Category Archives: commonplace

hammer without a nail

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“But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched; – at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.”

(Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter XCCCV, “The Chase – Third Day”.)

for so long

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“ ‘Thank heavens it’s all over now.’

‘What is?’

‘My youth. It took too long and got in my way.’

‘In your way Mr Thirst? How do you mean?’

‘It went on for so long,’ said Thirst. ‘I had about thirty years of it. You know what I mean. Experiment, experiment, experiment. And now . . .’

‘Ah!’ whispered someone.’ ”

(Mervyn Peake, Titus Alone, p. 837 in the Overlook edition of The Gormenghast Novels.)

containers for the thing contained

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“. . . we ourselves think of books as ‘containing’ chapters and paragraphs, paragraphs as ‘containing’ sentences, sentences as ‘containing’ words, words as ‘containing’ ideas, and finally ideas as ‘containing’ truth. Here the whole mental world has gone hollow. The pre-Agricolan mind had preferred to think of books as saying something, of sentences as expressing something, and of words and ideas as ‘containing’ nothing at all but rather as signifying or making signs for something.”

(Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: from the art of discourse to the art of reason, p. 121; cited in Josipovici’s The World and the Book, p. 149.)

against writing

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“In another essay I have dealt with written expression in relation to verbal expression: writing denatures the dialogue between men. [Los signos en rotación, Buenos Aires [Sur], 1965.] Although a reader may agree or disagree, he is unable to question the author and to be heard by him. Poetry, philosophy, and politics – the three activities in which speech develops all its powers – suffer a sort of mutilation. If it is true that thanks to writing we have at our disposal a universal, objective memory, it is also true that it has increased the passivity of our citizens. Writing was the sacred knowledge of all bureaucracies, and even today it is unilateral communication: it stimulates our receptive capacity and at the same time neutralizes our reactions, paralyzes our criticism. It interposes a distance between us and the one who is writing – be he philosopher or despot. But then I don’t think that the new media of oral communication in which McLuhan and others place so much hope shall succeed in reintroducing real dialogue among men. Despite their restoring to the word its verbal dynamism – something which contemporary poetry and literature have still not taken advantage of fully – radio and television increase the distance between one speaking and the one who is listening: they turn the former into an all-powerful presence, and the latter into a shadow. They are, like writing, tools of domination.”

(Octavio Paz, Claude Lévi-Strauss: an introduction, trans. J. S. Bernstein & Maxine Bernstein, pp. 108–109.)

giving it all away

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“But perhaps more essential, in The Beautiful Room Is Empty (the rather enigmatic quotation is from Kafka) are [Edmund] White’s descriptions of the discovery of the world of art, a subject not often explored by American writers. The novel begins not with a discussion of the young man’s sexual awakening but of his hunger for books, music, painting, information – commodities almost all Midwestern writers report being starved for. . . . The narrator is an interesting rarity, a budding artist and intellectual in Michigan. Normal Mailer, writing | somewhere of James Jones, speaks of ‘the terrible inferiority complex of the midwestern writer,’ meaning perhaps the feeling many Midwesterners have of coming upon culture suddenly or by accident, whether by going East to school or to Europe in a war, and having the impression that they were just now being let in on something other people had always known. . . . Though every American region has its apologists, the Midwest, which has produced so many of our greatest writers, has the fewest, is the most resolutely ‘a country where no one else was like me.’ Writers who start out there have tended to move (as White, who lives in Paris, has done) and not to take their flat, unromantic heartland for a subject. Just as blacks, from Baldwin to Baker, have found a more agreeable life in Europe, so the Midwesterners – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gellhorn, Jones, Herbst, to name a few – have their own set of circumstances to flee, those White describes so well.”

(Diane Johnson, “The Midwesterner as Artist”, pp. 71–72 in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1996)

delany/reading

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“KLS: What you’re saying suggests that, in much the same way as ‘writing,’ for Derrida, has come to mean something more complicated and broader than sitting down to scrawl a pro forma note to the landlord accompanying the rent check, so ‘reading’ for you has become a more complicated and broader process than running an eye over the list of contents on the back of the cereal box while waiting for the morning coffee to drip through.

SRD:Yes – or rather: for me, reading has expanded to include all we do in such a situation, from taking in the fact that it’s a cereal box at all and not a novel by Coover or Perec; that it’s breakfast time; that we pay a certain kind of attention to what’s written on that cereal box and not another kind; the ways we might put that information to use, in terms of diet or medical situations; how we remember those contents for so long and not longer – indeed, the set of material forces that constitutes, finally, ‘the contents listed on the back of the box’ as we read them.”

(K. Leslie Steiner, “An Interview with Samuel Delany”, pp. 98–99, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1996.)

i have had to find it out for myself

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“I am a different person with everyone I know. I would never have met the Jolivet I am with Jonquille had she not created him. This is strange. I have had to find it out for myself. No one has ever explained so clear and obvious a truth about people and identity to me.

Jonquille’s Jolivet was a surprise to me. Michel’s Jolivet a delight. I like Michel’s Jolivet as much as Jonquille’s Jolivet. I like Victor’s Jolivet, a splendid person I could not otherwise have been, Maman’s Jolivet, an uncertain but confident son, and Papa’s affectionate Jolivet.

Marc Aurel’s Jolivet is an imaginary and improbable character I have never met, called into intermittent being by Marc Aurel. In Trombone’s presence I do not exist. With Tullio I have the feeling that I represent somebody Tullio mistakenly thinks is there by happy error.

Liking, then, is not only of the person liked, but of the unique and otherwise absent person the other develops in us, releases in us, creates of us. A friend is an engendering. We love those who make us lovable. A friend is the friend a friend finds and brings out in another.”

(Guy Davenport, from “On Some Lines of Virgil”, pp. 187–188 in Eclogues.)

musil & gadda

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“For Musil, knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibility of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude – or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality – while the other he calls soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos. Everthing he knows or thinks he deposits in an encyclopedic book that he tries to keep in the form of a novel, but its structure continually changes; it comes to pieces in his hands. The result is that not only does he never manage to finish the novel, but he never succeeds in deciding on its general outlines or how to contain the enormous mass of material within set limits. If we compare these two engineer-writers, Gadda, for whom understanding meant allowing himself to become tangled in a network of relationships, and Musil, who gives the impression of always understanding everything in the multiplicity of codes and levels of things without ever allowing himself to become involved, we have to record this one fact common to both: their inability to find an ending.”

(Italo Calvino, “Multiplicity” in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, trans. Patrick Creagh.)

but rather to know these subjects by speaking of them with reverence

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“. . . St. Augustine’s comment on his study of the Trinity (and in the awareness that if my subject is not so exalted as his it is perhaps of an equally baffling complexity): ‘Therefore I have undertaken this work . . . not for the sake of speaking with authority about what I know but rather to know these subjects by speaking of them with reverence.’ “

(Gabriel Josipovici, The Word and the Book: a study of modern fiction, p. xvii.)

complacency

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“We must constantly remember that earlier, at the time of the Impressionists or of Cézanne, modern painting was something you never saw. Or else, when people did open their eyes to it, it caused a scandal . . . Today, provided it doesn’t look like anything that could really be called painting, everything is modern . . . and as soon as it appears it’s a work of genius, and all the rest doesn’t even exist. As though people had suddenly become so perceptive that they knew all about it as soon as it has even begun to take shape. Whereas in reality they see precisely as they always did or even worse. Because now they see in exactly the same way but they imagine they’ve learnt to see properly.”

(Pablo Picasso, 1966, unsourced epigraph to the preface of Gabriel Josipovici’s The World and the Book: a study of modern fiction.)