Conorthoughts

Middle

Aristotle recommends a middle way, in the Nichomachean Ethics. I'm too tired to find the book on my shelves to read what the way is about again but will go on here - my fingers are less tired - in search of it. Lots of people recommend a middle way, or they write it.

Hannes Böhringer is a thinker I like who writes it. I am name-dropping tonight. A foreign name counts here as a dropped one, I think. In his book Auf der Suche nach Einfacheit (Looking for Simplicity) - I am showing off now, one can overdo simplicity, showing off a little sometimes is perhaps part of a middle way - Böhringer, who cannot walk without a stick, manages at one point to thread his middle way through the maelström in Edgar Allan Poe's story 'A Descent into the Maelström'. But I better end quickly as my reader is, I sense, at risk of leaving me before I leave her or him.

Quickly and I will award myself a glass of wine uncorked two weeks ago!

Might the quiet corner of the office, about which I wrote yesterday, be a middle way through a

 

                                                                             (To be continued, hopefully)
 

Job

I've been in my job six months and two days now. I am speechless, sentence-less. Well, not quite. I sit in a corner. I must look for another one, a job, that is, rather than a corner, though I have nothing against corners.  A colleague who will be nameless and sits in another corner told me that people in the one I sit in - I am not its only inhabitant - don't ... I must ask her what happens to them.   

Up Late

 

Good morning and thank you for calling the Soulmates message collection line. To collect your replies, we need you to dial in your four digit pin number after the tone.

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"So it goes."

 

Kurt Vonnegut died this week at the age of 84. He was best known for this phrase and for the novel Slaughterhouse Five in which he used it - repeatedly - for the first time. He wrote with humour, black, Vonnegutesque. 

 

Desperate measure

Desperate measure. My therapist says ...  My ex-girlfriend says, writes ...

I need to post something here. I've haven't posted for ages. The Way of the Cross, the way of the word. What would Warburg think of that as a remark? Nothing, probably? Something, perhaps.

What can I post? Anything? Down to the wall. Another Oompah Loompah dog?  Hardly.

Here is my street, Lupus, in Google Maps. Count five (houses) from the left and I'm somewhere down there, beneath two layers of probably still sleeping bodies, looking, on a beautiful April morning, at the trees in the school-yard opposite, one of which you just make out. Damn, it doesn't work! Desperate measure, to be continued.
 

Liven up a bit more

A young reader in Norfolk also seems to think that I need to liven this blog up. He has suggested a photo that I consider to be in unusually bad taste.

Anthropomorphising humans beings is bad enough but I really take exception to anthromorphising animals. And in this case, there is money involved. How low can you go!

However, as I'm short of inspiration - I've have not posted here for weeks - and to keep my younger readers on board (I now have at least three if I include both Beatrix and Fionnuala, neither of whom have visited here for months, I suspect) here is the image that Oisín suggested.

 

Fariña

I like the sound of this novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me by Richard Fariña, a friend of Thomas Pynchon's whose Gravity's Rainbow I am reading at the moment and must take on the bus with me on my way to yoga this morning. Must have a shower. Bye.
 

Love

He said that it wasn't fair to ask him to do this.

She continued to ask questions.

I withdrew and walked around, then sat down again, by them. They were talking, she asking questions, he responding.

They finished, I asked her whether the meeting that we had just had was the meeting I had wanted to have.  She thought it was. I said that I had had another meeting in mind. He had said to me, I said to her, that he had talked to her in detail about something that interested me and that she had taken notes. I had thought that it would be a good idea for the three of us to together go through the notes she had made. That was the meeting that I had had in mind.

She had to go into a meeting.

He left, an hour early.

Why the title 'Love' here?

To try to get my writing going again, I am planning to go to to a meeting next week of the London Writers Cafe Meetup Group. The organiser is Bohemia. The subject of the meeting will be love. We have been asked to bring along a piece of writing on the theme of love, of five hundred words or more. So I thought that I would call this post 'Love'. Why not? It is everywhere.

