Teachers
--W. S. Merwin

Pain is in this dark room like many speakers
of a costly set though mute
as here the needle and the turning

the night lengthens it is winter
a new year

what I live for I can seldom believe in
who I love I cannot go to
what I hope is always divided

but I say to myself you are not a child now
if the night is long remember your unimportance
sleep

then toward morning I dream of the first words
of books of voyages
sure tellings that did not start by justifying

yet at one time it seems
had taught me

Dusk in Winter
--W. S. Merwin

The sun sets in the cold without friends
Without reproaches after all it has done for us
It goes down believing in nothing
When it has gone I hear the stream running after it
It has brought its flute it is a long way

[Allegory of Winter; Jacques de La Joue the Younger, 1686–1761]

Hum
--Ann Lauterbach

The days are beautiful
The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.
The other is weather.

I know what weather is.
The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.
Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.
The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?
Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
Today is weather.

The sound of the weather
Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.
Everyone weeps.

The tears of today
Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.
The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.
The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.
The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.
The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.
The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?
The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.
The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.
What are these ashes?

Here is the hate
That does not travel.

Here is the robe
That smells of the night

Here are the words
Retired to their books

Here are the stones
Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge
Over the water

Here is the place
Where the sun came up

Here is a season
Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.
The days are beautiful.

[Music-Making Angel; Rosso Fiorentino, 1521]

The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents—
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once—

Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts--
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses--
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.

--from Lute Music, Kenneth Rexroth

[I'll be back with regular posting next week. With that, a thanks and I wish you all a wonderful holiday season.]

Oh god yes.

They Feed They Lion
--Philip Levine

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

.....................Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow.

....................Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.

..................From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

...................From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.

Official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle.

Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and the order it will become.

Within two years of 1066, work began on the Bayeux Tapestry, Constantin the African brought Greek medicine to the western world. The chaos and tumble of events. The first sentence of every novel should be: "Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human." Meander if you want to get to town.

--from In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje

From the November, 1987 New York Times review of In the Skin of a Lion:

This book more closely resembles the writing that is being done on the Continent these days: episodic, fragmentary, structurally loose and shifty. And he's a beautiful writer. What he writes about most beautifully is work. Mr. Ondaatje is passionate about process, the way work, particularly construction of all kinds, is done and how it feels to do it. This is, of course, a rarity in fiction at any time, and one can only be grateful for a man who is not focused on the classroom, the bedroom and the bar:

''Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat. The rope roars alongside him, slowing with the pressure of his half-gloved hands. He is burly on the ground and then falls with terrific speed, grace, using the wind to push himself into corners of abutments so he can check driven rivets, sheering valves, the drying of the concrete under bearing plates and padstones. He stands in the air banging the crown pin into the upper cord and then shepherds the lower cord's slip-joint into position. Even in archive photographs it is difficult to find him. Again and again you see vista before you and the eye must search along the wall of sky to the speck of burned paper across the valley that is him, an exclamation mark, somewhere in the distance between bridge and river. He floats at the three hinges of the crescent-shaped steel arches. These knit the bridge together.''

But equally important was his appreciation of the transition from one culture to another, a key theme that emerges in the book. ''Toronto is a city of immigrants,'' he said, ''but there is very little official history about who they were, what their lives were like. I didn't want to talk about politicians or historical figures. I wanted to talk about the people who were unhistorical - all those invisible professions that lay behind history.'' A self-acknowledged slow writer, Mr. Ondaatje took eight years to finish his new novel. ''I write very freely,'' he said, ''but then do a lot of rewriting to alter it, change it, dip it into other colors.'' Having also worked as a documentary film maker, he defends his method of weaving many stories together simultaneously by comparing it to similar techniques in the visual arts and contemporary music. ''The novel has been quite slow in picking up what the other arts are doing,'' he said. ''For years they have been doing things that are much more suggestive, much freer of chronological sequence.''

Once settled on a subject, Mr. Ondaatje said, ''I'll try anything to bring the figure into focus. That is why I think my books have been perhaps a little more bizarrely structured.'' When all of the pieces fit together, the result ''is like hugging someone, instead of just giving them a peck.''

[Bloor Street viaduct, City of Toronto Archives]

Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 novel, In the Skin of a Lion, focuses upon a host of characters that immigrated to Toronto in the early 1900's and assisted in the structural build up of the city, the elaborate Prince Edward Viaduct and the R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant being examples, or worked on the messy floors of butcheries, leather tanneries, bakeries-- all of which provide numerous metaphors for Ondaatje's text. And while their civic contributions are significant, these were still the workers, the outsiders, the foreigners, those that were never directly acknowledged for their efforts.

But now steps in Michael Ondaatje, creating characters that demonstrate the lives that were in constant flux while going through the inevitable transformations of identity when in new social and economic environments, and often at the mercy of the more established social powers. At the same time though, these are characters that transcend their harsh living conditions through heroic grandeur, with passionate intensity and near mythical personalities that are comparable in strength, size and power to the landmarks and city they helped build. Important qualities to have when working in life threatening conditions! As much as Ondaatje concerns himself with social realism, he is equally flying high on dream-like Romanticism, working from the gut as much as the head.

While In the Skin of the Lion can be seen as in important contribution to fiction that documents post-colonial immigration, this is not at the expense of literary qualities as Ondaatje’s lingual artistry is in full, captivating force. Reeling with sublimely descriptive phrases on every page ("The night air is forensic"), imagery so cinematic that the scenes at times appear as mystical visions within the reader’s mind, and with events that segue from romantic love to life-threatening action to existential and physical despair, In the Skin of the Lion is just as much an epic poem as it is a fictional novel. Even more so when considering how its three sections resemble a triptych and allowed Ondaatje to take liberties with order and time, suggesting narrative simultaneousness, synchronicity, emergence, rather than traditional progression, dramatic arc and any sort of final conclusion.

If there is any problem with In the Skin of a Lion, its that it doesn’t have a hundred more pages to it. You just don't want it to end. On the other hand, this might cause a reader to slow down to make it last longer, to savor the richness of the writing and the stories being told. Although, it could be said that In the Skin of a Lion actually does continue as Ondaatje’s next novel, The English Patient, involves several characters that are first introduced in In the Skin of a Lion. I'm looking forward to it.

I accept whatever face there is
As a semblance of truth

To light up every face
And to begin with just one


--from Here There Everywhere; Paul Éluard

Auggie Wren's Christmas Story, by Paul Auster (as filmed for the movie, Smoke, dir. Wayne Wang, music by Tom Waits).

From the Harpers December, 2009 edition, a response from Paul Broks, University of Plymouth, to a survey in which psychologists were to identify an aspect of themselves they were not able to understand:

Paradoxically, the deeper I got into neuropsychology, the less interested I became in the details of my own inner workings. I'm not sure why. It certainly is not because I arrived at any great insight or understanding. What happened, I think, was a shift-- let's imagine a neural switch somewhere in the frontolimbic circuitry-- from one preoccupying question (What am I?) to another (What should I do?). It left me less inclined to bother about self-understanding than to consider the value of things, moral and aesthetic. But here's a nagging thought: Might those two preoccupying questions turn out to be one and the same, like the evening star and the morning star?

Two interesting points from a recent interview with Paul Auster at The Huffington Post. The first comments upon Auster's fascination with stories, how there is never simply one story, but many which integrate and spin out from one another. A quality that is apparent in many of his books:

TS: Writing about your work in the New York Review of Books last December, Michael Dirda said that your characters have a habit of escaping into stories. What is it about escaping that is so fascinating to you, and to your characters?

PA: I've written several novels that are just linear stories that go from A to B to C all the way to Z, quite a few actually. Other books are more complex. I think it has to do with the mood I'm in, the kind of story I want to write or that seems to be asked to be written. I really do feel at the mercy of the material. I don't try to manipulate what I have been given. I listen, and I follow. At times. I do feel that there can be interesting effects in what I call 'collage.' When you have two or three or four things in the frame or canvas with spaces in between them, there can be a kind of energy that's created in those spaces between the different elements of the collage. If any one of those objects is put alone on the wall, it wouldn't have the same effect that the grouping does. So I guess I'm interested in the energy created between stories. I can't justify this philosophically. It's just simply an emotional position.

The second point is in specific reference to Invisible. One aspect not mentioned in my post on Monday is that by using an 'open narrative' rather than a 'closed narrative', Auster can interweave numerous subtexts into his writing through poetic suggestion. As an example, I had focused upon the notion of identity, relationships and the imagination, but there are also socio-political angles in Invisible as well, raising questions about power, the inability to trust in the face of power, the concealment of information, manipulation of people, etc. Some reviewers related this to Conrad's Heart of Darkness:

TS: One last question about Invisible. Where did the title come from?

PA: I think I used the word invisible several times in the book, always very consciously. The first time is when I describe Born's face. He said "it was the kind of face that would become invisible in any crowd." He talks about the downtrodden in America, particularly poor black people as being invisible. When Freeman is flying back home in the dark from California to New York, he says "there's an invisible America lying beneath me." In the very last pages of the book, as Cecile is walking down the hill, she hears something but can't see it. And because she can't see it, she has no idea of what she's hearing. I think, in a sense, that that's the way the book functions. We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible.

[WordPlay VIII; Wosene Worke Kosrof, 2008]

"...isn't it intriguing that thought cannot exist without language, and since language is a function of the brain, we would have to say that language-- the ability to experience the world through symbols-- is in some sense a physical property of human beings, which proves that the old mind-body duality is so much nonsense, doesn't it? Adieu, Descartes. The mind and body are one."

--from Invisible, Paul Auster (2009)

I’ve been uncertain on how to post about Paul Auster’s newest novel, Invisible. Typically, I like to start with a brief synopsis. So I’ll try that. The first section relays some bizarre, possibly even nefarious, events experienced by a late 1960's Columbia student named Adam Walker. So far so good. Only, now with each subsequent section, the events of Adam Walker’s life begin to be relayed from different characters and alternate source materials (manuscripts written by Adam Walker, a reworking of one of those manuscripts, a diary, a recollection, and so on) and these multiple viewpoints begin to undermine any assumption I, as a reader, might want to place upon the stories. I can say though that at the heart of all the stories lay the two most prominent topics for any work of fiction: Sex (which, in Invisible, may or may not involve an act which may or may not be unspeakably reprehensible) and Death (an event which may or may not stem from an act of cold blooded murder, or a justifiable reaction). But as to who the actual ‘main’ character might be, and to what extent any of the stories may be considered ‘concluded’ to finalize a 'narrative', I can’t say. So synopsis gets us nowhere (even becomes impossible, unless I just want to make something up.....).

Then, maybe I could instead focus upon the formal structure of Invisible. I’ve already noted the multiple viewpoints Auster incorporates, thereby creating a hall of mirrors like effect that both reflects and fragmentizes the narrations, assembly by reader required. And I could relay this to the importance of recognizing that the multiple narrators may not be reliable, with each not only affected by subjective interpretations but also by their own personal motivations for placing different spins on the stories. And hey, with this, I could begin tying Invisible to the post-modern techniques developed by Knut Hamsun in Pan, as identified last week on this blog. On top of that, there are numerous parallel similarities in Invisible with many of Auster’s previous books, an added bonus for the Auster aficiandos out there. Know any? Yeah you do. But all this egg-headed meta-fiction technique is a bit dry and probably doesn't do much to encourage others to read Invisible. Not enough Sex and Death.

Probably best then to discuss both the basic narrative elements of Invisible and the structural techniques used for the writing. And I guess I am sort of doing that with this post, yet I still don’t feel like I’m getting across what makes Invisible a captivating read. Reason being because Invisible is ultimately an experiential novel rather than one that can be summed up into various final conclusions, where the joy from reading the book comes from the reader unfolding all the connective angles within the text, and doing so through characters that are realistically identifiable because of the stories involving some of our most basic emotions and life events. When the two are properly intermixed, as they are here, a reading proceeds with both emotional involvement and intellectual curiosity. And this is especially easy to do because of Auster's zen-smooth writing style, which makes reading him, even actually hearing the narration as a voice in your head, effortless.

A final thought on the title. It’s the most obscure within Auster’s oeuvre, and I don’t want to pin it down for anyone, but I would suggest that it can refer to the ultimate invisibility of people. At a social level rather than a material level. All we have are stories-- those we tell, those everybody else tells– and these being inseparable from teller and audience, the I with the We. To such an extent that they become the only social reality available to us and the means we have for understanding one another. Yet, because stories are always an act of the imagination, existing in the unreliable state of perpetual creation, the ‘individual’ we think we know through our stories can never be fully revealed. Yes, in existence, but in essence, remaining invisible to us. And you to yourself included?

A single roof unites all skies
Each house is but a work of fancy

The horizon reaches my eyes
By what miracle could I be afraid

Space is a trickle of milk
That feeds and nourishes me

Panorama at the bottom of the deep well
I gaze at a sky replete with stars and reflections

Star adds to stars
We know how to blend the seasons

--from Here There Everywhere; Paul Éluard [trans. by Gilbert Bowen]

And then when at the end of it all.......

[Synecdoche, New York; Charlie Kaufman, 2008]

What was love? A wind whispering among the roses, no, a yellow phosphorescence in the blood. Love was a hot devil's music that set even the hearts of old men dancing. It was like the marguerite, which opens wide as night comes on, and it was like the anemone, which closes at a breath and dies at a touch.

Such was love.

It could ruin a man, raise him up again, and then brand him anew; it could fancy me today, you tomorrow, and someone else tomorrow night, that's how fickle it was. But it could also hold fast like an unbreakable seal and blaze with unquenchable passion until the hour of death, because it was eternal. So, what was the nature of love?

[...

...]

Love is God's first word, the first thought that sailed through his brain. When he said, "Let there be light!" there was love. And everything that he made was very good, and no part thereof did he wish undone. And love became the world's beginning and the world's ruler; but all its ways are full of flowers and blood, flowers and blood.

--from Victoria, Knut Hamsun

Dang-Nabbitt!! More blue blooded Barons and Chamberlains running away with the Highnesses in the end. Only, in Victoria empathy for our earnest suitor, Johannes, is more easily garnered as he is not a half crazed, idiosyncratic lieutenant who dwells in the woods while occasionally lurking about the local village, hypnotizing the young maidens with his beastly eyes, but a childhood friend who’s father was a lowly miller that lived in the countryside which abbutted Victoria’s family castle. On top of that, Victoria loves Johannes equally-- only social structures prevent a final consummation for their tenderhearted love.

Both Pan and Victoria were written in the mid 1890’s and have similar plots and themes, in particular the erratic psychology that disposses those that find themselves in love and how these relationships are very often effected by social context. But what separates Victoria from Pan is the inclusion of art to satisfy the inadequacies of love. Johannes grows up to be a poet and as the narrative develops, Hamsun incorporates dream sequences and Johannes’ imaginings to signify the strength which he was able to develop through his poetry, finding emotional compensation and being able to come to personal terms with the love he deemed unattainable. In that, I find Victoria to be a more fun book to read as Hamsun allows the writing to occasionally lift from realism and into the romance of the imagination, although it is short of the literary complexity that can be found in Pan.

But both of these books are favorites for many who have taken the time to read them. They are quick, short works, more the size of novellas than full novels, and have simple fairytale-like surfaces that hold much richer tones and resonances when slowing down to savor what each has to offer. Thomas Mann, after reading both Victoria and Pan, referred to the two as “immortal poems” and reading them more as poems than works of fiction is good advice. I look forward to reading them again some day.

Rain or blow, no matter; often on a rainy day some little joy will take possession of you and make you steal away with your happiness. You stand there staring straight ahead, laughing softly now and then and looking around. What are you thinking of? A clear pane in some window, a ray of sunlight on the pane, the view of a small creek and perhaps a break of blue in the sky. It need be no more.

At other times even unusual experiences cannot jolt you out of a flat, impoverished mood; in the middle of a ballroom you may sit stolid and indifferent, unaffected by anything. For the source of grief or joy lies within.

--from Pan; Knut Hamsun