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?

who knows

the nostalgia of those pavements
the worn out nostalgia of those worn out pavements
the sweet pain of this nostalgia
the timeless melancholy of those pavements
who knows who walks those pavements now
hand in hand or heaves a sigh or
throws away a page torn from a diary
hesitantly on those pavements
a page scribbled with a hundred I love you's
who knows if the page flutters aimlessly or
someone stoops to pick it up who knows
the thought of those pavements
the harsh murmur of those pavements
the loud noise of those pavements
who knows how the breeze blows
how the sun sets on those pavements now
the littered memories on those pavements
the trodden years on those pavements
who knows who walks those pavements now
whether their shadows lengthen too in the afternoons
the solitude of those pavements after dark
do the pavements too remember the ceaseless echo
of some footsteps the thoughts of those steps
do you remember how we walked those pavements
do you remember
do you know what remembering is

The day has ended

The day has ended
and the night is spreading its shadow its moon
the moon its rictus
the rictus its shadow
the shadow its longing
the longing its bitterness
the bitterness its pain.

The day has ended
and you are leaving
leaving behind a space and a silence
the silence its noise
the noise its echo
the echo its shadow
the shadow its longing
the longing its bitterness
the bitterness its pain.

The day has ended
and the night and you are hand in hand
leaving your shadows spreading your moons
stealing my silence
the silence its place
the place its shadow
the shadow its longing
the longing its bitterness
the bitterness its pain.

Under cover of Night

To slip into your shadow under cover of night.
To follow your footsteps, your shadow at the window.
That shadow at the window is you and no one else;
it's you.
Do not open that window behind whose curtains you're moving.
Shut your eyes.
I'd like to shut them with my lips.
But the window opens and the breeze, the breeze
which strangely balances flame and flag surrounds my escape
with its cloak.
The window opens:
it's not you.
I knew it all along.

Robert Desnos

go

go
go and wear the medallion of my patience
wear the medallion of my patience on your lapel
show it or flaunt it or
else throw it into the sea
when you walk along the sea shore
with your new footprints in the new sand
under the new moon of your new life
ignoring funeral pyres along the shore

go
go and unremember the poems we read together
discard the amulets of known times
forget the melancholy we shared
the discreet nostalgia for old trains and attics
and lonely wooden barns
and the pain of a lonely owl hooting

you don't know what kneeling is
or what an altar looks like and
what remembrances are
you don't know even now that
when the moon sinks into the sea
a feverish haunting throbs
go ride the riptide to infinity
go

I will never forget

I will never forget that image
the hopelessness in your eyes
the pleading fever in my arms
the restless ache in my fingers
the unslept night in our eyes
and all this human pain so human
so created so worthless
that image when we parted when I left

then I think of travellers banished
and unmitigated separations
unplanned treason unthought of betrayals
but you and me could still have saved
so many nights and days
for our sorrows were worldly
and impious subject neither to melancholy
or doom

I will never forget the exact image
the meaningless tears as they fell unhesitant
the longed for turning back
you etched in stone in vain
hoping that I would change my mind
and learn that being left behind
adds to the face to the eyes
the colour of death of restless repeating death.

The Daily Moods of the Final Certainty

"I want to try to do a film about myself: what it would be like if I weren't successful. Ia'm trying to find out what kind what kind of person I'd have become. I would have always have tried to earn my living from culture, but let's assume I hadn't had the chance to make films or do theater, then maybe I w'd have directed radio plays. That's what the film will be about: a young man who does radio plays. He'd probably have the same health problems I do, because they go back to an earlier time, and the psychic dislocations would probably all be about the same, they'd express themselves differently. Or certain things would be real obstacles to him that aren't to me. I a'm really excited about it now......I definitely want to make the film. "The Daily Moods of the Final Certainty".....that'll be the title".

Fassbinder, Feb 1974

she lies in abandoned solitude

her body lies in abandoned solitude
on the beach,
in an uneasy solitude
motionless and limp she lies in restless unease
added to the world's limitless solitude.
though she killed herself, she
really died at his hands

he had left her, he had abandoned her to
die in an uneasy restless solitude.
she killed herself,
she who was alive yesterday, who was alive
last night,
now lies on the beach in an uneasy solitude.

she took her own life after he took her life
away, after he left her.
there she lies
betrayed and used,
her dead bare back sullies the fierce solitude
of the beach, as she lies uneasy in death.

soon the tides will wash her sad body to
a cold sea, consign her forever
to a limitless solitude.
a back without scars, eyes without lids
in a cold sea,
she will burn forever

he crushed her heart, he ate it
he left her abandoned her.
she killed herself though she really
died at his hands.
her black tresses will anchor her forever
to an unforgivable unforgettable solitude.


Note: The above lines were written after seeing this photo posted by Roxana. It is complemented by a perfectly neat poem written by Swiss and Roxana has translated it into Romanian. The above attempt only conveys an impression. The reality is known to Roxana alone.

Little Viennese Waltz

In Vienna there are ten little girls
a shoulder for death to cry on
and a forest of dried pigeons.
There is a fragment of tomorrow
in the museum of winter frost.
There is a thousand-windowed dance hall.
Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this close-mouthed waltz.

Little waltz, little waltz, little waltz,
of itself, of death, and of brandy
that dips its tail in the sea.

I love you, I love you, I love you,
with the armchair and the book of death
down the melancholy hallway,
in the iris's dark garret,
in our bed that was once the moon's bed,
and in that dance the turtle dreamed of.
Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this broken-waisted waltz

In Vienna there are four mirrors
in which your mouth and the echoes play.
There is a death for piano
that paints the little boys blue.
There are beggars on the roof.
There are fresh garlands of tears.
Aye, ay, ay, ay!Take this waltz that dies in my arms

Because I love you, I love you, my love,
in the attic where children play,
dreaming ancient lights of Hungary
through the noise, the balmy afternoon,
seeing sheep and irises of snow
through the dark silence of your forehead.
Ay, ay, ay ay!
Take this "I will always love you" waltz.

In Vienna I will dance with you
in a costume with a river's head.
See how the hyacinths line my banks!
I will leave my mouth between your legs,
my soul in photographs and lilies,
and in the dark wake of your footsteps,
my love, my love, I will have to leave
violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Poem to the Mysterious Woman

I have dreamt of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make
your dear voice come alive again?

I have dreamt of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my
chest
as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many
days and years, I would surely become a shadow.

O scales of feeling.

I have dreamt of you so much that surely there is no more time for me to wake up.
I sleep on my feet prey to all the forms of life and love, and you, the only one who
counts for me today, I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and
face of some passerby.

I have dreamt of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much
with your phantom,
that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom
among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow that
moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.

Robert Desnos

So must I write a poem?

So must I write a poem every time you leave me,
every time you go and leave me behind?
For this would leave me wordless,
as our partings are too numerous, too long,
and our natural destiny, it seems.

Must I write a poem every time the hour fades
into longing, with silence marching in
as your steps fade way, each fading step
in step with each silence that each step
gives?

I cannot leave our meetings to serendipity.
I do not trust chance encounters outside sad cafes,
your hair astray and my fists shackled,
you lost in reading a poem
and I lost in my loss.

There is no meaning in suffering. Try remembering
what has happened and the flowing tides of time
will stop. Then other lovers will resume their trysts,
suns will set, the time to part will come for others
too, but my loss is mine alone.

I must learn to trace my words in the shadowy
shadows of the moon or the henna that has dried
on your palms. I must try trusting fortune tellers
and hope that the sun that has set and the moon
that stung have not done so in vain.

your hair blown across your face

your hair blown across your face
I see the white of your eyes from a distance
I see the hair blown across your face
and how you blow this sunset to pieces

how your hair shades your face
and what I would give to live in that shade
under the shade of your hair
blown across your face

witness this blown sunset
witness too the falling shadows
after the shade after the visible white of your eyes
have shaded everything that lives inside me

and now the peripheral night is gathering its gloomy shade
but what can it know of a face that is shaded by hair
what does it know of shade and hair and your face
and the visible invisible white of your eyes

your lips too are covered with the blown strands
of your hair that has blown this sunset to pieces and
has shaded every shade into nothingness and how silent
everything seems now and how loud this silence is

The above hastily and unrevised lines were written after seeing the latest pictures posted by Roxana.