Herzog on Herzog

I must admit that I thoroughly liked reading Herzog on Herzog, a collection of interviews that chronologically traces the life and career of Werner Herzog. I was also amused at some of the things that Herzog is so passionate about and the way he articulates himself. The answers are long, some run over two pages but that has been modified by the editor to do away with the pauses, which to some extent feels as if Herzog has written his answers down.

Herzog talks about ecstatic truth in contradiction to facts or plain truth. In his funny The Minnesota Declaration, he speaks about cinema verite and how that leads to norms, not illumination. To those who have seen Herzog's movies,they will understand the importance of space, of landscapes in his oeuvre. However, to the director himself, these landscapes, this physicality is just a reflection of the more important internal landscape, a state of mind. The terrain is just a visible symptom, a screen metaphor so to say, of that inner agitation or turmoil that lead to the creation of ecstatic truth, that illumination.

Herzog is a great film maker and his fame rests as much on his movies as it does on his so called documentaries. But no mention of him will be complete without Kinski, his best fiend. The five movies with Kinski are more representative of that ecstatic truth or vision that Herzog reminds us on every page. Be it Fitzcarraldo and the ship moving over a mountain or be it the wrath of God himself, Aguirre, surrounded by demons and monkeys, his collaboration with Kinski is the sublimation of what Herzog calls the cinema of athletics over aesthetics. Herzog is at pains to remind us that this is no cinema of poetry or reality per se; this is the vision of a far deeper visualization of a deeper truth, a vision of ecstatic illumination. Herzog denies that any of his movies like Cobra Verde has a political message; far from it, he wants us to realize, if not understand the mechanism of a state of mind that can lead to bravery, desperation, a holocaust, slavery, ambition, suicidality and so on.

Most, if not all of the protagonists of Herzog are loners, desperate, raving, ambitious, emotionally unstable, bound for missions of a suicidal grandeur, leading others to such suicidal extremes that any association with such men is fraught with danger. Only men figure in Herzog's world, women are secondary in this vision of truth. The cinematic truth of Herzog is never internal; what I mean to say is that his characters inhabit the edges of an external landscape that is driven by an inner exigency. Contrast this with Fassbinder, where say in Petra Von kant, the entire two hours are spent in her boudoir; this is what Herzog perhaps means by his athletics over aesthetics. And the flavour we get is that of Herzog himself, a loner, desperate to scale a mountain, desperate to produce his movies, walking, walking, through forest and desert, in search of that inner landscape.

Some anecdotes that Herzog mentions are incredible, some humorous, some funny, some dark and yet all carry with them his own whiff of truth, his vision of ecstatic illumination. It is true, he says, that he was planning to fire bomb Kinski once, also true that he would have shot him with his Winchester rifle if Kinski had carried out his threat of leaving the sets in Peru. All this sounds a step too far but his cinema is really one step further from many. The examples are so many, like Kaspar Hauser, like the entire cast of Heart of Glass being hypnotized, his encounter with Reinhold Messner in the Himalayas and so on. Herzog comes across as too confident at times, too opinionated, too aware of everything. And yet, none of it sounds too dull, too over valued, for it sits nicely with his creations, his concept, his visually stunning landscapes, his charting of those frontiers that only a self-annihilating vision can lead to.

Travel on foot, says Herzog, it is a virtue. The movies he has carefully crafted are are as much flights of fancy and vision as much as of a certain kind of mental and physical travel, a mental and physical truth. And this book of interviews goes a step further in allowing us to have a glimpse of that vision, of that ecstatic truth, that illumination.

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

A kind of Frost

Thomas Bernhard's first novel, Frost, is a remarkable one, a novel that has the seeds of all his further works and perhaps one that is more complete, more whole than his other works. What follows below is an attempt to highlight certain aspects of this novel that I think are vital in his oeuvre and in the reader's attempts to surmount the difficulty of reading Bernhard.

In order to access the main character in his novels, the narrator and the reader must leave their usual habitat. He or sometimes she is always in the country side, in remote and desolate parts, besides torrents, having left some form of an easy life behind. The protagonist has usually been living there for some time or is considering living there, an action that is considered new for that person or exaggerated or strange. The protagonist must leave something or end something to begin anew or come to a standstill altogether. This refrain is not unusual in Bernhard and in Frost, our narrator, a medical intern, has been assigned to study the protagonist, who has been living in the Klamm valley for years without any external contact. This is indeed novel, for in his later novels, there is no specific contract for a case study, or it is not revealed so candidly. Thus the tone is set for an encounter between us and the painter, simply called Strauch.

