[I am now on indefinite hiatus. When I started this blog, what resulted was directly tied to the life I was living at that time. But life changes. Sometimes significantly. And when that happens, what we were doing before can become increasingly disconnected. To share a bit about myself, for about the past two years that disconnection has been there for me, but I haven't really had much of a reason to abandon what I had been previously been reyling upon in my daily life. As to how that relates to Five Branch Tree, my heart hasn't been fully in it like it was in the past. Which wasn't a problem necessarily, close enough is close enough, until, that is, I found it starting to become directed elsewhere. Which is where I am at now in my life.

But I do plan on either restarting this blog at some point later on down the road, or start a new project which might better reflect my life if I find myself resettled into a new understanding. Time will prove the worth of doing so. Until then, I could use some good old fashioned Buddhist quiet. For those of you that are maintaining blogs that I read on a regular basis, I will continue to visit as I have. Has been too enriching not to.

This effort has been hugely successful to me, so don't think for a second that I am going out on any sort of down note. Five Branch Tree has proven its worth towards my personal development, and I owe a portion of that to those of you that are also regularly posting your own inner explorations. I thank you all for it. Take care and I hope to see you on the return.]

CK Williams composes his poetry from the sentence. Captivating and intricate sentences that move the lines to create a nimble music of thought and images. His poetry is some of the most ‘accessible’ out there, which some might find keeps his work away from repeated readings, but there is an assured pleasure gained when sitting down with his poetry. An audio voice emerges from the pages, where, while reading through the eyes, you also begin to hear all the inflections and subtle changes in enunciation. The varied flex of pitch, tone and rhythm. The insistence of breath to easily follow his thought at both intellectual and emotional levels.

Throughout the collection Wait, topics Williams brings to his poetry include relationships, sex, love, aging, various world issues, art, philosophical notions.... An extensive list where it could appear that he is spreading himself a little too thin. That maybe he should choose a few of those and go more in depth. But, I don’t think the weight of the poetry relies upon the topics themselves. Instead, the weight of his voice and thought. His topics include just about everything anyone might think about on an average day, and Williams, to me, provides a poetic voice for those thoughts.

Conclusions though? We don’t have any, so why should Williams? But there is resolution in the art. The delight to be found in language. And in many poems Williams challenges and examines the notion of Judeo Christian guilt and sin. A concept he does not adhere too, but can’t deny that such notions remain embedded within his psychology, as well as within the ways the Western world and our elected leaders proceed at an international level.

When sitting down with Williams’s poetry, it is like having him sit with you in conversation, eye to eye, saying, “I have thought of this.” And doing so in an articulate, thoughtful and heartfelt fashion. Relatively simple, but at times its good to be reminded of how simple human thought and feeling can be.

[Snow at Argenteuil; Claude Monet, 1874]

From Daniel Lanois' "Black Dub" project released last year. A fantastic album.

Here's what happens: you cross the open water and enter the channel and you follow it as it winds through the grass past the hammocks and woodland domes, the swampy islands upon which various animals live their animal lives; you go on through the buggy days and the long buzzing nights and you don't let mischance or false pathways deter you, you keep right on with your goodwill about life and your stubbornness, leaving each lived day behind you, the husk of it drifting in the shallows of the past; you stay with the trail, pushing on and riding the slow current of boggy water draining down the sleeve of the continent-- keep on no matter what-- until one day, some sunny day, you come to the blue waters of the Gulf.

--from 'Three Delays'; Charlie Smith

.......................So there is
permission, not granted
but given, as a forsythia at the edge of the walk,
having stolen more light
than it can contain, trembles, and the echoes
of argument fade into a fluttering
over the price of butterscotch floats,
and we are dazzled
by the gouge of perception, as if there was in fact a word
we were waiting to hear, not
as completion but as synoptic
and inevitable entitlement—the drift
of some stranger’s conversation,
the memory of a thin mist
moored temporarily over the garden, that face
we saw from the window on the way to St. Albans: beautiful,
indifferent, unequivocably doomed.

--from Fuchsia; Charlie Smith

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Charlie Smith in BOMB magazine, which provides insight into Smith's writing style and how it carried over into writing Three Delays. Makes me want to read it again....

CSI don’t have plans when I write a poem or a novel, or even hard notions in terms of whom or what I want to write about. I don’t have a template that I try to place things into. I just start writing. What comes out is something that I discover, if I ever discover it, because I don’t ever really go at books critically. As far as the characters in Three Delays, they are imagined people who are discovered, by me and by the reader, in a certain situation, a kind of extremis. A psychic extremis in terms of personality and abilities; a spiritual extremis, expressed, say, by drugs. The veneer that the drugs and the alcohol provide in this book, covering what turns out to be pretty honest emotion, is a kind of carapace. It’s just in the nature of the situation and what’s going on. How long can love last? When do you quit? How do you stay in it under terrible circumstances? All of that is interesting to me—in the lives of these people—so I wrote about it. I’m not trying to figure anything out about it: those are problems for people’s individual lives. I try to let myself be as open as possible to characters and situations within the confines of the book. That means that in my own life I may need to act in certain ways to make that possible, so I’m not distracted by all that’s going on in the world. Live quietly. Let the world take care of itself. Seek a calm heart.

JR Turning this question to the writer: what about ego as a writer?

CS Well, I look at writing not as a management position but as a service position. I’m there to serve the needs of the book. That’s all it is, and the more I’m able to do that, the better the book goes. When I start thinking that I’m the big shot in the book, or that the big shot is writing it, there is no book.

It’s like raising a child or loving a woman; when you really do love them you’re willing to serve. That’s what I find operating in my marriage. I find it operating in the lives of people who have raised families—despite ourselves, despite our shortcomings, and our inabilities, we’re willing to serve the ones we love. A book is like that; it’s not a living thing, but the act of writing is. I go after the willingness to serve the poem, or the novel. I do that as best as I can within my limitations.

[...


...]

JR Billy and Alice are mutually attracted.

CS They see the universe in simpatico ways; that’s what pulls them together.

JR Like pathologies attract?

CS Yeah, in a sense. Early in the book they compare themselves to people who seem to have no particular pathology—the husband Alice has at the beginning of the book is described as a guy without pathology. He’ll just live a good life and prosper and all of that. But they are people with pathology: they’re fucked up and they’ve got to deal with it. Whether it’s their fuckedupness or their nature—I mean, they’re extremely bright and perceptive people but . . . It’s a gas when you’re around somebody who yucks at the same things you do. Whether it’s friendship or a marriage, you can go on that. People who can yuck it up together. They see the same things in the same way and that’s extremely powerful. That’s not to say that it’s some kind of solipsistic deal where you’ve got schizophrenics over there yucking it up.

They’re human beings, they appreciate life—that’s what’s going on with them. They’ve got severe handicaps. Alice is overburdened by rage and fear, and Billy is overburdened by rage and fear that he treats with chemicals. She treats her affliction, I guess, by raging and trying to get over this particularly obsessive, fucked-up way of loving somebody. But, I think, they are, at all times, like I said, just struggling to go forth and get something going. They just happen to be alike.

Truth is, they are both in love with beauty to the point of death. And they find this to an inestimable degree in each other.

Charlie Smith is the second new author I have discovered already this year, and having written both poetry and fiction, I should have plenty to delve into for a while. Three Delays is his most recent novel in the past ten years and its written in a style I could never tire of. Forgoing narrative plot for loose, almost improvised construction, barreling along in hallucinogenic sentences that can make your head spin through their eruptions of subjective feeling and altered perceptions, the romance of Henry Miller’s excess comes to mind, along with a bit of Kerouac desperado and the heavy weight of a brutally doomed love that you know can only end in tragedy.

The book follows various times in the blundering adult loves of Alice and Bill, childhood friends that fell into an obsessive love as teenagers and which, like moths to a flame, they can’t remove themselves from despite efforts to safely move in different directions. Which might be fine, if it wasn’t for that fact that their love is of a subsuming fire that feeds off of every fear, insecurity, existential angst, romantic yearning and surface emotion that can exist in a person. Appropriately, Bill is a junky supreme incapable of handling reality without a cocktail of mind bending drugs in his system and Alice keeps attempting to break free through a series of stale marriages.

Yeah, this is fun stuff. As misdirected and random as Bill and Alice themselves. Especially when their stories traverse across various regions in the United States, at times exploding violently over in Italy and the back roads of Mexico, and while also encountering various underground criminals, revolutionaries and other equally doomed seekers of a romanticized promised land. A reader can’t help but to both hate Bill and Alice for not staying away from one another while at the same time, never wanting them to leave each other’s side. A modern blend of Bonnie and Clyde and Romeo and Juliet that’s brought to life through the lyrical intensity of Smith’s writing. And every dialogue, paragraph and scene becomes a poem in their own right, both synthesizing Bill and Alice’s mood but then also extending the text beyond itself to navigate into areas of the heart and being that can only be revealed through indirection. Smith is both telling a good story and speculating along with the reader on these issues. Some participatin is required to make the book work because the writing can be a bit overwhelming, even tedious if not in the mood for Smith’s unrestrained effusions, but the world is all to recognizably human to not find oneself captivated.

[Death and Life; Gustav Klimt, 1916]

Chaplinesque
-- Hart Crane

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

My blog is in need of a correction. On Monday I advised of Saramago approaching 90, but he actually passed away this past summer at the age of 87. With that said, here is an excerpt from his 1998 Nobel lecture:

It was only many years after, when my grandfather had departed from this world and I was a grown man, I finally came to realise that my grandmother, after all, also believed in dreams. There could have been no other reason why, sitting one evening at the door of her cottage where she now lived alone, staring at the biggest and smallest stars overhead, she said these words: "The world is so beautiful and it is such a pity that I have to die". She didn't say she was afraid of dying, but that it was a pity to die, as if her hard life of unrelenting work was, in that almost final moment, receiving the grace of a supreme and last farewell, the consolation of beauty revealed. She was sitting at the door of a house like none other I can imagine in all the world, because in it lived people who could sleep with piglets as if they were their own children, people who were sorry to leave life just because the world was beautiful; and this Jerónimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again.

"...life is an orchestra which is always playing, in tune or out, a titanic that is always sinking and always rising to the surface, and it is then that it occurs to death that she would be left with nothing to do if the sunken ship never managed to rise again, singing the evocative song sung by the waters as they cascade from her decks, like the watery song, dripping like a murmuring sigh over her undulating body, sung by the goddess amphitrite at her birth, when she became she who circles the seas, for that is the meaning of the name she was given. Death wonders where amphitrite is now...where is she now, she who may never have existed in reality, but who nevertheless briefly inhabited the human mind in order to create in it, again only briefly, a certain way of giving meaning to the world, of finding ways of understanding reality..."

--from Death With Interuruptions, José Saramago

Death with Interruptions wouldn’t be the first book of Jose Saramago’s that I would recommend, but it does have its delights if a reader sticks through to the end. He returns again in the ususal mode of magical realism to bring forth a parable that can comment upon various social notions and philosophical ideas. This time, a city that finds itself without death after a typical New Year’s. People still age, can be injured, lay in wretched chronic illness, but they will not die. As to why, this isn’t revealed until the second half of the book when ‘death’ is introduced as a character. In the form of beautiful 36 year old woman and who eventually becomes fixated on an unassuming cellist– an identifiable trait shared by most of Saramago’s protagonists.

Typically with Saramago’s works, he interweaves intriguing character based stories with the myriad thoughtful speculations than can arrive out of his staged magical occurrences. Both intellectually and emotionally intriguing, which is why I am working through his publications. But in Death with Interruptions, the majority of the book keeps within cerebral speculation mode and it is not until the last third where an actual character based plot solidifies. And that does become a good story, but all too brief and deserving much more.

The rest of the book then largely meanders in hypothetic speculations towards how society would or would not function with the absence of death. Interesting? Yes. Captivating? No. Especially when Saramago relies upon his characteristic page length clause ridden sentences which, in this book, do not cause the insistent voice that can be sharply heard in his better works, and instead, only make the reading unnecessarily more difficult.

Fortunately, Death with Interruptions is a shorter book that can be read quickly. However, at the end, it reads more as an introductory effort to what could easily have been a more substantial novel. Probably best to keep in mind that Saramago is now approaching 90? His ideas are still there, his characters remain identifiably human, but the artistic execution falters in this most recent effort.

Why do Heaven and Earth last forever?

Because they

do not exist for themselves.


--Lao Zi

Shostakovich's Prelude and Fugue No. 22 with the paintings of Leonardo Cremonini.

A Human Being Is Here
--Jon Fosse (via)

A human being is here
and then disappears
in a wind
that vanishes
inwards
and meets the rock’s movements
and becomes meaning
in always new unity
of what is
and what is not
in a silence
where wind
becomes wind
where meaning
becomes meaning
in lost movement
of everything that has been
and at once is
from an origin
where the sound carried the meaning
before the word divided itself
and since then never left us
But it is
in all past and it is in all future
and it is
in something
that doesn’t exist
in its vanishing border
between what has been
and what shall come
It is infinite and without distance
in the same movement
It clears up
and disappears
and remains
while it disappears
And it lights up
its darkness
while it speaks
of its silence
It is nowhere
It is everywhere
It is near
It is far
and body and soul meet
there as one
and it is small
and as big
as everything that is
as small as no thing
and where all wisdom is
and no thing knows
in its innermost self
where nothing is divided
and everything is at once itself and everything else
in the divided
which is not divided
in endless boundary The way I let it disappear
in obvious presence
in vanishing motion
and walk around in the day
where tree is tree
where rock is rock
where wind is wind
and where words are an incomprehensible unity
of everything that has been
of everything that disappears
and thus remains
as conciliatory words

[Fra Borgøya; Lars Hertervig, 1867]

From Jon Fosse's essay, The Gnosis of Writing:

I understand so little. And as the years pass, I understand less and less. It is true. But the opposite is also true, that as the years pass I understand more and more. Yes, it is also true that as the years pass I understand a great amount, an almost frightening amount. As a matter of fact, I feel almost faint at how little I understand and almost frightened at how much I understand. How can it be that both things are true, that I simultaneously understand less and less and more and more?

The lucid thought would say, if that’s the case, either to understand little is also to understand much, and that, I would agree, is true in a certain sense, perhaps almost in a gnostic sense, or, the lucid thought would say, it is about two kinds of understanding. And perhaps that’s how it is, yes perhaps it is as simple as saying that in and through the kind of understanding which resorts to concepts and theory in order to understand, I become aware that I understand less and less, and that the scope of such a realisation more and more often appears to me to be limited, while in the kind of understanding which resorts to fiction and poetry to understand, I understand more and more. Perhaps that’s how it is. At least that’s what it feels like to me, who, after having written a great deal of essayistic theory, am now doing it less and less, and now almost exclusively write a language which first and foremost doesn’t mean, but first and foremost is, yes is itself, almost like rocks and trees and gods and human beings, and only after that means. And in this language which primarily is, and which only secondarily means, I feel that I understand more and more, while I also, in and through the other ordinary language, the language which primarily means, understand less and less.

One of the things I love about literature is picking up a book I know absolutely nothing about, usual at random as a result of perusing the stacks of the local library, and discovering an author for whom I want to read everything that might be available. This is how I discovered Haruki Murakami about ten years ago and how I discovered Jon Fosse (b. 1959) a few weeks ago. Fosse is a Norwegian writer and most notably known as a playwright, but has numerous works of fiction and poetry as well. English availability? Probably not enough.

His novel Melancholy is written as an internal monologue of the 19th century Norwegian artist, Lars Hertervig, who was born into a poor Quaker family in northern Norway, went to the Arts Academy of Düsseldorf in 1852, suffered a mental breakdown and then spent his remaining years either in an asylum or a poor house. The writing is in stream of consciousness form and reminds me of the obsessive qualities that can be found in Dostoyevsky, the bizarre absurdity of Kafka and the personal torturous drama of the protagonists found in Knut Hamsun’s earlier books, Hunger and Pan. Austere repetition is often relied upon to demonstrate the insistence of Hertervig’s thoughts, which means the writing on the surface can drag on a bit, be a tad boring, but also equates to a heavy pleading that can burrow the reader into the pages. It is not the breadth of Hertervig’s thoughts that engages, but the drone of his clinging obsessions that we can all sympathize with and relate to.

Hertervig’s paintings were known for their use of radiant light, but this isn’t the outward focus in Melancholy. More so the opposite. But the light is still there and worked in as subtle contrast, often through Hertervig’s infatuation with a 15 year old girl prior to his breakdown. However, the significance of light doesn’t really become shaped into the narrative until the last section of the novel. At this point, time leaps into the 1990's and the narrator is an accomplished author and a distant relative of Hertervig, who shows signs of sharing some of Hertervig’s emotional disturbance. When his narrative picks up, he is seeking out a pastor to discuss certain ‘mystical’ experiences that have arisen over the years while working on his writing.

Through Hertervig’s life and paintings, as well as the author’s discussions with the pastor in the last section, Fosse equates artistic humanism with metaphysical, even spiritual, notions that could be allegorically aligned with certain areas of theological thought. Language too, as I suspect comes out in his plays even more so. After consideration, perhaps artistic creation is less about creating or expressing one’s world and self, but instead about attempting to reveal the depth and complexity of what lies beneath the surface of our immediate modes of comprehension. Where a truer form of communication can exist.