Art by Maggie Taylor, music, 'Pan's Labyrinth Lullaby', by Javier Navarrete. [via The Perpetual Bird]

Probably my favorite story in The Grass Harp & Other Stories was 'The Headless Hawk', about a 36 year old man who lives in a basement apartment and works in the Garland Gallery. His life hasn’t taken the path he thought it would, which becomes fully acknowledged after a depthless woman enters, bringing along a surrealistic painting that includes a severed head from a reclining, robed, woman and a headless hawk flying in the background. "It was there, all of it, in the painting, everything disconnected and cockeyed..." Shamanistic or psychotic? Here are some select sentences to give you a feel for the writing:

This is my neighborhood, my street, the house with the gateway is where I live. To remind himself of this was necessary, inasmuch as he’d substituted for a sense of reality a knowledge of time, and place.

And it was true that about those whom he’d loved there was always a little something wrong, broken.

Vincent reacted as he did when occasionally a phrase of music surprised a note of inward recognition, or a cluster of words in a poem revealed to him a secret concerning himself: he felt a powerful chill of pleasure run down his spine.

It was as if her face were imposed upon his mind; he could no more dispossess it than could, for example, a dead man rid his legendary eyes of the last image seen.

“I am heavier that I look,” says the child, and the terrible voice retorts, “But I am heaviest of all.”

He notices then that many are also saddled with malevolent semblances of themselves, outward embodiments of inner decay.

A knot of pain was set like a malignant jewel in the core of his head; each aching motion made jeweled pinpoints of color flare out.

Chilling, prophetic words from the then, still young Truman Capote.

"Is it true, Charlie?" Dolly asked, as a child might ask where do falling stars fall? and: "Have we had our lives?"

"We're not dead," he told her; but it was as if, to the questioning child, he'd said stars fall into space: an irrefutable, still unsatisfactory answer. Dolly could not accept it: "You don't have to be dead. At home, in the kitchen, there is a geranium that blooms over and over. Some plants, though, they bloom just the once, if at all, and nothing more happens to them. They live, but they've had their life."

"Not you," he said, and brought his face nearer hers, as though he meant their lips to touch, yet wavered, not daring it. Rain had tunneled through the branches, it fell full weight; rivulets of it streamed off Dolly's hat, the veiling clung to her cheeks; with a flutter the candle failed. "Not me."

--from The Grass Harp; Truman Capote

I decided to pick up a Truman Capote book after watching the film Capote a few weekends ago. It was the perfect mood film for a dreary Saturday afternoon, but I got a lot more out of the film than I had anticipated, with the crux of the film weighted upon the internal conflict which developed within Truman Capote after he began interviewing Perry Smith, the one of the two prisoners that was willing to tell Capote about his life so that he could write In Cold Blood.

At first, Capote cascaded himself into his project with all of the inquiring ambition one might expect from a New York socialite. However, after becoming acquainted with Perry Smith, learning how he too was of an artistic mind set, possibly homosexual, and, most importantly, also abandoned as a young child by his mother, Capote became emotionally involved with Perry-- as if he were a brother when realizing that their roles in life could easily have been reversed. Only, the other side of Capote desperately, even ruthlessly, required as detailed information as possible from Perry so that he could write his book, including an accurate account of the night of the murders. So while Capote was developing an empathetic relationship with Perry, he was at the same time both exploiting and manipulating Perry for his own personal gain. But the conflict then even went a step further: Capote required Perry Smith dead in order to complete his book.

As is generally known, Truman Capote never completed a novel after In Cold Blood and suffered a slow decline with alcoholism. Previously I thought Capote’s story was the standard, ‘be careful what you wish for’ tale. But after watching Capote, I saw how his story is much more tragic than that, in a classic sense, as Capote was blind to his Shakespearean fault of self-centered ambition and then powerless to the inevitable fate that followed. The ‘Dolly’ side of Capote died when Perry died, leaving only a shell of a man to continue his remaining years. After Perry Smith’s hanging Capote confided to Harper Lee that he felt helpless towards not being able to do anything to stop Perry’s death. Lee’s response then the last line of the film, "Maybe not; the fact is you didn't want to."

What is most immediately noteable about Truman Capote's The Grass Harp is that it was published when Capote was only 26, although the autobiographical components I’m sure helped to move the writing along. Like Capote, the story involves an orphaned boy who moves in with two eccentric old aunts after losing his mother and father. One aunt, Dolly, is a nurturing, open minded woman while the other, Verena, is a self-centered, ambitious business woman who is without qualm to use others for her own advancement. And it is important to recognize that both of these personalities were prevalent within Capote as well– the friction between the two becoming destructively apparent after he began working on In Cold Blood.

