True: accidents are departures, and departures are accidents. The angel becomes visible at the magical moment of departure, and it is then that we perceive the real meaning of the turmoil called life. Only then can we ever go back home.

--from 'The New Life'; Orhan Pamuk

[Illustration to Dante's Divine Comedy, Pardiso; Gustave Doré]

"What would you be willing to do to reach the world in the book?" she asked.

Her face was pale, her hair light brown, her gaze gentle; if she was of this world, she seemed to have been drawn from memory; if she was from the future, then she was the harbinger of dread and sorrow. I gazed at her without being aware of gazing, as if I were fearful that if I looked at her too intently the situation would become real.

"I would do anything," I said.

She gazed at me sweetly, a hint of a smile on her lips...

"What do you mean by anything?" she asked me.

"Everything," I said and fell silent, listening to my heartbeats.

I don't know why but I suddenly had an image of long journeys that seemed endless, the deluges of myth and legend, labyrinthine streets that vanish, sad trees, muddy rivers, gardens, countries. If I were to embrace her one day, I must venture forth to these places.

--from The New Life, Ohan Pamuk

From Orhan Pamuk's 2006 Nobel Prize Lecture:

The starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his room with his books.But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people's stories, other people's books, other people's words, the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people's stories and books.

Ohmar Pamuk’s The New Life is one of those books that plays out on several levels. First would be story of a 23 year old going through the trials of obsessive love while attempting to find his path in the world. His journey begins with a special book that is known for radically changing the life of anyone who may read its pages, an infatuation over a beautiful woman and then their road trip adventure that results after embarking on a search for the woman’s former love. This is the main story that is sold on the book’s jacket, and probably the reason why this was a huge seller in Pamuk’s native country of Turkey.

While that sounds like a clear enough narrative plot, Pamuk interjects the text with too many blind alleys, false identities and storylines that simply fade rather than come to any conclusion. With this, the novel can be read as a work of meta fiction which explores the concepts which are understood to provide the appropriate structures for fiction. Kafkaesque would be apropos, especially when the mystery behind the magical book brings in a cast of assassins and various characters who may or may not be who they say they are. And towards the end, Pamuk tips his hat to other authors such as Jules Verne, Rilke and Dante to bring in an exploration that doesn’t just deconstruct traditional narrative, but brings to light the reasons why people are drawn to literature. Just what are they seeking? And, after one seeks, what is there actually to be found in books? Do angels really exist for poets? For the imagination?

The third major level at which The New Life could be read involves the main character being a stand in for Turkey itself. While Turkey’s culture and history is anything but new, its placement in the modern world is and like a 23 year old, no one knows for sure which direction might be taken. At the center of the matter would be the tension between Western and Eastern cultures and various characters are used to embody the social groups that arise from this ongoing conflict: modern progressives, Islamic fundamentalists, national militants, student radicals, etc. But its not just world view differences, but modern progress itself. Centuries old traditions meat Coca-Cola, hamburgers and bus accidents.

Many, many bus accidents for that matter. From which characters stumble out only to take on the identity of the dead person that was once their lively seat mate. Would that be considered the new life? Would such a new life be internal or external? Both? Such are the questions Pamuk asks his readers to consider.

The Window
--Robert Creeley

Position is where you
put it, where it is,
did you, for example, that

large tank there, silvered,
with the white church along-
side, lift

all that, to what
purpose? How
heavy the slow

world is with
everything put
in place. Some

man walks by, a
car beside him on
the dropped

road, a leaf of
yellow color is
going to

fall. It
all drops into
place. My

face is heavy
with the sight. I can
feel my eye breaking.

Position Is Where You Put It, No. 1

I always try to find a youtube video on Saturday that might, however loosely, relate to the week's posts. But that gets hard to do with poetry. So I realized that I needed to start making my own videos. Using The Window by Robert Creeley as inspiration, experimental film installations will be made from placement of the camera in fixed positions and allowed to capture whatever might enter into the frame. The setting and composition will visually reflect qualities of the poetry referenced earlier in the week.

Jewels and After
--Laura Riding

On the precious verge of danger
Jewels spring up to show the way,
The bejewelled way of danger,
Beautied with inevitability.

After danger the look-back reveals
Jewels only, dangerlessness,
Logic serened, unharshed into
A jewelled and loving progress.

And after danger's goal, what jewels?
Then none except death's plainest,
The unprecious jewels of safety,
As of childhood.

Earth--Laura Riding

Have no wide fears for Earth:
Its universal name is 'Nowhere'.
If it is Earth to you, that is your secret.
The outer records leave off there.
And as it seems, it is,
A seeming stillness
Amidst seeming speed.

Heavens unseen, or only seen,
Dark or bright space, unearthly space,
Is a time before Earth was
From which you inward move
Toward perfect now.

Almost the place it is not yet,
Potential here of everywhere--
Have no wide fears of it:
Its destiny is simple,
To be further what it will be.

Earth is your heart
Which has become your mind
But still beats ignorance
Of all it knows--
As miles deny the compact present
Whose self-misunderstanding past they are.
Have no wide fears for Earth:
Destruction only on wide fears shall fall.

As to what the special concerns of poetry are, the tradition provides no definitions. It presents itself as the definition of them, with the burden of proof put upon the poet of justifying the implicit meaning of the tradition as the union of the highest human concerns within the bounds of poetic expression. Thus it is that the general human weakness of want of distinctness of conception of the highest human concerns has been endowed in poetry with supplementary strength: poetry, that is, identifies commitment to its mode of expression with a commitment to exclusive preoccupation with these concerns, and in so doing represents itself as a plane of sensibility on which spiritual height of being is concretely realizable. In choosing my role of poety, I recognized this traditional allocation by poetry to itself of an area of experience of an immediate, absolute, life-purifying quality of spirituality, and I accepted poetry without reservation as having demarcated this area of potentially occupiable in distinct forms of consciousness, real functions of being, exactly congruous translation of the occupation of it into words.

--Laura Riding

The same could be applied to any tradition which relies upon regular practice for its worth and existence, such as painting, music, meditation, writing, yoga, reading, nature observation. And I would agree. These can embody the practioner with a form of spirituality. That which we do, is who we are. And the more focused and the more demanding for what we do, the more absorptive it can be for the practitioner.

A while back I read a list of authors John Ashbery reads in order to kick-start his poetic imagination and among those listed was Laura Riding (Jackson). And I can see why. Often Riding’s poetry is just as confounding (and frustrating) as Ashbery’s. But at the same time, with captivating language that pulls you into its playfulness even if after several reads you are left with large gaping holes of confoundment. Though, maybe that’s part of the point.

Riding was born in 1901 and studied at Cornell, after which she connected with various literary and intellectual types and allowed her the freedom to proceed with her own personal theories on poetry and its artistic practice. In reading her works, the earlier poems tend to be shorter and more lyrical, and therefore, more abstract. And these are the poems that she is more known for, at least from what I was able to find on the internet. While ‘meaning’ is difficult at times, it is noticeable that she makes great use of opposites, such as:

grand - small
self - nonself
being - nonbeing
vision - blindness
certainty - uncertainty
knowledge - ignorance
comprehension - confusion

However, her later poems tend to be longer and work more as philosophical inquiries rather than dynamic lyrical expressions. And the philosophy continues working with opposites to move towards a poetic viewpoint which embraces paradox, finds the edges where two opposites might meet and how they can then regenerate, affirm and negate one another. The result is poetry that both invigorates itself through oppositional tension, but at the same times, reaches a transcendent equilibrium. Albeit, at a cerebral level rather than emotive.

If I tried to explain her poetry much more, I would inevitably fall into personal subjectivity. The absorptive and reactive experience of the poetry directly by each individual reader being what counts. Although, its worth pointing out that she was about fifty years ahead of her time and would have been surrounded with many agreeable colleagues during the 1970's when the move was made from modernism to post-modernism. But I suspect she was largely unheard of outside of her own circles during her life.

[Basket of Fruit; Caravaggio, 1597]

The amazing title sequence for the 1962 adaptation of Nelson Algren's novel, A Walk on the Wild Side (via Issa's Untidy Hut).

Algren said of A Walk on the Wild Side, "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives."

...that you only know a fragment of what happens to you and that when you believe yourself capable of explaining or recounting what has happened to you up until a particular date, you do not have sufficient information, you do not know what other people's intentions were or the motivations behind impulses, you have no knowledge of what is hidden: the people closest to us seem like actors stepping out in front of a theater curtain, and we have no idea what they were doing only a second earlier... Likewise, we know nothing about the events at which we were not present and the conversations we did not hear, those that took place behind our back and mentioned us or criticized us or judged us and condemned us. Life is compassionate, all lives are, at least that is the norm, which is why we consider as wicked those people who do not cover up or hide or lie, those who tell everything that they know and hear, as well as what they do and think.

--from When I was Mortal, Javier Marias

Agree? A question for thought only. Marias' writing is dark, cynical at times, but it is truthful, and there is light as well-- an appreciation for life, if you move away from the center-weights of his stories.

[The Ray; Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin, 1728]

Flavorpill: A lot of literature tackles unanswerable questions and subjects — what is the purpose of writing for you?

Javier Marías: I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to “answer” things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore — often blindly — the huge areas of darkness, and show them better. So in my opinion it does not really matter if subjects are unanswerable (all of them are, possibly), as literature is not expected to solve riddles or mysteries, but just to show them — perhaps putting them in a slightly new light, perhaps calling attention to overlooked aspects of them.

(source)

A reoccurring situation in When I was Mortal is distant observation, such as from a resort or motel balcony, in the stands of a race track, through a window at night, from a darkened room into a lit room... just to name a few. And connected in some way or another with the detachment, more often than not, would be a murder. Appropriately, Marías never provides graphic descriptions of the deaths, or even accounts for them directly on the page. They too occur with the reader, like the observers, distanced, and the technique creates multiple effects. I could name a few, but it would be better to simply point out that each story uses this type of situation for different reasons. Although, central might be the characters’ desires to either connect or disconnect with the people that are being observed. From the story, Flesh Sunday:

I tried to focus on someone on the beach, to pick someone out, but there were too many people to be able to remain faithful to anyone in particular, I panned across the beach with the binoculars, I saw hundreds of children, dozens of fat men, scores of girls (none of them topless, that's still fairly rare in San Sebastian), young flesh and old flesh, children's flesh which is not yet flesh and mother's flesh which is somehow more fleshly for having already reproduced itself. I soon grew tired of looking and went back to the bed where Luisa was lying down, I kissed her a few times, then returned to the terrace, and again peered through the binoculars. Perhaps I was bored, which is why I felt slightly envious when I saw that two rooms down to my right there was a man, also armed with binoculars, who had them trained on one particular spot....I wondered enviously, I wanted to fix my gaze on something too, it's only when you rest your gaze on some-thing that you really relax and become interested in what you're looking at..........

Javier Marías is a well known fiction writer in Spain, but this is the first book of his that I have read. I will certainly be reading more. And as this is the initial go around, it’s a bit difficult to post on because of my not being familiar with his style of writing and usual themes. But I’ll do my best.

When I was Mortal is a collection of short stories, often quite brief and each written for other publications, such as magazines and journals. While originally published separately, when collected the stories form a stylistic and topical cohesiveness that, if I had not guessed otherwise, were written with the intent of being originally published together in a single book. In many respects, the stories resound and counter off of one another, not unlike individual soloists performing in a requiem, each with their own tale to tell.

The stories have the romantic elements of noir and the gothic, but settings remain largely prosaic and with characters who are only just on the fringe of urban humdrum. Slightly unique and a bit out of the ordinary, but not to be necessarily regarded as extreme, especially when it comes to the emotions they may be experiencing. In many respects, everyday people. Which is what makes the murders so intriguing. Haunting as well. The hint of death floats elusively in and out of the narratives and without build up or dramatic climax and at times, only alluded to in the few bare clues Marías supplants into his minimalist pages. And explanations aren't provided. The fun begins and ends in the mystery.

While the stories are dark and morbid (when is ‘murder most foul’ not?), Marías is capable of subtly infusing his stories with philosophical contemplations on the nature of life and death. Moreover, by exposing the frailty of human life, and human relations at that, his stories equally garner appreciation for life and its inevitable mortality. The title story being a great example, and easily the strongest in the collection. If you find yourself in a bookstore and have a half hour free, I’d highly recommend reading it.

After all the pages were read, which would include two told from the perspectives of ghosts, the title, When I was Mortal, resounds with echoing sighs of nostalgia and regret. For those of us that are still lucky enough to be mortal, such moribund whispering inverses into an affirmation of life when heard around the edges of Marías' writing.

[Owl; Graham Sutherland]

Auggie (Harvey Keitel) and Bob (Jim Jarmusch) talking and smoking in Blue in the Face. Raymond Carver died of lung cancer at age 50.

My Crow
--Raymond Carver

A crow flew into the tree outside my window.
It was not Ted Hughe's crow, or Galway's crow.
Or Frost's, Pasternak's, or Lorca's crow.
Or one of Homer's crows, stuffed with gore,
after the battle. This was just a crow.
That never fit in anywhere in its life,
or did anything worth mentioning.
It sat there on the branch for a few minutes.
Then picked up and flew beautifully
out of my life.

The Current
--Raymond Carver

These fish have no eyes
these silver fish that come to me in dreams,
scattering their roe and milt
in the pockets of my brain.

But there's one that comes--
heavy, scarred, silent like the rest,
that simply holds against the current,

closing its dark mouth against
the current, closing and opening
as it holds to the current.

[Paris Through The Window; Marc Chagall]

Romanticism
--Raymond Carver

The nights are very unclear here.
But if the moon is full, we know it.
We feel one thing one minute,
something else the next.

This past weekend Michigan had its first batch of cool weather that was more autumn than summer. With it, dreary days where the sun was only a wild rumor or a quickly fading memory. Not exactly the sort of weather that makes for a fun Labor Day holiday weekend, but pitch perfect for reading Raymond Carver. Friday night after an ok dinner and a beer, I headed out to drink some coffee, dark roast, toting All of Us in hand, and a pop lyric was whispering in the back of my head: “Hell darkness my old friend….”

While I’ve read all of Carver’s fiction, I have not read his poetry. To be honest, I didn’t even know he had a collection out there, so I was pretty excited when I found a copy on the shelves at the local library. And I was even more surprised to find out that the poetry was written towards the end of Carver’s life and not at the start of his writing career, as is the usual case when you find out a fiction writer also has poetry available. So I knew I had in my hands a body of work that would need to be reckoned with.

If Carver’s short stories are closer kin to poetry than fiction, than the reverse is true as well. Each poem reads like a story, only you have to provide the surrounding details yourself. But because Carver’s diction is so emotively intimate-- where a period or a comma can and will only go ’there’, and this sentence needs to be short, this one long-- the poems are poetic in that it’s the voice speaking the language that guides with mood and tone, whereas Carver’s fiction relies upon placement of selective details to create the drama. So, when sitting down with Carver’s poetry, saying that its like sitting down with an old friend is about it.

The subject matter is largely personal with many working as either autobiographies or self mythologizing. In particular, Carver’s difficulties with alcoholism, the painful experiences involved with his first marriage, and then the joy he found in his second wife, Tess. But equally involved are the universal matters of love, humiliation, death, solitude, loneliness, unspoken frailties, pity, and, of course, sadness. Lots of unrelenting sadness. But if you have ever read anything of Carver’s, you already knew that.

[Gateway to September; Charles Burchfield]

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

--from 'Tender is the Night', F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Oh--oh--oh--oh
Other flamingoes than me,
Oh--oh--oh--oh
Other flamingoes than me--"

Life is fun with Dick-- the people in deck chairs look at us, and a woman is trying to hear what we are singing. Dick is tired of singing it, so go on alone, Dick. You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

--from Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald