continuing to live

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Continuing to live – that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries –
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.

This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise –
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it’s chess.

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.

And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.

(Philip Larkin)

of modern poetry

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The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
                                Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
                                                                It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

(Wallace Stevens)

intent / the morality of design

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“Thus, I have come to you tonight empty-handed, having no offerings of Aims to give, because no Aim is so exalted that it be worth a heartbeat more than Decency of Means. Because, when all is said and done, Decency of Means is the Aim of aims.”

(Stefan Themerson, from The Chair of Decency, the 1981 Johan Huizinga Lecture at the Hooglandse Kerk in Leyden. Quoted in The Themersons and the Gaberbocchus Press: an experiment in publishing 1948–1979, ed. Jan Kubasiewicz & Monica Strauss, p. 39. More here.)

left imperfect

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“To draw up in advance an exact and detailed plan is to deprive our mind of the pleasures of the encounter and the novelty that comes from executing the work. It is to make the execution insipid for us and consequently impossible in works that depend on enthusiasm and imagination. Such a plan is itself a half-work. It must be left imperfect if we want to please ourselves. We must say it cannot be finished. In fact it must not be, for a very good reason: it is impossible. We can, however, draw up such plans for works whose execution and accomplishment are a mechanical thing, a thing that depends above all on the hand. This is suitable and even very useful for painters, for sculptors. Their senses, with each stroke of the brush or chisel, will find this novelty that did not exist for their minds. Forms and colors, which the imagination cannot represent to us as perfectly as the eye can, will offer the artist a horde of these encounters which are indispensable to giving genius pleasure in work. But the orator, the poet, and the philosopher will not find the same encouragement in writing down what they have already thought. Everything is one for them. Because the words they use have beauty only for the mind and, having been spoken in their head in the same way they are written on the page, the mind no longer has anything to discover in what it wants to say. A plan however is necessary, but a plan that is vague, that has not been pinned down. We must above all have a notion of the beginning, the end, and the middle of our work. That is to say, we must choose its pitch and range, its pauses, and its objectives. The first word must give the color, the beginning determines the tone; the middle rules the measure, the time, the space, the proportions.”

(Joseph Joubert, from The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, trans. Paul Auster, pp. 39–40.)

the lincoln-wilson effect

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“In most cases the impossibility becomes apparent after viewing the figure for a few seconds however the initial impression of a 3D object remains even after it has been contradicted. There are also more subtle examples of impossible objects where the the impossibility does not become apparent spontaneously and it is necessary to consciously examine the geometry of the implied object to determine that it is impossible.” The bed in the advertisement is an impossible object, a theme perhaps not discussed in topology or other sciences until later. The very words “impossible object” are suggestive of meanings which might be illuminatingly applied in the description of an artist, as Apollinaire himself was rather an impossible object, at least after some meanings are unpacked (Picasso drew him masturbating among friends). Any work of art, as an aesthetic illusion, is an impossible object in a separate sense. So Duchamp calls attention to an impossible object, while Penrose opens themes Duchamp might well be credited with appreciating, albeit tacitly. The spelling of Apolinère in relation to Apollinaire is like Guilliame in relation to my name, William, otherwise Bill Wilson. So think about the same name differently spelled. Your themes now include art, visual perception, platonic ideal beds, and reach Escher and undecidability, as if Duchamp had said, “I am a liar,” and pointed toward the pictured bed, itself a visual lie… If a work of art is true to itself, it is false to the materials which convey it. Were Duchamp to have said, “I am a liar,” his statement would be true if it were false, but false if it were true: thus an impossible object. Jasper Johns did write “I am a liar” in some works of art which elaborate on Duchampian undecidable verbal and visual statements.”

(William S. Wilson, from a posting here on Apolinère Enameled).

two serpents

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“When, dreadful to behold, from sea we spied
Two serpents, rank’d abreast, the seas divide,
And smoothly sweep along the swelling tide.
Their flaming crests above the waves they show;
Their bellies seem to burn the seas below;
Their speckled tails advance to steer their course,
And on the sounding shore the flying billows force.
And now the strand, and now the plain they held;
Their ardent eyes with bloody streaks were fill’d;
Their nimble tongues they brandish’d as they came,
And lick’d their hissing jaws, that sputter’d flame.”

(Vergil, The Aeneid, book II, lines 269–271, trans. John Dryden.)

to live without questions

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“My theme does meddle somewhat, of course, as if it came too close to life, which may perhaps have grown too sensitive. What made life so? Is it going to stay as it is, or change? Why am I asking this? Why do so many questions come to me, softly, one after the other? I know, for instance, that I can live without questions. I lived without them for a long time, knew nothing of them. I was open-minded, without their invading me. Now they look at me as if I had an obligation to them. I too, like many people, became sensitive. Time is sensitive, like a person begging for help, a person perplexed. The questions beg and are sensitive and insensitive. The sensitivities harden. The disobliged person is perhaps the most sensitive. Obligations make me, for instance, hard. Those who are begged beg the beggars, who don’t understand this. The questions gaze solicitously in upon them, and are not solicitous, and those who take care of them care for the increase of the questions which regard their answerers as being insensitive. The person who’ll not let them disturb his equanimity for an instant is sensitive in their sight. In that they appear to him answered, he answers them. Why do many people not trust them this way?”

(Robert Walser, “Masters and Workers” (1928), in The Walk, trans. Christopher Middleton, p. 178.)

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)