“The angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, already appears in its completion . . . ; that being who guarantees the recognition of a higher level of reality in the invisible.—Therefore ‘terrifying’ for us, because we, its lovers and transformers, still cling to the visible.”
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)
(note on p. 317 of The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. & trans. Stephen Mitchell.)
At three in the morning,
A quietness descends on central railway stations.
A mail van, or an ambulance, may be there;
A man in pointed boots, a Miss Carew.
Quietness keeps them apart,
The quietness that descends on central railway stations.
It is not meant for me.
It is not meant for you.
(Christopher Middleton, from Torse 3: Poems 1949–1961.)
(for Robert Walser, Swiss poet, in his madness)
Than sky, the lemon, dredged, more dark this liquid.
Fluminal violet, in a lockjaw littoral, swings
Wind-swathed, wind-cradled
Asunder the scooped rays
With fanged spire sentinels at last unbend
Over slender moles, where pedalos are harnessed.
Dazed, mad or dumb unscented gaze, but ladies
Emit, by twos and threes, conspicuous shadows
In a suave star-acre, hum in the voids they leave.
Sickle through throats of cloud the moon drops rustling
Down, as for a day forgotten. Configures heaven,
Curved luminous, in concord, over this brain’s trim bed.
Loll, where the rat stalks, the gowned fish and breed.
Air glabrous, may taste of acid, beast uncoil
Cocked like an abandoned eyebrow over
All ease, dark arbour, armoured there, his tail.
Time runs thick as thieves this iron way of water.
(Christopher Middleton, from Torse 3: Poems 1949–1961.)
“In a number of the preceding PROBABLE SYSTEMS, we have been examining concepts like ‘the weight of speech,’ ‘the speed of thot,’ etc. What becomes increasingly apparent is the need for certain world standards when it comes to print. Something as simple as measuring the circumference of words is made meaningless by the virtual babel of type-faces and type-sizes.
If a world standard were adopted – something like, say, 10 pt, or 12 pt, Helvetica, Garamond or Futura – then numerous variables could be taken into account & meaningful discussions & research could begin to take place. For instance, a more accurate notation of pitch and volume variables would become possible.* It could also illuminate discussion of the justified paragraph versus the preferred typographic mode of ragged right. And, of course, that old question of the time it takes for the mind to get around certain old thinking would finally be answerable.
This is merely to point to the advantages of setting up such a standard. Those interested could begin by forming local study groups to discuss the problem and approaches to be taken in order to get their government to adopt the notion of a World Standard for Print Size & Style. We can only hope that this initiative does not go the way of Esperanto.
written: Spring 1978
additional research & final draft: Summer 1988
* As an instance of what i’m saying here: pitch could be tracked through gradated use of type-faces; similarly, volume could be indicated by gradated use of type-sizes.”
(bpNichol, from Art Facts, p. 312 in The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader.)
There must be many other such derelicts—
orphaned, abandoned, adrift for whatever reason—
but few have kept flying before the winds
of cyberspace so briskly as Drunk Driver
(the name of the site). Anonymous (the author)
signed his last entry years ago, and more years passed
before the Comments began to accrete
like barnacles on the hull of a ship
and then in ever-bifurcating chains
on each other. The old hulk became
the refuge of a certain shy sort
of visitor, like those trucks along the waterfront
haunted by lonely souls who could not bear
eye-witness encounters. They could leave
their missives in the crevices of this latter-day
Wailing Wall, returning at intervals
to see if someone had replied, clicking
their way down from the original message—
April 4. Another gray day. Can’t find the energy to get the laundry down to the laundry room. The sciatica just won’t go away.
—through the meanders and branchings
of the encrusted messages, the tenders
of love for a beloved who would never know herself
to have been desired, the cries of despair,
the silly whimsies and failed jokes, to where
the thread had last been snapped,
only to discover that no, no one had answered
the question posed. Because,
no doubt, there was no answer.
Is there an “answer” to the war
wherever the latest war is going on?
If one could get under the ship
and see all those barnacles clinging
to the keel, what a sight it would be.
Talk about biodiversity! But on deck,
so sad, always the same three skeletons,
the playing card nailed to the mast,
frayed and fluttering weakly, like some huge insect
the gods will not allow to die.
(Tom Disch, quoted by John Crowley here)
Exhibits
Books
“It’s a paradox that, generally speaking, mystics want their religion to be mystical and their art to be inchoately logical – rather than the other way around.”
(Samuel R. Delany, interviewed by Josh Luskin, The Minnesota Review, 65–66, spring 2006.)
“Huw Nesbit: What made you remark that you believe Burroughs to be an important writer but not a great one?
John Calder: He had no interest in style. He never revised anything. He just enjoyed the act of writing. I remember sitting down with him when we were preparing Naked Lunch, and saying to him: ‘Look, this character on page so-and-so, it’s really the same one under another name a hundred pages later, isn’t it?’ and he’d say: ‘Yes, you’re probably right’. He was only interested in what he was doing in the moment and that is not the sign of a great writer. He was a good artist, but not a great craftsman.”
(from the new fiction issue. Also! a new translation of Kleist’s “The Earthquake in Chile” by Peter Wortsman (with reading!), and an interview with Ursula Le Guin.)
“The effective lifespan of a forgery, [Agnes] Mongan often said, is but a single generation. We’re not likely, in other words, to get fooled by the fakes of our fathers. Looking at forgeries much later, a person schooled in different aesthetic traditions and comfortable with other visual languages can see them for what they are, noting, say, the forger’s overly fancy, even fussy line, which, in the case of Mongan’s fake Matisse, bears the mark not of the modern master but something more conspicuous and contemporary, a more than passing resemblance perhaps to certain elegantly drawn department-store advertisements from the 1950s.”
(Paul Maliszewski, Fakers: hoaxers, con artists, counterfeiters, and other great pretenders, p. 101.)
“Fakers, by their nature, remain elusive. They seek not to be discovered. They leave no fingerprints. Their signature is invisible or looks identical to another person’s. The most gifted fakers will themselves to vanish, leaving behind only the work they made: the forged painting, say, which we nonetheless admire, or the seemingly true story, which engages and entertains us no matter how incredible it seems or how false it’s proved to be. ‘The counterfeiter’s real purpose,’ Kenner writes, ‘is to efface himself, like the Flaubertian artist, so that we will draw the conclusion he wants us to draw about how his artifact came into existence.’ Believers too are elusive – though for far different reasons. They may be embarrassed or feel disinclined to relive the moment they were taken in by a faker. ‘When did you first realize you were fooled?’ is a question nobody looks forward to answering, but for years now I have worked under the assumption that the question is in fact worth asking, and asking anew, and that the answers can tell us much about what we believe and what we want, why we trust and why we still get duped.”
(Paul Maliszewski, Fakers: hoaxers, con artists, counterfeiters, and other great pretenders, p. 84.)