message? To the roots of cinema, pure cinema or to another illusion? To make a statement of rhetorical intent ( all statements ending in a full stop are rhetorical and most are banal), to persuade through image and dream and memory, to innovate and to suffer through that innovation.

Ladoni is the movie to end all movies. That is a statement of extreme rhetoric. But are not all images and all odours in any movie constructs? Then we have beggars here, no actors and why should this seem like an invasion, as some think of Ladoni? For to portray those at the fringes, that needs a relaying of reality, and here we have the tortured bodies themselves, in all their muted isolation, their silence, their reticent terror. The beggars who populate this movie, the 'reality' that is shown is actually 'real', for these people lie outside the known networks of our social realities, outside the thin ice of our anarchic lives.

Ladoni says that everyone is blind, the blind boy begging in a blind world from blind people. That is confronatation? Aristakisyan addresses his unborn son. What can you see, achieve? Go into the world, outside the mechanisms of power, go beg. Don't say a word, words are meaningless. There is no escape, no saviour in the end. What you see is the beginning and the end, the terminal is forever. The bodies and the beggars, the litter and the waste are forever. There is no crisis. There are many stories within Ladoni, many terrors. "This is a dangerous film", says Aristakisyan.

The Exile

Menfi

Walser on ash

"Indeed", Walser writes about ash, "if one goes into this apparently uninteresting subject in any depth there is quite a lot to be said about it which is not at all uninteresting;if, for example, one blows on ash it displays not the least reluctance to fly off instantly in all directions. Ash is submissiveness, worthlessness, irrelevance itself, and best of all, it is itself pervaded by the belief that it is fit for nothing. Is it possible to be more helpless, more impotent, and more wretched than ash? Not very easily. Could anything be more compliant and more tolerant? Hardly. Ash has no notion of character and is further from any kind of wood than dejection is from exhiliration. Where there is ash there is actually nothing at all. Tread on ash, and you will barely notice that your foot has stepped on something."

from Selected Stories, Walser

Those words or that Time

The relentless alliance between sadness and the search for time lost is surely a recipe for disaster. For who knows where these dark ramblings may lead one to?
One starts from a familiar corner of a ....street and then, having lost control, finds oneself in lands so distinctly different, flowers so poisonous that the very search seems an affair of extravagance.

One remembers nights, when preparations are made for parting, when the heart refuses, stolidly , to beat slowly and when, insomnia is considered a gift. It is in these dark fields, before sunrise where sadness, now forever born, decides to spread a contagion of regrets.
When the moment to part comes, from homes and hearts , from those windows and doors where childhood has passed into a raging kind of shallow dilettantism, from these hedges and shrubs, whose green mosaic still perhaps holds the touch of fingers and shouts, when the time comes, to perpetrate these crimes, then the multitude of emotions suddenly ceases in selfish unease.

One looks at last for those words, letters, signs, sighs, tremors of the lips or mist in the eyes that have felt the mostly sad drama of life.

Walser: The Tanners

We can say that the The Tanners does not have a plot; it does not follow the conventionalities of a novel, we meander through it, we read it, the main protagonist is dissatisfied throughout, so are we, the moment of revelation does not come but to expect it would be a mistake, that much is evident. And yet, Simon Tanner endears himself to us, we like him, he is a bit crazy, a likeable craziness, we love him for that, we like his prolixity, we who like prolixity. There is a hidden movement, one feels we move too as the seasons pass with their own regularity, and yet somehow, there is anxiety too, there is something left unfinished.

The Tanners is not really a saga of the Tanners family, for the three brothers and sisters exist in relation to the main character Simon, whose relationship, if at all, exists with the reader. Simon Tanner does not want to be fixed, he hates fixity, he flows like a stormy river, at times as placid as a pond in midsummer, like snow that melts he melts too and then his sudden bloom, in spring, he springs too. The Tanners does not explore the relationship that exists between the Tanners siblings but puts them in perspective, there is attachment and distance between the characters, that bond of childhood has somehow snapped. Simon moves on from one establishment to another, drifts from one job to another, without finding his metier. However, the crucial point is: he does not find a vocation because he does not want one.

Compare this to The Assistant or to Jakon Von Gunten who enrol into a job, into a decided course. Here Simon just drifts, he allows himself to drift. However, he does not actually hate money, for he knows its uses. Compare this to the concerns that Joseph Marti has in The Assistant where there is a very clear sense of dissatisfaction between bourgeoisie values and the actuality that those entail. Marti is aware of the gulf that exists between his employer and himself; Simon does not care, he simply resigns from the numerous positions he gets into because he has moved a step ahead. He drifts from country to city and is fully aware of the dichotomy that the two places bring. He lectures us about the religious dimensions of life in the country versus the city and his sympathies lie entirely with the countryside.

Simon Tanner does not express his love for the ladies he meets during the course of his life, which is alike with Marti in The Assistant. Marti and Von Gunten feel that they are worthless to be loved; Simon feels that he is worthy but must sacrifice himself for others' sake. Simon is cleverer than the other predecessors in that he knows to rebel, the first two are quieter and perhaps unsure. Simon suffers the melancholic pain of unexpressed love; but being a curious person, the lady who befriends him towards the end offers some hope. We do not know what happens eventually, but that is entirely in keeping with the nature of this novel. The creator Walser himself does not know.

The Tanners is a beautifully written novel and the translation I hope will have done justice to the original. Simon is not a philosopher yet, but he has moved from the reclusive thinker, or from the self meditating monk to an employment in the city. He philosophizes, he lectures on everything, he is aware of the politics and the social dynamics of his place, he does not favour immigration, he wants to live and die in his country. He settles to be on the side of the lost and the defeated but we do not know if he gets completely lost in the end.

The Tanners leaves you with many great aches; there are some fabulous passages and some great images. Walser predated Kafka and as I mentioned in my previous posts on Walser, I prefer Kafka but like Walser. Musil described Kafka as a curious case of the Walser type. There could be no more different writers than Musil and Walser. And as Sebald writes in the introductory essay, the sentences are so long, so dreamy that each preceding sentence seems to make us lose the thread of the one we are reading. I did not remember whether it was summer or winter. I wanted to just follow Simon Tanner and his banter, his sadness, his melancholy heart.

You died young, you who died in autumn

You died young, you who died in autumn,
a silent sudden death, leaving a sudden silence.
I search for your face in my collection of
memories, I search for the last time we met,
when our eyes did not betray the finality
of fate and parting.

I see your clear face, the long nose,
the receding line of your hair,
your acrimonious wit, your smile above all
and the acceptance of fate and your
listless destiny.

I remember too the days of sunshine,
of snow and afternoon laziness,
in the playgrounds of our unbecoming,
of youth and what now is only death.

And now my friend, you lie buried,
covered with dew and rain and snow,
with damp, dead and fallen autumn leaves,
wet leaves and tears on your grave.
you left far too abruptly, too soon
and too suddenly.

The above lines are written in the memory of a dear friend who died recently in a road accident.

Walser

No one But You

Rosenzweig's War

An extract below from The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy by Gil Anidjar, considered as one of the "101 most dangerous" professors in America by David Horowitz. A link to an interview with Anidjar.

"No one, perhaps, has gone as explicitly far as Rosenzweig in extirpating, ultimately eradicating, Islam from the figure of humanity, that is to say, from the theologico-political, from the religious and historical world configuration that is constituted by Judaism and Christianity. " Before God, then, Jew and christian both labor at the same task. He cannot dispense with either. He has set enmity between the two for all times, and withal has known intimately bound to each".

This exclusion constitutes Rosenzweig's political theology, the theologico-political configuration that links three rather than two entities commonly referred to as 'religions.' This term 'religion' of course means very little to Rosenzweig, who recasts each element( God, world, and man) as privileged in its relation to one of the three religions. Judaism is with God, Christianity is man on its way to God, Islam is the war of the world. Judaism is theological, and it therefore experiences war as political. Christianity is the embodiment of the theologico-political, unable to know the difference when it comes to war. Islam, finally is detheologized and can therefore spread nothing but holy war. Rosenzweig casts Islam at once as the most obvious and the most hidden figure of the world as political. He casts Islam as the most extreme opposite, the most distant figure in its relation to Judaism, in relation to the theological space that Judaism occupies. Rosenzweig casts Islam as the political enemy.

Islam, one could say, cannot relate to the world because it is the world.......what Rosenzweig makes explicit is the structure of the theologico-political as constitutively Abrahamic. By enacting the exclusion of Islam, by making visible the becoming of the theologico-political as the Jude-Christian, Rosenzweig makes Islam into the invisible enemy. He also made Islam the political enemy. With the Star, with what can be seen as a certain culmination of its history, the enemy draws away, and with him, the Jew, the Arab."

from The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, Gil Anidjar

For Myself I Would Like

Tears or willow on the ground
teeth of gold
teeth of pollen
like the mouth of a girl
from whose hair swells a river
in each drop a tiny fish
in each tiny fish a gold tooth
in each gold tooth a fifteen-year-old smile,
that dragonflies may reproduce

What can a maiden think about
when the wind discovers her thighs?

from An Unspeakable Betrayal, Luis Bunuel

Le Promeneur Solitaire

In the characteristic style and prose for which Sebald has won many devotees in the English knowing world, there is another addition, an essay called Le Promeneur Solitaire on the writer Robert Walser. It is what Sebald says "a remembrance". The essay is also a part of the collection called A Place in the Country; I haven't read that yet but am reading Walser's The Tanners and the essay in question in an introduction to Walser. Sebald starts in his usual way and then meanders into melancholy and reflection. A brief introductory few life events, the writer's childhood and early life in Berne and then we find Sebald compare Walser to his own grandfather, both extremely fond of walking. In fact both died in the same year, part of that strange Sebaldian collection of facts and coincidences that seem outrightly too coincidental for comfort.

Interpersed as his writings are with photos, Sebald does his usual jumps in memory, reflecting from Benjamin and Carl Seelig, the man responsible for Walser's reputation as a writer at present. Sebald then frighteningly mentions another coincidence; he finds it really strange that he should come across the word Trauerlaufbahn, a word he says "I believed, when i wrote it down in one of my own works, to be an invention entirely my own". However, it had already been coined by Walser in his work The Robber. This incident, "has the persistent feeling of being beckoned to from the other side", meaning Walser. Sebald then writes about the comical dimension of Walserian fiction, the long sentences and the often done comparison with Gogol.

One of the strange methods that Walser had of writing secretly were his Bleistiftsgebeit, which some have viewed as a sign of his mental deterioration. To Sebald, these elusive texts are not a sign of a psychotic state but a reflection of absolute integrity, a work most daring, a self portrait and a self examination. This pencil system is the preparation of a life underground, these microscripts a sign of inner emigration. The subsequent events of Walser's life are described in the way that only Sebald could, with a repetitive sonorous pattern, allusions and reflections and yet never allowing his fondness for Walser overcome that objective appraisal that few are as capable of as Sebald.

The essay ends with a quote from Nabokov's Speak, Memory and while reading this essay and immediately afterwards, I felt that calm and glad acceptance, that unvoiced thankfulness towards those gods or demons that lead us to the books we read, for I am fond of Sebald and Walser and Nabokov and to find all the three merging in the same essay and on the same page seemed a Sebaldian kind of coincidence. I discovered Walser nearly two years ago and have read his longer works. I personally do not find Walser in the same tradition as Gogol for Gogol's style is outrageously cheeky and borders on the farcical while Walser's prose, generally described as august and dreamy, is quite honestly, simply not from this world.

Walser's prose has a hypnotic quality, that once it seizes you, a sense of calm dread prevails, the convoluted and complexity and sometimes Gogolian nature of the spoken sentences leaves the taste of burning sunsets on your skin, a feeling of having experienced the most unforgettable and yet the most fulfilling defeat and sadness; as if defeat in itself is so rewarding, so Walserian. Walser's prose makes one want to extinguish all lamps, turn out all lights and to love the very silence that one dreads. The sin of not reading Walser, the pain of reading Walser. And this essay, this very Sebaldian saturnine attempt, this gloriously poignant tribute to a great writer from a great writer.

In the reading room of Hell

In the reading room of Hell............ In the club
for science-fiction fans
On the frosted patios.................. In the bedrooms of passage
On the iced-over paths................. When everything finally seems clearer
and each instant is better and less important
With cigarette in mouth and with fear................ Sometimes
green eyes........... And 26 years................. Yours truly

from The Romantic Dogs, Roberto Bolano

Stigmata

Whatever her primary concerns may be, whether they be political or feminist, one can read Cixous for her lyricism alone. And nowhere is it better demonstrated than in her collection of essays called Stigmata. These collected essays deal with a variety of issues, from reading in painting, as evidenced in my previous incomplete post on Bathsheba to her cats, her real cats. Cixous' best essay, I think, in this collection is called My Algeriance: To depart not to arrive.The conception of our identities, the changing nature of our identities, the mosaic of our internal and external identities is called into question. Then the question of writing and the relationship an author has with the text, the celebration of such issues and the writing of the body: these threads run through her essays.