I am still some hundreds of words short, however. I think I'll open at random the novel that I began in the bath last night and copy some of it here (two hundred and fifty words will be enough):

"   "Shit man, if they hit that bag __"
    "Shh. I think we got the wire from the booster magneto." Off in the middle of the cloud can be heard the nagging whicker of an engine refusing to start. Linkage squeaks desperately.
    "Oh, fuck!" A muffled scream, far away. The intermittent whining grows fainter until there is silence. Schnorp is lying on his back, slurping pie, laughing bitterly. Half of his inventory's been thrown away, and Slothrop feels a little guilty.
     "No, no. Stop worrying. This is like the very earliest days of the mercantile system. We're back to that again. A second chance. Passages are long and hazardous. Loss in transit is a part of life. You have had a glimpse of the Ur-Markt."
     When the clouds fall away a few minutes later, they find themselves floating quietly under the sun, shrouds dripping, gasbag still shiny with the moist cloud. No sign at all of Marvy's plane. Schnorp adjusts the flame. They begin to rise.
     Towards sundown, Schnorp gets thoughtful. "Look. You can see the edge of it. At this latitude the earth's shadow races across Germany at 650 miles an hour, the speed of a jet aircraft." The cloud-sheet has broken up into little fog-banklets the colour of boiled shrimp. The balloon goes drifting, over countryside"

End of quote. Not the luckiest of dips. That makes four hundred and eighty six words so I am nearly over the five hundred word line set by Bohemia. "Phew!".

The passage above is from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow¹.

That's five hundred and eleven, and rising, word by word. I hope that Bohemia will let me read my piece.

                                                                                                         
P.S. I failed to read the instructions about what we had to write carefully. I've been overdoing it. Bohemia in fact wrote "under 500 WORDS or an extract from something larger". This doesn't strictly qualify anymore, though I could argue on the night, I suppose, splitting hairs, that it is an extract from something larger, my blog or my life.

1. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, New York, London, 1973, Picador, London, 1975, p. 336.

Liven up

Ju Min and Yvonne, two of my colleagues at work, suggested gently that my blog needed livening up. My niece Bea has had similar thoughts. Here, trying to take the hint, is a Happy New Year video by a New Yorker Oneparkave, starring his grandmother.   

                                 

Next poem

I read the next poem (See my previous post):

                                 Of Modern Poetry

                The poem of the mind in the act of finding
                What will suffice. It has not always had
                To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
                Was in the script.
                                        Then the theatre was changed
                To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
                It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
                It has to face the men of the time and to meet
                The women of the time. It has to think about war
                And it has to find what will suffice. It has
                To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage
                And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
                With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
                In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
                Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
                Of which, an invisible audience listens,
                Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
                In an emotion as of two people, as of two
                Emotions becoming one. The actor is
                A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
                An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
                Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
                Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
                Beyond which it has no will to rise.
                                                                It must
                Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
                Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
                Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

Is this not empty? Is it not simply the expression of a desire, for a poem of the mind, rather than a poem of the mind itself, whatever that might be?

What draws me, preventing me from writing the poem off as posturing, is that I am in a similar place myself, to some degree. My posting here is the expression of a desire to have thoughts, a body of coherent ones, conorthoughts.net, but I am not having any, or so few that I cannot build anything out of them. If W. Stevens is posturing, what am I doing?               

Empty, running on full

I am finding it difficult to have any thought directions after work. Not an idea in sight, tonight. Is that it? What about writers who worked full-time in the world of nine-to-five or six? Could one of them help? I pull out a volume of Wallace Stevens, senior insurance man, make a wish and open this

                                      Man and Bottle

                The Mind is the great poem of winter, the man,
                Who, to find what will suffice,
                Destroys romantic tenements
                Of rose and ice

                In the land of war. More than the man, it is
                A man with the fury of a race of men,
                A light at the centre of many lights,
                A man at the centre of men.

                It has to content the reason concerning war,
                It has to persuade that war is part of itself,
                A manner of thinking, a mode
                Of destroying, as the mind destroys,

                An aversion, as the world is averted
                From an old delusion, an old affair with the sun,
                An impossible aberration with the moon,
                A grossness of peace.

                It is not the snow that is the quill, the page.
                The poem lashes more fiercely than the wind,
                As the mind, to find what will suffice, destroys
                Romantic tenements of rose and ice.   

The poem is from his collection Parts of a World (1942). 

If the mind has something to do with the fury of a race of men, I am encouraged. That level of fury resonates with me. The link between the mind and destruction, I like. Aversion. Again, I'm encouraged. My mind may be rather empty at the moment, but I feel there is black fuel in the affective tank.

There is an emptiness about the rhetoric of the poem. The diction, the seriousness of it, of it being a poem, maybe there is something in the empty shell.

I have just remembered that I have a book by the Irish critic of modern American poetry Denis Donoghue and have just it picked it out and, of course, it does have an essay on Stevens.

Is the above serious criticism? Hardly but even if breaking the most basic rules, it leads somewhere, then perhaps it can be defended later.

Man and Bottle. I like the two meanings of bottle he is playing on, and the way it makes the title lighter than the poem. I am in need of a drink, and am still puzzled how Stevens wrote like this after a day in the office. I'm beat tonight, again, but encouraged.

                                                                                         To be continued