Nezhdanov: The idealist of realism

Nezhdanov dies, he kills himself, his lover marries, the plotters or so-called revolutionaries are arrested and some jailed, life moves on, the revolution is stalled, the rich coat of Petersburg attracts its most powerful citizens again. In Nezhdanov, Turgenev has created the quintessential tragic revolutionary, one who refuses to bargain, for whom any doubt in the cause itself is not worth the trouble, a slight hesitation, a difference of opinion or temperament is enough to foment doubt. Nezhdanov has doubts right from the beginning, the cause seems vague to him, he is not ready to jump himself blindly or let others do so and yet carry on does he, in spite of himself, everyone else even the very conditions he finds himself in.

Nezhdanov's suicide is an act of mercy. To languish in Siberia would have been a terrible injustice for he not only mistrusts the mission and its ultimate aims but is not sure all along what its aims actually are. he loves life but does not hate its seedier manifestations, he loves his country but cannot understand how the peasants can drink vodka and leer in oblivion, he is not a slavophile, he is a figure of moderation though he carries a gun only to set it on himself. Even in love, the slightest of doubts in affections returned makes him wonder a hundred times, he is zealously unselfish, polite and considerate, and his act of suicide is not an act of selfishness but an acknowledgement of the haste of others and a saving grace for them. His death is an act of compassion.

Can Nezhdanov, from Virgin Soil be compared to Stavrogin from The Devils? The answer is a resolute No. I am aware that any comparison of these two novels, which I cannot help comparing will not be totally out of place, and that (all comparisons are so odious and usually tasteless) but the quality of virgin soil sets it apart for not only are the revolutionaries treated with compassion, their very notions set forth clearly, they are treated with dignity.

Dostoevsky makes fun of these pamphleteers, these revolutionaries. I remember in one episode in The Devils, they all meet to discuss something and yet no one can set about the agenda for discussion. They are treated with no dignity, it seems they are just well read criminals, whose only aim is greedy crime and the hasty dissolution of a state that has no justification to exist. The aristocratic class, the governor of the city and his wife are actually soul-less characters and yet their very base ideas and actions are covered with a slime of hypocrisy and the veneer of good breeding, coated with the profusion of French sayings with which the devils abounds. The character of Stepan Verkhovensky is one that I have no sympathy with and yet the narrator of that story wastes literally a few hundred pages on resurrecting a character that has no moral fibre.

The notion of mental illness, of greed and alcoholic abuse, of any form of ill-health or physical defect does not arise in Turgenev's fiction. The men and women are perfectly healthy, the only differences we see are the ones of class, of opinion and education over which there are no controlling factors. in fact in virgin soil, there are no lectures around fires burning all night, we know they are talking but we do not know what, there is an ongoing cause but we are privy to their innermost thoughts. We move with them, we think we know them, in fact we know when Nezhdanov falls in and out of love, but in the devils we do not know what Pyotr Verkhovensky is up to, what Stavrogin wants? The Sipyagins of virgin soil are shown as to what they really are, condescending, greedy, hypocrites and all idle talk and no class really. Contrast this usually with Dostoevsky's treatment of the aristocrats, to whom , I suspect he was slightly impartial. His treatment of the lower classes and the poor is a mixture of condescension and a sort of christian love and misguided mysticism, in which lending an ear but not shaking the hand is the epitome of charity.

Turgenev's virgin soil, his longest novel is a brilliant portrait of not just so called revolutionary action but the preceding account and post- mortem of revolutionary ideals and the pungent distaste of defeat. The last chapter when Mashurina meets the lame Paklin, when old memories are exchanged is perhaps the best in the novel, where Turgenev shows not only his humanity but his sympathy too, sympathy for the characters he has created. It is evident from his tone that his is a voice of moderation and even though he is not a man of violence, he knows that only a certain amount of activity will lead to change and change there must be. In that sense, virgin soil is a prophetic novel for within forty years, the revolutionary activities were in full swing.

Nezhdanov, young and poetic burns his verses before killing himself. He gives his lover's hand away to the person he sees his rival in love at the very moment of death. He is aware of his humiliating past but does not resent it at all. He leaves his affairs in order, he is the only member of the group who is ready. He is ready to begin, to start change. He is true and loyal, he is not a hypocrite, he gives what is not asked, his very life.

Clara

If there is any more proof needed of the singularly vital thread that runs through all of Roberto Bolano's fiction, a thread that is symbolic of his entire oeuvre, then this short story Clara, published here is representative of that. This very short story, translated by perhaps his best translator Chris Andrews, conveys the same now so familiar Bolanesque theme of loss, the loss not only of innocence but of youth, not only of ambition but the certain loss of hope and the bitter realization of the impending certainty of death and the helpless surrender to that.

This is certainly not the best Bolano short story but not the worst too. Here, in this short piece, the concerns of his fiction and feeling find expression for in this microcosmic world we find love and betrayal, youth and disease, happiness and madness, travel and desperation and the ever hanging shadow of the realities of daily life, which are coincidences, lies, love and shame. Travel and immigration, solitude and exile, poetry, fact and fiction all merge together. The essential quality of this story lies in the narrator's brutal honesty but most of his narrators do not usually present themselves favourably, a vital feature of his fiction.

Clara has the usual qualities of the Bolano female, beautiful or pretty to begin with, adventurous and funny, idealistic and a little reckless, artistic without talent, a pseudo-poet and a bad painter, a reader of poetry or philosophy or classics ( depending on taste) usually though not always in love, romantic, sometimes penniless, usually jobless, strained and pained, haunted by dreams, betrayed sometimes, occasionally used. The Bolano woman steeps down and down quickly, loses beauty and wit, turns fat and bulimic, writes long love letters ( "Clara and I were writing to each other. Her letters were brief. Hi, how are you, it’s raining, I love you, bye. At first, those letters scared me. It’s all over, I thought. Nevertheless, after inspecting them more carefully, I reached the conclusion that her epistolary concision was motivated by a desire to avoid grammatical errors") when she is not in love and sometimes takes her own life. She either marries a pscychopathic poet or a poet who becomes a fascist. The end is usually alone.

Almost all the characters (with the usual exceptions) in Bolano's world are dilettantes, some good, shady, innocent and romantic, melancholic and funny, hopeless and a little crazed. Some of them travel savagely and some are savaged by travel. Occasionally during these travels, one of them meets a Clara.

When they met last

For now, after the space of so many years, he did not remember whether he had actually looked at her eyes when he had parted from her, when they had met last, apart from the scraping sound of a goodbye. It seemed to matter now, incomprehensibly though, whether he had looked at her face at all, at that final moment of departure, the only time he knew he was meant to know how a soul can leave a body, a moment that was far superior to his ever knowing what death could be like, what death can be like, for who has had any memory of death?

Perhaps he thought he had looked at her eyes, but this was now only a shimmering memory, a false belief, a kind of persuasive idea that one forces on to oneself, a kind of happening that does not actually ever happen for it had the shattering impact of a blow, a sudden sharp blow to the head, a kind of impact that makes the heart flutter. This lapse into unintentional emotionality was embarrassing, to say the least, for the passage of years had taught him a kind of torrid unlove in which the stickiness of emotions was a tarnish for the clear gaze of seeing.

However, this assurance, this knowledge that he had not looked away but had dared to look into the un-expressive irises of her eyes was important to him, suddenly so important and vital that it needed more than symbolic acceptance, more than any forced confession from a heart. It would let him accept with a certain kind of ease the knowledge of having lived through a moment and not having died at the essential meeting of those torpid moments when dying is far more acceptable than living, when fading into oblivion, into silent speechlessness is superior than any living.

For had he not wondered through many speechless days at that culminating moment, when he knew with a rocky certainty that they would never meet again, never get the chance to even meet in the haze of the same desert, never look at the same sun but be imprisoned like he was in the unending ungiving of that aggressive solitude, tied to the flippant unknowing of that vital question, namely the state of his knowing and the direction of certain mild light brown eyes, shaded by the neutral sunlight of that July afternoon, amidst the blowing apart of countless little cells in his heart, unknown unknown to everyone else, unknown to the world?

