Without Lifting A Finger

It may be that we each mean different things when we speak of love and happiness, within a couple, as well as within society. Especially now. When I was growing up in middle-class suburban England, our family knew no one who was illegitimate or divorced or homosexual; all was heteronormative, and no one saw a psychiatrist unless they were truly, deeply mad. (There were a few minor exceptions: a couple of schoolmasters we thought dodgy, plus a great-uncle who had remarried after his first wife was confined to an asylum.) Now, towards the end of my life, more children are born out of wedlock in this country than within it; divorce, homosexuality and seeing a shrink are routine, while gender has become more fluid. All this is as welcome as it is belated, and we may occasionally feel sharp pity for those in previous centuries horribly trapped in the prisons of social, religious and sexual expectation. Though it would be impertinent to imagine that they understood love less well. They certa...

But we don’t really imagine, do we, that all this authorial remembering has come from a cup of tea? Proust clearly believes in the powerful unloosing effect on our memory of taste and smell: in the second volume, À l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, he repeats that ‘The best part of our memory lies outside ourselves, in a rainy breath, in the smell of a closed-up room or the smell of the first blaze of a fire.’ But perhaps the Madeleine Incident, however true in life, should be regarded as a fictional device as much as a transcendental key. Perhaps Proust was a novelist in search of a theory to scaffold his work – which would be a very French thing.

 From Departure(s): A Novel Marcel finds that when he tries to remember Combray, only the frustrating norms of memory apply: he sees it as no more than ‘a luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background’. And he sees the same scenes again and again. This, he realises, is because they are prompted by ‘voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect’, and since ‘the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself’, he no longer has any interest in trying to ‘ponder over this residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead.’ But then a wonderful thing happens. One day, many years later, low in spirits, he returns home, and his adored mother, seeing that he is cold, offers him some tea, ‘a thing I did not ordinarily take’. Further, she sends out for a petite madeleine. He dips a morsel of cake into the tea and raises it to his lips in a spoon; as he tastes it, an exquisite pleasure runs through him. It is beyond gustatory; it is...

The one thing that is very good in life today is death. There’s still room for improvement, it’s true. But I think of all those nineteenth-century deaths. The deaths of writers aren’t special deaths; they just happen to be described deaths. I think of Flaubert lying on his sofa, struck down – who can tell at this distance? – by epilepsy, apoplexy or syphilis, or perhaps some malign axis of the three. Yet Zola called it une belle mort – to be crushed like an insect beneath a giant finger. I think of Bouilhet in his final delirium, feverishly composing a new play in his head and declaring that it must be read to Gustave. I think of the slow decline of Jules de Goncourt: first stumbling over his consonants, the c’s turning to t’s in his mouth; then being unable to remember the titles of his own books; then the haggard mask of imbecility (his brother’s phrase) slipping over his face; then the deathbed visions and panics, and all night long the rasping breaths that sounded (his brother’s wo...

We no longer believe that language and reality ‘match up’ so congruently – indeed, we probably think that words give birth to things as much as things give birth to words.

And then, post-finally, I discovered that Wilde was aware of this all along. As he once wrote to Conan Doyle: “Between me and life there is a mist of words always. I throw probability out of the window for the sake of a phrase, and the chance of an epigram makes me desert truth.”

Been reading it a while -- almost finished.  An interesting "clip": Those who generalise about the human condition often find their truths overturned by the obstinate individualism of reality. And the high point of the generalisation is the Wildean epigram. It is intended to be piquant, to stun and amuse and make the reader (or theatregoer) feel inferior: in this, the Wildean epigram is a verbal dandy. And like the dandy, most epigrams, except the greatest, come with a “best before” label. Time is equally the enemy of the butterfly, the dandy and the epigram.

6.0 Or we might try to draw the responsibility more narrowly and apportion it more exactly. And not use equations and integers but instead express matters in traditional narrative terminology. So, for instance, if Tony And there the photocopy—this version of a version—stopped. “So, for instance, if Tony”: end of the line, bottom of the page. If I hadn’t immediately recognised Adrian’s handwriting, I might have thought this cliffhanger a part of some elaborate fakery concocted by Veronica. But I didn’t want to think about her—not for as long as it was possible to avoid doing so. Instead I tried to concentrate on Adrian and what he was doing. I don’t know how best to put this, but as I looked at that photocopied page I didn’t feel as if I was examining some historical document—one, moreover, requiring considerable exegesis. No, I felt as if Adrian was present in the room again, beside me, breathing, thinking. And how admirable he remained. I have at times tried to imagine the despair...

Another good "clip" from Sense of an Ending . And a mysterious night viewing of the Severn Bore. For the third time (promise it's the last): Sorry for the Kindle jumble. * I don’t want to give the impression that all I did at Bristol was work and see Veronica. But few other memories come back to me. One that does—one single, distinct event—was the night I witnessed the Severn Bore. The local paper used to print a timetable, indicating where best to catch it and when. But the first occasion I tried, the water didn’t seem to be obeying its instructions. Then, one evening at Minsterworth, a group of us waited on the riverbank until after midnight and were eventually rewarded. For an hour or two we observed the river flowing gently down to the sea as all good rivers do. The moon’s intermittent lighting was assisted by the occasional explorations of a few powerful torches. Then there was a whisper, and a craning of necks, and all thoughts of damp and cold vanished as t...

Saw the film a month ago or so and have been meaning to reread the novel. Get a sense of the literary vs the cinematic. Which could lead to a reviewing of the film. Ad infinitum. * A "condensed" quote re History (good licks throughout the book). I won't try to right the formatting wrong. Sorry, Julian. “History is the lies of the victors,” I replied, a little too quickly. “Yes, I was rather afraid you’d say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. Simpson?” Colin was more prepared than me. “History is a raw onion sandwich, sir.” “For what reason?” “It just repeats, sir. It burps. We’ve seen it again and again this year. Same old story, same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment.” “Rather a lot for a sandwich to contain, wouldn’t you say?” We laughed far more than was required, with an end-of-term hysteria. “Finn?” “ ‘History is that certainty produced at the point ...

Has made me want to reread the correspondence: Flaubert & Sand. If not next, soon. * He does, however, restate his aesthetic one final, forceful time. At Nohant they had playfully named a ram after him—the two M. Gustaves had been introduced to each other in 1869—and even in his last tormented years he can still put his head down and charge. Art is not a vomitorium where one relieves one’s personal feelings; the artist must be hidden in the work as God is in Nature; a novel should imply, not state, its moral; form and content are interdependent; the truth of an observation or description is a good in itself; style is not a question of surface gloss—on the contrary, good writing implies good thinking. Of course, he does not convince Sand, any more than she does him: tulips are not going to flower in the potato fields at this late stage.

As for “meaning,” Mallarmé explains his poem “La nuit approbatrice” to Cazalis thus: It is inverted, by which I mean that its meaning, if there is one (but I’d draw consolation for its lack of meaning from the dose of poetry it contains, at least in my view) is evoked by an internal mirage created by the words themselves. If you murmur it to yourself a couple of times, you get a fairly cabbalistic sensation.    The key phrase in this—and a fairly crude one by Mallarmé’s normal standards of diction—is “dose of poetry.” It makes the poetic act sound like the plying of a magic syringe. Some poor, untrained clump of words is hanging out at the track, wondering if it will ever make the grade; then along com es Mallarmé with the pot Belge and the EPO.

Richard Charles Cobb   CBE   (20 May 1917 – 15 January 1996) was a British historian and essayist, and professor at the   University of Oxford . He was the author of numerous influential works about the   history of France , particularly the   French Revolution . Cobb meticulously researched the Revolutionary era from a ground-level view sometimes described as " history from below ". Cobb is best known for his multi-volume work   The People's Armies   (1961), a massive study of the composition and mentality of the Revolution's civilian armed forces. He was a prolific writer of essays from which he fashioned numerous book-length collections about France and its people. Cobb also found much inspiration from his own life, and he composed a multitude of autobiographical writings and personal reflections. Much of his writing went unpublished in his lifetime, and several anthologies were assembled from it by other scholars after his death. (Wik...

It all got worse (it always does); indeed, it reached a poignant climax in 1989, when Cobb was so disgusted by the Bicentennial celebrations that the Revolution’s great historian resolved never to write about France again. This was a sad, love-lost, and possibly naïve decision. Renan said that “getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,” and a nation rarely gets its history as wrong as when congratulating itself on a famous yet intensely contradictory event. Cobb might have known this. But it is a measure of the largeness and precision of his love for the country that it could in the end so disappoint him.

Perhaps, by chance, there's a bit of alphabet logic in my choice? I've finished with Borges anthology on Borges (supposedly) -- good, but missing a lot of Borges "greats," and perhaps a bit too weighted with poems (and not always his best poems). I'm sure more Borges will eventually hit the Kindle menu (if it's not already there). * Just starting another Barnes: essays on all things French: Something to Declare . A "clip": La France profonde has disappeared within our century; or at least is now graspable only in tainted form. Edith Wharton saw this about to happen as she roared through France with Henry James at her side. “The trivial motorist,” as she described herself, was to prove the forerunner of other destructive agents: war, peace, communications technology, mass tourism, the industrialization of agriculture, the unfettered free market, Americanization, Eurification, greed, short-termism, complacent ahistoricism.

Enjoying Barnes' new book on Shostakovich. Am I enjoying Barnes' storytelling or the story of Shostakovich (which I knew next to nothing about) more? Hard to say. I did download some of Shostakovich's music though (listening to his string quartets now). And am inspired to reread Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (after reading Shakespeare's Macbeth) this summer -- and then perhaps get a copy of Shosti's operatic version (based on Leskov's work) that so irked Stalin. * Excerpt from Barnes' Noise : Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake. But which people, and who defines them? He always thought of his own art as anti-aristocratic. Did he write, as his det...

No pics from my walk. A little rain and some wonderful clouds (reminding me of Otto Modersohn's obsessive sketching of Wolken). Waiting for Julian Barnes' new book on Shostakovich. Have been flip-flopping between Herbert and the early poems of Thomas Bernhard. From Bernhard's Auf der Erde und in der Holle  (very last poem): In the Bushes, I Know, Are the Souls In the bushes, I know, are the souls of my fathers, in the corn is the pain of my father and in the great black forest. I know that their lives, erased before our very eyes, have found refuge in the ears of corn, in the blue brow of the June sky. I know that the dead are the trees and the winds, the moss, and the night which lays its shadows upon my burial mound. [ Translation by Peter Waugh ]

Julian Barnes. Again. Don't "love love" him, but on the other hand I keep coming back. A friend says it's about multiple voices. Dunno. Certainly he has a point here: "A" History. * Kind of just about where I am (Kindle says 66%):      Sunday. That thing about the Indians. To tell you the truth I was a bit miffed when I found out, but now I'm beginning to see it from their point of view. I told you I was learning the language -- she's really very sweet and not a stitch on but as I said no need to worry, angel, riddled with diseases I'm sure, apart from anything else, I mean. It turns out that half the words she's been teaching me are all wrong. I mean, they're real words except they're not the right ones. The first thing I learned more or less was thkarni which means -- well she said it meant -- this white stork we've been seeing a lot of. So when we saw one go flapping by I used to shout thkarni and the Indians would all...

Though I'm closer to home now, I've gone from Physics to middle school math. Underutilized perhaps, but it pays the bills. I've only written one poem this month (still tinkering). The short list of recent reading material: Kafka's Letters to Felice , Barnes' The Lemon Table , some of Paul Bowles' stories, and Daudet's In the Land of Pain (translated by Barnes). From Daudet's Pain (one of the many interesting "notes"): *Proust, in Contre Sainte-Beuve , describes how he could scarcely look Daudet in the eye when they met: 'I remembered to what extent bodily pain, so slight compared to his that no doubt he would have enjoyed it as a respite, had made me deaf and blind to other people, to life, to everything except my wretched body, towards which my mind was stubbornly bent, like a sick man lying in bed with his face turned to the wall.' Proust was astonished and impressed by the way 'the beautiful sick man' held forth on...

Photo restoration- Felix Nadar , a photo by MattysFlicks on Flickr. Nadar (Gaspard-Felix Tournachon) also plays a major part in Barnes' most recent work.