the joys of reading

There are moments that just redeem everything and are a balm for your battered soul, as when a friend (thanks, dearest Jonathan!) introduces you to an unknown writer and a whole new world opens up.

Amazing, amazing Robert Walser. I shall hold you close forever keenly!

And has anyone ever described a boat trip so beautifully?

*       *       *

       Not that the water was crystal clear everywhere. Who would want to give orders to Nature? She makes no pretense of being other than she is. I don't know which is lovelier, boating on a lake or on a river, but this knowing needn't bother me. In the boat sat a few understandably contented people. A cloth canopy was stretched over their heads, and their course led beneath the twigs of the trees on the bank. Slowly they moved forward, for the rowers saw no reason to overexert themselves. What cause could there have been for this? The day is long from early morning to late in the evening. On a pleasure trip the hours don't admonish you to hurry up. It's fine to waste a little time now and then. 

[...]

       Odd similarities between things at rest and things flowing occurred to me during the trip that I, too, participated in, and I would have been delighted to have been as fascinating a stroyteller as one person there, who was asked to invent a tale so that the outing not become boring. The trip took place beneath the baldachin formed by the sky. Everyone listened to the teller's words as if to something heartening. Here and there fish, driven it seemed by an uncontrollable curiosity, bobbed upward from the depths to visibility, as though wishing to help the listeners be satisfied with the tale. On fish one finds no arms. Is that why they have such huge eyes and expressive mouths? Is it because they have no legs that they make the best swimmers? Doesn't river, Fluss, come from Flosse, fins, and aren't the latter an impediment to walking, and isn't this limitation that forms the foundation of their strength?

       A girl sitting with us in the boat compared travelling over the water to the imperceptible gliding and progress of growth, that of fruit for example, which perhaps would have little desire to ripen if it knew to what end.

       The thoughtful girl called ignorance a magnificent figure endowed with unconscious delights, sorrowful and splendid, not like those who learn arithmetic and writing, weep inwardly over their joy, and whose hearts tell them their laughter is a hardness, that they are incapable of enduring anything.

Robert Wasler, from 'Boat Trip' in Masquerade and Other Stories, trans. Susan Bernofsky (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1990), pp. 199-200.

when all other lines of communication are overloaded (1)

... Anything worth knowing passes from one man to one man. The book is still a viable way of communicating, provided one has taught oneself to find the book one needs to read. It isn't easy. All the electronic media are a flood of noise. And no medium can replace what may be an essential need in the poet: an audience. Homer recited his poems to people who cheered and even gave prizes; at least they passed around wine. Chaucer read his poems in warm firelit rooms. Every line of Shakespeare was written to move a paying audience. The next time you read a slack, obscure, convoluted poem, reflect that it was written in an age when printing has replaced recitation, and that the poet cannot tell his good poems from his bad except by fortuituous criticism.


Guy Davenport, in "Introduction" to Jonathan Williams, An Ear in Bartram's Tree (New York: New Directions, 1969), n.p.

====================

Davenport further suggests that the clarity of poems to the ear and the inner eye is to be tested in the classical weather of poetry - listening faces - and that the reading public is but a "charming fiction".

Couldn't agree more and it is from here that I derive my sense of responsibility as audience to poetry, to music: to be a totally responsive listening face, body and soul, accepting the invitation extended to me as well as my active part in the making of the work of art.

Now, more than ever, when all other channels of communication are blasted away, cluttered with unbearable noise.

sight and touch

Standing there at the wheel, conscious of the pull Ella was exerting, almost as though she were hanging heavily and warmly from my skin, a heaviness which centred at the base of my spine and at the back of my thighs, and conscious at the same time of the flickering images of the afternoon, it came to me suddenly that touch was more important than sight.

Touch convinced in a way in which sight did not. I was struck by the fact that sight is hypnotised by the surface of things; more than that, it can know only surfaces, flatnesses at a distance, meagre depths at close range. But the wetness of water felt on the hand and on the wrist is more intimate and more convincing than its colour or even than any flat expanse of sea. The eye, I thought, could never get to the centre of things; there was no connection between my eye and a plant on the windowsill or between my eye and the woman to whom I was about to make love.

Alexander Trocchi, Young Adam (1954; London: Calder, 2003), pp. 35-36.

the free man

Has just arrived from the other side of the world (thanks, Papa!), and I can hardly wait to bury myself in it.

An eye-opener, a friend tells me, reminding us how far, far removed from any form of freedom we are - and how sadly repressed. Too high a price for 'civilization'?...



From the blurb (original Portuguese version here):

Men are what they are by their nature. While one might say this is too vague a definition, it actually contains a precise, raw and true meaning. Nature is, as the English term indicates, drive, impulse, compulsion and the omnipotence of desire, what stems from that which is before reflection and judgement, what is and exists as necessity - to breathe, to eat, to have sex, and sometimes to be aggressive. Always, everywhere, all this is necessary as the condition of life, and all this is desired, and it is desired because it is good, because it quenches necessity, and quenching necessity gives pleasure. And what the Bororo teach us is precisely this: the more man is capable of overcoming nature, the more he is capable of recognizing himself as part of it.


Filipe Verde, O Homem Livre: Mito, Moral e Carácter numa Sociedade Ameríndia (Coimbra: Angelus Novus, 2009). [The Free Man: Myth, Morals and Character in an Amerindian Society; my translation]

in their matrimonial bed

I place a lot of importance on the care of the elderly within a family. I'm also a child of divorce, and like all children of divorce I want to see my parents back together. When my parents eventually need to be taken care of, all I have to do is stick their new partners in nursing homes and then I'll look after them myself--at home. I'll put them together in their matrimonial bed until they die.

Charlotte Roche, Wetlands, trans. Tom Mohr (London: Fourth Estate, 2009).


Hummm. A most promising prologue for a debut novel that has been considered 'puerile porn' and made people faint at public readings.
But, what the hell, isn't this just another fairly obvious roman-à-clef? Well, at least the author has had the good sense of expressly asking her parents, the poor things, not to read the book...

wanderlust

To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as guide. [...] I have often wished that my sentences could be written out as a single line running into the distance so that it would be clear that a sentence is likewise a road and reading is travelling.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, p. 72.