Contained in this short Life
Are magical extents
The soul returning soft at night
To steal securer thence
As Children strictest kept
Turn soonest to the sea
Whose nameless Fathoms slink away
Beside infinity

.......................--Emily Dickinson

Llorando, from David Lynch's Mullholland Drive.

Some Roberto Bolaño quotes:


"The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter."


"This is my last communique from the planet of the monsters. Never again will I immerse myself in literature's bottomless cesspools. I will go back to writing my poems, such as they are, find a job to keep body and soul together, and make no attempt to be published."


""No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.""


"The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune."


"We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it's so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive." (from The Skating Rink)


"What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others...And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?"

[And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur; Leonora Carrington, 1953]

A reoccurring imagistic motif that can be found in Bolaño's writing is the labyrinth, which can be found in the physical settings for his stories (winding stairs in old buildings; mazes of back streets and alleys), or the actual narrative construction, where all the pieces are there but the loose construction brings a tightening tension to the writing.

In The Skating Rink the archetype of the laybrinth is found in the Kafkaesque mansion in which the skating rink is built, the Palacio Benvingut with it's "labyrinthine, chaotic, indecisive layout". While this is typical Bolaño, I thought the use of the skating rink made a stark contrast and brought in another dimension. There, at the heart of the labyrinth, is a clear open space, one that is capable of bringing transcendence (Nuria, the ice skater), or death (the murdered body). An interesting decription from one of the characters when finding the body:

I was starting to get cramps-- and then, as if something in there was attracting me irresistibly, I went back into the storehouse, and wandered around the circular passages, looking absently at the packing cases, counting the spotlights aimed at the rink, trying to imagine what had happened in that glacial enclave. Taking care not to leave any fingerprints, I climbed on top of some cases and surveyed the storehouse. From that vantage point I had a panoramic view of what looked like a labyrinth with a frozen center, marked by a black hole: the body.

And the from another character while walking through a campground where he resided during the events of the story:

All we really knew was that we were hanging in a void. But we weren't afraid. Sometimes at night, as I walked through the darker parts of the campground, among empty sites and family-size tents strewn with pine needles, I though of the skating rink and then I was afraid. Afraid that I might come across something from the rink, snagged, hidden in the darkness. Sometimes the air and the rats scuttling along the branches of the trees almost made the presence visible, and without breaking into a run I'd quickly retrace my steps.....

The English translation of Roberto Bolaño’s The Skating Rink came out last year and it is understandable why this was a later publication. The writing is not as developed as his later works and the political backdrop is not as pertinent as some of his other books, but this is still great writing and easily recommended. Maybe even more so as this is a more accessible work but still with the identifiable characteristics that can be attributed to Bolaño. The book could even be seen as a genre work of crime fiction or mystery, and is an example why a person could honestly believe Bolaño when he claimed that he had thought about becoming a murder detective, but the writing is artistically crafted so that the story morphs into something else entirely, qualities that are much more subtle and disturbing in their implications.

The Skating Rink is written as personal accounts of three different narrators, each with their own individual perspectives on the events of the story, and therefore each equally unreliable. At the intangible heart of the book is a beautiful Spanish ice skater named Nuria. She infatuates the timid heart of a manipulative government official, Enric Rosquelles, to such an extent that he builds her a private skating rink within an old tattered palace located just outside of Bolaño’s fictional town of “Z”. Nuria also captures the sexual interest of Remo Morán, a one time novelist but after residing in the rundown and culturally impoverished town of “Z”, a local business owner. He had a fair amount of startup cash. The third narrator, Remo Morán, is a drifting poet originally from Mexico City and who’s relation to Nuria is only peripheral, although slightly voyeuristic, as is his social role as an itinerant hand laborer.

While Nuria could be the metaphoric zenith for Bolaño’s tale, as an ethereal but powerful siren who calls together the male characters, a murder found upon the skating rink about two-thirds of the way through becomes the nadir, one that is all too real, tangible, entirely physical. And as this is a mystery book, identifying clues and foreshadowing images are there to implicate suspects. But the pieces do not all fit– jigsaw pieces with one slightly misaligned edge which draws attention to the other pieces around it. Or perhaps they all only fit too well. As in Bolaño’s 2666, the only definite that is provided is the dark cloud that hangs over the town of “Z” and the bodies that fall beneath it.

The words the happy say
Are paltry melody
But those the silent feel
Are beautiful -

................--Emily Dickinson

Earthworm
--Louise Glück

It is not sad to be human
nor is living entirely within the earth
demeaning or empty: it is the nature of the mind
to defend its eminence, as it is the nature of those
who walk on the surface to fear the depths-- one's
position determines one's feelings. And yet
to walk on top of a thing is not to prevail over it--
it is more the opposite, a disguised dependency,
by which the slave completes the master. Likewise
the mind disdains what it can't control,
which will in turn destroy it. It is not painful to return
without language or vision: if, like the Buddhists,
one declines to leave
inventories of the self, one emerges in a space
the mind cannot conceive, being wholly physical, not
metaphoric. What is your world? Infinity, meaning
that which cannot be measured

.

Bats
--Louise Glück

There are two kinds of vision:
the seeing of things, which belongs
to the science of optics, versus
the seeing beyond things, which
results from deprivation. Man mocking the dark, rejecting
worlds you do not know: though the dark
is full of obstacles, it is possible to have
intense awareness when the field is narrow
and the signals few. Night has bred in us
thought more focused than yours, if rudimentary:
man the ego, man imprisoned in the eye,
there is a path you cannot see, beyond the eye's reach,
what the philosophers have called
the via negativa: to make a place for light
the mystic shuts his eyes-- illumination
of the kind he seeks destroys
creatures who depend on things.

[The Kangxi Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Three:
Ji'nan to Mount Tai, Qing dynasty(1644–1911), 1698 Wang Hui (Chinese, 1632–1717)]

Prior to writing my post yesterday, I scoured the internet for reviews of A Village Life to check my thoughts with those of others. What I found in the online newspapers and other 'established' publications were, at best, scant and boring, and the worst were just awful (one NYC based newspaper making comparisons with Shyamalan's The Village). Good thing we have bloggers and electronic magazines to help poetry out a bit more. A review at Coldfront is excellent:

Classically disciplined, her imagery arises directly out of the setting, evoking an austere, timeless, and archetypal community. Sometimes Glück astounds with loving descriptions of nature: “The sky above the fields has turned a sort of grayish pink / as the sun sinks. The clouds are silk yarn, magenta and crimson” (“March.”) Her infrequent similes provide insight while staying close to home: a pile of burning leaves is “a small thing, controlled, like a family run by a dictator” (“Sunset”); the sun hangs steady “like an actor pleased with his welcome” (“A Warm Day”). Despite maintaining a measured, contemplative tone throughout, she is also able to capture personal inflection: the bartender runs the television with the sound off, and “we spend hours watching this junk” (“Via Delle Ombre”). I caught only one instance of melodrama, at the end of “Hunters”—“the cries of love drown out the screams of the corpses”—although this is in persona for the poem. A Village Life is a wise statement about the body’s relation to the earth, and rewards with beautiful if, of necessity, fleeting glimpses of eternity, as in “Sunrise”:

Between them, the hills and sky took up all the room.
Whatever was left, that was ours for a while.
But sooner or later the hills will take it back, give it to the animals.
And maybe the moon will send the seas there
and where we once lived will be a stream or river coiling around the base of the hills,
paying the sky the compliment of reflection—

Blue in summer. White when the snow falls.

Often in Asian scroll paintings, immense landscapes fill the canvases while human presence is minimized, maybe through a sole wanderer shouldering his or her burden up or down a mountain path, or possibly a fisherman catching what may or may not be caught from the unheeding roils of a river. At other times village life is included and when doing so the perspective is typically from above to allow a bird’s eye view of the daily activities being depicted. One can look down and peer into the drama of village life, but a much grander view awaits a more expansive eye. And its the play in these perspectives that is required to see the light in Louise Glück’s 2009 collection, A Village Life.

Glück is often cited as being our modern poetess of doom and gloom, where transient life is brief and existence stark, momentary while in an unforgiving reality that forces us into solitude while moving closer and closer to eventual death. And in A Village Life, this is in full display as she versifies the end of childhood innocence, the emotional turbulence that can accompany romance, marital breakdown, alcohol infused escapism, withering bodies, the grim reaper that burns the landscape ash-barren every autumn– a frank denial of hope. And this is all very true....

...but there is more than this, much more. Behind Glück’s imaginary village are the mountains of immense existence, infinite meadows, illuminating sunlight that sets and rises both in and out of her poetic scenes, and, of course, small hints of summer. There remains in her book a returning of the perspective away from the urban and back to the continuance of the pastoral, to lift one’s gaze from her encapsulated village to also bear witness to the grander, more peaceful, reality of existence.

Then, a step further. Yes there is the continual cycle of the natural world. With death is birth and with bith comes more depth, ad nauseum. But the life of the individual body is not cyclic, it is finite. As much as we can enjoy the site of kids playing in the upsurge of a city fountain, lifeless cold gravity continues to pull us down into the black of earth. So where can consolation be found? Partly from stoic acceptance, but in reoccurring tropes of light (distant sun, personal candles) and window sitting (appreciative framing of our view outside from a detached perspective inside), Glück provides poetic gestures of apophatic theology which rely upon negation in order to understand the divine that courses equally through both our microcosm and the macrocosm. Not always bridging the two, but capable of demonstrating unity.

Its an experimental approach to higher understanding Glück’s poetry can lead a reader towards. And at least for this reader, she’s capable of creating such an experience. Her emotional insights are penetrating, cruelly so. But if you find yourself in a darker stage of your life, such cruelty befriends, like shadows colluding into the chiaroscuro of day and night. These things do happen and no one represents them better than Glück. And what she provides is not fanciful optimism, but appreciation to understand that what we do have will always be enough.

[The City from Greenwich Village; John Sloan, 1922]

Ted Berrigan reading his poem, Whitman in Black.

XXXVII
(from The Sonnets)
--Ted Berrigan

It is night. You are asleep. And beautiful tears
Have blossomed in my eyes. Guillaume Apollinaire is dead.
The big green day today is singing to itself
A vast orange library of dreams, dreams
Dressed in newspaper, wan as pale thighs
Making vast apple strides towards "The Poems."
"The Poems" is not a dream. It is night. You
Are asleep. Vast orange libraries of dreams
Stir inside "The Poems." On the dirt-covered ground
Crystal tears drench the ground. Vast orange dreams
Are unclenched. It is night. Songs have blossomed
In the pale crystal library of tears. You
Are asleep. A lovely light is singing to itself,
In "The Poems," in my eyes, in the line, "Guillaume
.......Apollinaire is dead."

III
(from The Sonnets)
--Ted Berrigan

Stronger than alcohol, more great than song,
deep in whose reeds great elephants decay;
I, an island, sail, and my shores toss
on a fragrant evening, fraught with sadness
bristling hate.
It's true, I weep too much. Dawns break
slow kisses on the eyelids of the sea,
what other men sometimes have thought they've seen.
And since then I've been bathing in the poem
lifting her shadowy flowers up for me,
and hurled by hurricanes to a birdless place
the waving flags, nor pass by prison ships
O let me burst, and I be lost at sea!
and I fall on my knees then, womanly.

From Mess and Message: Ted Berrigan's Poetics of Appropriation:

Notley also remarks that Berrigan “was interested in the fact that when he ‘appropriated’ a text he unconsciously changed it. He considered this tendency to be part of his creative process” (Collected Poems 679). The error is a slip typical of the human mind. Such slips are instances of the messiness of life—our inability to be fully in control—that pains most of us but that Berrigan embraced and even celebrated. His preference for the error over the perfect copy is an important facet of his poetics of appropriation, setting it apart from the mechanical reproduction that we expect from this type of creative process. This is a poetics of appropriation that contains an unexpected surprise for both the writer and the reader.....

If in Berrigan’s poetry “nothing adds up,” as [one critic] would have it, then perhaps we ought to say that in life itself, nothing adds up. Perhaps Berrigan’s messy contamination of life with art, and of art with life, has made [critics] uncomfortable. Or perhaps the honesty of this contamination is the source of their unease. The people who knew Berrigan well all have described the full-blown nature of the contamination. Ron Padgett has noted that for Berrigan, writing was “something you did when you read the sports page or ate a donut. It was something you did when you sat at your desk and thought about the gods. It was something you did with scissors and Elmer’s glue” (Ted, 44). The poet Ed Sanders put it this way: “Berrigan was one of those wall-to-wall poets. He was the guy who made up the dictum that there are no weekends for poets” (271). It is the consistencies between, and fluidity of, art and life that characterize Berrigan’s poetics of appropriation and that give it the power of truth.

Some poets just seem perfect for reading while lounging about your home in a tattered bathrobe, whether it be the middle of the day or well beyond the midnight hour. Ted Berrigan would be one of these poets. Perhaps the king of them all. Tied to the inspirational excess of the Beats (an early death from a long history of pill popping), the soul opening release of the Confessional Poets (I did it.), and the urban collage abstractions of the New York Poets (cakes of overheard surrealism collapsed from the stainless steel of car fenders), Berrigan’s poetry is immediate, improvised, personal and experimental, while striving with ballyhoo for the transcendent verse which all poets spend their lives attempting to capture, but never do, accepting instead the matters made to be available at hand. But it’s still the “fail better” attitude that brings the attentive momentum to the words, and when one reads Berrigan, its best to forget such notions as day or night, weekdays or weekends, coherency or bafflement. All becomes unfolding crystals of speedy presence upon the open white of the page. Observing. Fucking. Drinking. Breathing. Smoking. Thinking. Speaking. Feeling, this of the possible corporeal, playing out simultaneously and providing the raw material from which Berrigan’s poetry was composed and erratically continues today on the library shelves. The strings of connective detachment that were derived from fleeting choice, far beyond the podium-wired formalities or the rabble rousement of megaphones, but in the taste of halved utterances, the sweet saliva of recklessness, the wild for the spastic content for the swollen eyes in the flapping tears of the red tongue. Berrigan knew you could chase the jackrabbit down 5th Avenue as far as you would like, and should do so with your pants down, only if for no other reason to again find yourself back at the kitchen table or propped up by your hair-smelt pillow, making fool with your joyous continuance of nagging emotions. Now excuse me a second while I pour another cup of coffee..... and another.... ah yes, ‘ripped out of my mind again’, ready for the conversational quivers of emotion and humor. “A Mongolian Sausage//By definition: a long stocking: you fill it full of shit, and then you punch holes in it. Then you swing it over your head in circles until everybody goes home.” This is what Berrigan does in the third section of Sunday Morning, which was written for Lou Reed. And there are other for poems, for Ashbery, for Schuyler, for Sandy, for Alice, for community, for sharing, for flirtations, for the ‘awe that loveliness exists’. Existing in his flesh wrung creations, “and these were mine, not a deaf echo, merely, of thought, but living sounds.” And if not for you, than for Guillaume, Guillaume with (not entirely black) oranges, Guillaume dead with the world of distant horses corralled into the space of what is read from the verbal, Guillaume now with our watery pronouns afloat in the living air. This is where the identifiable thought clangs, the heart drenches, the wandering matters are given the gift of their momentary existence. Just like as you are, you and Mr. Ted Berrigan.

Substance
--W. S. Merwin

I could see that there was a kind of distance lighted
....behind the face of that time in its very days
as they appeared to me but I could not think of any
....words that spoke of it truly nor point to anything
except what was there at the moment it was beginning
....to be gone and certainly it could not have been proven
nor held however I might reach towards it touching
....the warm lichens the features of the stones the skin
of the river and I could tell then that it was
....the animals themselves that were the weight and place
of the hour as it happened and that the mass of the cow's neck
....the flash of the swallow the trout's flutter were
where it was coming to pass they were bearing the sense of it
....without questions through the speechless cloud of light

Time to post another Yuri Norstein animation. Previous works on this blog include Hedgehog in the Fog and Fox & Hare. All are excellent. The current doesn't have as strong of a narrative as the others but the animation is wonderfully layered with intricate detail and shifting emotive tones. Best viewing is at night in the dark.

If Poor Folk doesn’t sound like your thing, I would really recommend reading his novella, The Landlady (printed within the current Penguin edition of Poor Folk). Generally I would describe Dostoyevsky’s writing as social realism augmented with grossly heightened drama and occasional philosophic leveling. The Landlady though is a gothic tale that builds upon a dreamlike suspense and archetypes for character work up.

The story concerns a younger man named Ordynov who is first beginning to enter into the world independently and while doing so, fate leads him to encounter an old man and a beautiful young woman in a cathedral. Compelled by the presence of the couple-- the seductive feminine youth shadowed by the forbidding older patriarch-- Ordynov follows them home to find out where they live. Soon he resides in the same building with the two, which commences a love triangle that reveals the dark history of the relationship between the younger woman and the older man. Here’s one excerpt which is great fun, written from a dream being had by Ordynov:

...all of this came to life, acquired flesh and structure, arose before him in colossal forms and images, moving and swarming about him; he saw magic, luxuriant gardens unfolding before him, whole cities being created and destroyed in his sight, whole cemeteries giving up to him their dead, who began to live their lives all over again, whole peoples and races coming into being and dying away, and finally, around his sickbed, every one of his thoughts, every incorporeal daydream had ever had being embodied almost at the moment of its conception; at last he saw himself thinking not in disembodied ideas, but in whole worlds, whole universes, saw himself floating along like a grain of dust in this strange, infinite world from which there was no escape, and all this life, in its rebellious independence, crushing him, weighing him down and pursuing him with its eternal, infinite irony... [pgs. 154-155]

[by Alexey Titakenko; via Remarks in a Minor Key]

[Hurdy-Gurdy Player with a Dog; Georges de La Tour, 1622-25]

He's destitute, of course, there's no denying that; but he's destitute in a noble sort of way; he's tired, he's chilled to the bone, but still he toils, in his own, peculiar way, maybe, but he toils. And there are many of these honest people, little mother, who although they earn but little in proportion to the usefulness of their labour, bow to no one and beg for alms from no one. I, too, am like that hurdy-gurdy man-- that's to say, not really like him at all, but in my own way, in my own noble, aristocratic way, I am just like him-- I toil as I am able, I do what I can, in other words. More than that I cannot offer; what can't be cured must be endured.

--from Poor Folk, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When I first picked up Poor Folk from the shelves at the library, I was hesitant because of a concern that it would either be a borderline sentimental account of the disadvantaged within 19th century Russia or a too dry factual run down of the socio-economic living conditions of the time. Shame on me for underestimating the powers of good ol’ Fyodor.

Yes, there is a historic portrayal of what life was like for the bottom rungs of the bourgeois ladder, one of the main character’s apartment being nothing more than a partitioned area within a kitchen, but these characters receive no special treatment once their personal psychologies are laid out on paper, revealing all the contradictions, delusions, obsessions, strengths and weaknesses that can be found in many of Dostoyevsky’s characters. “Well rounded” not a fitting enough term, more “with a depth capable of revealing the fundamental paradoxes inherent to the human personality and the subsequent idiosyncratic behaviors that naturally evolve in the meager attempt to move towards resolution and wholeness”. Or something like that.

The book is written as a chronological series of correspondences between an older copy clerk and a younger woman who resides across the street. The copy clerk, of course, is desperately, madly, in love with the young woman. The young woman, not so much, outside of enjoying the attention freely thrown at her or the available ear when her life encounters its difficulties (or ‘hand’ when monetary difficulties are included). And you can see where Dostoyevsky can have some fun with this, emotions that become compulsively operatic (pathetic) and his pen seemingly barely capable of keeping up with the gushing sentiment of the older man or the sudden emotional needs of the younger woman.

But along with this melodramatic humor, Dostoyevsky also maintains a level of pathos for the characters. With the younger woman, its through stories about her background, which are truly heartbreaking and also revealing of an individual who is capable of selfless compassion towards the suffering of others. With the older man, it’s the inability to see through his delusion, the escapist dream fueled by self-pity but is what allows him to overcome the harsh social conditions of his life. With both, you could say at some level they are victims of biographical circumstances, harsh luck included.

Yet Dostoyevsky doesn't allow us to forget that they are both still making their own life decisions and remain with free will over their relation with circumstance and the directions they want to take their lives in the future. Respect begins to level out the pity, even when it becomes clear at the end of the book that each is making a decision that will likely lead to emotional destitution. It may be hell, but it is their hell and who are we to deny them that privilege?

So Poor Folk is both funny and sad, laughter and tears, which is a duality that maybe not be immediately apparent when someone first picks up Dostoyevsky. And interesting to note that Poor Folk was Dostoyevsky’s first publication and happens to mention this duality a couple of times in the writing. Poor Folk is by no means a major work, but it does provide a reader with a better understanding of Dostoyevsky’s cannon and how he developed his literary vision. I should point out that with this publication, there is also a novella and two short stories included and these also have a certain level of humor. I'll be sure to comment upon the novella this week because I actually enjoyed it more than Poor Folk.

[Wanderer In The Snow; Karl Hofer, 1924]

Maybe I will come
to where I am one
and find
I have been waiting there
as a new
year finds the song of the nuthatch


--from Words from a Totem Animal; W. S. Merwin