One could say that In Cold Blood was written from the Verena side of Capote’s personality and The Grass Harp written from the Dolly side. In The Grass Harp, the diametrical differences between Vera and Dolly eventually reaches a crisis when Dolly, having enough of the overbearing Verena, ventures out into the world with the boy and the house servant, Catherine Creek, in order to begin a new life. Not having anyplace to really go to, they take residence in a tree house up in a China berry tree located only just outside of the town. After some encounters with various endearing characters, word gets back to Verena where they are staying and she uses her political clout to form a search party, composed of various figures of power within the town, and retrieve Dolly, the boy and Catherine. From the various confrontations between the two groups, personalities open, honest communications begin and new understandings erode the ingrained divisions of the past.

In essence, The Grass Harp is a story about love and community. The ‘grass harp’ of the title referring to the blowing wind through the fields, forming a "grass harp, gathering, telling, a harp of voices remembering a story." How nice it would have been if Capote was able to find such balanced unity within the his own multiplicities..... But that was not his story to be known....

I didn’t get into The Grass Harp quite as much as I thought I would, probably because I basically knew beforehand what the book was about. But I did find it very interesting for what it revealed about Capote's psychology. And the same thing could be said with respect to the short stories included with the current edition of the The Grass Harp. While there are two exceptions (which could have been omitted), these stories relied upon magical realism to augment what are, for the most part, dramatic character studies. Capote used magical realism by bringing to the narratives characters which shadowed the more extreme aspects of the internal lives of the main characters. More half-formed specters than doppelgängers, emphasizing incompleteness there, and only known within the privacy of the main characters.

As to why Capote wrote a series of stories that work from this premise, an obvious answer could be because of his growing up isolated from family and a steady community (he never graduated from High School), so therefore only having his own ghosts to keep company and contend with (these short stories were also written when he was in his early twenties, if not before). But maybe another reason could be found in the again displayed divisions of Capote’s personality, or at least its early formations. Not as clearly defined as what resulted when and after he wrote In Cold Blood, the eventual surfacing of the Dolly vs Verena split, the compassionate Humanist vs the ambitious Artist, but definitely foreshadowing the complexities which would later consume Capote’s own internal life. More on this throughout the week.

[Death and the Woodcutter; Jean-François Millet]

Where we were walking in the day's light, seeing
the flight of bones to the stars, the voyage of dead men,
those who go forth like dead leaves on the air
in the long journey, those who are swept
on the last current, the cold and shoreless ones,
who do not speak, do not answer, have no names,
nor are assembled again by any thought, but voyage
in the wide circle, the great circle

where we were talking, in the day's light, watching...

--from Time in the Rock; Conrad Aiken

Whisper it, how among whispering ashes
Her pale bright beauty comes, the moon's dark daughter,
Lighting those ruins with her radiant madness...

This past Monday night I had to pull off the side of the road to take in the full moon sitting above a low field. It was the first full moon for November, the first after the change of daylight savings, and with a semblance to the upcoming winter season. Beneath her radiance, an ash-silver cloud bank moved across the sky, as though carried within the gravity of cold northern tide waters. But once entering closer into her argent sphere, a current slung curved away back outward into the closed sky of night. Radka Toneff was a Norwegian jazz singer who committed suicide in 1982 at the age of 30, and with her the world lost one of the most beautifully haunting voices it has known.

Go out in fog go out in snow go out in hoarfrost
break down the autumnal web that bars your path
gather your leaves and berries seeds and torments
your hours and minutes and all you save therefrom
assemble in all weathers the world's wonder
that tapestry of consciousness and stars
which grows from cabbage roots and sines and cosines
sing as you walk sing as you gather nonsense
sing as you make your meaning out of nonsense

and bring them home to us and spread them out,
your treasures, and assure us out of the pattern
in which they fall-- it must be thus and thus
only and always in such shape as this
this is the curve that sought them this wild curve
bending the waves of water or of light
shaping the alpha to the shape of the world
the shape of the world

.............................and thence your meaning
pitiful child pitiful crystal.....

--from Time in the Rock; Conrad Aiken

After getting about a dozen lines into this poem, I had no choice but to start reading it aloud. Not because the language was more eloquent than other Aiken poems, but because of the shifting dramatic inquiries and the emphatic challenge that was kicking to get out, needing to be heard in order to be considered. This is especially true as you get to the end of the poem. It starts as a deceptively playful pastoral but takes a sudden about-face against the reader, and with an imploring, even threatening seriousness. The progression very much reminds me of Tilda Swinton reading from The Raw Shark Texts (still one of my favorite youtube videos posted on this blog). If you don't want to read it out loud yourself, then imagine hearing the white fire of Swinton's dramatic voice infusing the poetry for you.

Shall we call it, then, the walk in the garden?
the morning walk in the simple garden? But only if by this we mean
everything! The vast daybreak ascends the stairs of pale silver
above a murmur of acacias, the white crowns
shake dark and bright against that swift escalation of light,
and then, in intricate succession, the unfolding minutes and hours
are marked off by the slow and secret transactions
of ant and grassblade, mole and tree-root,
the shivering cascade of the cicada's downward cry, the visitations
(when the brazen noon invites) of that lightened prism
the hummingbird, or the motionless hawkmoth.
Listen! The waterclock of sap in bough and bole,
in bud and twig, even in the dying
branch of the ancient plum-tree, this you hear, and clearly,
at eleven, or three, as the rusted rose-petal
drops softly, being bidden to do so, at the foot of the stem,
past the toad's unwinking eye! Call it
the voyage in the garden, too, for so it is:
the long voyage home, past cape and headland
of the forgotten or remembered: the mystic signal
is barely guessed in the spiderwort's golden eye, recognized
tardily, obscurely, in the quick bronze flash
from the little raindrop left to wither
in the hollow of a dead leaf, or a green fork
of celandine. For in this walk, this voyage,
it is yourself, the profound history of your 'self',
that now as always you encounter. At eleven or three
it was past these folded capes and headlands, these decisions or refusals,
these little loves, or great,
that you once came. Did you love? did you hate?
did you murder, or refrain from murder, on an afternoon
of innocent cirrus in April? It is all recorded
(and with man's history also)
in the garden syllables of dust and dew:
the crucifixions and betrayals,
the lying affirmations and conniving details,
the cowardly assumptions, when you dared not face yourself,
the little deaths, and the great. Today
among these voluntary resumptions you walk a little way
toward tomorrow. What, then, will you choose to love or hate?
These leaves, these ants, these dews, these steadfast trifles, dictate
whether that further walk be little or great.
These waiting histories will have their say.

--from The Walk in the Garden; Conrad Aiken

When reading Aiken, Wallace Stevens was the first to come to mind for a poet of similar style. A difference could be that where Aiken wrote poetry more for the act of speech, Stevens wrote poetry to emphasize the act of the imagination. A subtle difference, but still there. An analogy could be that Aiken’s poetry sings to the angels while Stevens’ sings with the angels. Stevens delves into abstraction and opens the poem beyond itself. Aiken more often remains linear, for the poetry to follow the thought’s progression. I personally prefer Stevens, where the thought follows the poetry, but a reviewer of Aiken’s Selected Poems at Amazon takes a different opinion:

Harold Bloom, in his very good introductory essay, tells why Aiken matters. But I must disagree with him on the subject of Aiken's eloquence, which he considers to be the fatal flaw separating Aiken from greater poets like Stevens and Crane. To me this eloquence is precisely Aiken's strength. If more modern poets had been less interested in modelling consciousness than in analyzing it and extracting its elusive essences--yes, even sometimes extracting the ore of eloquence from the dross of momentary chaos--poetry might still have an audience.

First, a portion from Aiken's long poem, Preludes for Memnon:

Or say that in the middle comes a music
Suddenly out of silence, and delight
Brings all that chaos to one mood of wonder;
A seed of fire, fallen in a tinder world;
And instantly the whirling darkness fills
With conflagration; upspoutings of delirium;
Cracklings and seethings; the melting rocks, the bursts
Of flame smoke-stifled, twisting, smoke-inwreathed;
Magnificence; the whole dark filled with light;
And then a silence, as the world falls back
Consumed, devoured, its giant corolla shrivelled;
And in the waning light, the pistil glowing,
Glowing and fading; and on that shrinking stage--

Whisper it, how among whispering ashes
Her pale bright beauty comes, the moon's dark daughter,
Lighting those ruins with her radiant madness...


And now a section from Stevens' Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction:

IX
Whistle aloud, too weedy wren. I can
Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them,
Like men besides, like men in light secluded,

Enjoying angels. Whistle, forced bugler,
That bugles for the mate, nearby the nest,
Cock bugler, whistle and bugle and stop just short,

Red robin, stop in your preludes, practicing
Mere repetitions. These things at least compromise
An occupation, an exercise, a work,

A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round

And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round in a final good,
The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

And we enjoy like men, the way a leaf
Above the table spins its constant spin,
So that we look at it with pleasure, look

At it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.

Conrad Aiken was a contemporary to the early American modernists, such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Willimas. Born 1889 in Savannah, Georgia and at the age of 11, he was the first to discover the dead bodies of his parents, both killed at the hands of his father, then later raised by a great-great aunt in Massachusetts. While such horrific trauma is rarely alluded to in his poetry (I wasn’t aware of it or would have guessed it when first reading Aiken’s work), there is a notable undercurrent of psychoanalysis-- with Freud even acknowledging some of his works as splendid examples of introspection-- as well as a quest to repeatedly reclaim personal empowerment and voice within his work, likely a result of needing to upkeep a life long battle against depression.

In one respect, I find Aiken an absolute joy to read. And quite often aloud, especially when he slips the tone into inquiring rhetoric. His poetic training was based in traditional English forms and verse and as a result, a strong internal music courses through Aiken’s lines. While he was ambitious in his ideas, the majority read Aiken for the sound that embodies his poetry rather than the loftier psychological inquiries, and it is in the faithful momentum of this music that brings unification to his poetry, rather than the intellectual conceits. Appropriately, Aiken created a prodigious body of work and could be seen as an early example of the writing of poetry as a process oriented activity.

On the other hand, reading Aiken for an extended period of time can become tedious. Often there is use of repetitive accumulation to progress the poems and while this can lead to introspection, because of its meditative effect (monotony), it can also diffuse the energy of the poetry to such an extent that there isn’t enough concentrated power capable of holding the reader to the page. It needs more tension, a problem which the New York Poets, who were influenced by Aiken’s sound based approach, resolved through the post-modernist techniques of kinetic interjection, associative leaps, disruption, torque, etc., the effects of these constantly engaging a nimble reader by bringing him/her to unexpected places and requiring an active reading.

Generally, Aiken could be considered a B-list poet for his time. While he was as erudite as any amongst his contemporaries, T. S. Eilot and Ezra Pound were capable of more valiant displays in their poetic methods. And with respect to innovative technique, modernists like E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams were busily opening doors while Aiken was largely relying upon past traditions. Still, Aiken’s dedicated belief in the compelling powers of poetry are capable of ringing his words true from time to time, becoming testament to the strength that can be derived from oration. He Collected Poems is out of print (the cheapest copy on Amazon running about $80.00), but a Selected Poems is widely available. Perfect.

Further Advantages of Learning
--Kenneth Rexroth

One day in the Library,
Puzzled and distracted,
Leafing through a dull book,
I came on a picture
Of the vase containing
Buddha's relics. A chill
Passed over me. I was
Haunted by the touch of
A calm I cannot know,
The opening into that
Busy place of a better world.

Happy Halloween! Guess what? Glenn Danzig has a library and based upon the giggles and sniffles, he seems to have a lot of fun in it.

The mother of a friend of mine waved at me from behind the shady, sun-striped screen of a porch. Against a backboard above a brilliant white garage door a basketball went round and round the orange rim of a basket. It was Sunday afternoon, time of the great boredom. Deep in my chest I felt a yawn begin; it went shuddering through my jaw. On the crosspiece of a sunny telephone pole, a grackle shrieked once and was still. The basketball hung in the white net. Suddenly it came unstruck and dropped with a smack to the driveway, the grackle rose into the air, somewhere I heard a burst of laughter. I nodded in the direction... ...and continued down the street. Tomorrow something was bound to happen.

--from 'Dangerous Laughter'; Steven Millhauser

Millhauser: What I look for in a work of art is something that might be called an expansion of being, a sense of mysterious exhilaration, and this has little to do with the quality of darkness in a work, but rather with the arrangement of elements, the elaboration of a significant design. The darkness is surely there, but it’s in the service of something else, which I think of as celebratory.


Would you care to try and define this mysterious “something else"?


Millhauser: I see you won’t let me get away with anything! I intended nothing mystical or mystifying here. I meant only that art is connected in my mind—in my body—with a sense of enhancement, of radical pleasure, of affirmation, of revelry. Darkness is the element against which this deeper force asserts itself. It may even be that this force deliberately seeks out darkness, in order to assert itself more radically.