Even after many years, he could not come to terms with what seemed like an inconsequential question but which had now assumed such proportions for him that any other thought meant only like an obscene distraction, for isn't it really vital to know, he asked himself sullenly, what happens when we finally leave someone forever? Isn't the distant sound that seems like a flute playing mournfully only an interrogating glare, the merciless sun that shines so brazenly that it leaves no space for shade? But these questions still haunt him, unsure as he is, and so unknowing of what happened when they met last, what happens when people part for ever.

Hangover

This beautiful poem below has been translated by the poet Guadalupe Campos herself and you can read the original at her blog here.

dispersion, dissolution
loosing your pretty head around a corner
full of black doves

maybe there, in your space
unknown as a landscape in New Zealand
you laugh at me —who cares

if I don't remember the shape of your eyes
if they took it on their wings with the sun
if there's silence behind your name —who cares

a charm to turn
the living-machine on for tonight
maybe tomorrow night —that might do.

Fassbinder's "disordered thoughts" on Schygulla

One of the characteristics of Fassbinder's prose is the clarity of what he wants to communicate, in a way that is neither wantonly sentimental nor profusely incriminating of others. He writes with the same edge that he shows in his movies, only here the medium being different, the manifestations of his thoughts are laid bare in numerous ways. In this delightful piece on Schygulla called "Hanna Schygulla.... Not a star, Just a vulnerable human being like the rest of us, disordered thoughts on an interesting woman", Fassbinder traces the development of his relationship with the great actress, the up and down course of their relationship and the way it affected his relationship with other members of his Theatre Action group and its eventual dissolution.

It is clear that Fassbinder was a dedicated team player and he respected the opinions of other people like Raban and Ursula Stratz, who was the manager whilst always being mindful of their shortcomings, for it is apparent that compared to his genius, they did falter and eventually succumb to his magnetism, passion and fervour and his physical energy. Fassbinder never let his repertory feel how different he was from them and in the same way, never allowed Schygulla to feel that it was he who was directing her and not Schygulla who was taking control. Schygulla was, to quote Fassbinder, "convinced that she was not submitting to the imagination and will of another and that the conception of the role was exclusively her own.............the other actors weren't in a position to see through this stratagem of mine........ they saw nothing more than my seeming deference to Hanna Schygulla......." About Stratz he was clear that she had few lucid moments when she was not drinking while Raban would keep his mouth shut. It was Stratz who gave Fassbinder his first break, we must remember.

Fassbinder met Schygulla at drama school in Munich and it was only when Marite Greiselis was badly injured by her lover ( she was paralysed from the waist down) that Schygulla was offered the role of Antigone, in which she shone. Schygulla did not participate in the activities of this theatre group, refused to belong to the group creating persistent acrimony between the group members, a kind of political activity was being thwarted and in Fassbinder's opinion, the group ethos was being decimated. However, he was always impartial towards her acting genius but she was sensitive towards being directed, he let her believe she was a free agent while it was Fassbinder who pulled the strings. Eventually the group broke, it was smashed to pieces by Ursula Stratz's husband, who thought Fassbinder was too close to his wife and ultimately, Fassbinder took on new people and went in a different direction.

Political correctness and Fassbinder have nothing in common, theatre and later on cinema was a vehicle for his ideas, on issues relating to women, racism, the power of the state, minorities within Germany and other power plays between individuals, a theme that he so craftily explores in various ways, in one form in Fear eats the soul and in another way in Petra Von Kant. Schygulla was interested in these issues too but in a passive manner and Fassbinder recollects that he spent too much time on fruitless discussions with Schygulla on issues like the meaning of life. Schygulla was more interested in "personal development", an idea that Fassbinder finds ridiculous though he never mocks it. Hanna Schgulla was university educated, which set her apart from the Action Theatre group but for Fassbinder, her reluctance to march on the streets for an idea was eventually unacceptable to him. To Fassbinder, Schygulla was concerned with her own vanity, but he quickly adds that, "she was no more splendid than most human beings, no matter who or where".

Fassbinder finds it strange that Schygulla gave her very best in the major roles he offered her but was below par in the minor roles and when Cartensen was chosen as the leading lady (as in Petra Von Kant). However, he remembers her fondly, from the days of Katzelmacher to later on, but eventually the gulf between them grew wider, with Fassbinder claiming to preferring the job of a streetsweeper in Mexico to that of being a film director in Germany. This piece from The anarchy of the imagination is delightful with interesting anecdotes, asides, gossip and rumour but also very clearly shows the great director's ambition and the adroit way he played his role in his repertory, a balancing act considering the widely different ambitions of his actors, managers and other film professionals. This book is important reading for those interested in Fassbinder as it contains interviews, essays, prose pieces, his ideas on cinema, on other directors, novels, theatre, poetry and more importantly on politics.

Dostoevsky's brother

It came as a surprise to me that Fyodor Dostoevsky had a brother who he describes as "a gifted writer, an expert on European literatures, a poet, a translator" and the founder and publisher of journals like The Epoch and Time. Mikhail Mikhailovich Dostoevsky had died by the time Dostoevsky wrote this feuilleton piece in his diary, defending his brother's name against allegations of financial impropriety. Called On behalf of one deceased, Dostoevsky's tone is that of an offended brother, eager to clear his brother's name, worried that such allegations might tarnish Mikhail's name.

It follows that one Shchapov, a writer presumably and a contributor to Mikhail Dostoevsky's journal was refused financial payment as promised, especially that Shchapov was in dire financial need. According to Shchapov's obituary, the man was desperate for warm clothes as the winter was severe and to his surprise, Mikhail said....."I know a tailor who will give you what you need on credit." He was given very dubious clothes to wear, for which he was billed dearly. It seems he never got his promised roubles.

Dostoevsky goes on to suggest that the incident was fabricated, the whole affair ridiculous and in this piece he goes on to prove otherwise. Dostoevsky distances himself from the financial dealings of his brother, even though the literary journals were co-founded by the brothers themselves. Dostoevsky goes on to claim how large hearted his brother was, sending cheques in advance for scripts not yet sent to the journals, citing evidence in a case when his late brother's family had to claim back an advance through a law suit. Dostoevsky is also upset in this piece about the tone his brother is depicted as spoken in, saying that his brother was "extremely decent and a gentleman".

It also transpires from this piece that Mikhail Dostoevsky too was a member of The Petrachevsky Circle, having spent a few months in prison like his famous brother. However, Dostoevsky says that his brother was innocent, even though he knew Petrachevsky, attended his evenings and borrowed books from him. Towards the end of the case, Mikhail was released, without incriminating others, though Dostoevsky claims his brother "knew a great deal". This proves the high ideals of his brother and Dostoevsky rubbishes any claim otherwise. How could Mikhail have allowed the poor writer to die of the winter cold!

The reason I wrote this post was that I found this piece quite amusing and funny, for one expects the great writer, any great writer to have risen above the foibles and other delirious desires of this life and yet how ordinary everyone actually is. I do not doubt that Dostoevsky was writing the truth about his brother but was also surprised by the vehemence of his defense. At the same time, it reveals his affection for his deceased brother which is quite natural. The whole incident reveals the jealous attitude of various publishers at that time and this attack on Mikhail could well have been fabricated, as Dostoevsky claims.

What I felt was more interesting is that of two Dostoevsky's writing at the same time, what a luxury of riches, considering that Dostoevsky claims that Mikhail was gifted. Even if Mikhail was only half as good as the great writer himself and even if Dostoevsky was being a bit carefree with praise, it will still take something to beat Mikhail. I wonder if there are any published pieces from Mikhail Dostoevsky? Did he write a great masterpiece that lies hidden, that is lost? How much did Fyodor borrow from Mikhail, how much did Mikhail contribute to the Dostoevsky canon? Did Mikhail approve of Fyodor's writing? All these are questions, one thinks however that two Dostoevskys might have been two much!

Dostoevsky & the Nechaev affair

In what Dostoevsky calls a feuilleton article, one of the essays in A Writer's Diary, Dostoevsky explains his own understanding of the infamous Nechaev affair, his affiliation with The Petrachevsky Circle and the influence of the Nechaev affair ( a good link here) on his important work The Devils. This article called One of today's falsehoods opens with an indictment of those who have tried to explain away the causes of the Nechaev affair by analyzing the impact of political activism amongst Russian students. Quoting this article, Dostoevsky takes umbrage at the writer saying that "an idiotic fanatic such as Nechaev could find proselytes only among the idle and underdeveloped and not among young people involved in studies".

To Dostoevsky, this is a distortion of reality, for to him the Nechaevs ( a link) of this world are not weak willed or uneducated or lazy or ill but are on the other hand quite well educated and motivated. Any attempt to give their political or moral ideology a cover or any attempt to explain their politics amounts to a betrayal of ancient and time tested values, which to him basically amounts to ignore Russian- ness, the very moral fabric of Russia. This attempt to explain how some students could be swayed by a persuasive ideology tantamounts to exonerating an entire society of its moral culpability and laying blame, in a very perverted way on young people.To Dostoevsky, this article in The Russian world absolves young people of blame and does not permit critical attitudes toward the youth.

It is indeed unthinkable for Dostoevsky to consider the possibility of the planners of the Nechaev affair to be other than diligent and ardent, who might incidentally possess good hearts. Not all Nechaevs are idiots or fanatics, yet among the Nechaevs "there can be creatures who are very shadowy, very dismal and mishapen, with a thirst for intrigue and power of most complex origins, with a passionate and pathologically premature urge to exprress their personalities". It is not always that these people are monsters or have had a complete education in a university. Even after all this, such people might be only scoundrels. Dostoevsky reminds here of what Pyotr Verkhovensky says in the devils that I am a scoundrel, not a socialist.

In the article, Dostoevsky enumerates his involvement in The Petrachevsky Circle, his imminent death at the hands of a firing squad, a miraculous reprieve and subsequent exile to Siberia ( one that he wrote as Memoirs from the House of the dead). Dostoevsky rationalizes the existence of this circle, tracing his own influences, particularly Belinsky, the orientation of the entire group and the ideology of not just a Russian Utopia but one that is universal. He is however quick to remind himself and the reader that he was only infected and not possessed of this visionary raving and was able to save himself of this illness. After the sentencing, Dostoevsky says that what liberated him and like minded people from the circle was the direct contact with the people, the brotherly union with them in common misfortune, the awareness that we themselves had become as they, equal to them and even placed on the very lowest of their levels. The real harm is any ideology that does not recognize the Russian tradition, in the legacy of ideas, "in the notion of a high status of a European, unfailingly with the proviso of disrespect to oneself as a Russian".

One of the bad influences on youth, one that can ultimately lead them to become Nechaevists is the complete disregard for their traditions, lack of respect for Christ and Christianity and a mocking intonation and indifference for russia's cause. Another aspect is the desire to emigrate, to work to turn into a common European man and work in a free country( here he points towards America). Towards the end of this article, Dostoevsky warns against the tendency for callous behaviour and forgetting the real direction and cause of Russia. All in all an interesting piece but one , as I keep reading the diary , I find less and less surprising.

The Devils, barring a few hundred pages and on second reading now, seems so listless. As Nabokov rightly says, it is bereft of any real beauty that can mark it as a great novel though it has great possibilities as a play. The Verkhovensky-Nechaev character is easy to understand now and the whole ruckus that is raised in the devils is easier to fathom. I personally think that Dostoevsky might secretly have modelled Shatov on himself though Kirilov is another possibility. But one must concede that by creating Stavrogin, Dostoevsky essentially saves his novel from becoming another pamphlet novel. The character of stavrogin is deliberately obscure and yet by ascribing hallucinations in clear consciousness to him, Dostoevsky absolves him of much blame.

It is indeed bewildering that Dostoevsky writes what he does in this article in a way that smirks of an ideological insistence, in a belief in the superiority of his country and people and values which later on in Europe took messianic proportions, lead to holocausts and the uprootment of millions and in the nineties saw his Slavs create torture and concentration camps. Dostoevsky takes a moral viewpoint and denies his opponents of theirs and in this competing ideology dehumanizes his opponents. He creates weak characters for them in his novels, gives them indefensible positions and also makes them ill, hysterical and usually epileptic, which in his grander scheme perhaps negates even the little good that they might have done in the past.

It is not enough to read one or two works by Dostoevsky but his entire oeuvre and see the thread of an inner passion run through all of his novels. It goes without saying that he has as much of a right to espouse an ideology as the Necheavists have. Through the medium of his novels and what Bakunin claims to be Dostoevsky's unique creation, the polyphonic novel, Dostoevsky has created a great assembly of characters who voice different opinions and espouse numerous ideologies. These competing political creeds are for all to see and think and yet where Dostoevsky fails sometimes is in the insistence of the moral superiority of one ideology over another unless of course one is simply calling for the extermination of another.

Perhaps Dostoevsky was a prophetic writer and foresaw much of what convulsed his dear country and in a way he created in his novels a unique atmosphere for dialogue, for an ideological debate, for those considerations which perhaps the Russian and indeed no other literature had seen or produced. In that we must stay hushed for it is easy to criticize. Dostoevsky's involvement with politics, an active one, is indeed credible no matter whether he adopts a Shatov. To understand his real politics, reading his diary is essential. More later.

Bela Bartok

Darkness, the stealth and murder of that dark thing sometimes called music. After this, death would seem easy. maybe.

So What : Taha Muhammad Ali

Khalid, a young boy in an unnamed Palestinian village has great dreams......his dream is to have and own and wear a pair of shoes, for all his life, he, Khalid, has walked barefoot, subject to ridicule, an internal torture, an external liquidation, bereft, solitude his essential companion, for he has no shoes, he fears his peers, their ridicule, their derision, for his feet are the only feet that bear the atrocity of the land, land that is hot and cold, land that burns, that burns him. Then one day, a Moroccan travelling merchant decamps in his village, selling among many goods, some shoes too. This is more than he can bear, this is more than he can see, this shoe he must have, otherwise his heart will explode. And then soon, this Moroccan man has only one pair of brown shoes left to sell.

Khalid enquires and understands that they are worth 20 piastres. He implores his parents that unless he has these shoes, he won't be able to live for he cannot walk barefoot, he will jump into a well. His parents beg and borrow and soon Khalid runs to buy his shoe. But he discovers that the shoes are both meant for the right foot only. So the merchant tells him. So what?, Khalid says. So what. He buys the shoes against the merchants advice, buying two rights. And on reaching home, when he tries to walk in these new shoes, he falls down and hurts himself. And he hurts himself and bleeds. Khalid is asked to return the shoes and that night Khalid can't sleep, and sometimes when he does sleep fitfully, he wakes up, crying and screaming, just asking So what?!, So what?!, so what ?!

This story from a collection of poems called So What by the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali might be a metaphor for the larger Palestinian experience, but I wonder what it is a metaphor for. This story can be found at the end of this collection of poems, from a poet who is basically an autodidact, a man to whom poetry has come with open lips, without much toil, Compared to Barghouti or Darwish, Taha is a different experience altogether for in him the dual nature of the poet alternates rapidly, swinging from one extreme to the other, in an unforgiving language, in a language that is so subtle it makes your solid indifferent heart palpitate, so tense and so sad that you, the remote reader wishes the end of poetry itself. Taha's Arabic is not the classical one that is generally taught but the one he speaks, the one he learnt in a Palestinian village called Saffuriya, now renamed Tzippori by the Israelis.

Taha sells touristic mementos in Nazareth, the place where his family fled to and where he has lived for the last few decades, selling totems and when not, then writing his great verses or the odd story, in a small shop now managed by his sons. In classical Arabic and later on in Persian, Turkish or further on in Urdu, the concept of saying something, conveying something difficult in a simple and eloquent manner is called sahl il mumtanaa. This requires genius and is not easily done. To Taha Muhammad Ali, this seems to come quite naturally. The rhythms of his poems, the rich images, the simplicity of style, short lines, sometimes longer, the relative simplicity of the ideas themselves and their usual surprises, all these heighten the sense of hypnotic charm that one encounters whilst reading these poems.

It is easy to dismiss all poetry from Palestine by saying that one knows what to expect. But for the undiscerning reader, that might be a fatal error, for now that Palestine is lost in a swamp of road maps and post post colonial barbarism, subject to the whims of republican and democratic masters, subject to the harsh reality of their own impotence and the servile impotence of their neighbours, those casual charlatans, in a mix of blood and sweat and loss of hope, this very man can only write poetry, for it is only in poetry that the Palestinian land can live, for future generations of the Palestinian diaspora to know and to remember that there was once a place called Palestine.

And it is here that Taha steps in, has already left a mark, even if it is only poetry, because Palestine, as the walls rise higher and longer, will seemingly never ever be an independent land, even as part of a two state solution for even that would be to ask too much. Writes Taha....

"Our traces have all been erased, our impressions swept away..... and all remains have been effaced...... there isn't a single sign left to guide us or show us a thing.
This land is a traitor
and can't be trusted.
This land doesn't remember love.
This land is a whore
holding out a hand to the years,
it laughs in every language
and bit by bit, with its hip,
feeds all who come to it.
..............................................
its newcomers
sailors, and usurpers,
uproot the backyard gardens,
burying the trees".


But here in Taha's poems, anything is possible, the entire land with its harsh realities, its olives and its seas, its men and proud mothers, even revenge. For though Taha is ready to forgive, he will never forget, he remembers, he versifies, he passes on to another generation of his people the scent and the wind of a plundered stolen country. He remembers how his people were forced to flee as he says......

"We did not weep when we were leaving..... for we had neither time nor tears, and there was no farewell.
We did not know at the moment of parting that it was a parting............. "

In this collection there are great and beautiful poems translated with such verve, such magic and so much care and love that the translation dignifies the original Arabic ( I have a bilingual edition) the translators, Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin have done an excellent job.

Some of the poems deal with general and personal issues, with a wedding, a failed love, the destruction of a village, meeting at an airport, on the interval between sleep and waking and a most delicately beautiful poem on tea and sleep. There is one called Thrombosis in the veins of petroleum, one called The fourth Qasida and so on. His poetry has received recognition, translations intoHebrew among other languages. He has travelled with Peter Cole reading his poems worldwide, gained a bittersweet recognition for a land that reminds one of Atlantis. The introduction to this volume is extremely helpful and tells us a lot about his passion and his language and his essential anxieties as a poet. I have in the recent past copied two of his poems in this blog. At this link here, you can find him reading his wonderful poem called Intiqaam or Revenge, translated immediately after by Cole. Though almost all of his poems are worth posting here, for now I am copying one called Twigs, which is a good example of the melancholy bitterness of Taha Muhammad Ali and his land, his people and the remotest memory of that memory.

Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life's brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child.

My love for you
is what's magnificent,
but I, you, and the others,
most likely,
are ordinary people.

My poem
goes beyond poetry
because you
exist
beyond the realm of women.

And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people's hearts.

After we die,
and the weary hear
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that we' ve done,
and on all that we've longed for,
and on all that we've dreamt of,
all we've desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first thing
to putrefy
within us.

Vittoria : an extract

All politics is Realpolitik," warring

soul, with your delicate anger!
You do not recognize a soul other than this one
which has all the prose of the clever man,

of the revolutionary devoted to the honest
common man (even the complicity
with the assassins of the Bitter Years grafted

onto protector classicism, which makes
the communist respectable): you do not recognize the heart
that becomes slave to its enemy, and goes

where the enemy goes, led by a history
that is the history of both, and makes them, deep down,
perversely, brothers; you do not recognize the fears

of a consciousness that, by struggling with the world,
shares the rules of the struggle over the centuries,
as through a pessimism into which hopes

drown to become more virile. Joyous
with a joy that knows no hidden agenda,
this army-blind in the blind

sunlight-of dead young men comes
and waits. If their father, their leader, absorbed
in a mysterious debate with Power and bound

by its dialectics, which history renews ceaselessly-
if he abandons them,
in the white mountains, on the serene plains,

little by little in the barbaric breasts
of the sons, hate becomes love of hate,
burning only in them, the few, the chosen.

Ah, Desperation that knows no laws!
Ah, Anarchy, free love
of Holiness, with your valiant songs!

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Herzog eating his shoe

In an interview with Alan Yentob, aired on Imagine on the BBC some days ago, Werner Herzog took umbrage at being called German, not Bavarian. Amongst other things he spoke about, including Kinski, there was also a clip shown on Herzog eating his own shoe several years ago. The brilliant director talks about it in this clip below which is insightful about this man and the passionate industry he brings to his craft.

Vertigo

I quite like this score from Vertigo by Bernard Hermann.

Where

Poetry hides
somewhere
behind the night of words
behind the clouds of hearing,
across the dark of sight,
and beyond the dusk of music
that's hidden and revealed.
But where is it concealed?
And how could I
possibly know
when I am
barely able,
by the light of day,
to find my pencil?

Taha Muhammad Ali, 2004

Daniil Kharms link

Some time back, I posted an extract from Incidences by Daniil Kharms. Amongst the great Russian writers, his voice is the most distinct and different. There is a link to a few Kharms stories, exceedingly witty and brilliant in a charming way, at this link here, which I found at Three percent.

All attempts must be made to read Kharms and then re-read him. The reward is ample. Kharms' literary genius is being discovered, albeit late.

Your photo

Your photo, now out of my eye's ken,
in its new transparent glass frame,
sits on Shakespeare The complete works.

I am so scared, I avoid your eyes,
I can see, reflected, its numerous voices fall
on my listless hand.

I who framed you
escaped you, leaving you behind
in a wilderness of waiting.

I don't want to hear its frozen words,
near this pointing finger, the cauldron of accusation,
near this merciless truth.

Dostoevsky and Turgenev

Dostoevsky's relation with Turgenev can at best be described as turbulent. It is fair to say that both were brilliant but dissimilar writers and had different political ideologies, with Dostoevsky adopting a more slavophilic stance. Their meeting outside Russia was fictionalized in The Devils and Turgenev's character was lampooned unfairly perhaps as Karmazinov in the same work by Dostoevsky. In fact, Cherneshevsky, considered as the real ideologue of the Russian revolution was not spared either, with his great novel What is to be done satirized and lampooned as Merci in The Devils. Turgenev was aristocratic and his political ideas, it seems to me were more euro centric and mature, in contrast to Dostoevsky who had more nationalistic fervour and saw in Russia a possibility of grandeur, based on the cultural and moral superiority of the Slavic people. Dostoevsky was not the only exception. Those were turbulent times in Russia, political winds were changing and yet, Dostoevsky was more in favour of autocracy and the Russian church, hating socialists, disbelieving God but devoted to Christ. Both writers wanted change, albeit in different ways and this is clearly reflected in their important and lesser known works.

Turgenev's break from Dostoevsky was complete in his work Smoke, which Dostoevsky attacked vehemently. The question of emigres, especially political emigres, their life and opinions and their various stances were beautifully reflected by Turgenev in a way that represents such people in all ages. It is important not to get carried away with the fervour of one's opinions and that was something that Turgenev did not allow to happen in his works. On the other hand, Dostoevsky let the characters in The Devils literally run amok, with the work ending in numerous murders. Dostoevsky had a deep suspicion of revolution, seeing as he did in it a reversal of passionate Russian nationalism, for he was more inclined towards the concept of Mother Russia, as an object of worship in itself. The character of Pyotr Verkhovensky is dealt with very unsympathetically and Dostoevsky, it seems to me was unsure what he should do with Stavrogin, who remains enigmatic, unapproachable and vastly more unknown than Ivan Karamazov.

What Turgenev would achieve in a few pages, Dostoevsky would take hundreds to do. Of course, Dostoevsky was brilliant in building up a characters and other numerous unimportant characters and their intertwined relations and his morose, morbid and psychological insights and those are without comparison , but It seems , on second or third reading of his novels that some of his more favourite characters are actually quite confused, ready to throw away their whole life's work or ideology at a whim. We must never forget that these novels are novels of ideas and the inner motives are mostly political and psychological and some characters are driven by various motives. Dostoevsky however, as cleverly pointed by numerous critics and by Nabokov also, gave multiple dimensions to his characters, making them look and feel physically unwell also, which sometimes absolves them of blame partly blame. Some of his famed creations were epileptic, melancholic and morose and he makes them organically ill, a distinction which Turgenev clearly maintains in his work.

Turgenev's Bazarov for instance is a more stable ideologue for in the end, he is not much of a nihilist. He calls for negation but not more annihilation, a departure from the grand inquisitor. Bazarov's friend settles for family life, Bazarov could have got married and so on. There is a climate of doom that surrounds the Dostoevsky hero or heroes and it clearly reflects his own preoccupations. Turgenev's Sketches, a great work on its own, even in the desperate situations that he finds the serfs in, Turgenev gives them a sense of hope, and in the landscape he describes a possibility of change but he never subscribes to a religious dimension or hopes that a religious falling back on could lift his country out of that morass. Turgenev is truly anti-iconic but not icon breaking while Dostoevsky strives to let say even a Verkhovensky sit stupefied in the Devils when a half-wit mystic solves problems by making people drink sugary tea!

Turgenev's Virgin Soil, in this respect is a true masterpiece. In this novel he achieves in a few hundred pages of exquisite brilliance a sum total of his aesthetic, moral and political philosophy and nowhere do his characters appear lazy, shallow and uncertain. To them he imparts hope and resonance and they are never fanatical. Yes, Dostoevsky's characters are fanatical for it appears that he might himself have been of a less tolerant nature, especially with regards to Europe, the Caucasian questions and other minorities within Russia. However, to be honest, Dostoevsky's characters bring with them more than a whiff of what being Russian meant then and what it might mean now. Who would not want to know Smerdykin, Lebyatkin or all the other people who all play a part in the intrigue that one finds the novels mired in. In his brilliant Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics, Bakhtin introduces the concept of a polyphonic novel, one that he argues did not exist before and one that was born with Dostoevsky.

The present political climate in Russia, with an autocratic democracy, political opponents languishing in jails or as emigres, journalists being killed in Russia or outside, the driving force seems to be the same kind of slavophilic nationalism, Russian superiority, xenophobia that brings fascism and intolerance. It is a moot point how the two great writers would react now. The purpose of this post is just to reflect on these issues between the writers and not make a case for either one as that is an academic and frankly facile job. Both the novelists are great in their own ways and if one employs the criteria of a writer who is actively political, as I think writers should be, then they are a cut above the rest. Their fiction is an indicator of how they reacted to the Russia of their times and produced works that will never die. It is my desire to write more about what Bakhtin so beautifully describes in the work mentioned earlier as it enhances one's understanding of not only what the writers were in their essence but also allows the dilettante reader to form some ideas. I am reading Dostoevsky's A writer's Diary these days which prompted this post and have also been revisiting Turgenev's timeless Sketches. More to follow soon, I hope.

Stavrogin's speech

"I can understand a fellow wanting to shoot himself, I have thought of it myself sometimes, and then always some new idea occurred to me: if one were to commit some crime, I mean, something shameful, that is something really disgraceful, something very mean and - ridiculous, so that people would remember it for a thousand years and remember it with disgust for a thousand years, and suddenly the thought came : One blow in the temple and there would be nothing more. What would I care for people then or that they would remember it with disgust for a thousand years? Isn't that so?

Let us suppose that you had lived on the moon, Let us suppose that you committed all those ridiculous and abominable crimes there. You know from here that they will laugh at you there and think of your name with disgust for a thousand years, for ever, for as long as the moon lasts. But now you are here and you are looking at the moon from here: what do you care what you have done there and that people there will think with disgust of you for a thousand years? It is true, isn't it?"

from The Devils, Dostoyevsky

Unwritten, Unvoiced

The unwritten poem and the unvoiced love don't really exist, even if the instigators of such violent acts will make us believe otherwise. Anything that is written is only written to be read and it is the fervent desire of any writer to have an audience, for without the act of reading and listening, any poem or for that matter, even brief prose only exists in a dark abyss, in the sultry corner's of one's heart, in those regions of the mind where misgivings, pain and desires simmer and ultimately die. Unless, and yes unless the written word does not see the light of day, it does not exist.

Any act of writing for itself does not really mean anything, for if writing is an act of catharsis, the cathartic effect is not complete unless it works on a distant reader, in whom it kindles a state of mind, a feeling, a mood. The identification of kindred states between the writer and the reader is part of the drama of creation. It is a moot point as to which of the two acts is more rewarding but writing exists in a nether state unless the reader adds more than thumb marks to the crisp or fading page. It is reading that saves both the written word and its author from oblivion.

And love, when it lies uncertain in the arc of the brow, when it lies trembling on lips and fingers, when it has not yet known what dawn brings, when it has not suffered the atrocity of sunsets, when it has not demonized itself, when the earlier part of coarse evenings and the latter part of merciless nights have not heaved their jungle of mysteries, when it is still if and when, when it only lies nearer me and farther away from you, when I have not released it yet and you have not sensed it still, till then it is only inside, dull, fatigue, odd and just so very dead.

And then something shifts. It is as if the plates that hold the continents from murder have shifted, the word itself blooms, the world too. Any undeclared love is sullen torture, it does not exist, it only perpetrates mayhem. It links in its magical pattern primeval thought and primeval memory. It is neither sweet nor happy, neither gray or dark. The act of loving is the greatest treason against oneself, it blinds the hapless victim, it overpowers the receiver and yet, if not declared or voiced, it is nothing in itself, it has no place, it does not exist, it dies so quickly.

All the injustices in this world must be catalogued. Any unfinished or unremembered torture, any unknown holocaust has not taken place. God would not have existed if man had not been created.

The dark of his death

The dark of his death was mixing
with the salt of my tears.
I thought, life, stopped, stopped,
and then the same again.

The last image suffers you fatal pain,
the body's surrender, of waste,
the indecent torpor that afflicts the mind.

Then, the same again, melancholy strains,
profuse sentiments, that void,
that missing, that sullen hissing,
and then the same again.

The time of burial is the cleansing act,
laying down the simmering sheet of memories,
and of one's own mortality. How unbelief stares
at the calling chasm!

You have gone but you have given
the reminder of future holocausts, of a similar pain,
the uncontestable stamp of oblivion,
the definitive song of death.

Bolano's 2666

Bolano's 2666 will be available in English soon. For the few who visit this blog, I must announce my enthusiasm for Bolano again, he being the only writer to whom I have devoted a few posts, under the general rubric of Literature, though I feel now that I should have created a label for Bolano!
It seems that a few people are already on to the new book and there are a few reviews too. A comparison to Delillo has been made but with all respects, that is far fetched, for the languages and the world views that the two writers have bear no comparison. I feel any such comparison is an affront to Bolano but one that does not matter. It also stems from an inadequate understanding of the clever craft of this type of fiction, which blends romanticism with practical fictive and unconscious emotional stances, reflecting a life that is lived on the edge, near posthumous desires, under a sky that is never benign, always changing, near the din and hovel of frenzied love, love for ideals and sensitivity, for drama and the detachment that only words can offer. Bolano's fiction is the fiction of visceral realism, of a kind of attitude that only a few can relate with. One has only gratitude for this kind of writing.

I hope that more will be written about this novel and Bolano's poetry will be published in English soon too. A link ( Perhaps the writer of this review should not read Bolano!) here.

Tristia

I have studied the science of separations
From nocturnal laments when hair flows loose.
Oxen chew, waiting lengthens,
This last hour of vigil in the city.
And I honourthe rituals of that cock-crowing night
When, having lifted the journey's burden of grief,
Tear stained eyes gazed into the distance
And the singing of Muses blended with the weeping of women.

Who can know from the word goodbye
What kind of parting is in store for us,
What the cock's clamour promises
When a light burns in the acropolis,
And at the dawn of some sort of new life
When the lazy ox chews in his stall
Why the rooster, herald of a new life,
Flaps his wings on the city walls.

Osip Mandelstam

Only Poetry

The hearts echoes render no songs when the spirit is mute, wrote Shelley. But we often forget it, during the course of our days, when we are taken in by the ephemeral babble of our rhetoric and the shifting sands of our logic. We forget the commonplace jealousies of our prejudices and the convenience of our biases. We move from position to position, edges and mirages and shadows, ignoring the ephemera of our lives, the commonplace diktats that we obey and the sometimes total abjection to cultures and voices that seek our attention. We disregard ourselves, we throw ourselves at the mercy of winds, winds that have not stopped blowing for ages, the same ill winds, of unchange and hate, of misplaced logic, of unedifying subtleties, of harsh histories and injustice.

For actually, when we are mute, when our very essence is held hostage by fears, fears of a common nature, of survival and livelihood, of love and betrayal, then our seemingly broad vision suffers a visceral death, our loud cacophony loses the rhythm of rhyme, it dies a painful slow nauseating and demeaning death. Our strength, the verve of an ordinary human being lies perhaps in just recognizing these ephemeras, these ebbs and flows, the waning and waxing of our fevers. But our spirits will be mute, will transpire, will change in a changing life and we, even if guarded and ready, will suffer the ignorance of darkness, inside dark nights.

Only poetry and words can help us see a thread, one that runs through all lives, even the meanest, the most depraved. Only poetry, even if illusory, can help pacify demons of ignorant strength and remind us of certain times in the past, of kings larger than life, those who built vast mountains that lie shattered now, where lone and level sands stretch far away. Even hesitant and unrequited loves, impulsive passion, hastily scribbled poems and hopeful happiness can unite a mute soul with a dissipate reality. Only poetry.

I do not know what poetry actually is, though at times I have been sure of what it is not. When that hard day has mercifully come to a stuttering end, when a falling night has tried to cosy itself to a few benign looking stars, when the cheapest looking bar in town has played the saddest love song, towards the end of that dissolute song, in rhyme with its fading notes, the hesitant steps taken away from that melancholy din reminds me of poetry.
Let these stars fall down tonight. A loved one is breathing his last.

Ya Menfi

Revenge

At times ... I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

Likewise ... I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.

But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

Taha Muhammad Ali, 2006
Translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin

Hiatus, block, malady, misery

Even by my own hesitant blogging rate, I have hit a lean patch. In cricketing parlance, I suffer from a lack of form. My concentration and desire to write have got less and less recently, I am not scoring at all. It is not for want of trying or thinking of doing so, it is that there is a genuine block. Now, I should not take myself seriously and believe that I am a genuine writer and so on, for I have constantly strived to remind myself of what blatant dilettantism I am capable of. And sometimes one forgets to notice this, gives in to crass hypocrisy and so on again.

Yet this time, I do actually want to write something, for I am not tired of blogging as I do not consider it as a chore. In fact, everything else I do is, apart from caffeine and nicotine. I have always hesitated to rant, I do not want to tell the very few people who read this blog of how much coffee I drink and I do not go asking people their nationalities after reading them sympathize about Palestine. I also do not rant about how prejudiced you are, you have something against western writers, why criticise someone, anyone who dares criticise European writers makes you head itch, some such crap. Yet, I am even incapable now of ranting, as you can see. I had once dared to question Thomas Bernhard and his style, and what do I get......a self proclaimed great British blogger literally questioning my right to do so. And that after his cut and paste blog.

I must have been mad to volunteer to co-write the Proust blog with Antonia and Alok, my favourite blog writers. There too, I have gone dry, the runs have stopped, I am clearly leg-before. I wanted to write regularly and have been so dismal there. So, my dear Alok and Antonia, try keeping me in your team but if I am dropped, I will not question it.

My blog co-writer, who calls himself alpha2omega, had warned me of this phenomena last year, calling blog writing intellectual masturbation. Now, I still disagree, for we each will go into different graves, but I think he is right when he suggested that I might actually be tired of blog psychology, a sign of late capitalism! Ha! Perhaps, reading the rants of other bloggers has made me really anorexic, I mean in a writing sense, for who is interested in being told what one should think or write or read, so long as one has the right, admittedly self acquired of criticising what you and I write, but not at the cost of being told that stay off so and so, they are great writers, that kind of crap. There is too much mutual backscratching here in the blog world and some people excel in being members of a mutual admiration society of bloggers!

Once Alok advised me to read only what I wanted to. The advice is great but the projection in the blog world is great even for me to understand and succumb to, as evidence this naive post!

I do want to write again, but not repeat what I wrote the last few times, 2 absolutely hopeless poems, and one listless review of Bacacay. Give me poetry, I pray!
I will continue to read the unreadable books I have recently bought, including Ecrits and Dabashi. But, I find reading too boring at present, the likes of Arendt, with her myopic blind spot towards less civilised races like the Arabs of Palestine, too nauseating. I must read good old stories, and start reading Russian literature again. The intellectual world, I mean the genuine one is largely composed of Comprador intellectuals, those who are being paid to think and instigate wars. Those whose dull ignorance smacks of arrogant vacuity. Thus, we need more of the really great literature and not hatred and messianism disguised as travelogues and philosophy. Or even literature.

That said, even a holiday recently has not helped my batting slump ( I am always a batsman) and perhaps I must go again to Tangiers, and not avoid the cheapest cafes. That is where the waves and the bread and the sun and the nicotine gurgle and shine together. I want to go into the heart of poetry.

I want

I want to be
Plath's Elm tree,
burnt, scorched to the core,
radiographed to the roots,
suffering the atrocity of sunsets.

I don't want to linger,
staring at the sky.
I want to be nailed across your sky,
your blue black, ephemeral abstract sky,
your vermilion sky.

I am tired of waiting
for the perfect poem.
I want the waters of poetry
to rise, the ink of my hands
tracing the outline of your face
on these blank sheets.

I want the peace of having you,
not the vagueness of promises,
or the thickness of your silence
cascading
the hurt of my night.

I want
the musk of kisses and
the neurotic's agitation.
I want the stickiness
of paranoia, the roughness of need.

I don't want philosophy.
I like the tremor of poetry,
the ravishing of love, the unhesitant
thud thud, beat beat
tachycardia of my heart.

I want
the coarseness of a few
promises.
Dull slow flame
lingering across a festering love.
Come back.

Violent love

I threw my violent love at you,
I talked to you even when I didn't speak,
you saw my sea.
You looked askance, you looked away,
You escaped the tightest nooses
that I made.
You threw back the moon, violent moon
with its violent light.
I swung my most violent love at you,
raging tides with raging words.
You even escaped through the riptide,
the tightest tide to another side.
Then I threw myself at you,
sulphur, yellow, bright, bleak.
you escaped my heart,
looking away, you looked away.
You threw the night back at me,
how you escaped.
I wrote you my poems,
I did all this and much more,
but what now?

Koka Briansky

Below an Incidence from Incidences, by the great Russian absurdist writer Daniil Kharms.

