Silver Fragments

1. At a certain point in the past decade zany and orotund seriocomic American novelist Stanley Elkin, a victim of chronic illness and gone since 1995, has risen to the very top echelon for me and I think I prize only Robert Coover higher in the whole of the American Lit pantheon, sea to shining sea, forever may your barge ride large. Elkin likened his own work and process to those of his friend William H. Gass and Saul Bellow, Lion of Letters, a Jewish and American writer like Elkin, though technically he was born in Montreal. Elkin feels a fraternal bond with Gass and Bellow because he believes they are the three of them above all “stylists.” In truth, they are to a man veritable pontiffs of style, its ne plus ultra. A few years back I found myself returning to Saul Bellow, a man whose writing I had not appraised since I was a teenager, and even then merely by way of having read but a single book. Obviously, all writers have a style and establish means to work their stye out within adaptable parameters (form, plotting, structural conceits, full-on architectural overview), but what Elkin means when he dishes us up stylists is that some literary artists are unusually attentive to the possibilities of language and the marvellous balletic performances that can be engineered sentence to sentence when writing down sentences is your chosen way of life. If Bellow is not a brass band blowing the roof off the joint to quite the extent Elkin is, there can be no denying that both writers will tend to present the reader with a highly-idiomatic scree of superhuman language pizzaz and infectious bonhomie. Again, Elkin dealt with chronic illness his whole life, and yet he’s somehow the jolliest prose stylist I’ve ever read. Bellow and Elkin are writers attentive to the joys of language as well as of much else native to bittersweet life. Language is immanent to and proper to life lived by human animals and other kinds too. Idiomatic language humanizes through comedy, absurdity, and pathos. A person is not fired in a Saul Bellow yarn, they are given the “shove-ho.” If you’ve never read it, you should do yourself a favour and scoop a copy of his third and most widely-beloved novel The Adventures of Augie March, a Chicago-and-beyond Bildungsroman whose author and protagonist both have so much get-up-and-go you almost worry about coinciding cardiac events. Social mobility, the sensibility born of good-humoured ironic opposition, Napoleon’s legacy of a nobility promising itself available to the marginal, and the notion that a man’s destiny might well serve as his guiding principle: the novel is about Augie’s relationship with his destiny, his individual piece of the greater universal wholeness. “My mind was already dwelling on a good enough fate.” If you forget he said that there’s a pretty good chance Augie will say it again later in some whole other way. Shall we also do the proper dainty bookclub thing and pause and consider that name? Augie March. Auger, august, march, the god Mars. A beautiful little poem about destiny and its pursuit, all on its own. How might Stanley Elkin pause to offer an encompassing statement on man’s condition and the bigger picture? Well, here he is in 1987’s The Rabbi of Lud: “I atoned, not quite grieving but getting warmer and aware of the immense, twisted tonnage of complex grief in the world at any given time, in any given place, some tight amalgam of woe and rue and complicity and fear. Grief like a land mass, like the seas, complicated as weather seen from high space or the veiled, tie-dye smudge of the alloy earth itself."

2. Overwhelming pleasure, blinding divine horror, annihilating ecstasy. “The sexual act poses a threat to our being because it places no limit on experience,” writes Ken Hollings in an essay on Georges Bataille called “In the Slaughterhouse of Love.” “During the act, the body no longer has limit or definition: it is dissolved into a storm of sensations which are violently superimposed and fluctuating. The effect that this has upon our consciousness can only be expressed negatively: in terms of exclusion and absence. The contemplation of the sexual act begins and ends in darkness and silence because it is contained by a law of exclusion which operates at the extreme limits of language and lucidity.” We’re definitely somewhere in Wilhelm Reich country—this sounds like the ultimate death metal orgone blast to beat the band (the sun notwithstanding). Naturally, anybody who has ever had an orgasm should basically get it. Yukio Mishima named Georges Bataille along with Witold Gombrowicz and Pierre Klossowski, the latter a one-time friend and collaborator of Bataille’s, as among his favourite Western writers, specifying shared habits respective of “an anti-psychological delineation, anti-realism, erotic intellectualism, straightforward symbolism, and a perception of the universe hidden behind all of these, as well as many other common characteristics.” Part of the vulnerability of the sex act lies in the fact that we cannot wear masks and dissemble when we have sex the way we normally might do. For Bataille, there is in sex as in panic “a certain lacerating consciousness of distress.” Additionally, there are ideas of limit and “unbearable surpassing,” the precise way in which mysticism and debauchery become wound like serpents. Bataille’s academic specialization was anthropology and that’s where he got much of his juiciest material. Among the most astonishing and provocative examples is a short vignette called “The Dead Man” which was written in the middle of the Second World War, probably near Normandy when Bataille was suffering from tuberculosis, but was not to see publication until after his death. It depicts a frenzied collective spree, but in a hyper-fragmented mode and with an uncommon level of general ghastliness, involving a golden shower, feces, vomit, and a dwarf who happens to be a fantastically disreputable count. An act of copulation is described as “hand to hand combat, unbelievably bitter.” In the end, impassive permanence trumps transient relations on the planetary surface. Ken Hollings draws a connection between myths explored by Bataille and the discovery of “several oceanic cultures where a whole community would react to the death of their chief by entering into a prolonged period of frenzy. They gave themselves over to murder, looting, arson, and sexual excess, continuing to do so until the decaying flesh had fallen away from the dead chief’s bones. At this point normal patterns of behaviour reasserted themselves.”

3. What do we find in Bleak House, a tale told by Charles Dickens? Hypocritical society ladies with prized charities, Law as Law of Cost, crime scene protocols, cemeteries, infirmities, public hygiene, dandyism, compound interest, and death by Spontaneous Combustion (!) G.K. Chesterton asserts of Charles Dickens that with this novel called Bleak House the great author has moved away from meandering quixotic narratives and towards something much more like what fancy 20th century critics might be inclined to call “the systems novel.” “When we come to Bleak House,” writes Chesterton, “we come to vital change in artistic structure. The thing is no longer a string of incidents; it is a cycle of incidents. It returns upon itself; it has recurrent melody and poetic justice; it has artistic constancy and artistic revenge. It preserves the unities; even to some extent it preserves the unities of time and place. The story circles round two or three symbolic places; it does not go straggling irregularly all over England like one of Mr. Pickwick’s coaches. People go from one place to another place; but not from one place to another place on the road to everywhere else.” I have always thought of human culture as analogous to ongoing weather systems and in a way I think of the “cycle of incidents,” especially as here theorized, as a kind of weather. What Chesterton means to index later by “sinister and unnatural vapour” is verily obviously the famous London fog, a comforting and renowned return visitor throughout the Dickens corpus, huffing and puffing and blowing its showy smoke. Is it not the absence of a fixed, univocal, and coherent perceptible field, no matter how exhaustive the vision, that ultimately finds its analogical equivalent in that great fog of fogs? Doesn’t this sound fishily like the most postmodern shit you ever heard? Please, don’t even get me started on Miguel de Cervantes and Laurence Sterne. Was it always postmodern? I don’t know, was was ever was? The systems novel has ascended to a plateau where it can address chaos theory, the second law of thermodynamics, and something soon to be known as quantum entanglement as least once we’ve gotten to the supreme Austrian modernist Hermann Broch (1886-1951), who writes in Sleepwalkers that “there are irrational forces, that they are effective, and that their very nature impels them to attach themselves to a new organon of values, to a total system which in the eyes of the Church can be no other than that of the Antichrist.” Sounds like more weather to me. Forces of industrial, military, and broadly institutional modernization set in motion acceleration and entropy. What will they have left behind to speak for them? Open pit mines, a sea full of trash, atomization and diminishment of neurological capabilities, a less and less habitable planet, mass extinction. Let us be grateful then that Broch has a sober and practicable precept for us: "we feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives.”

4. Anne F. Garréta was the first woman ever admitted to Oulipo, or the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, a loose and fairly informal guild originally kick-started by Raymond Queneau whose mandate was to bind enterprising literary renegades set on using mathematical and other formula as well as generative constraints in order to produce literary compositions of varying length. Garréta’s debut novel Sphinx is not only a jaw-dropping masterpiece, it is uncannily congruent with Oulipo methodologies (though she would not be affiliated with the organization for some while yet). Sphinx is engineered from a constraint that makes it both a groundbreaking work of generqueer literature and an impressive feat: it tells a love story to whose two central participants no gender is allocated, tricky to pull of especially in the original French, a language whose grammar is intricately gendered. Somehow, I like Garréta’s subsequent novel Not One Day even more than Sphinx. If Sphinx formulated and compounded an amorous relationship unmoored from fixed gender binaries but nonetheless imperilled by inflexible polarities of dominance and subjection (as in many a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Not One Day reflects upon years and many lovers, elaborating a "rhetoric of desire," revealing an author who has found herself in wavering and variable roles insofar as her couplings and close calls have been concerned, and who has come to possess a fairly untroubled grasp of the special tenuousness of human connection. Both Sphinx and Not One Day made me think of Roland Barthes' A Lover’s Discourse, Sphinx most especially because of the passages in which the author presents a profusion and enumeration of rites of amorous agony whereas in Not One Day it’s about the attention, doting, ritual, and enumeration. Not One Day also made me think of Chantal Akerman's 1982 film Toute une nuit, a probable influence on Garréta and major personal favourite that I finally got to see on the big screen the last time I was in London. Akerman’s film depicts multiple fragmentary encounters between numerous pairs of lovers or possible lovers. In the "Ante Scriptum" which prefaces Not One Day, the author lays out the contours of the project she has set for herself: she is to spend five hours on each brief section over a set span of time, not using notes or in any way preparing things in advance, working solely from memory and in-the-moment inspiration, in order to record reminiscences on either lovers, women she desired, or women who desired her. The sections are to be written in no prescribed order, merely as things come to her, the women depicted in each given a brief code name (E*, D*, Z*, etc.), the sections finally arranged alphabetically by name of corresponding female subject. The sections are named for the night they were written in the sequence of composition, but appear in a different order, hence the scrambled index at the front of the book. Garréta: “Writing at the whim of memory twists and turns on uncertainty. Like desire itself, never assured of its end or its object.” The book’s core ten sections of reminiscence are beautifully crafted and invigorating, filled to the brim with indelible, poignant, sometimes irreverent images. The author of Not One Day is the furthest possible thing from a dilettante, signalling her specialized knack by briefly comparing novels to cars: "any amateur mechanic knows upon initial inspection the type, its most common pathologies, and the structure of its engine. There are a few common models, a minuscule amount of rare ones that force you to revise your understanding, oblige you to dismantle them completely to understand their workings. We encounter more family sedans on the roads of literature than Ferraris or prototypes.”

5. Philippe-Paul de Ségur served as Napoleon’s aide-de-camp during the infamous and fantastically disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia by the enterprising Emperor and his Grande Armée, consisting as that behemoth was at outset of more than half a million men. Ségur would publish his firsthand account of the debacle in 1824, over a decade after the events themselves transpired, the Emperor having in fact been dead for about three years. The original printings of Ségur’s account would rapidly sell out and the book would quickly be translated into all the languages then operative in Europe. Many took exception to some of the facts, deeming certain elements exaggerated. Ségur would even fight (and win) a duel over the veracity of his testimonial. His grandson would introduce an abridged version of the text in the late 19th century. Philippe Paul de Ségur came from a wealthy and connected French family left impoverished in the wake of the French Revolution (his father having narrowly avoided arrest), and as a young man he had fledgling literary aspirations on which at first he failed to make good. Finding himself temperamentally disposed to a military career, he quickly rose up the ranks in Napoleon’s forces, finding himself a trusted intimate of the leader. Ségur was present as Napoleon remade Europe, triumphing in one brazen military campaign after another, seizing territory and placing functionaries in important leadership roles hither and yon. Russia would be the first time the Emperor disastrously overextended himself and would mark the beginning of his legendary downfall. Ségur’s account of this epic folly is written with considerable literary verve, setting out to both make and unmake myth, and the author himself serves as detached commentator, entirely removed from the events as active agent. Not only did Napoleon lose Russia, he lost the near entirety of his overwhelmingly massive army. Both Napoleon and Hitler failed to heed the warnings of advisors of sound sense because their previous impossible triumphs had conditioned them to believe themselves infallible. Like Napoleon, Hitler would himself conquer much of Europe, finding himself opposed to both England and Russia, and would see Russia as the latest of a series of strategic dominoes, a prelude to direct confrontation with Great Britain. Also like Napoleon, whose disaster he knew all too well but nonetheless failed to avoid repeating, Hitler would face a Russian strategy of strategic retreat and scorched earth. Military leaders have continued to fail to heed the warning, especially when they overvalue the efficacy of shock and awe within the context of asymmetrical warfare. Philippe Paul de Ségur, elegiac for the moment: “So great expeditions are crushed by their own weight. Human limits had been exceeded. Napoleon’s genius, seeking to transcend time, climate, and distance, had as it were got lost in space. Great as his capacities were, he had gone beyond them.”

Golden Fragments

1. Some authors complete significant literary works or appear to have completed them shortly before they take their own lives. How this all plays out case by case is invariably far from a simple matter, tending no doubt also to vary from instance to instance. David Foster Wallace seems to have left the manuscript for The Pale King intending for it to be published. I happen to think it’s the best work he ever did, but it is all about the demoralization and spiritual atrophy poisoning the 21st century. At any rate, all relevant intelligence would seem to indicate that as far as Wallace was concerned the work was for all intents and purposes complete. The case with Yasunari Kawabata’s Dandelions, published posthumously in 1972, seems a little thornier. There appear to remain some who surmise that Kawabata’s death was accident rather than suicide, that he did not intend to gas himself. Others point to his depression, his tendency to privately ruminate on his own death, and the profound affect upon him of his friend Mishima’s suicide two years before Kawabata would himself die. The novel left unfinished on account of suicide invites us to go hunting for clues, shimmering fragments of a nest of defeats. I think we want to find them and that we don’t. Perhaps we hope both to be comforted and shook-by-the-collar upset. Dandelions doesn't seem to present the ideal vehicle for such grim and morbid pursuits. There was already Kawabata’s tendency to tinker protractedly, revising his own work over and over on an ongoing basis. His novels tended to take shape over time as he found ways to unify disparate stories that had been published hither and thither. At the heart of the human condition lies for Kawabata teleological perplexity, and this perplexity about reality and aberrations of reality, distortions and torsions, correlates with what some commentators perceive as his final novel’s supposed incompleteness, a crime and indignity more properly placed upon the shoulders of God than upon any given gaggle of novelists. With a situation akin to that of Dandelions, what we have, to my mind, is a novel that has its ending plotted-out a piori and then lands it like one fierce competitor indeed, flawlessly and precisely and ever so very, very nicely, right where it was intended to go off from the get-go. General misrule may often prove the house of charms. Behold: the alarming but ever-so-easy coming and going of an only-sometimes-grounded self, identity there and then not there, elastic and pried open and mortified. That the one you love may be there and not meaningfully see you anymore or that you may yourself clumsily misplace your capacity to know or identify or not be horrified at the physical presence of the now-menacing one you ever-so-recently adored more than any other. Dandelions is philosophically and emotionally congruent with the depiction and literary circumlocution of ‘Capgras syndrome’ in the 2006 novel Echo Maker by Richard Powers. Often directly preceded by a physical brain injury, somebody suffering from ‘Capgras syndrome’ will typically believe that one particular person very close to them is now a fake or an imposter. 

2. Fernando Pessoa was five years younger than his contemporary Franz Kafka and lived just over a decade longer. It is perhaps to my discredit that I have long thought of each man as an awkward and solitary bachelor with an office job who practiced his craft as a writer in something like a kind of total isolation. Pessoa, in fact, published and translated quite widely, existing in fertile dialogue with a great many of his contemporaries. I think the primary reason we think of Pessoa as a writer discovered after his death is simply because of the fact that the bulk of his most important work, his magnum opus The Book of Disquiet included, was indeed discovered in a trunk or trunks following his demise from what were likely complications related to alcoholism. Pessoa wrote both prose and poetry under a wide-ranging array of pen names. He referred to these adopted names as heteronyms rather than pseudonyms because these names did not merely serve as covers or buffers but rather belonged to comprehensively-envisioned virtual personages. In Pessoa, a deep and genuine belief in actually existing fairies goes so far as to demonstrate that said green fairies have in fact written a large part of the ailing author’s body of work...which you now hold open on your lap. Pessoa even worked out astrological charts for some of his heteronyms. "Each of us is more than one person, many people," The Book of Disquiet has it, "a proliferation of our one self.” If there is any precedent for Pessoa's creation of multiple and extremely diverse heteronyms, it is probably to be found in the lives and writing of Stendhal and Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard literally wrote books whose authorship was attributed to fictional persons. It would appear that Stendhal for the most part just liked to fuck with people.

3. “Round Naumburg pressed the black Thüringer Wald, the Thuringian forest,” writes Sue Prideaux in I am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche, “Germany’s ur-forest with its tombs of ancient heroes, dragon caves, dolmens and dark abysses that from the earliest days of German myths symbolized the irrationality and uncontrollability of the German subconscious. Wagner would appropriate it for Wotan’s mental journey toward embracing chaos, resulting in the destruction of the old order through the death of the gods and the cancelation of all the old contracts.” For the brief time they were close and amicable, Nietzsche saw Wagner both as a surrogate father and as a Dionysus, a demon, and a destroyer of worlds. In his introduction to the 2019 New Directions edition of Clarice Lispector’s 1949 novel The Besieged City, Benjamin Moser allots ample space to the consideration of unhorsing, or "obyezloshadenie," a term borrowed from Isaac Babel, who had employed it originally with reference to the replacement of horses by motors within both rural and urban contexts during the process of industrial modernization. If one stops to consider the matter, it quickly becomes clear that the theme of unhorsing is a prevalent one in the art and culture of the early 20th century. My tendency is to immediately think of both the 1918 Booth Tarkington novel The Magnificent Ambersons and the absolutely divine, even if irreparably studio-butchered, 1942 Orson Welles film adaptation of same, his second feature and a passion project. Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin consciously borrows an image I think from former Italian fascist Curzio Malaparte and his book Kaputt. Malaparte saw much more of the Second World War than he would have liked, assuredly. The critical image in question from 2007’s My Winnipeg and its marketing: the heads of dead horses, macabre tableau, their visages twisted and agonized, frozen, jutting out of the ice.

4. It was a long time ago now for sure, but I am confident that I can go ahead and make the definitive claim that I fell in heedless and wholly unavailing love with star for the ages, occasional movie actress, and beaming ball of bouncy energy Lillian Roth, who is long dead and who I shall therefore almost certainly never meet, the first time I watched 1929 Ernst Lubitsch musical and early talkie The Love Parade. When I looked her up I realized I had also seen her in 1930’s Animal Crackers, the second film by and featuring the Marx Brothers, vaudeville’s greatest anarchist geniuses. When I found out that Roth had written a famous and highly-successful-in-it’s-day autobiography entitled I’ll Cry Tomorrow, I tracked an old hardcover down on eBay. It’s a lovely and intimate book but it gets extremely dark. Lillian Roth was at one time a very famous child star on Broadway… and then a all-too-famous recovering alcoholic. From approximately 1930 to 1946 Roth lived through again and again in a spiral the devastating indignities of active alcoholism, a progressive and ultimately fatal disease concerning which I have all too intimate a working knowledge. Roth’s nightmare lasted about sixteen years. Published in 1954, I’ll Cry Tomorrow became a bestseller worldwide and sold more than seven million copies in twenty languages. In 1955 it was adapted into a glitzy Hollywood movie and Susan Hayward was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the role of Lillian Roth. In 1953, Roth, who was then eking out a modest living doing club and lounge dates here and there, living with Burt, her sixth husband, in Florida, was invited to do an episode of the popular television show This is Your Life. It played extremely well with home audiences. All the while little Lillian wanted to be a good Jewish girl and to please her parents, though adulation wouldn’t make her any less crushed and crumpled up and she knew it better than anybody else around her ever did or appeared to. At the heart of it all, and in spite of her meteoric rise, Lillian is beset by a constant sense of deep personal inadequacy. This is the crux of alcoholic grandiosity: I am worthless, defective, but I need top billing, my name in lights. Not long after I read I’ll Cry Tomorrow, I happened to catch 1933’s Ladies They Talk About over on the Criterion Channel as part of a pre-code Barbara Stanwyck bundle. Young Lillian is in it. She has the only musical number. My God. What an extraordinary young woman. Damn it, that kid should be proud of herself.

5. The writer Italo Svevo lived and worked in Trieste, at one time a major Austro-Hungarian port city placed smack dab along the coast of Italy, and he studied widely in both German and Italian, apparently demonstrating noteworthy capabilities in the process. Italo grew up loving the theatre. He published his first article in 1880, its title “Shylock,” a fact notable in that the author is a Jew living in what is basically Italy. He had some success in business, especially after having married well, his in-laws overseeing an international firm specializing in submarine paints (!). Svevo wrote and self-published two novels in the 1890s to no fanfare, this apparently dissuading him from continuing to serve his literary métier with anything like gusto for a considerable period thereafter. No longer a young man, Svevo would go on to employ an English tutor to help him flourish in international business. The impecunious Irishman, temporarily living in Trieste with his wife Nora, was a fella by the name of James Joyce. Mr. Joyce would come in time to change everything for Svevo, ultimately helping to turn the third novel of his pal from Trieste, self-published and ignored in Italy just as the previous two had been, into a great overnight sensation in Paris. 

Robert Coover | Gerald's Party

 

One divine synchronicity from my adult life was when I learned that Robert Coover, my favourite ever American writer of literary prose, prized most highly among his own works the  bawdy and provocative but seldom celebrated novels Gerald’s Party and John’s Wife, neither a work of anything like wide acclaim or popular appeal and surely the novels in which Coover dares to go furthest with dicey gender politics and baroquely obscene sexual shenanigans. Naturally, these two were my favourite Coover novels as well. The most obvious influence from his own earlier existing body of work on short 2023 novel Open House, a work likewise unafraid to get it’s hands dirty and involving a number of sex acts that in reality would additionally be crimes, Gerald’s Party is, despite there being an earlier Coover novel featuring Richard Nixon as a main character, the author’s most biblically belligerent novel, appearing steadfastly committed to taking no prisoners—to imagining a living cesspool…and building it up…so as to fluff it up. Many will not wish to take this trip to terminus. Woe unto them. But who could blame them? Sex and violence, death and its alarming odours, worked into our very helices, in no small part define us; they are indeed the repressed of the domestic scene itself, daddy’s implicit rampage, but we are not used to having these forces and their forensics unleashed in such a way, used to beat and assail us, but with great mirth as at a carnival, and we are certainly not used to this level of abhorrence played to ear-piercing bellows of pagan laughter. There are many chortles here, but, by God, many of them ought catch in the throat, no? It is too easy to see this great spastic palimpsest as another postmodern intertext, playing on the parlour drama and/or ten-little-Indians murder mystery, but this shredded obscenity spaghetti works at the most abstracted and theoretical levels. There is a detective on the scene—he’s more nightmare Borges than pomo Poirot. Literature is a great big page-to-page real time spill of appalling luminous colours. It is way off in another realm where even the most basic measurements are taken differently. Imagine that it is you who is both obscene and has no crime for which to answer. We laugh heartily and do madly concupiscent things. Sands through ye ole hourglass, me hearty. The hilarious sound of loudly evacuating bowels in the lavatory is what permits and allows for what is fundamentally high-mided and immanently scopo-worlded in us. We find in Gerald’s Party and then John’s Wife a combination of dreadful sin with cartoony hew and persistent questions ontological, epistemological, correlational, and ultimately relating to the higher categories of aesthetics and spirituality. We grapple with time, the whiff of time, the domain of theatre, truth, beauty, identity, love, and Whac-A-Mole. In Gerald’s Party and John’s Wife, malevolent inhuman farce is a vertiginous and vertigo-inducing tent-show balancing act. It goes considerable and eminently impossible distances to evoke radical, cascading, sensory, many-partied simultaneities. There’s a huge cast and it is a night sky full of twenty zillion billiards balls. I can only imagine how exhausting and laborious a book as systematized as Gerald's Party must have been to write. It would be comparable I should imagine to building a log cabin by yourself in the mountains. Probably Coover's most exhausting and laborious book up to the time of its publication. He’s one of those postmodern conceptualists who isn’t going to accept an idea that fails to threaten to beat his ass and lay him flat…or leave him forever Master of the Forever Domains because miracles do sometimes happen after all. And you have to go a little mad in order to punch a slimy Golem out of a sepulchral birth canal. Apparently if you bring freaks people show up and buy bag after bag of peanuts. This shit ain't pretty and it sure weren’t never meant to be. And I never called this big and brawny illicit book a masterpiece, partner. Blunderbuss, is what I said. Blunderbuss. “Still, the flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me,” muses the ribald and hardboiled Jimmy Burns in the Charles Portis novel Gringos. “I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.” I think you could make a case that the systems novelists like Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and Joseph McElroy are always performing theoretical and clinically antiseptic acts of imaginary terrorism imagined in scales or degrees, the idea being to ultimately attain through totally imaginary acts of civil disobedience and decisive infrastructural sabotage the full rumbling heights of erotic plentitude (om). And Don DeLillo’s no doubt settled into the rhythm of whatever congruent vein of liquid gold he’s working at the present tempestuous hour. Tee hee. Saluto. 

And peg thee in his knotty entrails till / Thou hast howled away twelve winters.

Hypologic: The Metaphysics of Physics

“Metaphysics penetrates all science," claims Émile Meyerson, "for the very simple reason that it is contained in its point of departure.” The unknown and the impossible are preconditions for scientific investigation just as Gertrude Stein said they are for the genuinely artistic (universally). Hypologic involves the intercession of a governing axiomatic that imposes its arbitrary regulatory authority, not unlike how the month of January begins our year because a powerful Roman who dug Janus once insisted this be so. Because physics has increasingly dealt with principles not available to direct empirical scrutiny, it has become, according to Bjørn Ekeberg in his crucial book Metaphysical Experiments: Physics and the Invention of the Universe, “the only science in which theoretical laws are treated as more fundamental than phenomenological ones.”

The James Webb Space Telescope, a massively over-budget tool for brining back images of a kind, is not in any traditional sense an actual telescope. The JWSP is more than a little like the famous Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. Both work by translating data into computerized renderings on large digital monitors. What a particle accelerator tells you in data, the events it prioritizes, is based on the vast majority of information being filtered out; that’s what the tech has been told to do. This is experimentation as largely predetermined fishing expedition. Ekeberg: “Here, as in all scientific ventures, theory and experiment mutually determine each other,” meaning that even if all the complicated tech performs satisfactorily, there is still “the risk of paradigm failure.” However, from my standpoint, I believe it must be insisted that the paradigms will not fail ultimately, though the ride may remain hair-raising. The imagination is home of both God and Paradise. Things do not and cannot all fall apart, because we'll need them when we've gathered ourselves together sufficient as to go and get back up, pontificating our overzealous pontifications at the sun or whomsoever.

"I have made an effort to save myself from drugs," writes Antonin Artuad to a Parisian friend in May of 1937, "I have been completely off drugs for 33 days even if I have despaired of ever recovering without them, I feel everyday that I am getting better and that a mysterious and terrible being has been born inside me that I have never known, since I have never been free of drugs. Everything around me was supernatural until the stubbornness of the destiny of trials."

Whatever your heartfelt or not-so-heartfelt feelings with respect to the human faculty of imagination, it will forever carry tons more ready-at-hand ammunition than either logic or reason. Reason is especially bad, it's grounding principles meaning that it commences with its questionable thinking in service to one would-be hypological precept or another. For most of us at one time or another a strong enough emotion has allowed us to deny the irrevocable truth in front of our eye. In the kernel of the psychotic patient's delusion-formation is the corrosion of the casing that formerly kept the myriad populations in their proper appointed chambers. 

Imagination is always on the warpath. You need to roll over on your back and expose your belly.  

Copernicus and Kepler

Nicolaus Copernicus, the aesthete, a kind of daydreaming astrological draughtsman, is a "mimesis" man. Johannes Kepler, who had proposed to write a book called Geometric Cabala, is a "semiosis" man, seeking to go deeper in search of concealed esoteric truths of a more or less gnostic nature. Both men as presented in these precise terms appear terrifically characteristic of their two opposed zeitgeists, Copernicus connected to the Renaissance, Kepler to Mannerism. For both Copernicus and Kepler, God must remain the loadstar. 

Copernicus is very much still in thrall to Plato, Pythagoras, and Euclid, though he aspires to make his own way. He writes in lyric fashion of his love for the sun. 

Kepler believed in Spinoza’s ‘principle of sufficient reason.’ Mechanics was changing because the world was busier and crazier. Kepler’s cosmology is one of perverse ellipses and all manner of confounding motion. He said of music that it constituted "a construction […] so rational and natural that God the Creator has impressed it upon the relations of the celestial movements." 

In 1608, Kepler writes a dizzying bit of speculative theory—framing it as a dream, a literary device intended to help safeguard Kepler against charges of heresy—in which he imagines astrology as practiced on the moon.  

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"Neither perception, nor voluntary memory, nor voluntary thought," insists Gilles Deleuze in Proust and Signs, "gives us profounds truth, but only possible truth."

Maoist Kayak

It would appear that most of the beautiful and brilliant young folks in Paris during the last half of the 60s, leading up to May ’68 and its depressive aftermath, were one sort of Maoist or another. Among the radical leftists there was much sectarian bickering and rancour such that many Maoists were official enemies with one another. The poster children for the beautiful and beatific Maoist Parisians are surely Anne Wiazemsky and Juliet Berto in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece La chinoise (1967). Godard said of Maoist China that its greatest accomplishment was creating a nation where they only needed one book, a little if notorious red one. Personally, I’d go for the Analects of Confucius, but that’s hardly here nor there. No nation will ever actually be operating on a single book…no matter who’s the crook or how badly the populace be shook. “Mao thinks in an almost infinite way,” says brilliant but often vexing French philosopher Alain Badiou. Mao certainly didn’t know how to control or direct the widespread chaos and mass murder of the Cultural Revolution, whether or not he thought like I Ching. After the revolution the main purpose of the Communist Party was to make sure shit like that didn’t ever happen again.

The Persian empire was so wide

they did not believe the sun shined

beyond their borders.

“One could claim that the Paris Commune in 1871 was a complete ‘disaster,’” says Badiou. “20,000 workers shot to death in the streets of Paris—nevertheless, it was by reflecting on the Paris Commune that Lenin developed the means for a victorious revolution in 1917. Likewise, it is only by reflecting on the Cultural Revolution that we can prepare for the future of the communist political movement. Why? Because the Cultural Revolution was the sole example of a revolution under the conditions of state socialism. It is no coincidence that the most important creation of the Cultural Revolution took the name the Shanghai Commune.”

Imagine you are travelling 

over a great expanse of terrain

engulfed in flames

and not a single soul

has answer

for your inquiries.

Imagine you need

to pass through town

cloaked.

 

Three Drawings

I would prefer not to.

- Harman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener”

Let them have all of it, his measly joy, his scrapbook past, his hope, too.

- Stanley Elkin, “The Conventional Wisdom”

The Bartleby Zygote 

Sky-Smashed Face

Hillbilly Fuckery (At Very Least Their Yellow)