Category Archives: commonplace

a book is a box full of words

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“(‘A book is a box full of words,’ the O’ had said. ‘Some books are boxes full of boxes – Chinese boxes.’ ‘An effect resembling the circus clown car.’ ‘Yes, some books are just one big box with five sides that you put over a trapdoor in the floor of the world – and up comes everything until the box bursts.’ The story within the story within one of Marco Polo’s Chinese boxes – and whether or not he ever went to China, I certainly went to Washington.

Or as my favorite exhibit at the LC, Keith Smith’s ‘string book’ – instead of a written story, the reader follows strings shifting into suggestive patterns as they travel [like the ropes the Norns pass back and forth in Götterdämmerung] through the pages. Not knowing from page to page what form the strings will take creates numerous narrative yarns and multiple variations on the theme of loss.)”

(James McCourt, Delancey’s Way, pp. 206–7.)

maps vs. blueprints

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“”Waking at dawn, I went out and down to Duval Street for coffee at an all-night stand, then to the southernmost point in the U.S. I sat on a bollard trying to work out the following question – one O’Maurigan had posed on the flight down, quoting an exchange between Hart Crane and one of his critics. Do the compass, the quadrant, and the sextant contrive tides, or do they merely record them? You can see why.”

(James McCourt, Delancey’s Way, p. 157.)

153. finale

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“The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects – this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.”

(Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 247.)

rather than flow-through

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“I looked at my image in the window again. I had never had a problem conceiving of myself as in a movie. But suddenly came this deconstructionist vogue for the comic book, and I was more and more experiencing stop-frame and panel memory rather than flow-through.”

(James McCourt, Delancey’s Way, pp. 18–19.)

recapitulating duchamp

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“All right. The problem is that there is no new problem. It must awaken from the sleep of being part of some other, old problem, and by that time its new problematical existence will have already begun, carrying it forward into situations with which it cannot cope, since no one recognizes it and it does not even recognize itself yet, or know what it is. It is like the beginning of a beautiful day, with all the birds singing in the trees, reading their joy and excitement into its record as it progresses, and yet the progress of any day, good or bad, brings with it all kinds of difficulties that should have been foreseen but never are, so that it finally seems as though they are what stifles it, in the majesty of a sunset or merely in gradual dullness that gets dimmer and dimmer until it finally sinks into flat, sour darkness. Why is this? Because not one-tenth or even one-hundredth of the ravishing possibilities the birds sing about at dawn could ever be realized in the course of a single day, no matter how crammed with fortunate events it might turn out to be. And this brings on inevitable reproaches, unmerited of course, for we are all like children sulking because they cannot have the moon; and very soon the unreasonableness of these demands is forgotten and overwhelmed in a wave of melancholy of which it is the sole cause. Finally we know only that we are unhappy but we cannot tell why. We forget that it is our own childishness that is to blame.”

(John Ashbery, “The Recital,” pp. 107–108 in Three Poems.)

this “other tradition”

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“It is this ‘other tradition’ which we propose to explore. The facts of history have been too well rehearsed (I’m speaking needless to say not of written history but the oral kind that goes on in you without your having to do anything about it) to require further elucidation here. But the other, unrelated happenings that form a kind of sequence of fantastic reflections as they succeed each other at a pace and according to an inner necessity of their own – these, I say, have hardly ever been looked at from a vantage point other than the historian’s and an arcane historian’s at that. The living aspect of these obscure phenomena has never to my knowledge been examined from a point of view like the painter’s: in the round, bathed in a sufficient flow of overhead light, with ‘all its imperfections on its head’ and yet without prejudice of the exaggerations either of the anathematist or the eulogist: quietly, in short, and I hope succinctly. judged from this angle the whole affair will, I think, partake of and benefit from the enthusiasm not of the religious fanatic but of the average, open-minded, intelligent person who has never interested himself before in these matters either from not having had the leisure to do so or from ignorance of their existence.”

(John Ashbery, “The System,” p. 56 in Three Poems.)

only the one way

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“There is probably more than one way of proceeding but of course you want only the one way that is denied you, the leaves over that barrier will never turn the sorrowful agate hue of the rest but only burnish perpetually in a colorless, livid explosion that is a chant of praise for your having remained behind to think rather than act. Meditation rains down on you to be sucked up in turn by the sun like steam, making it all the more difficult to know where the branching out should occur. It is like approaching a river at night, uncertain of the direction of the current. But the pulsating of it leads to further certainties because, bouncing off the vortexes to be joined, the cyclical force succeeds in defining its negative outline. For the moment uncertainty is banished at the same time that growing is introduced almost surreptitiously, under the guise of an invitation to learn all about these multiple phenomena which are our being here, since a knowledge of them is after all vital to our survival in this place of provocative but baffling commonplace events.”

(John Ashbery, “The New Spirit,” pp. 31–32 in Three Poems.)

for we judge not, lest we be judged

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“It’s just beginning. Now it’s started to work again. The visitation, was it more or less over. No, it had not yet begun, except as a preparatory dream which seemed to have the rough texture of life, but which dwindled into starshine like all the unwanted memories. There was no holding on to it. But for that we ought to be glad, no one really needed it, yet it was not utterly worthless, it taught us the forms of this our present waking life, the manners of the unreachable. And its judgments, though harmless and playful, were yet the form of utterance by which judgment shall come to be known. For we judge not, lest we be judged, yet we are judged all the same, without noticing, until one day we wake up a different color, the color of the filter of the opinions and ideas everyone has ever entertained about us. And in this form we must prepare, now, to try to live.”

(John Ashbery, “The New Spirit,” pp. 7–8 in Three Poems.)

master of the hovering life

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“[Frederick G.] Peters cites the following from Musil:

A man who is after the truth sets out to be a man of learning; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity sets out, perhaps, to be a writer. But what is the man to do who is after something that lies between?

His own answer was to become what he saw as a ‘master of the hovering life,’ to navigate freely between the two, ideally embracing both.”

(Sven Birkerts, “Robert Musil,” p. 29 in An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature.)