The painter has been living in an inhospitable pub for years in this remote place and our narrator has been assigned by the painter's brother to observe him and prepare notes. It seems that there must be something wrong with the painter, a man who is isolated, who is isolating himself and is by all accounts strange.The narrator must not reveal his true identity for that will expose his brother in the city and will not lead to a true account, a true description of the painter, in his usual state, habitat. I do not propose to write a summary of this novel but to approach it from those perspectives which are so well known and liked by Bernhard's readers, an art that reached frenzied pitch in his later novels. But, I feel that in Frost, not only does Bernhard reveal the full force of his later menace but he does it with exquisite charm, sarcasm, wit and astounding lyricism, a factor not seen in his other works to this extent.

A case for paranoia

In my opinion, the painter Strauch suffers from paranoia, and it seems, a case for delusions and a more florid psychosis can be made.This must not be done hurriedly but I will quote the painter to illustrate the point. It is quite clear that the painter lives in isolation and is stressed. He has chosen to remain so. Right from the first moment, he launches into a tirade, an uncalled for aggressive rant against the villagers and yet, he does not ever substantiate his claims with facts, which could prove him right. His claims and thoughts are based on his perceptions alone, and these perceptions are internal, based again on opinions which he has elaborated over the years. He does not have a direct case against the village or villagers but his reflections are a consequence of his interaction with them, which to some extent, are one sided. The ideas are not just bloated and over valued, thay are clearly dominating his internal and external landscape. However, the cause of such methodology is also a process of communicating something, which is however, closed to us.

Exaggeration as a schema

To exaggerate, to repeat, to create from that exaggeration a suffocating pervading sense of restlessness, and then to build from that a picture of doom and gloom, Bernhard achieves that all in Frost. He build that dichotomy in this text, wherein everyone apart from tha narrator is a misfit, mentally unwell and so on. This exaggeration leads to the buildup of a flavour of an environment where everyone is either dead or dying. Whatever moral leverage left is lost and from that distance itself, the narrator's own exaggeration is evident too.Bernhard uses the same method in most of his novels and it serves his purpose admirably. This exaggeration makes another case for paranoid assumptions, only we can guess that Bernhard has created a distance from his characters and this paranoia in itself is a warning to the reader.

Degenerate nature

One of the consistent themes in Bernhard is of the vileness, the immorality of the landscape and the diseased state of the people, as if everyone is ill or malformed. This forth in the light of the things after the war. This valley is death to any tenderness of feeling. The whole region is sodden with disease. He goes on to enumerate the various congenital diseases that the villagers have, their festering ills and at one point says that everyone has tuberculosis. The impression that we get is not just of a physical dimension but that of a moral one, for with repetition, a device that he uses with sinister effect, we are scared into thinking of a more dangerous, more sinister and unnatural affliction, rather than a curable one. Since nothing can be cured, nothing can be saved. However, no one realizes that they are ill and this makes them more sinister and hence to be shunned. The painter is the only one who thinks so for neither the landlady nor the knacker ever talk of epidemics of hydrocephalus or tuberculosis or the inefficacy of streptomycin.

The very landscape, water, trees, snow and animals are degenerate and diseased. Is it because of the war or any political complicitness during the war? Is it because of Austrian silence during the second war? This theme is central for Bernhard, for in all his major works, he alludes to this.


I think that frost is Bernhard's most lyrical novel, as close to poetry that he allows himself to get to in his prose.
The poetry of repetition, of a sonorous lyricism, of a melancholic intonation is quite evident here. In his poems, Bernhard achieves a pilgrim mystic, prayer like litany and though Frost is prose, there is evidence of such melancholy here. Some of the passages are beautiful but the beauty is blighted by the sense of a desperate doom, not only clinging to the skins inside but also hanging from the icicles, in the gorges, near the torrents that pervade this resolutely impervious landscape.This poetry is both open and closed to us. The beauty of this poetry is a warning, a disease, a death, a dying.

Frost is a brilliant novel and like all Bernhard fiction, the terror is not just in the reading but in the atmosphere that pervades that terror. One returns to Frost again and again and that is its lasting triumph.

The waters of poetry

The waters of poetry will rise tonight
as your skin will blaze with my touch,
as the fever in your eyes will rise
step by feverish step.
The fast darts of your passion.

The waters of poetry will rise
as I will recite aloud the poems
that you like
and leave the best till the end,
leave it on the tip of my tongue
to leave it on the tip of your tongue.

The waters of poetry will mount
and the fever in your eyes will rage
like an angry beast against the chains
of this beastly fire.
The fires will burn and won't die out.

Night itself will stoke the beast of this poem,
stir the waters of this poem
as the madness of our skins will
unremember the reason of our reserve.
This blaze and fever will restore
the forgotten lyric of our skin and stones.

Dreamscape

when you came to me

rain fell
when you came finally,
when you came at last to me.

i had waited days and months
past silences, past hope
and had lost faith in mediums and magic.

and then you came
and rain fell, as you walked out of the crowd
towards me, my eyes wide,
my arms stronger, restored in faith.

i know you are mine now,
as i watch you sit and sleep, as
your voice covers me with its ripples,
as i waste myself from a distance.

but you give me new memories,
and i feel taut and stretched and tired,
since you will leave soon,
leaving me to my sullen hours, my restless repose.

i know the face of the hour when you will leave,
when i will hate mirrors and destiny,
mute with walls and stones and silences.
i wish you had not come at all.

Can you say, " I love you?"

"Can you say I love you?"

Fassbinder : I can for instance. There comes a moment when I can't do anything but say it. I've even got myself to the point where I don't tell myself how dumb it sounds. In the beginning I would say, I love you, but make it ironic. In the meantime I have taught myself not to,and when the moment comes, I simply say it, which doesn't mean that I'm not standing back and watching myself at the same time.But this business of always checking to see if my experiences can be used as material is another question.

I allow my film characters much more leeway than I give myself. For instance, I reached the point much earlier with the characters in my films Where I could give them a chance to express their feelings directly.

from The Anarchy of the Imagination, Fassbinder

Understanding Fassbinder

For the Fassbinder struck, any addition to the canon is valuable. This may be interviews on DVD or a newly published biography. Wallace Steadman Watson's Understanding Fassbinder: Film as public and private art is one such work. I know it is a mistake but I make it here: I compared this work to Elsaesser's work on Fassbinder which I must admit, I like more. Perhaps, Elsaesser's work has a more in depth sociological perspective into the environment of post war Germany which sets the tone for a lot of his work. There is a more versatile analysis of the movies which is lacking to some extent in this book. That however, should in no way detract from the merits of this book.

Watson charts the course of well, what was a stormy affair of a life, Fassbinder's birth, the early events of his childhood and the influence of Sirk on the Fassbinder way of making movies. That Sirkean melodrama was an influential factor on Fassbinder in now too well recognized; that melodrama was not unknown as such to Fassbinder is not well known. Watson devotes a well written chapter to the Women's pictures, including a documented analysis of Effi Briest, Petra von Kant and Martha. Fassbinder's troubled relationship with his mother is discussed too but not in a detailed manner, much is left for us to imagine. And his relationship with his stepdad, the liberal journalist Wolff Eder is discussed too. This person was to play a crucial part in Fassbinder's understanding of the problem of history in modern Germany, including the ideology of repression which gained ground after the second war. The women's pictures discussed here include Veronica Voss, Lola and Maria Braun. I have in my previous posts written about Fassbinder's anger-love hate relationship with Hanna Schygulla, which is briefly mentioned.

For me personally, the few pages devoted to In a Year of 13 Moons is the highlight of this book, for it narrates the development of what is Fassbinder's bleakest, most compelling, most powerful and the most polyphonic narrative within the movie genre. There are sections devoted to Berlin Alexanderplatz of course, and his scripts, and his hates and friendships and loves and wars and so on. Altogether, it is a decidedly good read and a good introduction to the Fassbinderless.

Much of what Fassbinder did was political, I think and some of it seems pure melancholic left wing despair. In his case, art comes out of crisis and defiance. Thus, Fassbinder wants to stay out of power and fight against authority. His self imposed exile must be seen in this light. He liked melodrama, Hollywood and its vanities. He also liked to show how it is. It is the recognition of aggression that was his genius, even very low aggression. Thus, all he does in one way or another is show how aggressive we generally are. And violent.

After the calm

I have felt like waves washing over me,
releasing me, from doubt, from the tidal
pain of moon
I have felt washed at shore, left unconcerned
from the hum of doubt, never before has
loneliness looked like reward.

I lie limp but awake, these ripples in my mind
no longer seethe.
All my questions have been answered, my loves
rewarded, the pain of each separation erased
from memory.
what was it that hung on me, carried me to this shore
so dark?

What stung the moon ? what drove those waves?
why this repose? what night is this without a search for meaning?
This listless repose, these no thoughts of you,
my dreamless moments, my acheless painless night.
Sink me back and drown me, take me to my ledge
where doubts hang dark, where the tides fall back
and recede and rise again.

Give me that night that lives me or give me sleep,
give me love that loves me or drive me deep
into that deep rictus, which the moon prepares
from its dark haunting ground.
I prefer the loneliness of doubt than the
aftertaste of certain calm.

Mumu

I do not know why I am writing a seperate post on Mumu, a Turgenev short story that is not as famous as his First Love or the Sketches. I am however not alone in thinking, as I have realized of late, that Mumu is nothing short of a masterpiece. As I have written on this blog before, Turgenev found so much space within the constraints of the longish short story that his results are astounding and the width of his vision, his compassion and the stirring characterizations of his stories are more than another ordinary writer can only dream of.

