Dialogue on the Threshold

(untitled)

2011-12-06T12:35:00.001+02:00

Fathers and Sons condensed

2011-11-20T16:41:00.004+02:00

Based on Fathers and Sons. A Novel. Ivan Sergheïevich Turgeneff. Translated from the Russian with the approval of the author by Eugene Schulyer, Ph. D. (New York, Leypoldt and Holt, 1867)

A fat cock with variegated plumage walks gravely up and down, striking the steps with the spurs on his big yellow feet; a cat, all covered with ashes, looks at him with rather an unfriendly air from the top of the balustrade where it is crouching. The sun burns hot; from the low chamber that serves as the entry to the inn issues a smell of freshly-cooked rye bread. A fat pigeon lights on the road and runs hastily to drink in a puddle of water near the well. Several carts, whose horses are unbridled,* rapidly go over a narrow cross-road; each carries one or two peasants in unbuttoned tulupes. A vast cultivated plain extends to the horizon, and the soil rises slightly, to fall soon after. Some little woods appear at rare intervals, and ravines, curtained with scattered low bushes, wind around a little further, recalling with some faithfulness the drawings that represent them on the old maps dating from the reign of the Empress Catharine. From time to time are seen little brooks with bare banks, ponds kept in by bad dikes; poor villages, whose low houses are surmounted by black thatched roofs, half off; miserable barns, with walls formed of interwoven branches, with enormous doors gaping on empty spaces; churches, some of brick, covered with a layer of plaster that is beginning to come off, others of wood, topped by a badly supported cross, and surrounded with ill-kept graveyards. All the peasants have a wretched air, and ride little worn-out horses; the willows that edge the road,** with their torn bark and their broken branches, resemble beggars in rags; shaggy cows, lean and fierce, eagerly browse on the herbage along the ditches. All grows green, all moves gently, and sparkles with a gilded splendor under the mild breath of a warm and light wind -- trees, bushes, and grass. From all sides rise the interminable trills of the larks; the lapwings cry as they hover over the damp meadows, or run silently over the clods of ground; crows whose black plumage contrasts with the tender green of the still short wheat, are seen here and there; they are distinguished with more difficulty in the midst of the rye that has already begun to whiten; their heads hardly rise for a moment above this waving sea. A lighted samovar*** waits on a table set between large bushes of lilac. The day is rapidly declining; the sun is hid behind a little aspen wood situated half a verst from the garden, and casts an endless shadow on the moveless fields. A peasant mounted on a white horse trots along a narrow path which skirts the wood; although he is in shadow, his whole person is distinctly seen, and a patch on his shoulder is even noticeable; the horse’s feet move with a regularity and a cleanness that is pleasing to the eye. The rays of the sun penetrate into the wood, and, traversing the thicket, colour the trunks of the aspens with a warm tint which gives them the appearance of savin trunks, while their almost blue foliage is surrounded by a pale sky, slightly redenned by the evening twilight. The swallows are flying very high; the wind has entirely ceased; belated bees feebly buzz in the lilac flowes; a swarm of gnats dances above an isolated branch that stands out into the air. The soft and warm night appears with its almost black sky, accompanied by the feeble murmur of the trees and the healthy odor of a free and pure air. A table of heavy wood, covered with papers so black with dust that they look as if smoked, occupies the space between two windows; on the walls hang Turkish guns, nagaïkas,**** a sabre, two large maps, anatomical drawings, the portrait of Hufeland, a crown made of hair, placed in a black frame, and a diploma, likewise under glass; between two enormous closet bookcases of birch root is a leathern divan, well rubbed and torn in several places; books, little boxes, stuffed birds, vials and retorts are placed pell-mell on the shelves; in one corner of the room is a worn-out electrical machine. A little room exhales an odor of fresh shavings, and two crickets behind the stove sing sleepily. It is mid-day. The heat is stifling, in spite of the fine curtain of white clouds which veils the sun. Everything is silent; the cocks alone crow in the village, and their languid voices give all who hear them a singular sensation of laziness and ennui. From time to time the piercing cry of a young sparrow-hawk comes like a plaintive appeal from the top of a tree. The morning is magnificent, and fresher than the preceding days. Little mottled clouds pass in flakes over the pale azure of the sky; a fine dew covers the leaves of the trees, and the spiders’ webs shine like silver on the grass; the damp, dark ground seems still to keep some traces of the first flush of the day; the song of the larks comes down from all parts of the sky. A finch sings its ceaseless song in the foliage of a birch. A puff of wind disturbs the leaves and carries away the words. Everything in the house seems in some way to be darkened; every face is lengthened; a strange silence reigns, even in the yard; they have sent off to the village a crowing cock, who must have been remarkably surprised by such a proceeding. Winter has come; winter with the terrible silence of its frosts, the compact and creaking snow, the rosy rime on the branches of the trees, the pillars of thick smoke above the chimneys showing against a sky pale blue and cloudless, the eddies of warm air shooting out of opened doors, the fresh and nipped-looking faces of the passers-by, and the hasty trot of horses half-frozen by the cold. A January day is drawing near its end; the coldness of the evening condenses still more the motionless air, and the blood-coloured twilight is rapidly extinguished.

* A strange custom of the Russian peasant.

** In accordance with a ukase of the Emperor Alexander I., all the high roads in Russia are planted with willows.

*** A large vessel in which tea is made.

**** Cossack whips

Les défauts de l'esprit

2011-10-14T21:08:00.004+03:00

Une traduction est un jugement, un commentaire, c'est un miroir où l'auteur peut comtempler à son aise les défauts de son esprit. Une traduction nous trahit, plutôt qu'elle ne trahit notre texte.

Emil Cioran, Cahiers 1957-1962, Paris, Gallimard, 1997, p. 899

A translation is a judgement, a commentary, it is a mirror in which the author may contemplate at his leisure the defects of his spirit. A translation betrays us, sooner than it betrays our text.

Ô humanité! Ô turpitude!

2011-10-09T17:45:00.006+03:00

La Bêtise publique me submerge. (...) La Bourgeoisie est tellement ahurie qu'elle n'a plus même l'instinct de se défendre. -- Et ce qui lui succédera sera pire! J'ai la tristesse qu'avaient les patriciens romains au IVe siècle. Je sens monter du fond du sol une irrémédiable Barbarie. -- J'espère être crevé avant qu'elle n'ait tout emporté. Mais en attendant, ce n'est pas drôle. Jamais les intérêts de l'esprit n'ont moins compté. Jamais la haine de toute grandeur, le dédain du Beau, l'exécration de la littérature enfin n'a été si manifeste. J'ai toujours tâché de vivre dans une tour d'ivoire. Mais une marée de merde en bat les murs, à la faire crouler.

Gustave Flaubert. À Ivan Tourguéniev, [Croisset], mercredi 13 [novembre 1872]

I am overwhelmed by the stupidity of the public. (...) The bourgeoisie is so bewildered that it no longer even possesses the instinct of self-defence. And what will come after it will be even worse! I feel the same sadness as the Roman patricians of the fourth century. I sense an irremediable barbarism rising from the depths of the earth. I hope I will be a goner before it all gets swept away. Never have the interests of the spirit counted for less. Never has the hatred of all greatness, the disdain for the beautiful, the execration of literature been so blatant. I have always striven to live in an ivory tower. But a sea of shit is beating against the walls to make them totter.

cette vieille canaillerie immuable et inébranlable

2011-10-05T14:40:00.005+03:00

Et au fond toujours cette vieille canaillerie immuable et inébranlable. C'est là la base. Ah! comme il vous en passe sous les yeux! De temps à autre, dans les villes, j'ouvre un journal. Il me semble que nous allons rondement. Nous dansons non pas sur un volcan, mais sur la planche d'une latrine qui m'a l'air passablement pourrie. La société prochainement ira se noyer dans la merde de dix-neuf siècles, et l'on gueulera raide. L'idée d'étudier la question me préoccupe. J'ai envie (passe-moi la présomption) de serrer tout cela dans mes mains, comme un citron, afin d'en aciduler mon verre. À mon retour j'ai envie de m'enforcer dans les socialistes et de faire sous la forme théâtrale quelque chose de très brutal, de très farce et d'impartial bien entendu. J'ai le mot sur le bout de la langue et la couleur au bout des doigts. Beaucoup de sujets plus nets comme plan n'ont pas tant d'empressement à venir que celui-là.

Gustave Flaubert, À Louis Bouilhet, Constantinople, 14 novembre 1850

le cimetière oriental

2011-10-04T14:11:00.004+03:00

Le cimetière oriental est une des belles choses de l'Orient. Il n'a pas ce caractère profondément agaçant que je trouve chez nous à ce genre d'établissement. Point de mur, point de fossé, point de séparation ni de clôture quelconque. Ça se trouve à propos de rien dans la campagne ou dans une ville, tout à coup et partout, comme la mort elle-même, à côté de la vie et sans qu'on y prenne garde. On traverse un cimetière comme on traverse un bazar. Toutes les tombes sont pareilles. Elles ne diffèrent que par l'ancienneté seulement. À mesure qu'elles vieillissent, elles s'enfoncent et disparaissent, comme fait le souvenir qu'on a des morts (dirait Chateaubriand). Les cyprès plantés en ces lieux sont gigantesques. Ça donne au site un jour vert plein de tranquillité.

Gustave Flaubert, À Louis Bouilhet, Constantinople, 14 novembre 1850

three exclamations

2011-10-04T13:51:00.006+03:00

Mets ton masque Sokolov, que tes fermentations anaérobies fassent éclater les tubas de ta renommée et que tes vents irrépressibles transforment abscisses et ordonées en de sublimes anamorphoses!

Don your mask, Sokolov, that your anaerobic fermentations may blare the tubas of your fame and that your irrepressible flatus may transform, abscised and sorted, into sublime anamorphoses!

[...]

Vente, Sokolov, sur ce monde luxueux et dérisoire, et quand dans ces miroirs brisés par tes tracés se dessinent en surimpression les nymphettes se refaisant les lèvres, que ton ubiquité soit le reflet multiplié des vices de la terre. Ô Sokolov, ton hyperacousie fait sursauter ta main. Regarde aux hublots de ton masque embués par ta fièvre paludéenne et créatrice se dessiner épures et graphiques tandis qu'oscilloscopes cathodiques et vu-mètres vascillent, serpentent et fluorescent sur les atonalités de Berg et Schönberg dont le dodécaphonisme s'allie à tes gaz contrapuntiques!

[...]

Tu as vécu Sokolov, me disais-je en inhalant mes gaz, tu as vécu ton inavouable destin. Mais que craindrais-tu de la mort, toi qui ne fus ta vie durant que ferments et putréfactions, signalés, codifiés, séismographiés à jamais par ta main prophetique!

You have lived, Sokolov, I said to myself as I inhaled my own gas, you have lived out your shameful destiny. But why should you fear death, you whose whole life was nothing but ferment and putrefaction, revealed, codified and seismographed by none other than your own prophetic hand!

Serge Gainsbourg, Evguénie Sokolov. Récit, Paris: Gallimard, 1980

Hypnos

2011-09-02T13:46:00.003+03:00

L'homme se plaît à exercer les forces de son corps & de son intelligence ; il sent que l'oisiveté est contraire à son être , & que pour son bonheur , il doit désirer & agir ; mais lorsque la nuit , en éteignant la clarté du jour , efface tous les objets , pour ne présenter à leur place qu'une obscurité générale , & l'image de l'ancien cahos (sic.) , il sent diminuer insensiblement ses forces. Bientôt ses idées s'obscurcissent , sa vigueur s'éteint , ses yeux se ferment... Il dort.

Delandine, L'Enfer des peuples anciens, ou Histoire des dieux infernaux (1784)

L’incommensurable goujaterie

2011-08-30T17:43:00.003+03:00

C’était le grand bagne de l’Amérique transporté sur notre continent ; c’était enfin, l’immense, la profonde, l’incommensurable goujaterie du financier et du parvenu, rayonnant, tel qu’un abject soleil, sur la ville idolâtre qui éjaculait, à plat ventre, d’impurs cantiques devant le tabernacle impie des banques !

Eh ! croule donc, société ! meurs donc, vieux monde ! s’écria des Esseintes, indigné par l’ignominie du spectacle qu’il évoquait ; ce cri rompit le cauchemar qui l’opprimait

Ah ! fit-il, dire que tout cela n’est pas un rêve ! dire que je vais rentrer dans la turpide et servile cohue du siècle ! Il appelait à l’aide pour se cicatriser, les consolantes maximes de Schopenhauer ; il se répétait le douloureux axiome de Pascal : « L’âme ne voit rien qui ne l’afflige quand elle y pense », mais les mots résonnaient, dans son esprit comme des sons privés de sens ; son ennui les désagrégeait, leur ôtait toute signification, toute vertu sédative, toute vigueur effective et douce.

Il s’apercevait enfin que les raisonnements du pessimisme étaient impuissants à le soulager, que l’impossible croyance en une vie future serait seule apaisante.

J.-K. Huysmans, À rebours (1884)

The Days of the King

2011-07-13T18:50:00.006+03:00

Filip Florian's novel The Days of the King (Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt, 2011) is at Read This Next for the week of 11 July 2011

Interview with author Filip Florian

Interview with translator Alistair Ian Blyth

.

Dies caniculares

2011-07-11T23:03:00.007+03:00

The cockroach in Russian literature (3): Gogol (3)

2011-07-11T17:09:00.004+03:00

Покой был известного рода, ибо гостиница была тоже известного рода, то есть именно такая, как бывают гостиницы в губернских городах, где за два рубля в сутки проезжающие получают покойную комнату с тараканами, выглядывающими, как чернослив, из всех углов

Мертвые души. Поэма, глава первая

The room was of the familiar kind, as the inn, too, was of the familiar kind, which is to say, like the inns to be found in provincial towns, where for two rubles a day travellers receive a quiet room with cockroaches gazing from every cranny, like prunes.

Dead Souls. A Poem. Chapter One

The Cockroach in Russian Literature (2): Gogol (2)

2011-07-08T15:23:00.005+03:00

Огромный, величиною почти с слона, таракан остановился у дверей и просунул свои усы.

Полное собрание сочинений в 14 томах (1937-1952), Том второй: Миргород (1937), Вий: Варианты, стр. 574

A huge cockroach, almost as big as an elephant, came to a stop in the doorway and thrust its whiskers inside.

From the first version of the story "Viy", published in Mirgorod (1835), but omitted from the Collected Works (1842) and all subsequent editions

Gogolian piles (4)

2011-05-26T16:21:00.003+03:00

(v)

If only you knew how sorry I was to find not you but rather the note you left on my desk. Had I returned but a minute earlier, I might still have been able to see you in person. The other day I wished to pay you a visit without fail, but it was as if everything conspired to thwart me: a cold got it into its head to conjoin itself to my haemorrhoidal virtues and so now I have an entire horse collar of kerchiefs around my neck. It looks like this illness will sequester me for the week. Nevertheless, I have decided not to sit around idling and instead of verbal presentations to sketch out my thoughts and teaching plan on paper.

Letter to A. C. Pushkin, 23 December 1833, Petersburg

Если бы вы знали, как я жалел, что застал вместо вас одну записку вашу на моем столе. Минутой мне бы возвратиться раньше, и я бы увидел вас еще у себя. На другой жедень я хотел непременно побывать у вас; но как будто нарочно все сговорилось идти мне наперекор: к моим геморроидальным добродетелям вздумала еще присоединиться простуда, и у меня теперь на шее целый хомут платков. По всему видно, что эта болезнь запрет меня на неделю. Я решился, однако ж, не зевать и вместо словесных представлений набросать мои мысли и план преподавания на бумагу.

А. С. Пушкину. 23 декабря 1833, г. Петербург

Gogolian piles (3)

2011-05-26T14:43:00.004+03:00

(iv)

"Cat's mint" (i.e. catsfoot). Glechoma hedera terrestris, alleviates piles.

Arzamas region medicinal herbarium

Кошечья мята. Glechoma hedera terrestris, уменьшает почечуи

Лекарственный арзамасский травник.
Полное собрание сочинений в 14 томах. (1937 - 1952). Том девятый: Наброски. Конспекты. Планы. Записные книжки. (1952). стр. 416.

Gogolian piles (2)

2011-05-26T10:21:00.007+03:00

(iii)

Having ordered a very light supper, which consisted of only a sucking pig, Chichikov straight away undressed and, climbing under the bedclothes, fell deeply, soundly asleep, he fell into the wonderful sleep such as is slept only by those fortunate men who know nothing of haemorrhoids, fleas, or overly powerful intellectual faculties.

Dead Souls (1842)

Потребовавши самый легкий ужин, состоявший только в поросенке, <Чичиков> тот же час разделся и, забравшись под одеяло, заснул сильно, крепко, заснул чудным образом, как спят одни только те счастливцы, которые не ведают ни геморроя, ни блох, ни слишком сильных умственных способностей.

Мертвые души (1842)

Gogolian piles (1)

2011-05-25T12:43:00.005+03:00

(i)

"Would you like to take some snuff? It chases away headaches and gloomy moods; it is even good for treating haemorrhoids."

Saying this, the clerk offered Kovalev his snuffbox, rather deftly flipping up the lid, which had a portrait of some lady in a hat.

This thoughtless behaviour exceeded the limits of Kovalev's patience.

"How you find it appropriate to joke about it I do not know," he said indignantly. "Can't you see I do not have the wherewithal to take snuff?"

The Nose (1836)

- Не угодно ли вам понюхать табачку? это разбивает головные боли и печальные расположения; даже в отношении к геморроидам это хорошо.

Говоря это, чиновник поднес Ковалеву табакерку, довольно ловко подвернув под нее крышку с портретом какой-то дамы в шляпе.

Этот неумышленный поступок вывел из терпения Ковалева.

- Я не понимаю, как вы находите место шуткам, - сказал он с сердцем, - разве вы не видите, что у меня именно нет того, чем бы я мог понюхать?

Нос (1836)

(ii)

I sit down to my task, about which you already know, I have written to you about it, but my work is sluggish, it lacks that former animation. The ailment, for whose sake I set out on my travels and which, it seemed, had found alleviation, has now intensified once more. My haemorrhoidal illness has turned back onto my stomach. It is an unbearable illness. It parches me. It tells me about itself every minute and prevents me from being busy.

Letter to M. P. Pogodin, Naples, <14 August 1838>

Сижу над трудом, о котором ты уже знаешь, я писал к тебе о нем, но работа моя вяла, нет той живости. Недуг, для которого я уехал и который было, казалось, облегчился, теперь усилился вновь. Моя гемороидальная болезнь вся обратилась на желудок. Это несносная болезнь. Она меня сушит. Она говорит мне о себе каждую минуту и мешает мне заниматься.

М. П. Погодину. Неаполь. <14 августа 1838.>

исполинский образ скуки

2011-05-17T12:48:00.003+03:00

Хотя бы только пожелать так, хотя бы только насильно заставить себя это сделать, ухватиться бы за этот <день>, как утопающий хватается за доску! Бог весть, может быть, за одно это желанье уже готова сброситься с небес нам лестница и протянуться рука, помогающая возлететь по ней.

Но и одного дня не хочет провести так человек девятнадцатого века! И непонятной тоской уже загорелася земля; черствей и черствей становится жизнь; всё мельчает и мелеет, и возрастает только в виду всех один исполинский образ скуки, достигая с каждым днем неизмеримейшего роста. Всё глухо, могила повсюду. Боже! пусто и страшно становится в твоем мире!

Собрания сочинений Гоголя, Полное собрание сочинений в 14 томах (1937—1952), Том восьмой: Статьи, Выбранные места из переписки с друзьями, Светлое воскресенье, стр. 416

If only one might so desire, if only one might force oneself to do it, to clutch at this [day], like a drowning man clutches at a plank! God knows, perhaps for this desire alone a ladder is ready to drop down to us from the heavens and a hand is ready to extend to us, helping us to soar up it.

But the man of the nineteenth century does not wish to spend even one day like this! And with an incomprehensible anguish the earth is already burning; life is becoming ever more callous; everything is becoming pettier and shallower, and before all our eyes only the single gigantic image of boredom rears up, and with every passing day it attains an immeasurable height. All is dull, everywhere the tomb. O, God! it grows desolate and terrible in Your world!

Gogol, Selected Passages from the Correspondence with Friends (1847), Holy Sunday

The proscenium of eternity

2011-05-15T15:57:00.004+03:00

Creation sometimes pours into the spiritual eye the radiance of heaven. The green mountains that glimmer in a summer gloaming from the dusky yet bloomy east; the moon opening her golden eye, or walking in brightness among innumerable islands of light, not only thrill the optic nerve, but shed a mild, a grateful, an unearthly lustre into the inmost spirits, and seem the interchanging twilight of that peaceful country, where there is no sorrow and no night. After all, I doubt not but there must be the study of this creation, as well as art and vision; tho' I cannot think it other than the veil of heaven, through which her divine features are dimly smiling; the setting of the table before the feast; the symphony before the tune; the prologue of the drama, a dream of antepast and proscenium of eternity.

Samuel Palmer, 1828

Letters, ed. Raymond Lister. Oxford, 1974. Vol. 1, p. 50

Сон и Явь

2011-04-18T15:35:00.004+03:00

Даниил Иванович говорил: надо подойти к пропасти, стать на самом краю ее, взглянуть вниз и не упасть.

Чинари
глава из книги Якова Семеновича Друскина (1902-1980)
Сон и Явь, 1968

Daniil Ivanovich used to say: it is necessary to go up to the abyss, to stand on its very edge, to look down and not to fall.

Before Brezhnev Died

2011-02-23T17:19:00.006+02:00

Iulian Ciocan, Înainte să moară Brejnev (Before Brezhnev Died). Polirom: Jassy, 2007. 173 pp.

Before Brezhnev Died by Iulian Ciocan is a dense, multi-layered novel of everyday life in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova, a land at the periphery of both the USSR and the communist Eastern Bloc. It is a novel that is in many ways different to the more subjective “autobiographical fictions” of the communist past which have been published by Romanian writers from the western side of the Prut in recent years.

The novel consists of ten chapters: nine interlocking short stories and a penultimate meta-chapter that explores the book’s methods and technique. In this explanatory chapter, entitled “An Elucidation”, Iulian Ciocan tries to answer the question put to him by an indignant older writer, who is working on a novel of post-Soviet, transition-period Moldova: “Why do you keep raking up the Soviet past? How much longer are you going to be its prisoner?” This reinvented writer of the old guard, who has “liberated himself from the tyranny of the Soviet past”, suspects Ciocan of trying somehow to revive “socialist realism”. However, socialist realism and the reality of socialism are two very different things. The “reality” of the Soviet period, in the sense of everyday life during that time, is still largely unexplored territory. The stories of the Gulag and the Terror are well known, but less has been written about the real life behind the “absurd, grotesque, sometimes comical” ideological façade created by socialist realism as propaganda for both foreign and domestic consumption. Of course, post-Soviet writers such as Victor Erofeev, Vladimir Sorokin and Ludmila Ulitskaya have described everyday Soviet life in their different ways. But Soviet reality was not only a Russian reality. The USSR was by no means the monolithic entity it is sometimes imagined to be. As Iulian Ciocan points out, “there was not a single Soviet everyday, one that was the same for a Russian, a Moldovan and a Tungus, for the centre and the periphery.” Moreover, the reality of Soviet Moldova itself, “the Latin periphery of the Empire,” was by no means homogenous; that reality was more complex than the perspective to be found in a Ludmila Ulitskaya novel, for instance, where Moldovans are merely men with “droopy moustaches” who dump mounds of rubbish on the coast of the Black Sea.

The characters in the novel, whose lives can be seen to intersect in dramatic and unexpected ways in each chapter, range from Grișa Furdui, a lowly collective farm worker, to Pavel Fiodorovici Kavrig, a highly placed Party apparatchik. In between there are factory workers, war veterans, pensioners, schoolteachers, hooligans, and the seemingly model communist pioneer Iulian, a semi-autobiographical portrait of the author. Ciocan consciously rejects subjectivity as a narrative technique, however, preferring to make use of multiple perspectives, which allow the same event to be simultaneously comic and tragic, absurd and amusing, depending on the viewpoint of the particular character. Reality shifts according to the perspective of the protagonist of each individual chapter. For example, in one chapter we are introduced to Ion Pîslari, a factory worker who lives with his wife and child in the grotesque squalor of a cramped communal apartment block. In the next chapter, these soul-destroying conditions seem like a veritable paradise on earth to Pîslari’s cousin, Grișa Furdui, who is visiting Kishinev from the country, where he leads an even more dehumanising life of grinding toil on a state collective farm. His “nostrils anaesthetised by rural dung,” Grișa avidly inhales the “comforting reek of boiled onion/borsht/urine/bleach” that pervades the building of his more fortunate city cousin. Even the filthy communal toilets, with the sounds of someone straining in the next cubicle, are “a revelation” after his native village and the “rudimentary back-yard pit where you freeze your arse off in winter”. To cynical city folk, Grișa Furdui is the incarnation of “bucolic ignorance”, a “messenger of rural eternity.” On the other hand, the culture shock of seeing the city for the first time convinces Grișa that the utopia of communist propaganda really does exist. It also makes him realise that his fellow peasants, or rather collective farm workers, are “sleepwalkers”, reduced to a mindless, vegetative existence by never-ending toil and abject poverty. Again, this bleak picture of rural life contrasts with the official socialist reality, which is presented in the following chapter in the form of inserts within the narrative, culled from the voiceover to an idyllic episode of Po zayavkam rabotnikov zhitonovodstva (At the Requests of the Animal Husbandry Workers) about Stakhanovite cow-milker Frasîna Paierele.

Throughout the novel, there are other similar inserts, drawn from Soviet-era propaganda and providing striking, even disorienting contrasts with the squalid reality of the characters’ everyday lives. The effect of these diametrically opposed discourses and shifting perspectives is one of defamiliarisation or estrangement—the ostranenie theorised by Victor Shklovsky. Indeed, as a fictional approach to the Soviet period, Ciocan recommends Shklovsky’s method in the chapter “An Elucidation”, rather than falling prey to maudlin self-pity about the hardships and horrors of the past. Ultimately, it is better to bring out the comical, bizarre or absurd side of events, because in any case the glut of human tragedies on the nightly television news bulletin has wholly numbed us to horrors.

The grotesquely absurd, random violence of some events in the novel is reminiscent of Daniil Kharms’ sluchai or “accidents”. For example, pensioner Dochia Barbalat is crushed by a falling crane as she returns home from the market with laden bags. Her husband, Nicolae Barbalat, encounters utter indifference, mockery and even aggression on the part of the authorities when he tries to seek justice. In another chapter, widower and war veteran Polikarp Feofanovici is hit on the head by a rotten tomato, thrown from the roof by a communist pioneer, quite possibly the young Iulian himself. The event provokes an existential crisis, forcing him to confront, in disbelief, the degeneration of Soviet society and morals, the ineluctable failure, lies, poverty and decay of the system itself. This decay was embodied in the person and crepuscular rule of Leonid Brezhnev. For Iulian, the death of Brezhnev—itself played out amid the initial denials of a system for which lying was a reflex, and then amid the grotesque, tragicomic rituals of insincere mourning—finally shatters the illusion of Soviet invulnerability and perpetuity.

Before Brezhnev Died is unsettling and hilarious by turns. It is a novel that provides a unique and unfamiliar—for readers outside the Republic of Moldova, and even for readers in Romania, with their own different experiences of everyday life under communism—perspective on the former Soviet Union.

Alistair Ian Blyth

The Beckett Bowel Books

2011-02-20T00:56:00.003+02:00

Samuel Beckett, letter to Mary Manning Howe, sent from Hamburg on 14 November 1936

... I am exhorted to ablate 33.3 recurring to all eternity of my work (1). I have thought of a better plan. Take every 500th word, punctuate carefully and publish a poem in prose in the Paris Daily Mail. Then the rest separately and privately, with a forewarning from Geoffrey, as the ravings of a schizoid, or serially, in translation, in the Zeitschrift für Kitsch. My next work shall be on rice paper wound about a spool, with a perforated line every six inches and on sale in Boots. The length of each chapter will be carefully calculated to suit with the average free motion. And with every copy a free sample of some laxative to promote sales. The Beckett Bowel Books, Jesus in farto. Issued in imperishable tissue. Thistledown end papers. All edges disinfected. 1000 wipes of clean fun. Also in Braille for anal pruritics. All Sturm and no Drang.

I replied, dear agente provocatrice, that I would not have a finger laid on the section entitled Amor intellectualis etc., nor on the Thema Coeli, nor on Endon's Affence, nor on the last will and fundament, but that so far as the rest was concerned I would willingly remove all ties and supports, dripstones, keystones, cornerstones, buttresses, and, with especial pleasure, the entire foundations, and accept full and entire responsibility for the ensuing detritus. The owls, cats, foxes and toads of the higher criticism could be relied on to complete the picture, a romantic one. ...

(1) The at the time unpublished novel Murphy

The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Volume 1: 1929-1940, eds. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 382-383

The ruins of Babel

2011-02-06T10:55:00.006+02:00

Babylon is a towne not very great but very populous, and of great traffike of strangers, for that it is the way to Persia, Turkia and Arabia : and from thence doe goe Carovans for these and other places. Here are great store of victuals, which come from Armenia downe the river of Tygris. They are brought upon raftes made of goates skinnes blowne full of winde and bordes layde upon them: and thereupon they lade their goods which are brought downe to Babylon, which being discharged they open their skinnes, and carry them backe by Camels, to serve another time. Babylon in times past did belong to the kingdome of Persia, but nowe is subject to the Turke. Over against Babylon there is a very faire village from whence you passe to Babylon upon a long bridge made of boats, and tyed to a great chaine of yron, which is made fast on either side of the river. When any boates are to passe up or downe the river, they take away certaine of the boates untill they be past.

The Tower of Babel is built on this side the river Tygris, towardes Arabia from the towne about seven or eight miles, which tower is ruinated on all sides, and with the fall thereof hath made as it were a litle mountaine, so that it hath no shape at all: it was made of brickes dried in the sonne, and certaine canes and leaves of the palme tree layed betwixt the brickes. There is no entrance to be seene to goe into it. It doth stand upon a great plaine betwixt the rivers of Euphrates and Tygris.

The voyage of M. Ralph Fitch marchant of London by the way of Tripolis in Syria , to Ormus, and so to Goa in the East India, to Cambaia, and all the kingdome of Zelabdim Echebar the great Mogor, to the mighty river Ganges, and downe to Bengala, to Bacola, and Chonderi, to Pegu , to Imahay in the kingdome of Siam , and backe to Pegu , and from thence to Malacca, Zeilan, Cochin, and all the coast of the East India: begunne in the yeere of our Lord 1583, and ended 1591, wherein the strange rites, maners, and customes of those people, and the exceeding rich trade and commodities of those countries are faithfully set downe and diligently described, by the aforesaid M. Ralph Fitch.

Richard Hakluyt. The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation Made by Sea or Overland to the Remote & Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at any time within the compasse of these 1600 Yeares.

British grossièreté

2011-01-17T20:54:00.004+02:00

In a most curious and rare tract, entitled A Joco-serious Discourse in two Dialogues, between a Northumberland Gentleman and his Tenant, a Scotchman, both old Cavaliers, 1686, p. 32, we read:

“To horse-race, fair, or hoppin go,
There play our cast among the whipsters,
Throw for the hammer, lowp (leap) for slippers,
And see the maids dance for the ring,
Or any other pleasant thing;
Fart for the pigg, lye for the whetstone,
Or chuse what side to lay our betts on.”

We find notes explaining the word “Hoppin” by “annual feasts in country towns where no market is kept,” and “lying for the whetstone,” I’m told, has been practised, but farting for the pigg is beyong the memory of any I met with; tho’ it is a common phrase in the north to any that’s gifted that way; and probably there has been such a mad practice formerly. -- The ancient grossièreté of our manners would almost exceed belief. In the stage directions to old Moralities (1) we often find “Here Satan letteth a fart.”

Henry Ellis, Observations on the popular antiquities of Great Britain chiefly illustrating the origin of our vulgar and provincial customs, ceremonies and superstitions, Second edition, H.G. Bohn, London, 1853

(1) I.e. morality plays

Historia cicatricosa

2010-12-16T21:27:00.004+02:00

Scars can be literal or metaphorical, physical or psychical. The scar is the memory of the wound, imprinted on the warp and weft of the flesh or in the incrassate tissue of the brain. Every scar is unique, the trace left by an unrepeatable concatenation of circumstances and events that culminate in a trauma affecting the body or mind.

But the one scar that is common to all is the umbilical cicatrix. It is the primordial scar; it is the mark that unites all men (and, indeed, all living things not born from the seed or egg). For, no man can enter the world without the cord that bound him to the womb being severed and leaving its trace. The umbilicus thus also marks us as separate, distinct individuals. For the scholastics, it was a subject of fierce debate whether Adam, the only man not to have been formed in the womb, possessed a naval, the umbilical scar. Was his belly smooth, unblemished, or when God moulded him from the red earth did He fashion him an umbilicus in order not to be incomplete? Likewise, when God removed a rib from Adam’s breast from which to shape Eve, did it leave a scar?

What is certain is that the scar is to be found only in the fallen world, a place of toil, disease, violence, natural shocks and heartaches. We enter the world in a state of original sin, and this entrance is thenceforth and forever marked by a scar. The umbilicus, as the first scar, is the nexus from which all other physical scars radiate, the primal node of a web of accidents, mishaps, injuries, and illnesses that forms an intricate and unique map of our passage through the world. Each body has its own uniquely patterned web of scars, and each scar tells its own story. The cicatrix is thus the imprint and bearer of memory, a sign by which a man is revealed in his uniqueness, in the particularity of his own unrepeatable acts and sufferings and the marks they have made on him.

When Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a wandering beggar, his old nurse, Eurycleia, recognises him by the scar on his leg, when, bidden by the unwitting Penelope, she washes his feet in the basin of ringing bronze. The cicatrix, once revealed, aches for its tale to be told. And at this moment of agonising suspense in the flow of Homer’s epic, when it seems that Odysseus might be unmasked before he can exact his revenge on the upstart suitors, the narrative breaks off and the listener is taken back to Parnassus, whither the young Odysseus had journeyed to visit Autolycus, his mother’s father, beloved of cunning Hermes. And thus begins the story of one of the most famous scars in all of literature. Hunting with the sons of Autolycus, among the windy hollows of Mount Parnassus Odysseus corners a boar, within a glade on the steep, forest-clad slopes. Charging from its deep, bosky lair, where neither the rainy winds blow nor the bright rays of Helios ever strike, the boar gashes Odysseus’ thigh with its tusk, and in his turn the resourceful son of Laertes transfixes the beast with his spear. In the halls of Autolycus, on the hunters’ return, the wound demands that its tale be told, the same as the scar (oulê) will demand that its memory be unfolded by the rhapsode once it is secretly revealed in the halls of Odysseus many years later, after the war on the windy plains of Troy and the many years of bitter wandering that followed. Unlike in the Odyssey, it is significant that in the Iliad, the epic of the wrath of Achilles, a narrative of never-ending, fresh wounds, the word oulê (scarred over wound, cicatrix) does not occur once.

Thus, the recounting of the wound is like a scar that forms a break in the tissue of the narrative. A text itself might be full of scars, if the author, like an over-zealous surgeon, wields the critic’s knife, hacking away at even the flesh of healthy passages. Cicatricosus (full of scars) is the adjective used by Roman rhetorician Quintillian in his Institutio Oratoria to describe the bloodless works of those orators who cannot resist tinkering with their manuscripts whenever they have them in their hands, in the belief that every first draft must necessarily be riddled with faults (1). Of course, for the Romans, who for everyday purposes wrote by incising letters with a stylus upon waxed tablets, a text could be a reticulation of scars in quite a literal sense.

The mind, too, has been likened by philosophers to a waxed tablet, upon which impressions are imprinted. Impressions and thoughts are incised into the mind, each leaving a deeper or shallower scar. In the Satyricon, it is said that the man of true culture must smooth all irritation (scabitudo, from scabies, “roughness”) from his mind without leaving any scar. (2) Ataraxy would thus be a state of supreme scarlessness. But just as none can enter life unscarred, life itself cannot be lived without incurring or inflicting scars. And the cicatrix is both memory and the inscription of a tale.

(1) Institutio Oratoria 10 4.3. Sunt enim qui ad omnia scripta tanquam vitiosa redeant et, quasi nihil fas sit rectum esse quod primum est, melius existiment quidquid est aliud, idque faciant, quotiens librum in manus resumpserunt, similes medicis etiam integra secantibus. accidit itaque ut cicatricosa sint et exsanguis et cura pejora.

(2) Petronius, Satyricon 99. Tantum omnem scabitudinem animo tanquam bonarum artium magister delevet sine cicatrice.

Un ciel de gouffre / Au coeur du gouffre

2010-12-07T15:11:00.005+02:00

Paris-Cauchemar
(1870-1871)

À Mr. Étienne R. Veron de Braïla

Un ciel de gouffre, et des images très opaques,
Nuit d'horreur, - mais, parfois, la lune dans le bleu,
Et Paris, et l'hiver grelottant sur les flaques,
Et les long boulevards et ses lignes de feu.

Et des éclairs aussi: - l'homme sinistre et pâle
Dressé, spectre farouche, au-dessus du grand bruit,
Et la cité - chaos, et son immense râle,
Et ses miroitements s'abîmant dans la nuit.

Paris-Cauchemar, et Paris-Déséspérance,
Réel enfer, à nul fictif enfer pareil,
Salut, pourtant, cité très noble, Paris-France,
Malgré ta nuit restant toujours Paris-Soleil.

Alexandru Macedonski, Bronzes, 1897, p. 219-222

Enfer

Au coeur du gouffre blème où Dieu gîta le sel,
Des voûtes, vainement, suintent, mornes, des larmes,
Les pâles reprouvés aguerris aux alarmes
Font voler en éclats les scellés du recel.

D'aucuns, les traits divins malgré le sombre scel,
Lèvent parfois des yeux volés d'étranges charmes,
Mais leurs torses puissants comme des troncs de charmes
Peupleraient de démons les pages d'un missel.

Et l'acier sur le roc résonne, métallique,
S'entrechoque, et l'écho lui donne la réplique,
Et la paroi s'ébranle et l'enfer s'élargit,

Et malgré la ténèbre, et malgré la souffrance,
Qui, formidable, croit, s'exaspère, et rugit,
Nul enfer où soudain ne chantât l'espérance.

Alexandru Macedonski, Le beau Danube bleu, I, 5, 9 avril 1905, p. 3

Thibault

2010-11-28T11:28:00.007+02:00

Mais bientôt les bizarreries s’accusèrent davantage, et il devenait parfois difficile de les excuser, car elles sortaient du domaine de la pensée pour entrer dans le domaine de l’action. Des soins éclairés devinrent nécessaires, à la grande indignation de Gérard [de Nerval], car il ne concevait pas que des médecins s’occupassent de lui parce qu’il s’était promené dans le Palais-Royal, traînant un homard en vie au bout d’une faveur bleue. « En quoi, disait-il, un homard est-il plus ridicule qu’un chien, qu’un chat, qu’une gazelle, qu’un lion ou toute autre bête dont on se fait suivre? J’ai le goût des homards, qui sont tranquilles, sérieux, savent les secrets de la mer, n’aboient pas et n’avalent pas la monade des gens comme les chiens, si antipathiques à Goethe lequel pourtant n’était pas fou. » Et mille autre raisons plus ingénieuses les unes que les autres.

Théophile Gautier, Portraits et souvenirs littéraires, G. Charpentier, Paris, 1881, p. 40

Then, suddenly aware of her hideous equipment: "What are you going to do?" he cried.

"Boil the beast," she said, "what else?"

"But it's not dead" protested Belacqua "you can't boil it like that."

She looked at him in astonishment. Had he taken leave of his senses?

"Have sense" she said sharply, "lobsters are always boiled alive. They must be." She caught up the lobster and laid it on its back. It trembled. "They feel nothing" she said.

In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. It had survived the Frenchwoman's cat and his witless clutch. Now it was going alive into scalding water. It had to. Take into the air my quiet breath.

Belacqua looked at the old parchment of her face, grey in the dim kitchen.

"You make a fuss" she said angrily "and upset me and then lash into it for your dinner."

She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about thirty seconds to live.

Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all.

It is not.

Samuel Becket, "Dante and the Lobster", More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), The Grove Centenary Edition, Vol. 4, Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism, ed. Paul Auster, Grove Press, New York, 2006, pp. 87-88.

Uri potest in gehenna, non exuri

2010-11-02T13:50:00.005+02:00

God sealed us, in imprinting his Image in our soules, and in the powers thereof, at our creation; and so, every man hath this seale, and he hath it, as soone as he hath a soule: The wax, the matter, is in his conception; the seale, the forme, is in his quickning, in his inanimation; as, in Adam, the waxe was that red earth, which he was made of, the seale was that soule, that breath of life, which God breathed into him. Where the Organs of the body are so indisposed, as that this soule cannot exercise her faculties, in that man, (as in naturall Idiots, or otherwise) there, there is a curtaine drawn over this Image, but yet there this Image is, the Image of God, is in the most naturall Idiot, as well as in the wisest of men: worldly men draw other pictures over this picture, other images over this image: The wanton man may paint beauty, the ambitious may paint honour, the covetous wealth, and so deface this image, but yet there this image is, and even in hell it selfe it will be, in him that goes down into hell: uri potest in gehenna, non exuri, sayes St. Bernard, The Image of God may burne in hell, but as long as the soule remaines, that image remaines there too; And then, thou who wouldest not burne their picture, that loved thee, wilt thou betray the picture of thy Maker, thy Saviour, thy Sanctifier, to the torments of hell? Amongst the manifold and perpetuall interpretations of that article, He descended into hell, this is a new one, that thou sentest him to hell in thy soule

John Donne, Sermon Preached to the Earl of Exeter, and his company, in his Chappell at Saint Johns; 13 June 1624. Apoc. 7.9 After this, I beheld, and loe, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the lambe, clothed with white robes, and palmes in their hands.

Immanent justice

2010-11-01T10:56:00.004+02:00

"Be virtuous, don't be greedy, Divine justice will not spare you."

Dîmbovița valley, Argeș

Bananas

Jonah

2010-10-26T13:56:00.009+03:00

In the deep places of the earth,
in the utmost depths of the sea,
in the alveoli of the lungs,
in the ventricles of the heart,
in the cavities of the teeth,
in the vesicles of volcanic rock,
in the vacuoles of the cytoplasm,
in the innermost chambers of death,
in the penetralia of the mind,
in the hull of the swart ship,
in the keel of the muffled storm,
in the caul of oblivion,
in the calyx of the dream,
in the shuck of oyster darkness,
in the ventral cavern of the whale,
in the musty cell of a nutshell,
bounded sleeping, enclosed unfeeling,
enveloped fainting, forgetting,
I prayed that I be plucked
from the inner to the outer
surface of mine own hell.

Melancholia flatuosa

2010-10-24T16:00:00.004+03:00

Melancholia Flatuosa multiplicem ob causam difficilis curationis est. Nam praeter vehementem venarum meseraicarum a crassa crudaque materia, tum melancholica, tum pituitosa, unde contumaces perpetuo spiritus elevantur, obstructionem: maxima etiam intemperaturae viscerum inaequalitas subest. Hujus quidem ratione non levia accidentia ingruunt, excrementorum nempe suppressio ab exiccante et humiditatem exugente calido hepate: difficilis spiratio a comprimente septum transversum inflato ventriculo, dolore ventriculi a flatuum distensione et intemperie frigida; eructationes, vomitiones, et successu temporis ab obstructione putredo, cujus venenata evaporatione perculsa mens deficit, et delirium accidit.

Windy melancholy is difficult to cure by reason of its manifold causes. For, besides the violent obstruction of the meseraic veins by incrassate undigested matter, now melancholic, now phlegmatic, and constantly giving off unyielding vapours, a fluctuation in the greatest degree underlies the imbalance in the internal organs. Because of this, grave corollary effects aggressively proliferate: retention of the excretions due to the parching and moisture-draining action of the heated liver; difficulty in breathing due to compression of the transversal septum by the bloated stomach, with pain in the stomach arising from windy distension and excess chill; belching; vomiting; and, over the course of time, due to the blockage, a suppuration, whose poisonous evaporation causes the stricken mind to go astray and delirium to occur.

Johannes Fienus (Jean Fyens), De Flatibus humanum corpus molestantibus commentarius novus ac singularis, in quo Flatuum natura, causae et symptomata describuntur, eorumque remediae facili et expedita methodo indicantur. Antwerp, 1582; Heidelberg, 1589; Frankfurt, 1592 (with notes by Lievinus Fischer); Amsterdam, 1643; Hamburg, 1644; some editions bear the title Physiographia de flatibus.

Quare creatae sunt sternutationes?

2010-10-05T15:06:00.006+03:00

Ebraeis sternutare est Atasch; unde Thalmudistarum verbale Ittonsch, sternutationem notat. Iidem apud Buxtorfium in Lex. Thalmudico distinguunt inter sternutationem superiorem et inferiorem. Inferior est crepitus ventris. De quo sternutamento idem Buxtorfius ex libro ben Syrae cum Comment. Constantinopoli excuso fol. 27. sequentia Latine reddidit: Quare creatae sunt sternutationes? (inferiores scilicet seu crepitus) Dixit ei; Nisi illae, essent, homo egereret necessitates suas in vestimenta sua. Cum autem homo sentit sternutationes, flatus venientes, abit et satisfacit naturae, ne pudefiat, et vestimenta sua coinquinet.

Martinus Schoock, De Sternutatione. Tractatus copiosus: Omnia ad illam pertinentia, juxta recentia inventa proponens. 2nd edition, Petrus van den Berge, in Vico de Heeregracht sub signo montis Parnassi, Amsterdam, 1664

For the Jews, to sneeze is Atasch, whence the Talmudists’ Ittonsch denotes a sneeze. According to Buxtorfius in his Talmudic Lexicon, they also distinguish between an upper and a lower sneeze. The lower is the crepitus ventris. On which sneezing the same Buxtorfius has rendered into Latin out of the Book of ben Syra with Commentaries printed in Constantinople, page 27 ff. the following: "Wherefore have sneezes been created? (scilicet lower sneezes or crepitus). He said to him: Were it not for them, man would discharge his necessities in his own clothing. But when man feels the sneezes, the flatus, coming, he goes out and satisfies nature, lest he shame himself and besmirch his clothing."

Martin Schoock, On Sneezing. Plentiful Treatise, Laying Forth All Those Things Pertinent to the Subject, along with Recent Findings, Pieter van den Berge, in Heeregracht Street under the Sign of Mount Parnasses, Amsterdam, 1664

1:1

2010-09-12T21:30:00.010+03:00

1:1 at the Romanian Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2010. Installation created by Romina Grillo, Ciprian Rășoiu, Liviu Vasiu, Matei Vlăsceanu and Tudor Vlăsceanu
Image: Dezeen Design Magazine, 3 September 2010

De Nihilo

When confronted with an empty space, we might ask ourselves what exactly it is that is not there. Something is not there, which is to say, nothing is there. As Henry Fielding puts it in his “An Essay upon Nothing” (1743), “as Nothing is not Something, so every thing which is not Something, is Nothing; and wherever Something is not, Nothing is.” But the statement “Nothing is there” ineluctably leads to a logical dead-end, an aporia: for, if nothing “is”—if “nothing” has being—then it is no longer “nothing” but rather “something”.

The paradoxes of “nothing” and “not-being” are as old as philosophy itself. They are a subversive discourse against which philosophy is helpless to legislate or defend itself. For, as soon as speculative thought postulates “being”, it is a dialectical inevitability that “not-being” will then stake its paradoxical claim to existence. In Plato’s dialogue the Sophist, the Eleatic Stranger, the anonymous sophist of the title (and thus himself a nemo or nobody, a species of nullus and ultimately nihil), warns Theaetetus to turn from the way that leads to thinking not-being is, before himself becoming lost in a maze of reasoning about the possibility of false statements. In Greek, false statements are those that “say what is not” (similarly, Swift’s ultra-rational Houyhnhnms have no notion of falsehood, and Gulliver is only able to explain it to them as “the thing which is not”). But if a statement says nothing, if it predicates what is not, then it is no longer a statement, an adfirmatio, and so there can be no false statements. Another aporia.

Whereas the Greeks laboured under a horror vacui, imagining that primitive matter must somehow have always existed before it was moulded into the cosmos by a divine demiurge, for the scholastics God’s creatio ex nihilo conferred upon “nothing” the privileged status of a primordial “something”. For example, in the Epistola de Nihilo et Tenebris (Letter on Nothing and Shadows) by ninth-century English monk Fredegisus (also known as Fridugisus), the answer to the question “nihilne aliquid sit, an non” (whether nothing is something or not) is found to be affirmative. Among the series of logical arguments he provides is the following: “Omnis significatio est quod est. Nihil autem aliquid significat. Igitur nihil ejus significatio est quid est, id est, rei existentis” (Every signification is what it is. But ‘nothing’ signifies something. Therefore the signification of ‘nothing’ is what it is, that is, [the signification] of an existing thing) (Migne, Patrologia Latina, 105: 752-3). Moreover, given that according to the sacred mysteries God created earth, air, water, fire, light, the angels and man’s soul “out of nothing”, nothing is not only something, but also a great and particular something (magnum quiddam).

Having been elevated to this primordial God-given dignity, nihil goes on to be the subject of several mediaeval (parodic) sermons. Later, with the revival of the spoudogeloion/joco-serium tradition in the Renaissance, it becomes the subject of countless epideictic encomia, which paradoxically demonstrate its pre-eminence. The most important of all these, and the source of countless imitations, was the Laudatio Nihili of Johannes Passeratius (1534-1602), where we find that Nothing is more precious than gold and gems (“Nam Nihil est gemmis, Nihil est pretiosius auro”), Nothing is more beautiful than a watered garden (“Nihil irriguo formosius horto”), Nothing is loftier than the stars (“Nihil altius astris”), Nothing is more useful to the human race than the art of healing (“Humano generi utilius Nihil arte medendi”), and so on. When Passeratius goes so far as to say that Nothing is ultimately greater than Jove (“Nihil est Jove denique maius”), praise verges upon blasphemy, however. Such daringly blasphemous paradoxical permutations are also on display in a tractate called De Nihili Antiquitate (included in the Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Socraticae Joco-Seriae (1619) of Caspar Dornavius), composed by P. Aemilius Portus (1550-1614/15), where we find that Nothing is more ancient than Eternal God Himself, because Nothing was created before God (“Aeterno Deo Nihil antiquius [est]. Quia Nihil creatum est ante Deo”). Ultimately, however, the nihil paradox can always be rescued from blasphemy by its amphiboly: if nihil is read as a pronoun rather than as a noun, as a significatio, as Fredegisus would have it, then the statement that nothing is greater than God becomes the definition of orthodoxy itself.

In 1608, thus at around the same time as the De Nihili Antiquitate, a certain Cornelius Götz delivered a discourse on Nothing before a learned assembly in Wittenberg, presided over by Rudolf Goclenius senior (the great humanist philosopher and inventor of the terms “ontology” and “psychology”). Published in Marburg, the full title of the work is Disputatio de Nihilo, quae non est de Nihilo, Vagans per omnes disciplinas (Disputation on Nothing, which is not about Nothing, Ranging through all the Disciplines). The treatise explores the Greek and Latin etymologies of nothing, the definition of nothing (Modus sine re, cuius est modus, a quo pendet essentialiter, est nihil, id est, esse non potest—The mode without reality, from whose mode it is that it essentially hangs, is nothing, that is, it is not able to be), the species of nothing (nihil absolute and nihil negativum or non ens per se), the theological significations of nothing (for St Paul, an idol is nothing (Idolum nihil est), devoid of any numinous power, while for St Basil, man is nothing by reason of his matter and great by reason of his dignity (homo nihil est propter materiam et magnus propter honorem)), the physics of nothing (nothing can be made from nothing—Ex nihilo nihil fit, after Aristotle), God’s creation out of nothing (Creatio est constitutio essentiae ex nihilo—the creation is the establishment of being out of nothing), evil as a privation of being and thus nothing, the differences between annihilation (recidere seu transire in nihil—to fall back or pass over into nothing), corruption, dissolution and transubstantiation, and much more. To the forty-six propositions of the disputatio proper are appended a number of miscellaneous metaphysical, theological, physical, logical, rhetorical and grammatical questions and answers. Under the heading of Logic, for example, Götz puts forward the following conundrum: “Principium materiale mundi est non nihil: Enunciatum affirmatum falsum est. Principium materiale mundi non est nihil. Enunciatum negatum verum est” (The material origin of the world is non-nothing. The proposition is false when asserted positively. The material origin of the world is not nothing. The proposition is true when asserted negatively).

The jesting-serious wisdom of the Renaissance, which can turn even such a seemingly sterile subject as Nothing into a dazzling rhetorical display of wit and learning, will later give way to metaphysical and existential angst, to fear of the néant. In Heidegger’s Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935, published 1953), the question posed by Leibniz—“Why is there something rather than nothing?”—becomes the inevitable Grundfrage, which looms equally in moments of despair, joy or boredom: “Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts” (Why are there beings-that-are and not nothing?). For Heidegger, however, the second part of the question is redundant. Even to speak of “nothing” is a grave offence against the logos, against logic, a reckless act that undermines all culture and thought, allying itself with nothingness in the destructive will to nihilism. Therefore, he erases it, consigning the question about nothing to nothingness, and asks simply, “Why are there beings-that-are?” In Was ist Metaphysik, Heidegger tries to find a way around the angst-inducing implications of using “nothing” and “is” in the same sentence, and comes up with “Das Nichts selbst nichtet” (The nothing nothings itself). Rudolph Carnap famously cited this as an example of metaphysical nonsense, but Henry Fielding perhaps best described the nature of this kind of discourse two centuries earlier in his “An Essay Upon Nothing”: “When a Bladder is full of Wind, it is full of Something; but when that is let out, we aptly say, there is Nothing in it. The same may be as justly asserted of a Man as of a Bladder. (…) It is at least possible for a Man to know Nothing. And whoever hath read over many Works of our ingenious Moderns, with proper Attention and Emolument, will, I believe, confess, that if he understands them right, he understands Nothing.”

However, the very word “nothing” does undeniably incorporate an existential premise. No-thing is the non-existence of a thing, after all. Nihil can only be defined by reference to aliquid, a something (else). In etymological terms, this existential premise would seem to be linguistically universal. But what it is that nothing is not varies according to different languages. In Greek, “nothing” is ouden, literally “not-one” (ne unum quidem), or, in the language of philosophy, to mê on, “not-being” (non ens). In Latin, nihil derives from hilum, “a tiny thing”, “a thing of no importance”, “a trifle”. The Russian nichto is a “not-what”. To take a very interesting non-Indo-European example, in Georgian (Kartveli) “nothing” is araperi, literally “not-colour” (ne color quidem). In the phenomenal world, every thing has a colour and it is impossible to imagine any thing without a colour. Even transparent things—water, air, glass etc.—reflect the colours of other things. They exist in space against a background of colour, and it is impossible to picture them mentally in a vacuum, in their pure colourless transparency. Any empty space is thus imbued with borrowed colours. Only an unimaginable metaphysical non-space, a ne locus quidem outside space and being, would truly be devoid of any colour, be it even only black. Only the non-space of non-colour would truly be nothing.

Finally, the etymon of the Romanian nimic (“nothing”) is nemica, from the Latin ne mica (not a crumb, not a morsel). It thus echoes the Latin ne hilum. The Romanian verb a nimicnici (“to annihilate”), and its variant a nimici, might be translated as “to reduce something to less than its ultimate crumb of matter”. The mica, which refers to the smallest possible particle of matter (cf. the hilum, which can also refer to the moral unimportance of a thing; Lucretius uses ne hilum in the sense of “not a whit”, “not a jot” and hilum in the sense of “smallest part (of a thing)”), is thus the final threshold between “something” and “nothing”. In contrast to the German das Nichts, which is perhaps the starkest nothing of all—a naked “not”— the Romanian nimicul (the nothing, nothingness, not-a-crumb-ness) is peculiarly substantial; it incorporates within itself the trace or echo of a physical something, a tiny crumb which is no longer there or could never be there. Likewise, the empty space that is intrinsic to the 1:1 installation in the Romanian Pavilion at this year’s Biennale of Architecture in Venice is a means of articulating within space nimic, nihil, nichego, araperi, nothing, as a way of asking what is no longer there, what could have been there, what should be there.

Alistair Ian Blyth, from the exhibition catalogue

Image: Dezeen

The Immediate Unreality

2010-09-03T16:58:00.009+03:00

Max Blecher was born on 8 September 1909 in Botoșani, a provincial town in northern Moldavia. Up until the Second World War, Botoșani was an ethnically and culturally diverse town, whose population was made up of Romanians, Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Roma and Lipovians (Russian Old Believers whose ancestors had fled persecution during the time of Peter the Great). At the turn of the century, Jews made up almost half of the town’s population. Max Blecher was the son of a merchant from the town’s Jewish community. While he was still a young child, Blecher’s family moved to Roman, a Moldavian town south of Botoșani, in the county of Neamț, where his father opened a porcelain shop. The petty bourgeois Jewish milieu of provincial Moldavia is memorably evoked in his autobiographical Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată (Occurrences in the Immediate Unreality) (1936), for example in the settings of Eugene’s sewing machine shop or the house and office of Blecher’s uncle and cousins, the Webers.

After finishing lycée in Roman, Blecher travelled to Paris to study medicine. It was here, in 1928, that he was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the spine, or Pott’s disease. He subsequently underwent treatment at sanatoria in France (Berck-sur-Mer), Switzerland (Leysin) and Romania (Tekirghiol), an experience which served as the inspiration for his novel Inimi cicatrizate (Cicatrised Hearts), in some ways a miniature, more naturalist counterpart to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and which is also described in Vizuina luminată: Jurnal de sanatoriu (The Illumined Burrow: Sanatorium Diary). However, treatment was of no avail, and Max Blecher was to remain bedridden until the end of his short life. After a decade of illness and suffering, he died, aged twenty-eight, on 31 May 1938.

Blecher’s literary work dates entirely from the period of his illness. Sașa Pană describes him as having been “paralysed and wracked by pain for ten years, with a few relative intermissions, but his mind voyaged through the most deeply buried mysteries, he burrowed with the tenacity of a miner into the remotest seams of his rich mind, of a body engrafted with abscesses and gangrenes.”(i) On 29 June 1930, Blecher made his literary debut with a short prose piece entitled “Herrant”, written in Berck-sur-Mer and published in Bilete de papagal (Parrot Papers)(ii). In another short prose piece published in 1934,(iii) Blecher describes Berck, home to five thousand patients suffering from tuberculosis of the spine, as a “town of immobility and plaster-casts”. Plaster is the material specific to the place, “just as steel is to Creuzot, coal to Liverpool, or petrol to Baku”. Similarly, Blecher describes the hallucinatory spectacle of a town whose inhabitants are all paralysed in a recumbent posture and encased in plaster: “Recumbent they go to the cinema, recumbent they take carriage rides, recumbent they frequent places of entertainment, recumbent they attend lectures, recumbent they pay their social visits.”(iv) Also in 1934, a slim volume of Blecher’s poems, entitled Transparent Body, was published. In the same year, Blecher published translations from Appolinaire, in Frize (Friezes) magazine. His own poetry is lyrical and surrealistic, reminiscent perhaps of Paul Eluard, as can be seen in the following strophe, for example: “Your integument / Like a bird in the nest of the heart / In rivers of blood you bathe / And you fly through my fingertips.”(v) The following year, in 1935, his parents rented a small house for him in a suburb of his hometown of Roman. Writing on a wooden board propped against his knees, which had remained paralysed in a flexed position, it was here that he finished, during interminable nights of insomnia, the books Occurrences in the Immediate Unreality (1936), Cicatrised Hearts (1937), and The Illumined Burrow (posthumously edited and published by Sașa Pană in 1971).

Blecher’s literary prose was, to a certain extent, influenced by Surrealism. As an autobiography describing the subject’s oneiric, irrational experiences, Occurrences in the Immediate Unreality (1936) has been compared with André Breton’s Nadja (1928), although Sașa Pană was of the opinion that Blecher’s novel surpassed and would ultimately outlast that of Surrealism’s founder. Blecher himself was fascinated by the controlled, lucid pictorial descriptions of delirium to be found in the work of excommunicated Surrealist outcast Salvador Dalí. In a letter to Sașa Pană, dated 7 July 1934,(vi) for example, he speaks of Dalí’s “cold, perfectly legible and essential dementia”, whose “hyper-aesthetic extravagances of adjusted irrationality” he endeavours to imitate in his own texts: “For me, the ideal in writing would be a transposition of the heightened tension that is released by the paintings of Salvador Dalí.” Like Dalí’s “paranoiac critical method”, Blecher’s “surrealism” is therefore not an unmediated, disorganised outpouring of the unconscious, such as that found in the experiments with “automatic writing” made by the doctrinaire Surrealists, but rather a controlled channelling of the irrational life of the mind: “The power of the unconscious is very great. A well-structured unconscious (…) can bring ideas which our conscious mind would never have arrived at. I may thus cite two characteristic manifestations of this power: revelation and inspiration.”(vii)”

It is revelation and inspiration – what James Joyce in his autobiographical fictions of childhood and adolescence (Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man) refers to as (secular) “epiphanies” – that provide the material for Max Blecher’s own Bildungsroman of formative experiences, “occurrences” which take place almost entirely within the confines of the author’s own febrile, delirious consciousness. In childhood, Max Blecher suffered “crises” or “attacks” of unreality, in which he experienced rupture both from the outer world of objects, and from the inner world of the self. These crises, narrated in Occurrences in the Immediate Unreality, might also be likened to the haunting moments of Stimmung evoked by Giorgio de Chirico in his pittura metafisica, as well as in his oneiric novel Hebdomeros (1929), moments during which inward disquietude is experienced as outward atmosphere, submerging the world in ineffable strangeness and enigma. In psychopathology, this is the eerie atmosphere of heightened but empty significance also experienced by sufferers of dementia praecox during the so-called ‘aura’ that precedes complete rupture with reality. Psychiatrist and neurologist Klaus Conrad referred to such states of exalted dread as the “Trema”, employing a piece of German theatrical slang for stage fright.(viii). In this respect it is notable that many of de Chirico’s paintings depict the vertiginously tilted boards of theatre stages. Likewise, as we shall see below, Blecher’s occurrences in the immediate unreality are also pervaded by a menacing sense of theatricality.

During the state of Stimmung, external phenomena are thus imbued with a sense of intense but ineffable significance, which hovers tantalisingly beyond reach. Like de Chirico, who saw the world as a “vast museum of strangeness”, Blecher too locates his crises out there in the world; they are intrinsic to various places, “sickly spaces”, which thereby become menacing “invisible traps”. These crises, which Blecher defines as the “profound sentiment of the world’s pointlessness”, are thus precisely the anti-epiphany or empty transcendence of Modernism: an anxious, heightened sense of meaningfulness, but one devoid of cognisable content, like the “Anwandlungen eines Fast-Nichts” (fits or attacks of an Almost-Nothing) described by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten (Letters of Those Who Returned) (1901). Like the cast of the inner ear whose image obsesses Blecher, people and things are nothing more than the negative image of an immanent emptiness.