Would you care, as an obvious follow‑up, to comment on the reasons for your fascination with the world of adolescence?


Millhauser: What’s fascinating about adolescence is that it’s an in‑between state. It feels a tug in two directions: back toward the completed world of childhood, from which it is permanently banished, and forward toward the unknown realm of adulthood, which it both craves and fears. Because it’s an in‑between state, adolescence is fluid, unformed, unsettled, impermanent—in a sense, it doesn’t exist at all. Fiction conventionally presents adolescence as a time of sexual awakening, but for me it feels like the very image of spirit in all its restless striving. [source]

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists....

[...


...]

two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

--from 'Questions of Travel', Elizabeth Bishop

David Ulin at the LA Times provides one of the more interesting takes I could find on the internet when reading reviews for Dangerous Laughter:

For Millhauser, the key is language, which can bridge the gap between familiar and unfamiliar and draw us in. At the same time, he knows that words can fool us, that language both illuminates and obscures. Nowhere is this made more explicit than in "History of a Disturbance," about a man who stops speaking after realizing that words "harmed the world." As he explains: "My vow of silence sought to renew the world, to make it appear before me in all its fullness. I knew that every element in the world -- a cup, a tree, a day -- was inexhaustible. Only the words that expressed it were vague or limited."

Yet despite the acuity of such a statement, it also highlights what seems an unresolved contradiction the more we read of "Dangerous Laughter." It's not just that books are made of words, although that's part of it; the narrator of "History of a Disturbance" has no choice but to use them to describe his renunciation of language, after all.

More to the point, what's at issue is the balance between words and narrative, between the surfaces of Millhauser's writing and what goes on underneath. When fully developed, his work is among the most thought-provoking I've encountered, deftly layering character, emotion and intellect, beautiful and profound. Such longer efforts as "The Room in the Attic" or "The Wizard of West Orange" are like mini-novels, opening our imaginations, telling a story and commenting on it all at once.

And Bookslut alludes to a similar notion when reading Millhauser:

When I think about the stories of Steven Millhauser I find myself thinking in terms of paintings. A Magritte, maybe, or perhaps De Chirico. Paintings in which the surface reality is carefully and precisely delineated, but the more we look at it the more it seems to distort our notion of what is, what can be real.

['Il Telescopio'; René Magritte]

Steven Millhauser writes stories. In the classic sense. In the style of parables with techniques that date back to the oral tradition of storytelling, where the characters are fairly simplistic, without too much dimension, placing the emphasis instead upon the compilation of events that stem from the paths created by the characters. In Millhauser’s case, these creations leading to obsessions and dreams that eventually subsume the characters. Tied with this are the seductive and pervasive powers of the imagination, where the line between reality and the Quixotic becomes indecipherable, for better or worse.

Dangerous Laughter is Millhauser’s most current publication and it consists of 13 short stories placed into three different sections. But there is one introductory story- a narration for the classic Cat and Mouse cartoon. “The cat and mouse lean backward and try to stop on the slippery wax, which shows their flawless reflections. Sparks shoot from their heels, but it’s much too late: the big door looms”. That unstoppable momentum to the big door, it’s looming threat, open or shut, a reoccurrence in the rest of the stories. But let's be honest, isn't that exactly when things start to get interesting?

In the first section, "Vanishing Acts", Millhauser explores the fringes of our social relationships. This is followed by "Impossible Architectures", which is the least character driven of all the sections and instead focuses upon the environments in which we live, or can imagine ourselves living in if our visions did not have to account for the laws of physics. Millhauser concludes with "Heretical Histories", where the ways in which we understand our place and time are placed under the microscopic telescope, or the telescopic microscope, or sort of both at the same time.

On a whole this is a solid enough collection. However, there are a few duds. Particularly in "Impossible Architectures", where Millhauser wants to create stories centered around ideas only, without the typical use of characters. While I respect the experiment, what doesn’t change is that obsessions are much more juicy when attributed to characters. Especially when repetition, the choice method for parables, is used to build up the story. With characters, this makes a reader more and more engrossed. When applied to a broader, social level, there is instead distance, which doesn’t equate into compelling reading. Although, it can be interesting.