Mumu is not simply a story of social protest. The deafening cruelty of serfdom is made obvious but without the polemical pressure of showing; the story ends in a kind of helpless stalemate with Gerasim restored to the solitude of a hut, without desire for woman or dog. The protest against injustice, in the form of the prevailing serfdom of the times is as clear as day and yet the end, the end is quite disturbing for Turgenev, in a masterstroke restores to silence and solitude all that was so disquieting, and in letting it simmer and show its ugly face, against the face of stolid acceptance, the plight of 19th century Russia is made obvious.

The greatness of Mumu lies in the dignified hush of the end, the calmness restored to beast and man, the cruel acceptance of desperate fate. Mumu is also a love story, a desperate love story and because it is desperate, because it will lead to nowhere, because it is doomed to failure, because man and might have conspired against Gerasim before the acts of creation were unrolled, the emotional aspects of this story are forces of release, sublime acts.

Who can forget the image of Gerasim walking towards his village in darkness, deaf and dumb amongst shadows, a sack on his shoulders, an indelible image in all literature?

Filling spaces

With exceptions, all varieties of writing acts are acts of filling spaces, filling silence, filling with words the un-understandable involuntary passage of acts, of time. A melancholic tune makes me want to write, somebody's sorrow too, somebody's silence makes me feel that even against the harsh impenetrability that words have around them, an attempt must be made, a passage created that could lead to what may eventually only be isolation or incomprehension. The act of a certain way of writing or certain kinds of writing can only thus be described as acts of resistance, of rebellion. The savaged persona or body is eventually the self for the supposed comprehension of an other experience or person is based only on one's own sensory or un-nameable experiences, to which one is sometimes privy to but in a blind unknowing way. Some call that an other experience and those who are more confident call it mystical. Whatever it is, the rite of passage is through words, even if they lead to more emptiness or another attempt.

Come

When nights come, nights like this one,
huge, unending, black with doubt.
when nights come, nights like this,
with parallel pains of many kind,
different strands within the same
kind of unease, with new difference, as each act
passes into new discomfort.

The beginning and the end are known
as the issue is not forced,
thinking is not stretched to the point
of meaning or revelation,
and each act of meaningful pain remains
unresolved, an act of subterfuge,
just a jostled attempt with words.

These nights are no more than rhetorical questions
with unresolved knots and depth less depths.
No metaphysical notes, no existential lines
streak the sky of my nights.
I only ask for a favour, one favour.
Come.

As he draws away

The enemy who drinks tea in our shack has
a mare in smoke, a daughter with
thick eyebrows, brown eyes, long
hair like a night of songs over her shoulders. Her image
doesn't leave him when he comes over to ask for tea. But he
doesn't speak to us about her evening chores, or about
a mare abandoned by songs at the top of a hill...

...In our shack the enemy takes a rest from his gun,
leaving it on my grandfather's chair. He eats our bread
like a guest, dozes on
the wicker chair, caresses our cat's
fur. He always says to us:
Don't blame the victim!
Who is the victim? We ask him
He answers: Blood that the night will never dry...

...The buttons on his uniform sparkles as he draws away.
Good evening to you! Say hello to our well
and to our fig trees. Tread gently on
our shadow in the barley fields. Say hello, higher up, to
our pines. Don't forget to lock the gate
at night. Don't forget the horse's
fear of airplanes
And greet us, there, if time allows...

These words that we'd wished
to say at the door... he hears them,
hears them well, but hides them in a quick cough
and tosses them aside
So why does he visit the victim every evening?
And memorize our proverbs, like us?
And repeat our songs of
our own appointments in the holy place?
Were it not for the gun
the flute would pass into the flute...

...The war will last as long as the earth
in us revolves around itself!
Let's be good then. He used to ask us
to be good. He'd read the verses
of Yeat's Airman: Those that I fight
I do not hate, those that I guard
I do not love...
Then he'd leave our wooden shack
and walk eighty meters to
our stone house, there, at the edge of the plain...

Say hello to our house, stranger
Our coffee cups
are still as they were. Can you smell
our fingers on them? Will you tell your daughter with
her long hair and two thick eyebrows that she has
an absent friend
who would like to visit her? For nothing...
but to enter her mirror and see his secret:
How she follows, after him, the course of his life
in his place? Say hello to her
if time allows...

These words that we'd wished
to say, he hears them,
hears them well
but hides them in a quick cough
and tosses them aside. The buttons
of his uniform sparkle as he draws away...

Mahmoud Darwish

I am burning, I am burning

One cannot always sustain

One cannot always sustain one mood, that is well known and clear to all. Politics, the deafening roar of death that must take on others........the death that kills others......we have been there, in the vicinity of such nights. Before, at a younger point in the day, we were filled up with ourselves, the world was generally bright, we were not silly to be idealistic but occasionally reckless enough to dream. Then came the long night of a merciless siege and we were marooned.

That is a lot of politics for one post, and besides what is the use of visiting this kind of politics anyway. One is left with the distaste of dusty mirrors in long forgotten halls and attics in houses where no one visits anymore and no one lives. Old melancholic songs, little ditties that are difficult to hum, poems forgotten, loves hushed up, the distinct memory of a distinct memory, the probability of having written these lines before, the night outside, the same same.

It is quite certain now that old friends will never meet again, how is it possible anyway and who will take such trouble? The last time that friends met, if only the tremors of time could have warned people, given them a hint that now is the last time, after this no more, regret if you want, think of a smile, a parting glance for after this there is only misery, only parting, only tragedy. Where is politics, unless there is a politics in parting too, the politics of parting and fading away forever?

One must be a realist they taught, idealism gets you nowhere, yes read but be sure, sure of yourself, for when nights end, when nights reach an end suddenly, then the next day is too bright anyway, besides the merchants have gone, the small shops have shut down, the old neighbourhoods have changed, people migrate, some have left their countries altogether, there is noise, it is deafening, there is so much clamor, there is no space for poetry anymore.

New writers were discovered, war & peace happened ages ago, this is not even solar pessimism, that too was abandoned, now is the time for lyricism, of a new kind, of a new song, for evenings come abruptly bringing fatal nights, nights of revision, of hushed lips, of those nights that are unending, those that end later, leaving a mirage, a litter of thoughts, only for them to lose sight of themselves among these new books, new monsters. And then these thoughts too are difficult to sustain, to reach a certain end, for beginning demands a certain closure, a break. And then everything ends suddenly, like certain meetings and even the viability of these paragraphs seem dubious, so utterly utterly unnecessary.

What about you sir?

"They didn't know how to take a walk. They walked through the heavy rain and stopped in front of a hardware store where the window display featured piping, tin cans, large bolts and nails. And Macabea, afraid that the silence might already mean separation, said to her new boyfriend:
'I just love bolts and nails, what about you sir?' "

Lispector, The Hour of the Star

Batuba Jantiram Lecoli

"If I could describe the inner life of a dog I would have reached a summit", wrote Lispector once. However she also wrote to tear language away from all restraint, to the extent possible and thus describe those states of mind which language usually fails to do. Talking to her dog Ulisses in a language that Lispector invented which she claimed only her dog could understand. Quoting her biographer Moser "She explicitly makes the link between nonsensical language and precisely those realms of life that are impossible to define and describe". And Lispector herself "I enjoy speaking this way: it is a language that resembles an orgasm. Since I don't understand, I hand myself over: tilibica samvico esfolerico mazuba! I am the water of a lovely cistern".

Discovering the holy name is not permissible for the Jewish mystic, for it can belong to no human tongue. Her biographer claims that this senseless babble that she created was the culmination of her 'search', for true words. She said once, " I restrain myself, as if holding the reins of a horse that could gallop off and take me God knows where."

Lispector is I guess not the only one who invented a personal language to talk or communicate. Myself included, I know some who would speak at those hours where intimacy and knowing melt into a state of knowing and recognition or awareness. At those instances only a personal language can bridge enormous chasms. When I read these words, everything seemed familiar. This language or intimate words do not interest me from any mystical dimension of hers which I doubt but from a personal aspect as it is not entirely an idiosyncratic expression. To import any transcedental angle would be to give it a dimension that it lacks.

Below, an extract of Lispectorish, from her biography.

Angela....Batuba jantiram lecoli? adapiu quereba salutria kalusia. dacoleba, titban, ziticoba, letuban. joju leba, leba jan? Tutiban leba, lebajan. Atotoquina, zefiram. jetobabe? jetoban.

This will not do

this will not do
this alone night
you somewhere and I sit here fuming
tracing the first letter of your name on my palm
again and again
to undo the sea between us the gap words lost

hearing a tune I heard late last night in my head
I hear it again and again a serpent tune
like your name constantly in my head
I erase your name letter by latter
in anger and surprise
to undo the sea the silence between us the heaviness

this is nothing but revenge this hatred you also call
love this step by step murder of my love
like marks in my skin your name digs deep
you serpent strange music enemy whore
I cross your name off letter by letter
in anger and dismay
to undo the sea the silence between us the waiting the love

Monsieur le vivisecteur

Musil, dissecting like an anatomist, analysing each emotion, an empiricist at work, analysing the analysis.

"This is how it looks from the inside looking out......and from the outside looking in?
so now I look from outside to inside, and summa summarum, this movement from outside to inside and from inside to outside gives me the contemplative peace of the philosopher.

I love the night for she wears no veil; in the day nerves are tugged to and fro till they go blind but, at night, beasts of prey take one in a stranglehold and the life of the nerves recovers from the anaesthetic of the day and unfolds within; a new sensation of self emerges that is like stepping suddenly in front of a mirror that has not received a single ray of light for days and, drinking in greedily, holds out one's own face."

The prose written during the night, the emotional closeness of night seems weak and limpid when examined during the day. Says Musil again "Monsieur le vivisecteur....that is who I am! My life: the wanderings and adventures of a vivisectionist of souls at the beginning of the twentieth century".

Musil's prose is distilled, it is clear liquid. The only loser is the reader if the thread is not visible. Musil, poet-philosopher-scientist-analyst-historian, "brain-man perhaps" he says. However, "all words are so ambiguous, so resonant in meaning, so double-edged in feeling, that one is wise to steer clear of them."

Musil, Diaries

Miscellaneous

Horacio Castellanos Moya's Senselessness was the most outstanding novel I read last year. It was such a great breath of fresh air, cliche apart. New Directions are publishing another novel of his called She devil in the mirror which will be available soon. I hope to read it soon.

It seems that everybody is on the Bolano bandwagon. Even people who normally desist from such pursuits are reading 2666. In some quarters Bolano excites irritation. This posthumous success does not meet the approval of literary establishments in certain quarters. I think I liked reading 2666 as much as I liked his TSD. However, as some maintain, it is in his shorter fiction that Bolano scales dizzying heights. I think Amulet and the unforgettable collection called Last evenings on earth represent the real music of his prose. I confess I haven't yet read his poetry collection called The Romantic Dogs. Another short novel called The Skating Rink is coming out soon courtesy New Directions. At Three Percent, Chad Winters writes about this new book.

The real highlight it seems is the publication of The Tanners by Robert Walser. I wrote about two of his books that I read a couple of years ago. However, when I go into Walser mode, then I hate blogging for he makes everything seem superfluous. But it is my intention to read this book.

Why This World

A biography can never be intimate. It remains an account after all, a sort of history, a sketch of milestones, dates, events. The person in question is beyond the objectively verifiable veracity of events. A biography is a construct.

Moser's Why This World, an account of Clarice Lispector's life is a sympathetic study, an appreciation. If Lispector's husband faded into distance after years of marriage, writing apologetic letters to her later, it is not possible for the determined reader to get to any proximity to her scheme of things. Lispector was shrouded in mystery when well known, unknown when not really famous.Some thought she was a man. Lispector perhaps did not deliberately create that aura, that mystery. That was partly because of who she was.....an outsider in Brazil, Jewish-Ukrainian, even though she was only one when her family fled pogroms in the Ukraine. Her accent made her stand apart. Then the great danger she presented, the physicality of her charm, her attractiveness, her prose, her dangerous mysterious closed prose.

If Lucio Cardoso, who she loved had not been a homosexual, Lispector's life could have turned away from the voluntary exile associated with being a diplomat's wife. With Lispector, the twin faces of acceptance and rebellion, domesticity versus individuality found flower in her first great novel. Moser sketches her childhood from family and close confidants, their troubles in the Ukraine, their poverty in Brazil, the pain of displacement. She denied standing outside the glittering gloss of Rio. She belonged to Brazil, she insisted. Near to the wild heart leads to the recognition of a conflict but no solution, and later novels heighten the pain and mystery. Her own neuroses lead to psychotherapy, divorce and other loves, they lead to insomnia and a burnt scarred hand.

The acts of love are questioned constantly, she self aids herself with a certain dated mysticism, outright rejection, affirmation in faith, then there is the impossibility of bridging the gap, yes, words are there but words are merely words. Later on it gives us Agua Viva, benzodiazepines, strange and childish insistence on attention, very demanding behaviours too. When the edifice on which we base our lives start to crumble, and loved ones vanish so easily, then words present a certain refuge. Her beauty was intimidating, her intelligence formidable, the questions she asked difficult.

Moser's biography leaves gaps and I felt we really do not know Lispector after a few hundred pages. Her construction is based purely from her novels., which is not satisfactory. The woman who was an insomniac couls sleep as well, that threshold can never be known, that hour between wakefulness and drowsy numbness. However, this book is a good point to start an acquaintance with Lispector. It should be carried on by reading her novels.

The Hour Of the Star

Within 95 pages is achieved what other writers usually take hundreds to do. The novel is not perfect, it has 13 titles, A hora de la Estrella one amongst them. Lispector takes the fight away, one is surrounded by pounding screaming demons, till all energy is sapped. The young no one, asthenic anorexic poor girl from the north east of Brazil, in the energy sapping bulimia of grand Rio, the star glazed glitter of 1960's Copacabana, the beach, the crazy crazy world of being no one, poverty, sharing apartments, lives dreams and stories, and then everything ends at the hour of reckoning.Life punches you in the stomach says Lispector. Go away, be rather dead.

The Hour Of the Star, this great novella was written by Clarice Lispector towards the end of her life. It was written after The Apple in the Dark and The Passion according to G.H. In this novella, Lispector questions the relationship between the author and the text, a narrative objectivity does not always create a polyphony within the story telling context. The narrator exists apart from the writer? The girl needs a voice, needs a voice. She has seen her, she. People can catch your eye crossing busy streets, even if they are the least eye catching. She tells her story. In the end it achieves nothing, for Lispector thoroughly believed that writing changes nothing.

The Hour of the Star is a brilliant achievement, a novel written by a novelist whose cabbalistic mystical tendencies were well known. She had famously wanted to go beyond man in the absence of god. She retreated to a different position towards the end, when this novel was written. This novel was written on scraps of paper, on cigarette packs. It not only helped spread her aura further but also secured her mystery in the pantheon of Brazilian Literature. There was only one Clarice and in Brazilian literature, only one Lispector. It is a matter of debate whether her prose is more beautiful than she herself.

The mountain was mourning

The mountain was mourning, (and mountains do mourn)
their clay is bitter, in the hours of parting).
The mountain mourned: for the tenderness
(like doves) of our undiscovered mornings.

The mountain mourned: for our friendliness, for
the unbreakable kinship of the lips.
The mountain declared that everyone will
receive in proportion to his tears.

The mountain grieved because life is a gypsy camp
and we go marketing all our life from heart to heart.
And this was Hagar's grief. To be
sent far away. Even with her child.

Also the mountain said that all things were a trick
of some demon, no sense to the game.
The mountain sorrowed. And we were silent.
leaving the mountain to judge the case.

Marina Tsvetayeva

my hours my witnesses

my hours my witnesses
you have seen
how i have carried the hot tinder flame
of my love, the tides of her moments, her moods
like a sacred relic tied to the dark corners of
my silent grotto

how i have lit the dark recesses of
my unrequited passion
with the promise of words alone
how i have unlayered dismembered
the hope of of those promises the passions
of those sunsets
you have seen
the agitation of my heart
as it grieves and wounds and thrashes
against the tides of unbecoming unresolving chains


i know the hot touch of my fingers
have asked for the mooney mounds of your skin
the hooks of your skin
you have seen
i have asked but asked seldom

my hours my witnesses
you have seen
i am ragged with desire, for the
water of your mouth the burning
incense of your thighs
i am willing to pray to seek intercession with
saints holy men scripts amulets
unjudge everything and uncast myself
at the altar of your high temple
you have seen
how dark this fever how unwilling to recede
this ache pain numbness want

my hours my witnesses
you must testify
to this defeating promise
to the tides moons moments of
her moods whims
i tie her like a sacred relic to the inner
layers of my skin want moods desire
you have seen
my hours my witnesses
you have seen

only a son can write these lines

only a son can write these lines
to his mother only a son can
perpetrate this lonely crime
the crime of leaving far behind
leaving estranged the moons and moments of his childhood
and your youth
to leave you picking the touch left behind
on the doorhandles on the staircase
under the poisonous bloom of a magnolia tree
you seek the hidden noise of soundless feet
you seek them in shade in sun on the steps
of a cool veranda on the window sill near the
favourite sofa where you paraphrased shakespeare
and taught the difference between
sensitivity and negative capability
when you taught that ripeness is all
and we are merely as flies to wanton boys
and you said that knowledge is suffering
and so is love you said
but these lines that you will never read
and these words that i will never whisper
and your night that i will never live
and my night that i will never show you
will all end all end in vain
and you did me wrong to take me out of grave
you said and awakening is painful you added
i am living in reality what you paraphrased in fiction

The end of the road

It has been nearly three months since I wrote my last post here, one that I tentatively called This dying blog. However, I have not even once felt inclined to blog again, a term that I clearly differentiate from writing, for these are two different things. It does amaze me as to why I have suddenly moved away in such an indifferent way from this blog, for no matter how trivial my blog is or was, it was still an act of creation. The reasons for this ending are as hidden at times as the beginning of this blog but some of them are not so.One hides the vivid from the obscure but these chimeras have their own space and time and they have a predilection to strike one unawares.

