ANATHEMATIZATION OF THE WORLD
IS NOT AN ADEQUATE RESPONSE TO
THE WORLD.
(Donald Barthelme, Snow White, p.184)
Category Archives: commonplace
the rose has teeth in the mouth of a beast
“ ‘A new-born child has no teeth.’ — ‘A goose has no teeth.’ — ‘A rose has no teeth.’ — This last at any rate — one would like to say — is obviously true! It is even surer than that a goose has none. — And yet it is none so clear. For where should a rose’s teeth have been? The goose has none in its jaw. And neither, of course, has it any in its wings; but no one means that when he says it has no teeth. — Why, suppose one were to say: the cow chews its food and then dungs the rose with it, so the rose has teeth in the mouth of a beast. This would not be absurd, because one has no notion in advance where to look for teeth in a rose.”
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, pp. 221–222)
(cf. the interpretation of Matmos)
fabre’s humility
“We all have our own talents, our special gifts. Sometimes these gifts seem to come to us from our forefathers, but more often it is difficult to trace their origin.
A goatherd, perhaps, amuses himself by counting little pebbles and doing sums with them. He becomes an astoundingly quick reckoner, and in the end is a professor of mathematics. Another boy, as an age when most of us care only for play, leaves his schoolfellows at their games and listens to the imaginary sounds of an organ, a secret concert heard by him alone. He has a genius for music. A third – so small, perhaps, that he cannot eat his bread and jam without smearing his face – takes a keen delight in fashioning clay into little figures that are amazingly lifelike. If he be fortunate he will some day be a famous sculptor.
To talk about oneself is hateful, I know, but perhaps I may be allowed to do so for a moment, in order to introduce myself and my studies.”
(Jean Henri Fabre, introduction to Fabre’s Book of Insects, adapted, whatever that means, from Souvenirs Entomologiques)
(see also)
(the idea of proust inspecting baby vultures)
“This was all that I had been able to make out, apart from a sharply defined nose (a rare thing in a child) in a thin face, which recalled the beaks of baby vultures.”
(Proust, The Captive, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, pp.135–136)
haneke on freedom
“Haneke’s obsessions converge in Caché‘s final scene, a chilling long take that’s the most enigmatic conclusion in recent movie memory. ‘Using a fixed shot means there’s one less form of manipulation – the manipulation of time,’ Haneke says. ‘I’ve always wanted to create the freedom one has when reading a book, where one has all the possibilities because you create all the images in your head.’ Resolutely cryptic, he refuses to decode the scene’s meaning: ‘About half the viewers see something and the other half don’t, and it works both ways.’ He adds, invoking his protagonist’s own mental journey, ‘We always fill the screen with our own experiences. Ultimately, what we see comes from inside us.’ ”
(David Ng interview of Michael Haneke)
written by a pig.
“. . . and I am not sure that it was not about this time that she learned to say, when she wanted to indicate that she thought a book badly-written: ‘It’s interesting, but really, it might have been written by a pig.’ ”
(Proust, The Captive, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, p.10)
detail
“People who learn some correct detail about another person’s life at once draw conclusions from it which are not accurate, and see in the newly discovered fact an explanation of things that have no connexion with it whatsoever.”
(Proust, The Captive, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, pp.1–2)
the time that remains
“. . . . Before we begin our reading, I would like to make one observation on the temporal structure of lyric poetry in general, especially in metrical schemes, as they appear in the sonnet, the canzone, the sestina, and so on. From this perspective, a poem is something that will necessarily finish at a given point: it will end after fourteen lines in the sonnet, but may be prolonged by three more lines, if the sonnet has a coda.
The poem is therefore an organism or a temporal machine that, from the very start, strains toward its end. A kind of eschatology occurs within the poem itself. But for the more or less brief time that the poem lasts, it has a specific and unmistakable temporality, it has its own time. This is where rhyme, which in the sestina consists in repeated and often rhyming end words, comes into play.”
(Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: a commentary on the Letter to the Romans, p. 79, trans. Patricia Dailey)
and again
“. . . . There was a time when people recognized things easily when they were depicted by Fromentin and failed to recognize them at all when they were painted by Renoir.
Today people of taste tell us that Renoir is a great eighteenth-century painter. But when they say this they forget Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To gain this sort of recognition, an original painter or an original writer follows the path of the occultist. His painting or his prose acts upon us like a course of treatment that is not always agreeable. When it is over, the practitioner says to us, “Now look.” And at this point the world (which was not created once and for all, but as often as an original artist is born) appears utterly different from the one we knew, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we used to see, because they are Renoirs, the same Renoirs we once refused to see as women. The carriages are also Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we want to go for a walk in a forest like the one that, when we first saw it, was anything but a forest – more like a tapestry, for instance, with innumerable shades of color but lacking precisely the colors appropriate to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe that has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe unleashed by a new painter or writer with an original view of the world.”
(Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp.323–325, trans. Mark Treharne)
on being wrong
(The narrator goes to see La Berma for the second time.)
“My impression, to tell the truth, though more agreeable than before, was not really different. Only, I no longer pitted it against a preconceived, abstract, and false notion of dramatic genius, and I understood now, that dramatic genius was precisely this. I had been thinking earlier that if I had not enjoyed my first experience of La Berma it was because, as with my earlier encounters with Gilberte in the Champs-Élysées, I had approached it with too strong a desire. Between these two disappointments there was perhaps not only this resemblance, but another, deeper one. The impression made upon us by a person or a work of strong character (or its interpretation) is intrinsic to them. We have brought along with us the ideas of ‘beauty,’ ‘breadth of style,’ ‘pathos,’ which we might just possibly think we recognize in the banality of a passable talent or face, but our critical mind is confronted in fact with the nagging presence of a form for which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, the unknown part of which it needs to extricate. It hears a high-pitched sound, an oddly questioning intonation. It asks: ‘Is that good? It it admiration I am feeling? Is this what is meant by richness of color, nobility, power?’ And what answers back is a high-pitched voice, an oddly questioning tone, the despotic impression, wholly material, caused by a person we do not know, in which no scope is left for ‘breadth of interpretation.’ And for this reason, really fine works of art, if they are given genuine attention, are the ones that disappoint us most, because in the sum total of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression.”
(Proust, The Guermantes Way, p.43, trans. Mark Treharne)