For the stories that do stand out, I could not put down 'The Room in the Attic', which is about a curious High School student that develops a relationship with a convalescent girl confined to a lightless attic. Another must read being 'A Precursor of the Cinema', where a painter develops the means for his paintings to both extend beyond the canvas and to eventually allow the viewer to enter the paintings. In both these stories Millhauser builds up the writing through character and ideas so that the two can compliment and build off one another. Why Millhauser likes to occasionally remove one of these components, I’m not sure. However, this is easily overlooked enough considering the unique publications which Millhauser consistently offers to the reading public.

LXXXIII

Music will more nimbly move
than quick wit can order word
words can point or speaking prove
but music heard

How with successions it can take
time in change and change in time
and all reorder, all remake
with no recourse to rhyme!

Let us in joy, let us in love,
surrender speech to music, tell
what music so much more can prove
nor talking say so well:

Love with delight may move away
Love with delight may forward come
Or else will hesitate and stay
finger at lip, at home,

But verse can never say these things;
only in music may be heard
the subtle touching of such strings,
never in word.

--from Time in the Rock; Conrad Aiken

[Monkey Before Skeleton; Gabriel Cornelius von Max]

The symphony is a musical epic. We might compare it to a journey leading through the boundless reaches of the external world, on and on, farther and farther. Variations also constitute a journey, but not through the external world. You recall Pascal's pensée about how man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. The journey of the variation form leads to that second infinity, the infinity of internal variety concealed in all things.

What Beethoven discovered in his variations was another space and another direction. In that sense they are a challenge to undertake the journey, another invitation au voyage.

The variation form is the form of maximum concentration. It enables the composer to limit himself to the matter at hand, to go straight to the heart of it. The subject matter is a theme, which often consists of no more than sixteen measures. Beethoven goes as deeply into those sixteen measures as if he had gone down a mine to the bowels of the earth.

The journey to the second infinity is no less adventurous than the journey of the epic... Man knows he finds it unbearable to be condemned to lose the second infinity as well, the one so close, so nearly within reach....

--from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Milan Kundera

From a 1980 Phillip Roth interview with Milan Kundera, shortly after the translated version of Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published:

PR: Laughter has always been close to you. Your books provoke laughter through humor or irony. When your characters come to grief it is because they bump against a world that has lost its sense of humor.

MK: I learned the value of humor during the time of Stalinist terror. I was 20 then. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn't fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humor was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humor.

PR: In your last book, though, something else is involved. In a little parable you compare the laughter of angels with the laughter of the devil.....

MK: Yes, man uses the same physiologic manifestations--laughter--to express two different metaphysical attitudes. Someone's hat drops on a coffin in a freshly dug grave, the funeral loses its meaning and laughter is born. Two lovers race through the meadow, holding hands, laughing. Their laughter has nothing to do with jokes or humor, it is the serious laughter of angels expressing their joy of being. Both kinds of laughter belong among life's pleasures, but when it also denotes a dual apocalypse: the enthusiastic laughter of angel-fanatics, who are so convinced of their world's significance that they are ready to hang anyone not sharing their joy. And the other laughter, sounding from the opposite side, which proclaims that everything has become meaningless, that even funerals are ridiculous and group sex a mere comical pantomime. Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.....

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise--the age old drama of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith... once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets ever smaller and poorer.

[...

....]

MK: Through the last section of the book.... resounds the contrary kind of laugh, the kind heard when things lose their meaning. There is a certain imaginary dividing line beyond which things appear senseless and ridiculous. A person asks himself: Isn't it nonsensical for me to get up in the morning? to go to work? to strive for anything? to belong to a nation just because I was born that way? Man lives in close proximity to this boundary, and can easily find himself on the other side. That boundary exists everywhere, in all areas of human life and even in the deepest, most biological of all: sexuality. And precisely because it is the deepest region of life the question posed to sexuality is the deepest question. This is why my book of variations can end with no variation but this.

PR: Is this, then, the furthest point you have reached in your pessimism?

MK: I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out in the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

Milan Kundera (b. 1929, Czechoslovakia) opens The Book of Laughter and Forgetting describing a famous photograph which depicts Klement Gottwald, the original leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, standing publically next to Vladimír Clementis, who at first was a strong supporter of the party but later executed for becoming a “deviationist”. Upon his execution, his image was airbrushed from the photograph through the propaganda efforts of the state, making as though he never existed. From this opening, Kundera provides seven different short stories to explore the notion of forgetting– when it might be necessary, when it is a tool for oppression and social control, when it becomes an inevitable, even necessary, aspect of human life.

While all the stories contain political undercurrents, politics is not the focus of the book. As Kundera said himself, “The condemnation of totalitarianism doesn't deserve a novel.” A concept I also found when reading the poet Durs Grünbein (of the former East German state); both always finding more to life than what occurs politically. Kundera instead probes deeper into human behavior to reveal the totalitarianism that arises when we envision any utopian state of being, which he accomplishes by paralleling stories of personal relationships with the political-social-historical context of communist Czechoslovakia, the two reflecting off one another equally. In doing so Kundera finds humor in the follies that inevitably result whenever the characters begin striving for a splendid unity of wholeness, hence the “laughter” portion of his title. And what does Kundera then value, while baulking our efforts for perfected relations and communal harmony? Something more authentic, a quality of life that is not so fragile when facing corruption or easily effected by others, “Intimate life [is] understood as one's personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one's originality.”

Kundera’s writing tends to freely adopt whatever style and approach he thought appropriate for each individual story, at times focusing specifically upon the internal psychology of his character(s), other times, remaining surface only, without direct comment upon how the characters might be processing the events in which they are embroiled. Kundera’s writing also often extends itself through such tangents as philosophy, the arts, music, or just general offhand humanist musings. Resultingly, it is difficult to ‘pin down’ exactly what Kundera is communicating, and in fact, when I finished the book, I knew I enjoyed it, as all the stories were fascinating and imbedded with nuggets of thought, but I found myself at a loss to capture Kundera’s “artistic vision” to help me determine out exactly where he was ultimately trying to go with the material.

But in retrospect, this is probably all by design, Kundera not wanting the author to be yet another form of totalitarian rule that tells his readers what to make of his books. Subsequently, readers have to provide their own interpretations of the stories, which in turn makes the writing that much more engaging– especially when sex is involved, which reoccurs prevalently in Kundera’s book, even borderline smut at times. But what better topic is there to discern privately the irony within Kundera’s, quite often, morally ambiguous events? And if one views sexuality as an expression of Eros, that human desire for wholeness beyond ourselves? And what is funnier than someone getting caught with their pants down? The dream that is forgotten as quickly as it begins to be replaced.

[Song of the Lark; Jules Breton, 1884]

If I had to choose a movie to recommend to display Sam Shepard’s acting, it would be Days of Heaven, simply because it was written and directed by one of America’s great filmmakers, Terrence Malick. Shepard plays a wealthy landowner just prior to World War I and in this scene-- involving a young couple who have found themselves down on their luck-- the story is laid out pretty clear (I couldn’t find one with Shepard‘s character). And the scene is quintessential Malick, with every camera angle, image, line, facial expression and body movement combining to create ineffable drama. It also displays Malick’s reoccurring effort to depict the harsh, irreconcilable beauty of nature, which humans are equally a part of.

...Misfortune grows, brother men,
more quickly than the machine, than ten machines,
......and it grows
with Rousseau's beast, with our whiskers;
evil grows for reasons we do not know
and it is an inundation with its own liquids,
with its own mud and its own solid cloud!
Suffering inverts positions, performs a function
in which aqueous humor is vertical
to the pavement,
the eye is seeing and this ear hearing,
and this ear strikes nine o'clock on the hour
of the lightning flash, and nine belly laughs
at the hour of wheat, and nine female sounds
at the hour of weeping, and nine canticles
at the hour of the hunger and nine thunderclaps
and nine whips, minus a scream.

...Sorrow seizes us, brother men,
from behind, from the side,
and maddens us in the cinema,
it nails us in gramophones,
unnails us in beds, falls perpendicularly
to our tickets, to our letters;
and it is very grave to suffer, one can pray...
For of the results
of sorrow, there are some
who are born, others grow, others die...

--from Vallejo's 'Nine Monsters', written 11/03/1937
..during the Spanish Civil War

And what if after so many wings of birds,
the stopped bird doesn't survive!
It would be better then, really
if it were swallowed up, and let's end it!

I notice the contemporary English poets and critics want English poetry to be tied to "history", by which they mean linguistic history, the various layers of meaning a given word has taken on, the encrustations an iambic line has taken on by floating face down through the centuries, the curious angles an idea has chipped into it by being misunderstood by dopes in the Elizabethan, in the Tudor...The outcome of this longing is that the word is never fresh, the line has fused vertebrae, and the poem does not convey thinking, but instead contains portraits of ideas, like those "Wanted" posters issued by police departments. But Vallejo's art shows us what it's like not to be about recapturing ideas, but actually how to think. We feel the flow of thought, its power like an underground river finding its way for the first time through some shifted ground-- even he doesn't know where it will come out. [Robert Bly on César Vallejo]

CROWD MEMBER: As an actor, what do you expect from your writers, and as a writer what do you expect from your actors?

SHEPARD: I don’t compartmentalize things like that. I’m not interested in borders so much as I like putting things together. I don’t ever look at things so black and white like that..... I really think that we are not just one person. We are a multiplicity of beings, if you want to call it that. Not to get too philosophical about it, but it’s very easy for me to see character in the shifting, myriad, ever-changing tableau rather than one part. We’re used to looking at character in a traditional sense, of being something we can define by behavior or background. You know what I’m saying? But it may not be like that; it may be much more interesting. For me, anyway. It may not be so interesting to lock down the character with specifics. What I’m interested in is this shifting of the character, you know, not the exactness of definition. [from a 2006 Cherry Lane Theater interview with Sam Shepard]

Is this Paris, Texas,
or Paris, France?
Am I alive
Or am I dead?

Something identifies you with the one who leaves you, and it
is your common power to return: thus your greatest sorrow.

Something separates you from the one who remains with
you, and it is your common slavery to depart: thus your
meagerest rejoicing.

–César Vallejo

Man: Bring the tripod, Honey! Hurry Up!

Honey: Boy, what a monster! I've never seen one so huge. Be careful Dukie. They're deadly poisonous. I read it in one of those desert manuals. They're the only thing to really be afraid of out here.

Man: Don't worry. I didn't spend the best part of my years in the Philippines for nothing you know.

Honey: He's actually kind of beautiful when you look at him close. I was always taught to be afraid of snakes but actually they're no so bad. I mean he's just out here trying to get a suntan or something. There's nothing awful about that. He looks kind of tense but I'll bet he'd loosen up in no time at all if he got the right kind of attention. You know what I mean, Dukie? Little mice and stuff. I'll bet he'd make a nice pet.

Man: Maybe we oughta' aggravate him a little, Honey. He blends right into the background when he's not moving. I don't want to wast any more film than I have to.

Honey: O.K.

(She stomps her foot and hisses at the sidewinder.)

--from 'Operation Sidewinder', Act One; Sam Shepard

Any other Sam Shepard fan out there? I like his plays, his acting, his stories, his general exploration of the American male psyche. A complicated beast it can be at times. The New Yorker recently published a new Shepard story, 'Land of the Living'. It is very good-- midwestern family vacation strains, tourism on the Yucatán penninsula, pharmaceuticals, social anxiety, complications of technology, battle of the sexes, capitalistic world culture, and how the wilds of the jungle can hit the folks of St. Paul, Minnesota just as hard as it hit the Mayan empire:

The tables in the dining room are set with pink napkins and bright sprigs of bougainvillea propped in skinny glass vases. A Mayan waiter is pouring ice water from a metal pitcher. We sit by the window across from a pair of women with boyish haircuts, dressed exactly alike, in white starched shirts and red ties. They hold hands across the table and stare out at the crashing surf. New Age music is playing in hypnotic repetition, like massage-parlor background atmosphere. It gives the room a gloomy, apocalyptic air. Nobody’s smiling. The spectacular view of the white beach stretches clear down the narrow peninsula, evaporating into billowy sea foam. Two dark soldiers emerge, strolling casually along the surf line, their hawklike Indian faces set hard against camouflage uniforms, black machine guns strapped to their backs. A fleet of white pelicans sail past them, then dip low to the water. One of them plunges headlong into the green tide and comes up spewing mullet. “I just want you to know something, Emma,” I tell my daughter as I smooth the pink napkin on my knee. “Your mother has no idea what she’s talking about."

[Patti Smith/Sam Shepard, performing their play, Cowboy Mouth, 1971]

White Rose
--César Vallejo (trans by James Wright)

I feel all right. Now
a stoical frost shines
in me.
It make me laugh, this ruby-colored
rope
that creaks in my body.

Endless rope,
like a spiral
descending
from
evil...
rope, bloody and clumsy,
shaped by
a thousand waiting daggers.

Because it goes in this way, braiding
its rolls of funeral crepe,
and because it ties the quivering cat
of Fear to the frozen nest,
to the final fire.

Now surrounded by light
I am calm.
And out on my Pacific
a shipwrecked coffin mews.