I differentiate true writing from blogging for writing is a calling and no real writer can fend off this monster love while blogging at best is a pursuit and sometimes quite a trivial one. And then it summates and makes you wonder as to the real reasons behind this act, this act of vanity for if I don't miss blogging, then it confirms my ideas of dilettantism though I never had any doubts about that. Ellis Sharp, perhaps the best British blogger, wrote at his The Sharp Side that the average half life of a blog is three years and I think he is nearly right. I have been around here for nearly that time though I was never prolific or regular by any means. However, one cannot generalize and speak about the motives of everyone who blogs for that would be an exaggeration and an unwarranted one at that.

I think blogging is an activity wherein one does involuntarily let slip in the odd prejudice, the temper and aggression behind the facade of a nice looking Internet page, a page mixed with some half-baked insights, that music, that feeling, this music, that thing and yet, one does slip in the temper behind the careful opinion not actually sublimated or lived through.One reveals without revealing and says without much hiding. There are some blogs that try to steal authority, basing feeling on rhetoric, opinion on a well written paragraph, a novel, a fine poem or a movie badly watched. One must distinguish between blogs that create authority from ones that are purely authoritarian, an example is the fine blog Lenin's tomb, which is basically a blog that speaks, speaks with authority but is not based in authority. There are many blogs in the British space which have now neatly merged with the mainstream, representing the same hallowed thoughts and old ideas, speaking purely from a position of authority, creating the authority of those some texts that we have grown with and refusing to show a mirror to the establishment. The rest is generally considered subaltern for it does not represent the establishment.

However, my road ends here. I do like walking occasionally and sometimes I have lapsed into carefree running but the shadows that had started to lengthen in April have now eclipsed that space which I had kept for words. Sometimes 'emotions mount the hermitage of collected remembrances' and the heart caves in. The weather, the climate, known and unvoiced atrocities, the lingering solitude after a sad song, the train of remembrance, the smoke rings of memory, other tics, some habits, the voices of a few people I recognize here, the moments when I was actually close to some kindred spirits here, these I will cherish forever. But no more new words. Just the memory and desire of, the recollection of some such thoughts in a fictional kingdom, of a subaltern memory, of an unauthenticated, unauthorised desire.

This dying blog

As the few readers of this blog may have perhaps observed, this blog is dying, may be slowly but dying nonetheless, much to my dismay. It is not intentional, it was my desire to write about books read and unread, about poems and other vague songs, if not philosophy but attempt to philosophize. However, the material aspects of my life prevent a coherent attempt, the practical ways of life are getting in the way of the 'real' life and the loser is always the mind. It is not possible to live the life of the mind or that of the heart either. The days of medieval travel are over, there is no Ibn Battuta outside of Ibn Battuta, modern travel is a big hassle too. What one is left with are obscure and embarrassing attempts at writing, and I remember my posts on the carnage of Gaza early this year. I think my attempt was obscene but that is the crux, this blog in itself was an attempt to understand through the act of writing what I was reading and seeing around me but the results were getting poor and the will was sporadic and the words were petering out and everything was desultory.

The last so many 'poems' that I have posted here were going only in one direction and I have posted one below too and I think the poems were getting messed up with the rhetoric in my head and I realized quite long ago that I was writing only one poem but occasionally disguising it. I have been reading stoically but have not felt bothered to write about a single book that I have recently read, evidence of both my own malaise and the unmoving nature of what I was reading. Reading 'good' books has made me cynical I thought to myself but I think I was looking only for one kind of writer, say a Genet or a Goytisolo as I could see through the narrative deceptions of almost every one! However, I know this is a phase which will eventually pass, fall like sand from straw sandals, wane and die eventually.

I have got to know the blogs of a few people here and I think some are quite talented and innovative while some are courageous to think of writing. The quality of writing matters to me after the act of writing, for me the act of writing is getting in the way of more serious questions, the sea, the trees, the desert not seen yet, the hearth, the nomad unmet till now. There is shrill music in this world and injustice and no act of writing can change it. This was known to only a few people in the past, I mean those who actually write and lived by a few people some decades ago, like Genet, like Goytisolo, whose anger is tempered by fiction that the gods have bequeathed to them. I will continue to follow the blogs I read regularly and attempt to comment whenever an intelligent comment can be left behind.

I will not obliterate this blog for it reminds me of the few people I have met in this most unreal of places. I do hope that I will return soon to this debased act of writing. I pray that when that time comes, I will be able to actually transpose real memories on to this ethereal page and not construct desires and label them as memories. Till then funeral pyres.

do you not know?

do you not
do you not see
that when the moon glitters
when it shines
when old and new moons shine together
when it is night
when the moon is alone
when at night
in the heart of silence
in the palpable silence of the heart
when old and new moons shine together
at night
with their sorrow their loss
when the moon burns
in its solitary grandeur
with its wasted vanity
when old and new moons shine together
do you not
do you not know
that I remember you all night?