Category Archives: commonplace

response to a request

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“Remember what I told you before; namely – and you’ll know it still, I hope – that it is possible for one eye alone, open or closed, to achieve an effect of terror, beauty, grief, or love, or what have you. It doesn’t take much to show love, but at some time or another in your, praise God, disastrous life you must have felt, honestly and simply, what love is and how love likes to behave. It is the same, naturally, with anger also, and with feelings of speechless grief; briefly, with every human feeling. Incidentally, I advise you to perform athletic exercises often in your room, to go for walks in the forest, to fortify the wings of your lungs, to practice sports, but only select and balanced sports, to go to the circus and observe the behavior of the clowns, and then seriously to consider by which rapid movements of your body you can best render a spasm of the soul. The stage is the open, sensual throat of poetry, and dear sir, it is your legs that can strikingly manifest quite definite states of the soul, not to mention your face and its thousand mimings. You must take possession of your hair, if, in order to manifest fright, it is to stand on end, so that the spectators, who are bankers and grocers, will gaze at you in horror.”

(Robert Walser, “Response to a Request” (1907), in The Walk, trans. Christopher Middleton, p. 4)

an ideal for living

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” ‘Include Marcel Duchamp in your book.

Just like you, Marcel Duchamp had few ideas. Once, in Paris, the artist Naum Gabo asked him directly why he had stopped painting. “Mais que voulez-vous?” Duchamp replied, spreading wide his arms, “je n’ai plus d’idées” (What do you expect? I’ve no more ideas).

In time he would provide other, more sophisticated explanations, but this one was probably closest to the truth. After The Large Glass, Duchamp had run out of ideas, so instead of repeating himself he simply stopped creating.

Duchamp’s life was his finest work of art. He abandoned painting very early on and embarked on a daring adventure in which art was conceived, first and foremst, as a cosa mentale, in the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci. He wanted always to place art at the service of the mind and it was precisely this desire – driven by his particular use of language, by chance, optics, films and, above all, by his famous “readymades” – which stealthily undermined 500 years of Western art and transformed it completely.

Duchamp abandoned painting for over fifty years because he preferred to play chess. Isn’t that wonderful?

I imagine you are perfectly aware who Duchamp was, but let me remind you of his activities as a writer; let me relate how Duchamp helped Katherine Dreier form her own personal museum of modern art called the Sociéteé Anonyme, Inc., advising her what art works to collect. When plans were made to donate the collection to Yale University in the forties, Duchamp wrote thirty-three one-page biographical and critical notices on artists from Archipenko to Jacques Villon.

Roger Shattuck has written in the New York Review of Books that had Marcel Duchamp decided, not uncharacteristically, to include a notice on himself as one of Dreier’s artists, he would probably have produced an astute blend of truth and fable, like the others he wrote. Roger Shattuck suggest that he might have written something along these lines:

“A tournament chess player and intermittent artist, Marcel Duchamp was born in France in 1887 and died a United States citizen in 1968. He was at home in both countries and divided his time between them. At the New York Armory Show of 1913, his Nude Descending a Staircase delighted and offended the press, provoked a scandal that made him famous in absentia at the age of twenty-six, and drew him to the United States in 1915. After four exciting years in New York City, he departed and devoted most of his time to chess until about 1954. A number of young artists and curators in several countries then rediscovered Duchamp and his work. He had returned to New York in 1942 and during his last decade there, between 1958 and 1968, he once again became famous and influential.”

Include Marcel Duchamp in your book about Bartleby’s shadow. Duchamp knew that shadow personally, he made it with his own hands. In a book of interviews, Pierre Cabanne asks him at one point if he undertook any artistic activity during those twenty summers he spent at Cadaqués. Duchamp answers that he did, since every year he had to repair an awning that sheltered him on his terrace. I admire him greatly and, what’s more, he’s a man who brings luck – include him in your treatise on the No. What I most admire about him is that he was a first-rate trickster.’ “

(Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co., trans. Jonathan Dunne, pp. 56–58.)

the internet has always been there

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“Are there any other reasons for thinking it is better to write? Yes. One of them is very simple: because it is still possible to write in the classical style with a heightened sense of the risk and of beauty. This is the great lesson to be drawn from Del Giudice’s book, since in it, on page after page, there is a profound interest in the antiquity of the new. Because the past always re-emerges with a twist. The Internet, for example, is new, but the net has always existed. The net fisherman used for catching fish serves now not to enclose prey, but to open up the world to us. Everything remains, but changes; the everlasting is repeated mortally in the new, which is gone in a flash.”

(Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co., trans. Jonathan Dunne, pp. 25–26.)

as wonderful as being a strain

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“If my life means anything, it is that I am always forgetting just what it is that I want. How’s that for meaning? I have found a way to be unsatisfied by everything and always somewhat pleasantly excited. Or painfully excited. What’s Zen compared to that? What’s Academia’s compelling suture? its compiling future? I want to know who has ever found anything as wonderful as being a strain – not the strainer or the strained, but the thing itself, held tight between two eternities (what is that?) like a dog, held on two leashes, by two enraged furies, the eyes of the world, the peacemakers of eternity (that word again, you would think I wanted to die, if you didn’t know me better, it is more that in truth I would like to vanish, but into this prose study to live forever here but also be eternally writing, my ideal would be a text that was always writing, but then on the other hand I have never been aware of being interested in that, and I can’t imagine actually as I read it over what it means – I have to get out of this sidetrack: I have something important to say), the stones that are never lying in the grass but are always bouncing around. And I’m held between them. They tug me. And I resist. I run and they chase me. The can never stop me from moving and I can never completely get away. What’s Dante’s Paradise compared to that? You always think I am kidding. I am trying to define happiness by what I have actually got and go on from there. Afterwards we can have something to eat and drink and re-enter the process, you who seem more comfortable in the process but who are, I imagine, inside, like me, a watcher of Essaouiras. Do I love you for that? I don’t know if I love you or have ever loved anything or anyone. I am a desert. Kill me. And now a town. Signed, ‘Zagora.’ “

(Kenneth Koch, from “Reflections on Morocco,” pp. 355–356 in The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. Quoted by Tanya Larkin in the Boston Review here.)

delany explains things

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“One person’s fantasy is another’s reality. The difference between fantasy and the real, however, is that the ethical and moral implications the fantasy has for the person who indulges in it are always ones brought to it from a prior reality. The ethical and moral implications for those who live through what might once have been for them a fantasy situation can come from the reality of the situation; and so may be very different.”

(Samuel R. Delany, Heavenly Breakfast: an essay on the winter of love, p. 22)

the python that will devour it

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“As soon as I realized this I felt panic within me. The calm which I had just sampled was the first appearance of the great but intermittent force which would struggle within me against pain and against love, and would ultimately overcome them. What I had just had a foretaste and foreboding of, if only for a moment, was that which would later become a permanent state for me, a life where I would no longer suffer because of Albertine, where I would no longer love her. And my love, which had just recognized the only enemy able to vanquish it, the act of forgetting, started to tremble, like a lion enclosed in a cage which has suddenly seen the python that will devour it.”

(Proust, The Fugitive, trans. Peter Collier, p. 415.)

that everything is surface

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                             But your eyes proclaim
That everything is surface. The surface is what’s there
And nothing can exist except what’s there.
There are no recesses in the room, only alcoves,
And the window doesn’t matter much, or that
Sliver of window or mirror on the right, even
As a gauge of the weather, which in French is
Le temps, the word for time, and which
Follows a course wherein changes are merely
Features of the whole. The whole is stable within
Instability, a globe like ours, resting
On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball
Secure on its jet of water.
And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to say what it really is, that it is not
Superficial but a visible core, then there is
No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.
You will stay on, restive, serene in
Your gesture which is neither embrace nor warning
But which holds something of both in pure
Affirmation that doesn’t affirm anything.

(John Ashbery, from “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”)

interviewer: what kind of action can you hope to take?

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“POUND: The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these package words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight if there is going to be any intellect left.

It is doubtful whether the individual soul is going to be allowed to survive at all. Now you get a Buddhist movement with everything except Confucius taken into it. An Indian Circe of negation and dissolution.

We are up against so many mysteries. There is the problem of benevolence, the point at which benevolence has ceased to be operative. Eliot says that they spend their time trying to imagine systems so perfect that nobody will have to be good. A lot of questions asked in that essay of Eliot’s cannot be dodged, like the question whether there need be any change from the Dantesque scale of values or the Chaucerian scale of values. Is so, how much? People who have lost reverence have lost a great deal. That was where I split with Tiffany Thayer. All these large words fall into clichés.

There is the mystery of the scattering, the fact that the people who presumably understand each other are geographically scattered. A man who fits in his milieu as Frost does, is to be considered a happy man.

Oh, the luck of a man like Mavrocordato, who is in touch with other scholars, so that there is somewhere where he can verify a point! Now for certain points where I want verification there is a fellow named Dazzi in Venice that I write to and he comes up with an answer, as it might be about the forged Donation of Constantine. But the advantages which were supposed to inhere in the university – where there are other people to contrôl opinion or to contrôl the data – were very great. It is crippling not to have had them. Of course I have been trying over a ten-year period to get any member of an American faculty to mention any other member of his same faculty, in his own department or outside it, whose intelligence he respects or with whom he will discuss serious matters. In one case the gentleman regretted that someone else had left the faculty.

I have been unable to get straight answers out of people on what appeared to me to be vital questions. That may have been due to my violence or obscurity with which I framed the questions. Often, I think, so-called obscurity is not obscurity in the language, but in the other person’s not being able to make out why you are saying a thing. For instance the attack on Endymion was complicated because Gifford and company couldn’t see why the deuce Keats was doing it.

Another struggle has been the struggle to keep the value of a local and particular character, of a particular culture in this awful maelstrom, this awful avalanche toward uniformity. The whole fight is for the conservation of the individual soul. The enemy is the suppression of history; against us is the bewildering propaganda and brainwash, luxury and violence. Sixty years ago, poetry was the poor man’s art: a man off on the edge of the wilderness, or Frémont, going off with a Greek text in his pocket. A man who wanted the best could have it on a lonely farm. Then there was the cinema, and now television.”

(Ezra Pound, interviewed by Donald Hall for the Paris Review in 1962.)

the failure of surrealism

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“Past the period of the revelation and enthusiasm of its beginnings, surrealism was ineluctably destined to blend in with preexisting ways of feeling, ways of living, and ways of writing, because its initial stakes were entirely placed on exceptionally rare conjunctions, almost as slow to reproduce themselves as the conjunctions of stars, and which it could not ultimately claim to read in the book of life in the faint glow of a flash of lightning (the singular merit of Nadja is to almost convince you, through the potent charm of the writing, that such conjunctions could be rather frequent and form the fabric of a life). But blending in was what Breton could not accept, could never accept. In wanting to establish surrealism as an autonomous and closed way of living, the problem was making a lifestyle work full time that in the last analysis relied only on miracles, intermittent by definition . . . .”

(Julien Gracq, “Surrealism”, pp. 301–302 in Reading Writing, trans. Jeanine Herman)

a true likeness without a resemblance

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“The story an opera tells makes imaginative sense perhaps – odd people wait around and sing now and then to music played in a pit – even before it starts we know who Einstein was and what a beach is and the believability of opera – EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH is an opera – there are scene changes – a courtroom, a prison, a field, a train, a moon, a computer building, a space ship, a small boy on a tower throwing older-paper-airplanes, two very beautiful single heroines too, you can see a few times their lovely fingers counting eighth notes – and there is a wonderful solo dance – the cast doesn’t change clothes, it sings a lot and acts different parts and dances and sometimes someone freezes in a pose – the stage action is clear, unforeseen, and straight – even touching – it isn’t symbolism or telling a story – watching it happen, the spacious proportions for looking and seeing make it easy to breathe and stay open and very soon to realize the exalting strength of the music listening to it section by sectino, a continuous present moment of time for four hours, the energy and force of the score – driving, clear, new, straight – a structure or wall that opens on brick, like a half-step outward or further inward, and with that one step it builds or grows a whole unforeseeable further structure – no telling how the stage action keeps finding room to press through that wall effortlessly, sweetly, and so spaciously – a double structure for artists and audience together, ears and eyes – for all of us in the building together – what an elating evening! (I am speaking here of the preparatory New York rehearsals that I was at.) A Parisian lady exclaimed, “It’s the best opera since Pélléas!” everybody laughed happily – a true likeness without a resemblance.

(Edwin Denby, October 12, 1978, New York City. Text from the back of the CBS recording of Philip Glass & Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach.