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.

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)