Koka : I am getting married today.
Mother: What?
Koka: I said I am getting married today.
Mother: What did you say?
Koka: To-day......ma-rried!
Mother: Ma? What is ma?
Koka: ma-rr-iage.
Mother: Idge? What is this idge?
Koka: Not idge but ma-rr-iage.
Mother: What do you mean, not idge?
Koka: Yes, not idge, that's all!
Mother: What?
Koka: Yes, not idge. Do you understand! Not idge!
Mother: You are on about that idge again. I don't know
what idge's got to do with it.
Koka: Oh blow you! ma and idge! What's up with you?
Don't you realize yourself that saying just ma is senseless.
Mother: What did you say?
Koka: Ma, I said, is senseless!!
Mother: sle?
Koka: What on earth is all this! How can you possibly
manage to catch only bits of words, and only the most absurd bits at that:
Why sle in particular?
Mother: There you go again.....sle.

Koka Briansky throttles his mother. Enter his fiance Marusia.

I will, hopefully, write in detail about this collection of incidents, stories and other assorted fantastic bits called Incidences in the future.

Every time

Every time I kiss you
after a long separation
I feel
I am putting a hurried love letter
in a red mail box.

Nizar Kabbani, From Love Poems

Bacacay

Imagination and in short everything is possible in the world of Gombrowicz. This collection of short stories, called Bacacay for no reason, is the great writer at his most macabre, best. Described variously as fresh, vigorous, weird, wonderful, seductive, repulsive, alarming and amusing, as you can see, the adjectives that describe this collection convey something that one could expect on reading them. And yet, they do not really describe these stories altogether, for these stories or tales or sketches are actually quite bizarre, outre and to a great degree disconcerting, producing in the reader a certain feeling of being in the vicinity of danger, of having been near something odd, unusual, strange and yet unnameable, indescribable.

Bacacay and Bakakaj in polish is named after a side street where Gombrowicz lived in Buenos Aires, whilst in exile. Thus the stories could be named after anything, after his dog or cat. The carelessly named or so it seems name conveys intrinsically the inner theme of these stories, which is actually nothing. The stories are at once absurd and surreal, impossible and remotely possible at first reading. But, on second thought, it is actually, to myself, quite possible to be in the presence of this malice. One is usually just a few seconds or a few veils away from an absurd thing or a surreal encounter. That it does not usually happen is incomprehensible to me, for I believe that this is not the prerogative of fiction alone. Any absurd encounter or a fantastic narration is not impossible in reality and then, what is reality anyway?

Apart from two stories which are taken from Ferdydurke, the collection contains previously unknown material, this a collection that Gombrowicz burst with on the Polish scene. And he says,
"From the beginning the nonsensical and the absurd were very much to my liking, and I was never more satisfied than when my pen gave birth to some scene that was truly crazy, removed from the healthy expectation of mediocre logic, and yet firmly rooted in its own separate logic. A writer can apply a different method in which reality is reduced to its component parts, after which these parts are used like bricks to construct a new edifice, a new world or microcosm........which ought to be different from the regular world, and yet correspond with it in some way........different but, as the physicists say, adequate".............

Mark the words.........healthy expectation, separate logic and regular world. In fiction, we always want a regularity, a kind of the real world transferred to the pages we read. Yet, it does in no way detract from reality if the absurd or illogical is also part of the reality we encounter, for, in real life, it is only the illogical that abounds. And then, different fictional narratives increase the richness of literature and present to the discerning reader, a confusion of colours. The craziness of these stories or the comicality is in no way different from what all Gombrowicz wrote. In the last year or so, I found the same method in his novels like Cosmos and Pornographia. In fact, strangely, I did not find them strange. Oddly, there is a certain gothic undertone or a detective shade that lurks in his tales, which has always been a certain fondness in my own literary hunts.

One of these stories here concerns a man invited to a vegetarian dinner, with the question of actually having soup made up of a disappeared man in the background. It is at Countess Pavahoke's who later misspells her name as Havapoke. The comical is always near the sinister, while having cauliflower soup, they learn of the disappearance of Valentine Cauliflower, a stable hand! I found all the stories brilliant, with A premeditated crime, Adventures ( a man imprisoned inside a bubble on the floors of seas, later floating in a basket over Chinese faces) and On the kitchen steps outstanding. Of course, you could read the afterword by the brilliant translator Bill Johnston first, but that is not necessary in my opinion. To find out what the stories really mean is a naive exercise, for in their reading alone lies the refuge of those smitten by a certain fever.( Gombrowicz explained what the stories mean)

I would add this book to the collection of strange fictions, written by Borges and to some written by Cortazar. Gombrowicz writes in a prose that is mostly poetry, and the poetry is quite obvious and so easily discernible and has come to him so easy; the poetry is filled with a menace, of the shadow of some old memory, as he says. These stories reflect the encounter of the normal with the the layer just underneath the normal. These stories are the trembling notes of that encounter. I am, against my own will, starting to read a certain kind of strange literature, that written by Alfred Jarry, Cendrars and Schulz. I will, hopefully, in the coming months write about these strange, enticing and miraculous works of literature. All life and all literature is a miracle. The absurd and the macabre are as real as the regular and the simple. And as common.

The same poem, always

Hasn't he tried to write the same poem always?
hasn't he ended up writing the same poem,
always?
Of those dull looking bars and shrill songs
outside dirty fast food joints, of love that sometimes
hangs outside cheap cafes, boys smoking, girls
hanging out till sunset merges into pain.
Always the same refrain, the same words really,
of loneliness, night, exile, the moon, the same
stuff you see, till he runs out of sad words
and usually out of cigarettes, usually.
And never running away, from poetry, from
a certain palpitation, but useless, these poems.
Of course, he does wonder about distances
and the certain melancholy of faded sepia photographs,
and realize that there could have been time
that brings a kind of rhythm, a kind of meeting,
or rather some time that should have,
and yet the incessant love for the song
which she used to hum, and this new hatred too.
And inside the deserted cemetery outside town,
where fugitive lovers used to meet after dark,
he found the same poem, always, after promises
and sunsets were exchanged, and never has he reached
yet the farthest point of poetry, but always the same,
the same poem.

Lean back now

Lean back,
let cigarette ash fall on the dim carpet,
let your eyes roam into the estranged blackness outside.
You can hear violet noises,
the zoom of a speeding car
on the main road outside, perhaps a lover late for a date
or a fugitive from town.
Let not these vague simmerings scatter your thoughts
of love or hate or about those
who die or get killed without justice.
These humane thoughts too are evaporated discontent,
thoughts that will leave you soon
like so many before.
Lean back and read some love poems,
lines written under moonlight, of flowers
in a flowery language, disregard any coercion,
any attempt to be subdued into neoreality,
into the human condition.
These are lies, only words,
and what use are they to people under occupation
under permanent assault, humiliated and ignored?
Go back to your self, release your senses to
some mezcal, throw and shatter that glass later
and ignore the mess that shards leave.

A poem from "Stalker"

Arseni Tarkovsky's Poem from Stalker

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant

Petra Von Kant lives on an island, the island of her apartment, the claustrophobic spaces of her bedroom, in her bed. She is surrounded by herself, she has a huge Angelo like painting on a wall, depicting a nude man among other things and she orders and rules Marlene, her helper, her servant girl, her whipping post. We meet her when she asks Marlene to be considerate, as Petra lies in bed, as Marlene draws the curtain. Each of Petra's moves and actions are slow, deliberate, artistic, dream-like. And Marlene, the worshipper, the sufferer. This is the first act of Fassbinder's great movie, a movie that is not only a celebration of a certain kind of tragedy, but a relentless description of the same. This movie is also a virtuoso act, shot entirely in one room, with long almost real time scenes, mis-en-scene and a fabulous attention to a certain kind of interior decor.

It is soon obvious that Petra and Marlene are locked, with Petra commanding Marlene into anything, Marlene the submissive. Petra's friend Sidonie then drops in. What follows is Petra's relentless deconstruction of her marriages, as she goes into all the sordid details of her two marriages, ending in divorce. Petra looks at the past from her point of view, while Sidonie wants her to look anew. Petra, it seems has been used and abused herself, as there follow descriptions of being mounted by a bull, ending in pain. however, the characteristic definition of those relations is in the desire to control, the interface of relations, the daily tugs of war and the need of lovers to dominate, to own, to possess. Petra has lost effectively what she wanted to own, from her point of view, with herself as the centre. however, she has decided to be free, after loving and losing. This scene later introduces us to Karin, played by Hanna Schygulla. Karin is Sidonie's friend and Petra falls in love with her.

Petra Von Kant has surrendered herself, now she is surrounded by Karin. Karin, it is obvious, reluctantly likes Petra, does not love her. However, Petra obstinately refuses to accept this, and Karin refuses to give in. Karin describes a night of passion with a "black man with a European face" and Petra simmers in jealousy, unable to accept that love can also live with infidelity, only there is no love here. Karin leaves Petra, having used her to climb socially, leaving Karin in a haze of gin, shouting and screaming at Marlene, her young daughter and her mother who have come to celebrate her birthday. The scene is rapt with tragic poetry, Petra lying on the shag carpet, a phone in front, gin besides, waiting like lovers do, disconsolate, unhopeful, hopeful, for that one call, one hello from Karin.

Petra has a final conversion, she "longs for sleep, wants to sleep, for death is quiet". She acknowledges that love can only be love "without demanding". She had hoped for "beautiful" love, with lovers sharing everything, the inner and outer lives, not merely obeying certain codes of behaviour. But, this is not possible, everything is lost. In the last act of this "case history", Petra wants reconciliation with Marlene, a relation on equal terms. Marlene, who has not spoken throughout the movie, refuses that, packs her bags and leaves. Petra gets in bed, turns the lights off, the credits roll.

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant is a sublime movie, a kind of approach that squeezes the hypocrisy out, that leaves little scope for affectation. It is so relentless in its dissection of relations and love, so minute in its observations of struggle between people, power issues and yes, class distinctions too. Petra's sadomasochistic relation with Marlene, her weak position with Karin, her rejection of her daughter, her disdain for her mother are ample demonstrations of power schemes, affectations, so-called love and so much hate between people. The final act, when Marlene rejects an equal relation with Petra is her final rejection, leaving her completely marooned in her bed, surrounded by nothing.

From a pure cinematic perspective, I thought this movie is ravishing, ravishing because it makes out of her bed, from her shag carpet, ash-tray, gin, Marlene and her idiosyncratic dresses, and her nude man on the wall, a possibility, a world that other directors would have struggled with in a thousand different sets. There being only one room, the claustrophobic court room style deposition of Petra, her constant melancholy, Marlene's silence, Karin's greed enhance the ardour, the passion of those walls and the space limiting narrowness of those relations.
When Petra is lying on her bed, listening to a song and Karin, eyes closed dances nimbly with Marlene typing away, that scene, that image is truly one that is unforgettable and depicts the utter isolation of everyone there.

Petra Von Kant is a true tragic figure, for she suffers the real classical tragedy and this movie portrays what love can mean, what sexual power is and how it can be manipulated. It doesn't just depict lesbian love but bi-sexual love and there are no men in this movie. They have been left behind or they are in the periphery. Importantly, while Petra has loved, she has had no emotional resonance with her lovers. That is the most important issue Fassbinder conveys.
It is not just a great movie, it is an astonishing movie, with visuals on a grand scale. It is epic and colossal and the performances of Karin, Marlene (Irm Hermann) and Petra ( Margaret Carstensen, in a performance of sustained brilliance) are all brilliant. Marlene with her quiet menace, Karin with her naked need and Petra, the tragic woman, lying, sitting, standing, wax like, human, and not ever detestable, crying occasionally, tears visible and bitter.

To say I Love you

To say I love you
to a dark stranger with hair nonchalantly messed,
stranger with trembling lips and with aching hands,
aching hands that hold an invisible arrow,
to see and lie in the shade, in the shade of her shadow,
to see your shadow fall near her shadow,
trespass with stealth with the discreet brown of her eyes
the pale white of her eyes, sometimes with the ache of her hands,
to see her shine and multiply in mirrors,
and throw away the tearing resolve of your poem,
the uncertain beat of your poem,
the uncorrected rhythm of your poem,
to recite it against all odds,
to let this poem fly, fly against the poem in her eyes,
the famous steel in her eyes,
to hope then for calm, for a forced approval
from her lips, from the night of her lips,
the unending dream of those lips,
to recede away and melt then, and invite her into
your dreams, the fugitive scream of your dreams,
the unending poem in your dreams,
to wake up then unclouded, into the azure of
your room, into the torn page from the book,
the scribbled poem from the book.
Stranger of a certain fame, I only wanted to say,
I love you.

On Despair

"You can't talk about the meaning of life without using phony words. Imprecise ones. But there aren't any others. If there is anything, it's movement. At some point a solar system got established, which doesn't move anymore because it moves according to laws. To get it moving, something has to come along and smash things. That's why human beings were invented. But that wasn't part of a plan. We are no longer allowed to say: We are here to..........The plan of the powerful takes part of our causal thinking, which is always intent on setting up value systems, creating meaning. All history, all mythologies grow out of this notion of planned chains of causality...........But we just stand around, the creator of values. That's what we are here for. We are not capable of accepting the opposite of things as they are. So we are nowhere near freedom. We won't become free unless we accept destruction the same way we accept the ordered solar system, which makes for our paralysis...........I am not talking about intellectual knowledge, but about the physical certainty in everything the individual does. The possibility of understanding this is withheld from him for a long time, and he experiences it physically only much later.If the certainty that he had to die became physically palpable for the individual early on, he would lose the existential pains.........hatred, envy, jealousy. No more fears. Our relations are cruel games we play with each other because we don't recognize our end as something positive. It's positive because it's real. The end is life in concrete form. The body must understand death..............
Destruction isn't the opposite of what exists. Destruction is when this concept no longer exists, when it doesn't have any meaning anymore, when it has a reality that makes it disappear. What people invent then.........that would be exciting".

Fassbinder, 1977

What music is

Music is what exists at the margins of the desert and the sky, near fires that burn alongside melancholy and a few hazy stars; music that exists just where midnight begins and the dust of the previous day gets heavy; music, the kind that you hear surreptitiously, outside well and badly lit bars, near the city's edge, where badly dressed students merge with sharp faced girls, that sort of music, that sort of night, that is music.

Music, the kind that is neither well known nor nameable, that shapes how childhood passes into agitated youth, when all that unrequited love brought was clamouring heartache and all that requited nights gave was an impassable yearning for the past; music, the sort that existed when rebellious soldiers ran away with willing horses and damsels in tears, at the last remaining margins of a few pitched tents in a desert strewn with youth and love; that sort of music, that kind of memory.


Music, the kind that obliterates all colour, leaving a few people with empty glasses and clouds of smoke amidst the fading embers of a few nights trespassed; music that has a bit of anger and some weariness, a bit of love and mostly heartbreak, sad and beautiful words; music that somehow ventures into the impossible after all possible has been shaken, when promises and lies seem the same, when only melancholy seems worthwhile, that hope, that kind of feeling, that is music.

Music is a kind of attitude, a kind of emotion. After the most awesome love and the least regarded nightfall have merged and gone, defeated and packed away into the list of oblivious nights; in the shimmering solitude of that moment, in the blistering haze of that hour, what you hear, what I just said, is music.

On thinking Contrapuntally

No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are no more than starting points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white or black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their own cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connection between things; in Eliot's phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the "other echoes that inhabit the garden". It is more rewarding....and more difficult.....to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about "us". But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how "our" culture or country is number one( or not number one, for that matter). For the intellectual there is quite enough of value to do without that.

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism