Category Archives: commonplace

jealousy

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“How many people, towns, pathways jealousy makes us desperate to know! It is a thirst for knowledge thanks to which we come to have, on a series of isolated points, all possible information except the information we really want. We never know when a suspicion will arise, for suddenly we remember a phrase that was unclear, an alibi which must have been given for a purpose. It is not that we have seen the person again, but there is a jealousy after the event, which arises only after we have left the person in question, a ‘staircase jealousy’ like staircase wit. Perhaps the habit I had developed of keeping certain desires secret within myself, the desire for a young girl of good society like the ones I saw passing under my window followed by their governesses, and particularly the one Saint-Loup, who frequented brothels, had told me about, the desire for pretty lady’s-maids, and particularly Mme Putbus’s, the desire to go to the country in spring and see the hawthornes again, the desire for storms, for Venice, to set to work, to live like other people, perhaps the habit of keeping all these desires alive in me without satisfying them, simply promising myself that I would not forget to realize them one day, perhaps this habit, formed over so many years, of perpetual postponement, of what M. de Charlus damned under the name of procrastination, had become so general in me that it had invaded even my jealous suspicions and led me, while making a mental note that one day I would certainly demand an explanation from Albertine about the young girl (or young girls, for this part of the story was confused, half erased, in other words unreadable in my memory) in whose company Aimé had met her, to delay this demand.”

(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 75)

contra melville

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“The truth is that men have always hated this world and tried to get off it. The earliest myth is of man gluing wings to himself and trying to fly, and he’s trying to go to the bottom of the sea, and on land he’s trying to see how much speed he can make. Because, actually, they hate life and they hate themselves and they don’t like this earth and they’d like to leave it . . . [They] spend billions of dollars putting people on the moon where they have no business to be when we have not yet learned how to keep our water pure or have a decent system of garbage disposal or snow removal on earth.”

(Katherine Anne Porter, quoted in Alice Denham’s Sleeping with Bad Boys, p. 266. Unclear whether this is a quotation from Porter’s work or a personal communication . . .)

naming things

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“Text and textus? Text, of course, comes from the Latin textus, which means ‘web.’ In modern printing, the “web” is that great ribbon of paper which, in many presses, takes upwards of an hour to thread from roller to roller throughout the huge machine that embeds ranked rows of inked graphemes upon the ‘web,’ rendering it a text. All the uses of the words ‘web,’ ‘weave,’ ‘net,’ ‘matrix’ and more, by this circular ‘etymology’ become entrance points into a textus, which is ordered from all language and language-functions, and upon which the text itself is embedded.

The technological innovations in printing at the beginning of the Sixties, which produced the present ‘paperback revolution,’ are probably the single most important factor contouring the modern science-fiction text. But the name ‘science fiction’ in its various avatars – s-f, speculative fiction, sci-fi, scientifiction – goes back to those earlier technological advances in printing that resulted in the proliferation of ‘pulp magazines’ during the Teens and Twenties.

Naming is always a metonymic process. Sometimes it is the pure metonymy of associating an abstract group of letters (or numbers) with a person (or thing), so that it can be recalled (or listed in a metonymic order with other entity names). Frequently, however, it is a more complicated metonymy: Old words are drawn from the cultural lexicon to name the new entity (or to rename an old one), as well as to render it (whether old or new) part of the present culture. The relations between entities so named are woven together in patterns far more complicated than any alphabetic or numeric listing can suggest: and the encounter between objects-that-are-words (e.g., the name ‘science fiction,’ a critical text on science fiction, a science-fiction text) and processes-made-manifest-by-words (another science-fiction text, another critical text, another name) is as complex as the constantly dissolving interface between culture and language itself. . . .”

(Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton: an ambiguous heterotopia, pp. 282–283)

and when we lose objects?

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Every day I set less store on intellect. Every day I see more clearly that if the writer is to repossess himself of some part of his impressions, reach something personal, that is, and the only material of art, he must put it aside. What intellect restores to us under the name of the past, is not the past. In reality, as soon as each hour of one’s life has died, it embodies itself in some material object, as do the souls of the dead in certain folk-stories, and hides there. There it remains captive, captive forever, unless we should happen on the object, recognize what lies within, call it by its name, and so set it free. Very likely we may never happen on the object (or the sensation, since we apprehend every object as sensation) that it hides in; and thus there are hours of our life that will never be resuscitated: for this object is so tiny, so lost in the world, and there is so little likelihood that we shall come across it.”

(Proust, By Way of Sainte-Beuve, trans. Sylvia Townsend Warner, p. 17.)

clubs that would have you as members

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“The detachment of M. de Charlus was total. And, seeing that he was merely a spectator, everything was bound to make him pro-German from the moment when, although not truly French, he started living in France. He was very intelligent, and in all countries most of the people are silly; no doubt if he had been living in Germany he would have been equally irritated by the way the German fools defend, passionately and foolishly, an unjust cause; but living in France, he was no less irritated by the passionate and foolish defence of a cause that that was just. The logic of passion, even if it is in the service of the right, is never irrefutable for somebody who is not passionately committed to it.”

(Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson, pp. 82–83)

faust vs schweik

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“This story has a lot to do with why there isn’t very much variety. I don’t think that this characteristic is confined to America at all. Two well-known characters might be taken as the prototypes of our artists today: Faust and Schweik. Faust who makes a gnostic religion or way of life or even mystery out of art is the older style. He is beautifully described in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which is said to be based on the life of Alban Berg. Mahler, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Paik – I think of these people as Faustian.

The other type of image is even more poetic than old Faust. Schweik is a character in a great novel by that name by Haşek. Schweik is a soldier. The world explodes, but he endures. His country crumbles, but he sells dogs. He is forced into the army. He is buffeted and thrown around here and there. But he is too naive and too fine a person to pay any attention to all that. He is, perhaps, above it. At the end of the novel he wanders off into no man’s land, in pursuit of a beautiful butterfly. He may have been captured or shot: we do not know.

Right now this is the more popular kind of image. Most artists are behaving as if they had set this image for themselves. I think some consciously have. And to me, the terrible thing is that anyone behaves as if they had set any image for themselves.

Schweik is poetic. But to live up to one’s image is sheer Madison Avenue. And Madison Avenue is sick, don’t you think? Madison Avenue may plant the trees on Park Avenue every Christmas, but Madison Avenue is available to the highest bidder.

And so is living up to the image of Schweik being for sale at the noblest phrase.

But that is to get ahead of the story.”

(Dick Higgins, Postface, p. 4 in Jefferson’s Birthday/Postface, 1964.)

the sea is the sea

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“From these random slips, it would seem, that Pierre is quite conscious of much that is so anomalously hard and bitter in his lot, of much that is so black and terrific in his soul. Yet that knowing his fatal condition does not one whit enable him to change or better his condition. Conclusive proof that he has no power over his condition. For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;—nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.”

(Melville, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, from Book XXII: The Flower-Curtain Lifted from before a Tropical Author, with Some Remarks on the Transcendental Flesh-Brush Philosophy; a particularly interesting selection of text from the novel is here.)

white space

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“Magritte reopened the trap the calligram has sprung on the thing it described. But in the act, the object itself escaped. On the page of an illustrated book, we seldom pay attention to the small space running above the words and below the drawings, forever serving them as a common frontier. It is there, on these few millimeters of white, the calm sand of the page, that are established all the relations of designation, nomination, description, classification. The calligram absorbed the interstice; but once opened, it does not restore it. The trap shattered on emptiness; image and text fall each to its own side, of their own weight. No longer do they have a common ground nor a place where they can meet, where words are capable of taking shape and images of entering into lexical order. The slender, colorless, neutral strip, which in Magritte’s drawing separates the text and the figure, must be seen as a crevasse – an uncertain foggy region now dividing the pipe floating in its imagistic heaven from the mundane tramp of words marching in their successive line. Still it is too much to claim that there is a blank or lacuna: instead, it is an absence of space, an effacement of the ‘common place’ between the signs of writing and the lines of the image. The ‘pipe’ that was at one with both the statement naming it and the drawing representing it – this shadow pipe knitting the lineaments of form with the fiber of words – has utterly vanished. A disappearance that from the other side of this shallow stream the text confirms with amusement: This is not a pipe. In vain the now solitary drawing imitates as closely as possible the shape ordinarily designated by the word pipe; in vain the text unfurls below the drawing with all the attentive fidelity of a label in a scholarly book. No longer can anything pass between them save the decree of divorce, the statement at once contesting the name of the drawing and the reference of the text.”

(Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness, pp. 28–29)

eau et gaz

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“And the problem, suddenly, was that I’d been trying to be eau et gaz for all my life, that was the kind of game I was trying to play, that was the way I read the lesson I learned from Duchamp, it was a way of liberating yourself from just about everything, and it’s a very dangerous lesson to learn, the idea was to be always and totally available, even more than schizophrenic. The idea of living in a state where the mind has just simply exploded, scattered itself everywhere, and the psyche, the animus, the capacity for feeling is exploded and vaporized too, the idea of belonging to everybody, the idea then too of needing a container. I found myself deciding that I’d had enough of that and that I didn’t want to be eau et gaz any more because being a fluid in a container is a very difficult state to live in. All somebody has to do is to punch a little hole in it, and here I was suddenly full of holes. It suddenly became clear that I had to transform my whole way of being. It seemed that I couldn’t any longer be pure eroticism always at the disposal of others, just as my work couldn’t continue to be, well, so open, so open to investigation. There’s a secretiveness in Agricola Cornelia too. There’s a point where everything you’re dependent on can turn against you, and being eau et gaz is like being an irritated mucous membrane, it involves a sensibility where you can be very easily hurt by even the very slightest slight, and I decided that I’d had enough of that and that in addition to being eau et gaz, that instead of being eau et gaz I had to be something else.”

(Gianfranco Baruchello & Henry Martin, How to Imagine: a narrative on art and agriculture, pp. 52–53)