Cixous very clearly demarcates the forged nature of various identities, especially for those who identities have been constructed for them or those who seek to tear away from the conventional nature of such fictions. Cixous is quite aware of her dual identity in Algeria, her jewish identity which separates her from the French and the French-Jewish duality that estranges her from the Arabs. Cixous is at pains, from her previous reflections and experiences to identify with the subjugated identity and at the same time, on arrival in France to question the nature of arrival. Cixous is no stranger to inventing new words and her neologisms are quite clever and some very poetic. She sees herself as not having arrived but being in a state of arrivance; to depart a place would mean to arrive somewhere, but only after having departed? And then one can settle into a particular identity only after clearly going step by step through the rubric of such forced identities or arrivances.

She deals with these issues with a lyrical force that is astounding, but also with a certain degree of lyrical play which questions the nature of such narratives. The interplay is between philosophy and politics and fiction and how such threads weave into or away from each other. Thus what seems like a political question dissolves into a profound melancholy, and the reader, unprepared like me, sways between passionate lyricism and profound politics or both. However, it is actually in subverting all genres that Cixous aims at, whether it is reading Rembrandt or talking about Fatma, the Arab domestic who, it turns out after twenty years, is not Fatma but Messouda. The feminist concerns are woven into her anxieties about identities that are subjugated under colonialism but also about the reframing of such identities after post-colonialism.

Most of our reading, instead of doing away with our prejudices seems to augment them; Cixous' reading of Bathsheba for instance cleverly subverts the pre-conceived nature of such readings, which obviously not only depend on our mind states but the rungs that lead to such states. Our perceptions, which we think are our own, are in constant danger of being subverted. Conventional reading reinforces such perceptions. Texts like Stigmata allow us to re-evaluate our conceptions of not only our reading but the aftermath of our reading and in allowing us to perhaps reframe our absurd accommodations with ideas that we feel comfortable with. It is one thing to acknowledge in public what one holds on the smithy of our conscience and another to actually conform in a meaningful way. The rest is just chatter. Cixous does this all in the most poetic, most lyrical way. And as I said earlier, one can read her for the poetry alone, regardless of our other agendas.

Bathsheba or The Interior Bible

Helene Cixous writes with the force of torrents, unleashed unstoppable rapids, like we imagine angels should if they could, with music, loud and deeply touching, fast, furious, like a poet. There, in the painting above by Rembrandt, she approaches it with twenty-four steps. She who is percieved from afar, the non-nude nudity. Without a man.

It would be the last thing I do, write about the painting above, but I write about this halting stuttering poetry of Cixous', this chant, this prose, music that fills, that leaves leaving us longing, a cadence, some steps, a bit more, less, again, again, the same want, then the considerable erudition, insights, darkness, insights, her wandering, her Jewish-wandering, a flash, then loneliness. However, I am interested in certain aspects of how she reads this painting; what follows is just a paraphrase of her reading, which I intend to complete in three posts.

The background she warns is black; blackness isn't black, it is the last degree of reds. The secret blood of reds. Then the expression on Bathsheba's face: the passivity, the despondency, the imminence, drooping. We don't know where we are, what time, what age? Our own country, a foreign land, our hearts, that foreign country? No, this is interior land, the interior Bible.

We see some light on her, we see her servant now. Asks Cixious: Of what secret lights are we made? What lives do we live, this light takes us inside, down the stairs we never take, to the interior land. The entire room is flesh. Sex. Then again:

She does not look at us. She is of those who do not look at us. I mean to say: Bathsheba, Mary, don't look at us, don't stop living, in order to look at us. And when we look at them, thoughts take leave.

What is she thinking about?

Then we see the older woman, at the bottom. Says Cixous: the older woman is Bathsheba's foreignness, her exoticism, Asia. And the woman's coif is oriental. The body is Bathsheba's, the coif is the older woman's.
The servant gazes towards the East, Bathsheba towards the occidental future. The two gazes don't see each other. They are on two parallel planes. And then we see the letter.

I daresay that this is only half the movement, half of her approach. What interests me is the Occidental gaze. The coiffured servant, at her feet stands no chance. Though she too has partaken something from her. But the gazes are different, even if they are day dreaming. They are not of this world, they are parallel to each other. I don't know why I feel a pang for Bathsheba's servant.

from Stigmata, Cixous

Khartoum