Although in time Blecher’s crises as such abate, they leave behind them the same “crepuscular state” that used to presage them. As in de Chirico’s cluttered paintings of his later metaphysical period, Blecher then discovers in heteroclite, seemingly insignificant objects an “essential nostalgia for the world’s pointlessness”. Such states, which oscillate between melancholy and exaltation, are also closely intertwined with the ambiguous, confusing, even dream-like, experiences of his sexual awakening as an adolescent. He experiences occurrences as disturbingly artificial and theatrical, while other people are like automatons or mannequins, oblivious that “the certitude in which we live is separated by a very fine pellicle from the world of uncertainties”. The world itself becomes an eerie stage set, and many episodes in the novel occur in settings of inherent theatrical artificiality, such as the cinema, a waxworks exhibition, or the prop-cluttered basement beneath the stage of a theatre, where Blecher finds refuge and which thus becomes a symbol of the tiers of conscious and unconscious mind. Blecher himself dreams of being an inanimate waxwork, or else he is haunted by his own photograph, which he chances to see mysteriously displayed in the booth of a travelling fairground photographer and which then takes on a life of its own, threatening to subsume his own existence. In one of the most remarkable episodes in the book, Blecher attempts to escape from the agony of his exacerbated awareness (the “Bewußstseinswelt”, as it is called by Gottfried Benn, who similarly yearns to escape the pain of consciousness by regressing to the condition of mindless protoplasm) by descending to the ontological level of amorphous, primal mud.

As a whole, Occurrences in the Immediate Unreality teems with unsettling characters and events, refracted through the prism of the author’s unique existential “illness”. It is a work that deserves recognition as one of the most remarkable texts of European modernism.

(Introduction (c) Alistair Ian Blyth and University of Plymouth Press, 2009)

(i) Cu inimă lîngă M. Blecher, in Max Blecher, Vizuina luminată, Bucharest: Cartea românească, 1971, pp. 6-7, quoted in Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondență, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Țone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, p. 409. Sașa Pană was the pen name of Alexander Binder (1902-1981), a close friend of Max Blecher and an important figure in the Romanian avant-garde. As well as being a writer in his own right, he financed, edited and published unu (one), an avant-garde magazine, and, after the War, wrote a number of studies and memoirs about the Romanian avant-garde.
(ii) Edited and published by Tudor Arghezi (1880-1967), a major Romanian poet and novelist.
(iii) “Berck, orașul damnaților” (“Berck, the Town of the Damned”), Vremea, VII, 358, 7 October 1934; Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondență, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Țone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, pp. 352-357.
(iv) Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondență, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Țone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, p. 353.
(v) Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondență, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Țone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, p. 335.
(vi) Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondență, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Țone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, p. 396.
(vii) Note from an undated manuscript, quoted by Radu Țepoșu in the Preface to Max Blecher, Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată. Inimi cicatrizate. Vizuina luminată. Corp transparent. Corespondență, ed. Constantin Popa and Nicolae Țone, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 1999, p. 12.
(viii) See the chapter ‘The Truth-Taking Stare’ in Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), pp. 43-74.

Max Blecher, Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth, University of Plymouth Press: Plymouth, 2009.

Quare morieris?

2010-09-03T11:10:00.006+03:00

That God should let my soul fall out of his hand, into a bottomless pit, and roll an unremovable stone upon it, and leave it to that which it finds there, (and it shall find that there, which it never imagined, till it came thither) and never think more of that soul, never have more to do with it. That of that providence of God, that studies the life of every weed, and worm, and ant, and spider, and toad, and viper, there should never, never any beam flow out upon me; that that God, who looked upon me, when I was nothing, and called me when I was not, as though I had been, out of the womb and depth of darkness, will not look upon me now, when, though a miserable, and a banished, and a damned creature, yet I am his creature still, and contribute something to his glory, even in my damnation; that that God, who hath often looked upon me in my foulest uncleanness, and when I had shut out the eye of the day, the sun, and the eye of the night, the taper, and the eyes of all the world, with curtains and windows, and doors, did yet see me, and see me in mercy, by making me see that he saw me, and sometimes brought me to a present remorse, and (for that time) to a forbearing of that sin, should so turn himself from me, to his glorious saints and angels, as that no saint nor angel, nor Christ Jesus himself, should ever pray him to look towards me, never remember him, that such a soul there is; that that God, who hath so often said to my soul, Quare morieris ? Why wilt thou die ? and so often sworn to my soul, Vivit Domimis, As the Lord liveth, I would not have thee die, but live, will neither let me die, nor let me live, but die an everlasting life, and live an everlasting death; that that God, who, when he could not get into me, by standing, and knocking, by his ordinary means of entering, by his word, his mercies, hath applied his judgments, and hath shaked the house, this body, with agues and palsies, and set this house on fire, with fevers and calentures, and frightened the master of the house, my soul, with horrors, and heavy apprehensions, and so made an entrance into me; that that God should frustrate all his own purposes and practices upon me, and leave me, and cast me away, as though I had cost him nothing, that this God at last, should let this soul go away, as a smoke, as a vapour, as a bubble, and that then this soul cannot be a smoke, a vapour, nor a bubble, but must lie in darkness, as long as the Lord of light is light itself, and never spark of that light reach to my soul; what Tophet is not paradise, what brimstone is not amber, what gnashing is not a comfort, what gnawing of the worm is not a tickling, what torment is not a marriage-bed to this damnation, to be secluded eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God? especially to us, for as the perpetual loss of that is most heavy, with which we have been best acquainted, and to which we have been most accustomed ; so shall this damnation, which consists in the loss of the sight and presence of God, be heavier to us than others, because God hath so graciously, and so evidently, and so diversely appeared to us, in his pillar of fire, in the light of prosperity, and in the pillar of the cloud, in hiding himself for a while from us: we that have seen him in all the parts of this commission, in his word, in his sacraments, and in good example, and not believed, shall bo further removed from his sight, in the next world, than they to whom he never appeared in this. But vincenti et credenti, to him that believes aright, and overcomes all temptations to a wrong belief, God shall give the accomplishment of fulness, and fulness of joy, and joy rooted in glory, and glory established in eternity, and this eternity is God; to him that believes and overcomes, God shall give himself in an everlasting presence and fruition, Amen.

John Donne, from a Sermon preached to the Earle of Carlile, and his Company, at Sion (Autumn, 1622), on Mark 16:16, 'He that believeth not shall be damned'

Fresco in the porch of Biserica Sf. Elefterie Vechi (the Church of Old St. Eleftherios) (1744), Bucharest

Trulla aurea

2010-08-31T11:07:00.009+03:00

Les Grecs dont parle Juvénal mettaient au service de leur ambition une merveilleuse souplesse de caractère, leur devise était: Tout à tous, aussi le succès ne leur manquait guère. Habiles à composer leur visage sur celui du maître, ils flattaient; c’est le grand secret de plaire; ils applaudissaient en toute occasion, même dans des circonstances singulières :

Si bene ructavit, si rectum minxit amicus.

Les éructations, qu l’on dissimule avec tant de soin chez nous et dans beaucoup d’autres pays, ne sont pas considérées comme une incongruité chez les Arabes. Les gaz s’échappant de l’estomac sont l’indice d’une bonne digestion, d’une bonne santé, et les Orientaux diraient volontiers, à ceux qui rotent, comme nous à ceux qui éternuent : Dieu vous bénisse ! Quant au second chapitre, rectum minxit, il y a là un signe évident de vigeur, de jeunesse, et puisque ces actes s’accomplissaient en public, il n’est pas étonnant qu’ils fussent l’occasion de remarques de ce genre et de compliments analogues. Mais notre Grec ne se borne pas à cela; il félicite le patron qu’il encense d’une autre chose bien difficile à dire en français :

Si trulla inverso crepitum dedit aurea fundo.

Dusaulx n’a pas osé traduire ce vers, et bien d’autres ont fait comme lui. Une longue note latine de M. Achaintre donne tous les éclaircissements nécessaires sur ce passage si dégoûtant. Nous emprunterons encore à M. Constant Dubos deux vers de son excellente traduction. Nous l’avons dit, ce confrère se croit ici en plein clinique, il ne recule devant aucune expression, jugez-en :

De son anus béant si la charge élancée
Tombe avec bruit dans l’or de sa chaise percée.

C’est une paraphrase, mais elle dit tout; elle dit trop, sans doute, et nous regrettons les derniers mots qui ne rendent pas trulla aurea. Mais hâtons-nous de passer outre, car, si médecin que nous soyons, nous devons être discrets et ne pas abuser de ces particularités de garde-robe bonnes à réjouir les Purgon et les Diafoirus de Molière.

P. Menière, Études Médicales sur les Poètes Latins, Paris 1858

Logical lunacy

2010-08-28T16:09:00.002+03:00

Victor Serge said, "I followed his argument

With the blank uneasiness which one might feel

In the presence of a logical lunatic."

He said it of Konstantinov. Revolution

Is the affair of logical lunatics.

The politics of emotion must appear

To be an intellectual structure. The cause

Creates a logic not to be distinguished

From lunacy.

Wallace Stevens, Esthétique du mal, part xiv

De Nihilo

2010-08-07T20:54:00.005+03:00

As Nothing is not Something, so every thing which is not Something, is Nothing; and wherever Something is not, Nothing is (...) For instance; when a Bladder is full of Wind, it is full of Something; but when that is let out, we aptly say, there is Nothing in it. The same may be as justly asserted of a Man as of a Bladder. However well he may be bedaubed with Lace, or with Title, yet if he have not Something in him, we may predicate the same of him as of an empty Bladder. (...) Indeed some have imagined, that Knowledge, with the adjective human placed before it, is another word for Nothing. And one of the wisest Men in the world declared, he knew Nothing. But without carrying it so far, this I believe may be allowed: it is at least possible for a Man to know Nothing. And whoever hath read over many Works of our ingenious Moderns, with proper Attention and Emolument, will, I believe, confess, that if he understands them right, he understands Nothing.

Henry Fielding, "An Essay on Nothing", Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (London, 1743)

Lebens-Attrappen

2010-08-02T20:09:00.011+03:00

To our grandparents, a ‘house’, a ‘well’, a familiar steeple, even their own clothes, their cloak, still meant infinitely more, were still infinitely more intimate; almost everything was a vessel in which they found something human and added something human to its store. Now, over here, there are encroaching from America empty, trivial things, sham-things, dummies of life... A house, in the American understanding of the word, an American apple or a vine from over there, have nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which the hope and reflection of our forefathers had entered... The life-infused, genuinely lived things, the things known to us, are waning and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last still to know such things. Upon us rests the responsibility to preserve not only their memory (that would be too little and unreliable), but also their human and laral value (‘laral’ in the sense of the household deities [the Lares]).

Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Witold von Hulewicz, 13 November 1925

Noch für unsere Großeltern war ein ,Haus‘, ein ,Brunnen‘, ein ihnen vertrauter Turm, ja ihr eigenes Kleid, ihr Mantel: unendlich mehr, unendlich vertaulicher; fast jedes Ding ein Gefäß, in dem sie Menschliches vorfanden und Menschliches hinzusparten. Nun drängen, von Amerika her, leere gleichgültige Dinge herüber, Schein-Dinge, Lebens-Attrappen... Ein Haus, im amerikanischen Verstande, ein amerikanischer Apfel oder eine dortige Rebe, hat nichts gemeinsam mit dem Haus, der Frucht, der Traube, in die Hoffnung und Nachdenklichkeit unserer Vorväter eingegangen war... Die belebten, die erlebten, die uns mitwissenden Dinge gehen zur Neige und können nicht mehr ersetzt werden. Wir sind vielleicht die Letzten, die noch solche Dinge gekannt haben. Auf uns ruht die Verantwortung, nicht allein ihr Andenken zu erhalten (das wäre wenig und unzuverlässig), sondern ihren humanen und larischen Wert (,Larisch‘, im Sinne der Haus-Gottheiten.)

Photographs: Sergej Mixailovich Prokudin-Gorskij, Russia 1909-1912 (Library of Congress)

Stimmung

2010-07-31T19:41:00.004+03:00

A patient noticed the waiter in the coffee-house; he skipped past him so quickly and uncannily. He noticed odd behaviour in an acquaintance which made him feel strange; everything in the street was so different, something was bound to be happening. A passer-by gave such a penetrating glance, he could be a detective. Then there was a dog who seemed hypnotised, a kind of mechanical dog made of rubber. There were such a lot of people walking about, something must surely be starting up against the patient. All the umbrellas were rattling as if some apparatus was hidden inside them.

In other cases patients have noticed transfigured faces, unusual beauty of landscape, brilliant golden hair, overpowering glory of the sunlight. Something must be going on; the world is changing, a new era is starting. Lights are bewitched and will not burn; something is behind it. A child is like a monkey; people are mixed up, they are imposters all, they all look unnatural. The house-signs are crooked, the streets look suspicious; everything happens so quickly. The dog scratches oddly at the door.

Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, trans. J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 100.

Einem Kranken fällt im Café der Kellner auf. Der hupfte so schnell und unheimlich an ihm vorbei. Bei einem Bekannten fiel ihm das seltsame Benehmen auf, so daß ihm nicht geheuer war. Auf der Straße war alles so anders. Es mußte etwas los sein. Ein vorübergehender Mann hatte einen so durchdringenden Blick, das war womöglich ein Detektiv. Dann kam ein Hund wie hypnotisiert war, wie ein Gummihund, als wenn er durch Maschinen bewegt wurde. Es waren so viele Menschen unterwegs: es war wohl etwas gegen den Kranken im Werke. Alle klapperten mit den Schirmen, als wenn ein Apparat darin wäre.

