Conorthoughts

Almost

I've stopped writing here. I've stopped writing but here I am so I have only almost stopped. Maybe this will be a new beginning. Here, in lieu of a thought, in the hope that copying something that gives me pleasure will help my writing juices at least trickle, is a poem by the American A.R. Ammons (1926-2001). It is taken from the Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Helen Vendler. I read poetry mainly on the toilet and read this for the first time this morning:

 

                          The Eternal City

                         After the explosion or cataclysm, that big
                         display that does its work but then fails
                         out with destructions, one is left with the

                         pieces: at first, they don't look very valuable,
                         but nothing sizable remnant around for
                         gathering the senses on, one begins to take

                         an interest, to sort out, to consider closely
                         what will do and won't, matters having become
                         not only small but critical: bulbs may have been

                         uprooted: they should be eaten, if edible, or
                         got back in the ground: what used to be garages,
                         even the splinters, should be collected for

                         fires: some unusually deep holes or cleared
                         woods may be turned to water supplies or
                         sudden fields: ruinage is hardly ever a

                         pretty sight but it must when splendor goes
                         accept into itself piece by piece all the old
                         perfect human visions, all the old perfect loves. 

 

 

Here is another one by him that I've just read, not on the toilet this time, on my sofa, two for the price of one:

 

                        Grace Abounding
                        for E.C.

                        What is the misery in one that turns one with gladness
                        to the hedge strung lucid with ice; is it that one's
                        misery, penetrating there as sight, meets neither

                        welcome nor reprimand but finds nevertheless a picture
                        of itself sympathetic, held as the ice-blurred stems
                        increased: ah, what an abundance is in the universe

                        when one can go for gladness to the indifferent ghastly,
                        feel alliances where none can ever take: find one's
                        misery made clear, borne, as if also, by a hedge of ice.

 

 

It is midsummer here.

 

Keep it slow

A 'my job' update. Since I last posted on it, it has been going, well, ...

A colleague Yvonne wrote a comment on that post. It had contained a veiled question to her that she answered neither in her comment nor in person. I would still like to know what happens to them.

Yvonne is leaving here very soon for another job. I don't know whether she will be sitting in a corner there. I must ask her. She is off sick today. I'm still sitting in my corner. Keep it slow.

The job has been going, well, ...

I'm writing this at work, during my lunch break of course, a splendidly movable feast.

Trying to talk the other evening about how the job was going with M., one of my more self-absorbed friends who had to get up very early the following morning - I had not overstayed my welcome but it was quite late and I think she wanted to have her nightly bath - she suggested swimming. It works for her. I left shortly after that.         

You know that line about always asking for and listening to your friends' advice?

This morning I woke early - again - and went for a swim. I haven't been for one for at least a year. The menu of lanes was 'Front Crawl', 'Fast & Furious', 'Getting Fast', 'Keep It Slow'. I chose my level, the 'Keep It Slow' lanes at the end. I managed eight lengths, albeit with multiple breaks and bumpings into others.

M's was good advice. Today, for a change, work has been going, well, swimmingly, not that I have got that much done yet but swimming takes many forms, as do productive days.

An adviser to whom I pay fees said to me when we last met that being in work is important because it means you're swimming.

Must go to lunch now. Keep it slow.       

 

Up Late

 

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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. 

 

Backwards

Reading the title essay in Jacob Taubes' Vom Kult zur Kultur (From Cult to Culture)¹, a collection of essays and articles written by the Jewish-German theologian and philosopher between 1953 and 1983 and published after his death, brings me back to Carl Einstein's book Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen² of 1933. C. Einstein was the writer on whom I did my thesis. Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen was his last book. After finishing the thesis, I found myself in a place similar in some ways to the intellectual space marked out in this book. I have, in a way, lived there ever since. Maybe Taubes would help me move on, by stimulating me into looking at the Einstein book again.  

Taubes' essay was written in 1954. Thirty-one years separate it from Einstein's book. The Nazi period and the Holocaust separate them. It is difficult to read the Einstein book without thinking of it as a premonition of the disaster, and it is difficult to read Taubes' essay without thinking of what happened.

The essay 'Vom Kult zur Kultur' turns around the person who was the model for Dr. Chaim Breisacher, a character who appears in Chapter 28 of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947). His name was Oskar Goldberg. Like Breisacher, Goldberg was a philosopher of culture. Goldberg had published his main work Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer (The Reality of the Hebrews) in Berlin in 1925, having already presented it in lecture form some years earlier, between 1903 and 1908. Taubes describes Goldberg as a historian of myths who took his subject so seriously that he became a philosopher of myth.

Breisacher represents for Mann an intellectual forerunner of the conservative nihilism that led to Fascism and Nazism. Like Breisacher's, Goldberg's is a theory of decline. Culture is itself decline.

                  (To be continued)

 

Notes

1. Jacob Taubes, Vom Kult zur Kultur: Bausteine zu eine Kritik der historischen Vernunft, eds. Aleida and Jan Assmann, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich und Winfried Menninghaus, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, 1996.
2. Carl Einstein, Die Fabrikation des Fiktionen, ed. Sibylle Penkert, Rowohlt, Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1973. 

 

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.
 

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

                                                         

My book 'Carl Einstein in Documents'

I'm killing two birds with one stone here, and bringing a third into being while I'm at it.

I want to make a quick first post in the Categories Art and Philosophy, to get them going.

My book 'Carl Einstein and Documents' is partly about art but also has a philosophy dimension.

The third bird is a new Category, Literature: Einstein and the other person that the book is mainly about, Georges Bataille, were writers including of novels.

Here is a page on the book. I am not marketing it, of course!