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.)

the bees

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1

When the last of the sunlight goes,
and shadows stretching from the shade
of trees and bushes, long hedgerows,
join up together to invade
wild grasses and the flat pasture,
turning from shadows into night,
then the bees, scattered far and near,
take notice, and start on their flight
back to those walls and roofs they know,
beehives where their small bodies rest
between dark and dawn; they go
over the threshold, noisy, fast,
massing in hundreds at the doors,
and pour past into their close cells,
cramming chambers and corridors
while the last of the daylight fails:
sleep silences the working hive
and leaves it quiet as the grave.

2

For bees put no trust in the sky
when storms come up with an east wind,
and seldom venture far away
from their stations when downpours impend:
instead, they draw the water off
and stick close to their city walls
where any flights they take are brief;
as the wind blows and the rain falls
they steady themselves through turbulence
by taking with them little stones
(as frail boats, faced with violence
of gales and tides, take ballast on),
and hold their given course along
the clouds, balanced, and balancing.

3

A wonder, how they reproduce:
without courtship, or lovemaking,
without letting their hearts unloose
nerves and sinews like so much string,
without the agony of birth,
they gather offspring from the leaves
and softer hearts, draw with each breath
pollen and children for the hives,
providing themselves with a fresh
ruler, and tiny citizens,
to take the place of some who crash
against the earth, onto hard stones,
brought level by their single love
for flowers and honey-vintages
(the glorious legacy they leave
behind them, in trust for the ages),
although the time that waits for them
is short enough, and not beyond
a seventh summer; yet the same
nation and race will soldier on,
deathless in spite of time’s attacks,
in cells and palaces of wax.

4

All of these things have given pause
to the bees’ watchers and guardians
whenever they ascribe the cause
to some influx, some influence
over and above the natural,
an exhalation from beyond
or an element more ethereal
than air itself – maybe the mind
of God, that strengthens as it runs
in earth and sky, or turns in deep
acres of churning oceans,
in herds of cattle, flocks of sheep,
the wild beasts and the harmless beasts,
in life that feels along a thread
from its first movement to the last,
finishing where it all started,
and never reaching a true end:
this keeps the bees away from death
when, at the last, they all ascend
into the skies they lived beneath,
to fly between undarkened spheres
in heaven, and the many stars.

(Virgil, from the Georgics, book IV. Translated from the Latin by Peter McDonald. Published in the 26 January 2007 Times Literary Supplement.)

circumference issue 5 / bernhard reading

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Circumference issue 5 is out and in better book stores, if not online. It is a fine issue, I think. Launch party is Thursday, 8 February at 7 pm at the Swiss Institute (495 Broadway, NYC); there will be readings of poetry translated from Spanish, Arabic, and Romanian by Emily Moore, Wendy Walker, and Matthew Zapruder.

ALSO in reading news: Jonathan Taylor has organized a Thomas Bernhard-themed reading at KGB (85 E. 4th St., NYC) for 7pm on the 18th of February. Readers to be Wayne Koestenbaum, Rhonda Lieberman, Ben Marcus, Geoffrey O’Brien, and Dale Peck.