In anderen Fällen fallen den Kranken die verklärten Geschichter, die ganz ungewohnte Schönheit der Landschaft, dar auffällig goldene Haar, die überwältigende Schönheit der Sonne auf. Es muß etwas vor sich gehen. Es verändert sich die Welt. Es ist ein neues Zeitalter im Anbruch. Die Lichter sind verhext und wollen nicht brennen. Da steckt etwas Unnatürliches dahinter. Das Kind ist wie ein Affe geworden. Die Menschen sind ,,verwechselt‘‘, es sind ,,Figuranten‘‘, sie sehen alle unnatürlich aus. Die Schilder sind schief an den Häusern, die Straßen sehen so verdächtig aus. Es geht ,,alles so schnell‘‘. Der Hund kratzt so sonderbar an der Tür.

Karl Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie (Berlin, Heidelberg and New York: Springer-Verlag, 1923, 1973), p. 84

Die lyrische Stimmung

2010-07-30T12:00:00.000+03:00

...Darum geht im Liede und der lyrischen Stimmung das Wollen (das persönliche Interesse des Zwecks) und das reine Anschauen der sich darbietenden Umgebung wundersam gemischt durch einander: es werden Beziehungen zwischen beiden gesucht und imaginirt; die subjective Stimmung, die Affection des Willens, theilt der angeschauten Umgebung und diese wiederum jener ihre Farbe im Reflex mit: von diesem ganzen so gemischten und getheilten Gemüthszustande ist das ächte Lied der Abdruck

Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819)

Ueber den Prozess seines Dichtens hat uns Schiller durch eine ihm selbst unerklärliche, doch nicht bedenklich scheinende psychologische Beobachtung Licht gebracht; er gesteht nämlich als den vorbereitenden Zustand vor dem Actus des Dichtens nicht etwa eine Reihe von Bildern, mit geordneter Causalität der Gedanken, vor sich und in sich gehabt zu haben, sondern vielmehr eine musikalische Stimmung („Die Empfindung ist bei mir anfangs ohne bestimmten und klaren Gegenstand; dieser bildet sich erst später. Eine gewisse musikalische Gemüthsstimmung geht vorher, und auf diese folgt bei mir erst die poetische Idee“).

Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik (1872)

Like another Sisyphus

2010-07-23T20:19:00.005+03:00

... and giving to one of his old acquaintances his wallet, books, and opistographs, away went he out of town towards a little hill or promontory of Corinth called Craneum: and there on the strand, a pretty level place, did he roll his jolly tub, which served him for an house to shelter him from injuries of the weather; there, I say, in a great vehemency of spirit, did he turn it, veer it, wheel it, whirl it, frisk it, jumble it, shuffle it, huddle it, tumble it, hurry it, justle it, jumble it, joult it, evert it, overthrow it, subvert it, beat it, thwack it, bump it, knock it, thrust it, push it, batter it, shock it, shake it, throw it, toss it, jerk it, overthrow it upside-down, topsy-turvy, arsiversy, tread it, trample it, stamp it, slamp it, tap it, ting it, ring it, tingle it, towl it, sound it, resound it, shut it, unbung it, stop it, close it, unstopple it. He hurled it, slid it down the hill, precipitated it from the very height of the Craneum; heaved it, transfigured it, bespattered it, garnished it, furnished it, bored it, bewrayed it, parched it, bedashed, tottered it, adorned, staggered it, transformed it, brangled it, heaved it, carried it, bedashed it, hacked it; then from the foot to the top, like another Sisyphus with his stone, bore it up again, slid it down the hill, and every way so banged it and belaboured it that it was ten thousand to one he had not struck the bottom of it out.

François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart (1653, 1693)

The Seductiveness of the Interval

2010-07-19T14:54:00.002+03:00

The Seductiveness of the Interval catalogue is available from the Renaissance Society Bookstore, at the University of Chicago

Encomium culicis

2010-07-16T21:12:00.008+03:00

Caelius Calcagninus (1479-1541)

Ast ego magnanimum culicem quo carmine laudem?
Certe huius rara est gloria, rarus honor.
Cetera quaecunque a nobis insecta vocantur,
Furtim ex insidiis figere tela solent.
Ille, cave, exclamat, metuendaque classica pulsat:
Dissidiaeque nota, qui dolet, ille dolet.
In reliquis fraudem atque astum causabere: nemo
De culicis poterit vulnere jure queri.

l. 4 solent Buonaventura, Carmina illustrium poetarum italorum ] sonant Dornau, Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Socraticae Joco-Seriae

But by which song might I praise the great-souled gnat? Assuredly, rare is its glory, rare its renown. Whatever other things we call insects are wont to lay traps, fastening their stings by stealth. The gnat cries out, "Beware!" and blares his fearful war-trumpet: "And mark the fray, whoever smarts will rue. As for the rest, you will allege trickery and cunning: but no one can justly accuse a gnat for the sake of a wound."

Latmia saxa

2010-07-15T20:05:00.006+03:00

Politian (Angelo de'Ambrosini da Monte Pulciano) (1454-1494)

O mihi quanta datis fallacia gaudia, somni!
Invideo, Endymion, Latmia saxa tibi.
Iam si nil sopor est gelidae nisi mortis imago,
Omnia mors superat gaudia: vita, vale.

Oh, slumbers, how many illusive joys you give me! / I envy thee, Endymion, thy Latmian* rocks. / And if sleep is nought but the image of frigid death, / Then death doth surpass all other joys: life, farewell.

* Latmus, a mountain at the mouth of the Maeander, in Caria, where the Moon descended to kiss the sleeping Endymion

Melancholicorum risus

2010-07-04T11:11:00.008+03:00

Georgio de Chirico, Mélancolie (1912)

Qua de caussa Melancholicorum risus rarior ille quidem, sed immoderatus esse solet?

Certum est: sicut iracundia non est in felle, cuius conceptaculum est in folliculo cavae parti hepatis adnascenti: Ita risum & facultatem ridendis etiam in splene non esse. Splen enim tam destinatus est a natura ad recipiendum ab hepate melancholicum sanguinem & excrementum: Melancholicus autem humor risui, sicut gaudio inimicus est. Risus igitur in ea parte non esse potest, in qua hic humor abundat. Unde igitur est, quod melancholicos effusius ridere contingit? Responsio vera ad hanc quaestionem haec est: Melancholici seu quorum sanguis valde melancholicus & crassus est, ut rariuscule rident, quia sunt natura frigidiores, ita incalescente humore melancholico, si quando in risum erumpunt, in hoc saepiuscule sunt nimii seu solent modum excedere, ob iam dictam calefactionem adventitiam.

Rodolphi Gocklenii De risu et ridiculo problemata (Frankfurt, 1607), cap. xvi

By what cause is the laughter of melancholics wont to be infrequent but immoderate?

It is certain that just as irascibility does not reside in the gall, whose receptacle is in the sac adjoined to the hollow part of the liver, so too laughing and the faculty of laughter do not reside in the spleen. For the spleen is designed by nature to collect melancholic blood and waste from the liver. But the melancholic humour is inimical to laughter, the same as to joy. Therefore laughter cannot reside in that part where this humour abounds. And so why is it that melancholics are seized with unrestrained laughter? The real answer to this question is that melancholics or those whose blood is exceedingly melancholic and incrassate very rarely laugh, because they are colder by nature, and so once the melancholic humour has been inflamed, if they burst out laughing they are very often excessive in this or wont to be immoderate, because of the said heating of the connective tissue.

Cur nullus possit seipse titillare?

2010-07-03T18:18:00.009+03:00

Cur nullus possit seipse titillare?

Titillatio risus species esse videtur, etsi nesciam maximis quibusdam Philosophis placere verum risum non esse, sed huic similem. Alii ita loquuntur, ut dicant, ex titillatu in nobis excitari risum, sed haec nunc relinquentes in medio, quaerimus, cur nemo possit seipsum titillare? Respondit Vallesius lib. 5. controversiarum cap. 9. Titillatio fit ex fraudulento & clandestino tactu seu attrectatione partium acerrimi sensus, ad quas musculorum sunt capita. Eae sentiunt voluptatem ex tactu velut delintis carneis partibus, quem repente & latentur accedens transfundit gaudium ad cor cum quadam novitatis specie, atque ita risus fit. At nullus tactus potest sibi ipsi occulte seu latenter occurrere, Nemo igitur potest seipse titillare.

Rodolphi Gocklenii De risu et ridiculo problemata (Frankfurt, 1607), cap. v

Why is no man able to tickle himself?

Tickling can be seen to be a species of laughter, although in the opinion of certain great philosophers it is not true laughter, but merely similar to it. Likewise, others say that laughter is, as they argue, stimulated in us from a tickling, but leaving these things undecided we shall now ask why it is that no man is able to tickle himself. Vallesius, in Book 5, Chapter 9 of his Disputations, answers that tickling is produced by furtive and secret touching or by fingering of the parts of sharpest sense, present at the extremities of the muscles. These feel pleasure from the touching and the contraction of the fleshy parts, which the swiftly and secretly attendant delight transfers to the heart together with a certain kind of surprise, and thus laughter is produced. But no man is able to touch himself in secret or run up on himself and surprise himself. Therefore no man is able to tickle himself.

Tute, si recte vixeris

2010-06-20T20:52:00.003+03:00

Aeschylus in Sicilia moenibus urbis, in qua morabatur, egressus, aprico in loco resedit: super quem aquila testudinem ferens, elusa splendore capitis (erat enim capillis vacuum) perinde atque lapidi eam collisit, ut fractae carne vesceretur: eoque ictu origo et principium fortioris tragoediae extinctum est.

La Mort est inévitable.

Ne crois pas éviter la mort,
Que la Loy divine t’apprête;
Car si ton propre toit ne t’écrase la tête,
Le toit d’un étranger accomplira le sort.

Othonis Vaeni [Otto van Veen's] Emblemata Horatiana (1684)

Clouds

2010-06-02T10:53:00.019+03:00

The lychgate of a field showed Father Conmee breadths of cabbages, curtseying to him with ample underleaves. The sky showed him a flock of small white clouds going slowly down the wind.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922), Wandering Rocks

Мокрая осень летела над Петербургом; и невесело так мерцал сентябревский денек. Зеленоватым роем проносились там облачные клоки; они сгущались в желтоватый дым, припадающий к крышам угрозою. (Sodden autumn was flying over Petersburg; and joylessly gleamed the September day. Thence cloud-tatters were borne in a greenish swarm; they congealed into a yellowish smoke, tumbling down to the rooftops threat-wise.)

Andrei Bely, Petersburg (1913), A Wet Autumn

The wind began to moan in hollow murmurs, as the sun went down carrying glad day elsewhere; and a train of dull clouds coming up against it menaced thunder and lightning. Large drops of rain soon began to fall, and, as the storm clouds came sailing onward, others supplied the void they left behind and spread over all the sky.

Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Chapter 29

Небо было ужасно темное, но явно можно было различить разорванные облака, а между ними бездонные черные пятна. Вдруг я заметил в одном из этих пятен звездочку и стал пристально глядеть на нее. Это потому, что эта звездочка дала мне мысль: я положил в эту ночь убить себя. (The sky was frightfully dark, but it was possible to descry the ragged clouds clearly, and between them bottomless black spots. All of a sudden I noticed in one of these spots a little star and I began to stare at it fixedly. That was because the little star gave me an idea: I decided to kill myself that very night.)

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877)

Становилось все темнее. Туча залила уже полнеба, стремясь к Ершалаиму, белые кипящие облака неслись впереди наполненной черной влагой и огнем тучи. Сверкнуло и ударило над самым холмом. (It was growing ever darker. Nearing Jerusalem, the cloud had already flooded half the sky. Seething white billows raced ahead of the cloud saturated with black moisture and flame.)

Mikhail Bulgakov, Master and Margarita (1931-1940), Chapter 16 'The Execution'

It was principally for these reasons that Watt would have been glad to hear Erskine’s voice, wrapping up safe in words the kitchen space, the extraordinary newel-lamp, the stairs that were never the same and of which even the number of steps seemed to vary, from day to day, and from night to morning, and many other things in the house, and the bushes without and other garden growths, that so often prevented Watt from taking the air, even on the finest day, so that he grew pale, and constipated, and even the light as it came and went and the clouds that climbed the sky, now slow, now rapid, and generally from west to east, or sank down towards the earth on the other side, for the clouds seen from Mr. Knott’s premises were not quite the clouds that Watt was used to, and Watt had a great experience of clouds, and could distinguish the various sorts, the cirrhus, the stratus, the cumulus and the various other sorts, at a glance.

Samuel Beckett, Watt (1953)

There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

A fitful light was breaking through the clouds, and the arches circumscribing the quadrangle cast pale shadows that weakened or intensified as the clouds stole across the sun.

Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (1946), 'The Sun Goes down Again'

De poenarum tartarearum latitudine

2010-05-28T13:22:00.006+03:00

Etenim oculi, qui nunc colorum venustatem, concinnasque membrorum symmetrias studiose demirantur, multaque quae referre non lubet, nec licet, curiose simul et exitiose observant, tunc solis, lunae, caeterorumque astrorum splendore, suavissima Christi et Sanctorum omnium visione, omni denique quod oculorum sensum quoquo modo capere aut oblectare queat privati, tenebris, fletu, fumo, terrifioque daemonum et impiorum aspectu vehementissime offendentur. Aures, quae vocanti Christo male nunc occluduntur, diaboli suggestionibus late panduntur, musicis numeris ad ciendam voluptatem comparatis distenduntur, ineptas nugatorum facetias, facetasque ineptias, adulatores rursum, alienaeque famae corrosores avide excipiunt, quaeque miserorum clamoribus et fletibus, vivificoque Dei verbo fastidito, ad inanes fabulas se se convertunt, horribili impiorum clamore, ulutata, fletu, planctu, gemitu, suspiriis, maledictis, blasphemisque vocibus mire tunc obtundentur. [...] Gustatus, qui esculentis et poculentis plusque Sibariticis hic male sese oblectarat, quotidie splendide epulando, immoderateque helluando, omni cibariorum et potionum suavitate orbatus, perpetua isthic siti et fame excarnificabitur, aut certe felle et absynthio ex[s]atiabitur. [...] Odoratus, qui exquisitissimis aromatum et unguentorum odoribus hic ad luxum et lasciviam abutebatur, teterrimo foetore isthic affligetur. [...] Ad tactum quod spectat, ut is unus omnium latissime patet, ita ei nusquam non, unde offendi queat, ocurret. Nec impiorum corpora solum enim erunt segnia, crassa, obscura, foetida, deformiaque, verum etiam maxime patibilia. At vero sensuum exteriorum poenae, ad sensum communem, phantasiam, aestimativam, memoriam, caeterasque omnes tam organicas, quam inorganicas animae vires ordine quodam penetrantes atrocissimos isthic cruciatus excitaturae sunt.

Theodor Anton Peltanus, De Inferno et miserando impiorum statu (1569)

Truly, the eyes, which now eagerly marvel at the loveliness of colours and the pleasing symmetries of the limbs, which inquisitively yet perniciously gaze upon many things neither permissible nor decent to mention, but which then shall be bereft of the radiance of sun, moon and other stars, of the most sweet sight of Christ and all the Saints, and, in short, of all that the eyesight might seize upon or delight in howsoever, will be most violently assailed by darkness, lamentation, smoke, and the fearful sight of demons and sinners. The ears, which now are evilly shut to the call of Christ, which yawn wide to the insinuations of the devil, which gape to musical measures composed in order to excite lascivious pleasure, which avidly listen to the absurd witticisms of idle speeches, inane jokes, flatterers and those who gnaw away at others’ reputation, and which turn aside in disgust from the life-giving word of God, preferring vain stories, will then be deafened by the dreadful clamour of sinners, by wailing, lamenting, weeping, groaning, sighing, cursing and blaspheming voices. [...] The taste, which here evilly delights in Sybaritic foods and beverages, every day feasting ostentatiously, gormandising immoderately, there, deprived of the sweetness of nourishment and drink, shall be perpetually emaciated with thirst and hunger, or else glutted on gall and wormwood. [...] The smell, which here abuses the exquisite scents of perfumes and unguents for purposes of luxury and lust, there shall be afflicted with a most noisome stench. [...] With regard to touch, as this is the broadest of all [the senses] in extent, there will be no place it might run whence not to suffer mortification. Not only will sinners’ bodies be sluggish, heavy, darksome, foetid, and misshapen, but also sensitive to pain in the highest degree. And indeed the punishments of the external senses, penetrating in turn to the sensus communis, phantasia, instinctive judgement ([vis] aestimativa), memory and all the other faculties of the soul, both organic and inorganic, will in that place rouse unrelenting torments.

De Risu et ridiculo

2010-05-16T14:54:00.013+03:00

from Johannes Kuhl Marpurgensus, Theses de risu, fletu, et locutione

Risus est diductio oris in transversum, facta ab homine, propter rei ridiculae sensum & considerationem, ad declarandam animi voluptatem. / Descriptio ex forma subiecto, obiecto, efficiente & fine. / Subiectum, recipiens Homo. / Obiectum res ridicula, sive sit factum sive dictum novum, insolens, inopinatum, argutum, admirabile, ludicrum, ineptum, indecorum. / Caussa efficiens externa est sensus rei ridiculae, motus musculorum, thoracis & buccarum. / Interna partim anima rationalis, partim facultas ridendi, partim imaginatio & consideratio rei ridiculae, partim affectus cordis inde resultans. / Forma diductio oris in transversum, seu extensio rictus in facie. / Finis, declaratio voluptatis ex re percepta. / RISUS Sonorus vel Insonorus. / Sonorus, qui fit cum sonitu excitao a spiritu e pulmonibus per guttur exeunte, propter illius ad partes oris internas allisionem. Hic fit Sine clamore vel Cum clamore, & dicitur Cachinnus.

Laughter is a drawing apart of the mouth crosswise, made by a man, on account of the meaning and consideration of a laughable thing, in order to make known the soul's delight. / Description according to form, subject, object, cause and end: / Subject: a receptive Man. / Object: a laughable thing, be it a deed or a thing that is novel, unusual, unexpected, witty, surprising, trifling, inappropriate, unseemly. / The external efficient cause is the meaning of the laughable thing, the movement of the muscles, chest, and mouth. / The internal [cause] is partly the rational soul, partly the faculty of laughter, partly the imagination and a consideration of the laughable thing, partly the favourable mood of the heart thence resulting. / The form is the drawing apart of the mouth crosswise, or the spreading of the opened mouth across the face. / The end is the expression of delight on account of the thing observed. / LAUGHTER is either resounding or soundless. / Resounding laughter is produced from the lungs by the breath and comes out of the throat with a sound, on account of its striking against the internal parts of the mouth. This might be without loud noise or with loud noise, and is called Cacchinus (loud or cackling laughter).

from Rodolphus Goclenius, De Physiologia Risus & Ridiculi

Goclenius divides laughter into two species: laughter properly speaking (proprie dictus) and laughter improperly speaking (improprie dictus). Laughter properly speaking can be simple/absolute or κατά τι [at something]. Simple laughter is more unrestrained (effusior) and is also called Cachinnus [loud laughter]. Laughter κατά τι is called subrisus [literally 'sub-laughter', also with the meaning 'a smile']. Laughter improperly speaking arises from tickling (e titillatione); it is the laughter of the monkey, a simulacrum of laughter. Laughter is also to be defined according to the species of the laughable thing (rei ridiculae). These species include the strange or novel (insolentia), the unshapely or uncouth (deformitas), the unsightly or shameful (turpitudo), the unbecoming or indecent (indecorum), witticisms (argutiae), and things unexpected or surprising (inopinata).

Exempla Ridiculi sunt Ludicrum Depositionis Scholasticae crepitus ventris, cum quaeritur apud Aristophanem in nubibus, orene, an podice sonum edant culices, & sexcenta id genus alia.

Examples of the laughable are the jest of the scholastic deposition on the fart, as when in Aristophanes' The Clouds there is an inquiry into whether gnats emit noise through their mouth or their anus, and innumerable others of the same kind.

Stimmung

2010-05-10T10:38:00.001+03:00

Stimmung, A.I. Blyth, 2006

Hieronymi Angeriani Erotopaegnion De Pulice

2010-05-04T21:43:00.011+03:00

Ctenocaphalides felis, A. I. Blyth, 2007

Hieronymi Angeriani Erotopaegnion De Pulice

Pulchra pulex tenerae penetrat dum membra puellae;
Clamque subit niveum dente premente femur:
Comprimitur digitis, et nigro clauditur orco:
Sed dedit hoc illi distichon alma Venus:
Mortuus hic iaceo, sed non hic mortuus; ardens
Dum premor albenti pollice, vivo pulex.

Girolamo Angeriano (1470-1535), Erotopaegnion On a Flea

A flea makes its way over the fair limbs of a tender girl,
And stealthily, with squeezing tooth, he closes in on snowy thigh.
By fingers he is gripped, and in hellish blackness confined,
But bountiful Venus to him this couplet yields:
Here lie I dead, but here not dead; blazing
As I am squeezed by whitening thumb, I live a flea.

Stultifera navis mortalium

2010-04-28T21:00:00.006+03:00

Hi sunt qui descendunt mare in navibus, facientes operationes in aquis
multis. Ascendunt usque ad coelos, & descendunt usque ad abyssos:
anima eorum in malis tabescebat. Turbati sunt & moti
sunt sicut ebrius: & omnis sapientia eorum
devorata est.

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters:
They mount up to the heavens, they go down again to the depths:
their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro,
and stagger like a drunken man, and are at
their wit's end.

An Tartarus sit aliquid, utrum vero nihil?

2010-04-25T18:36:00.009+03:00

Q. An Tartarus sit aliquid, utrum vero nihil?

R. Est aliquid nempe locus cruciatus Luc. 6 [sic.]. Est nihil de quo Plato in Phaedone. Sic ᾅδης est aliquid; ut cum dicitur, descendit ἐις ᾅδην. Est etiam nihil: ut fingitur esse domus Plutonis. Plasmata enim rationis, quae Aristot. opponit πράγμασιν, referimus ad nihil.

Rodolphus Goclenius, Disputatio de nihilo, quae non est de nihilo,
vagans per omnes disciplinas

Q. Whether Tartarus is something or in fact nothing

A. The place of torment is surely something (Luke [16.23]). It is the nothing about which Plato [tells] in the Phaedo. Thus ᾅδης [Hades] is something; as when it is said, he descended ἐις ᾅδην [into Hades]. It is also nothing: as it is imagined to be the house of Pluto. For, the fictions of reasoning, which Aristotle opposed πράγμασιν [to concrete realities], we ascribe to nothing.

Labour sub tecto

2010-04-25T15:47:00.007+03:00

Both S. Basil, and S. Chrysostome put this difference in that place, between the labour of the Ant, and the Bee, That the Ants worke but for themselves, the Bee for others: Though the Ants have a Commonwealth of their own, yet those Fathers call their labour, but private labour; because no other Common-wealths have benefit by their labour, but their own. Direct thy labours in thy calling to the good of the publique, and then thou art a civill, a morall Ant; but consider also, That all that are of the houshold of the faithfull, and professe the same truth of Religion, are part of this publique, and direct thy labours, for the glory of Christ Jesus, amongst them too, and then thou art a religious and a Christian Bee, and the fruit of thy labour shall be Hony. The labour of the Ant is sub Dio, open, evident, manifest; The labour of the Bee is sub Tecto, in a house, in a hive; They will doe good, and yet they will not be seene to doe it; they affect not glory, nay they avoyd it. For in experience, when some men curious of naturall knowledge, have made their Hives of glasse, that by that transparency, they might see the Bees manner of working, the Bees have made it their first work to line that Glasse-hive, with a crust of Wax, they they might work and not be discerned. It is a blessed sincerity, to work as the Ant, professedly, openly; but because there may be cases, when to doe so, would destroy the whole worke, though there be a cloud and a curtaine betweene thee, and the eyes of men, yet if thou doe them clearely in the sight of God, that he see his glory advanced by thee, the fruit of thy labour shall be Honey.

John Donne, Sermon preached at White-hall, 8 April 1621 (Prov. 25.16 Hast thou found honey? Eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it)

A Dish of Dainties for the Devil

2010-04-15T20:27:00.007+03:00

A godly father sitting on a draught,
To do as need and nature hath us taught,
Mumbled (as was his manner) certain prayers,
And unto him the Devil straight repairs,
And boldly to revile him he begins,
Alleging that such prayers are deadly sins;
And that it showed he was devoid of grace,
To speak to God from so unmeet a place.
The reverent man, though at first dismayed,
Yet strong in faith, to Satan thus he said:
"Thou damned spirit, wicked, false and lying,
Despairing thine own good, and ours envying:
Each take his due, and me thou canst not hurt,
To God my prayer I meant, to thee the dirt.
Pure prayer ascends to him that high doth sit,
Down falls the filth, for fiends of hell more fit."

Sir John Harington, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (London, 1596), Ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London, 1974), p. 94 [spelling and punctuation modernised]

A streame of brimstone

2010-04-09T11:55:00.006+03:00

That then there is damnation, and why it is, and when it is, is cleare enough; but what this damnation is, neither the tongue of good Angels that know damnation by the contrary, by fruition of salvation, nor the tongue of bad Angels who know damnation by a lamentable experience, is able to expresse it; A man may saile so at sea, as that he shall have laid the North Pole flat, that shall be fallen out of sight, and yet he shall not have raised the South Pole, he shall not see that; So there are things, in which a man may goe beyond his reason, and yet not meet with faith neither: of such a kinde are those things which concerne the locality of hell, and the materiality of the torments thereof; for that hell is a certaine and limited place, beginning here and ending there, and extending no farther, or that the torments of hell be materiall, or elementary torments, which in naturall consideration can have no proportion, no affection, nor appliablenesse to the tormenting of a sprit, these things neither settle my reason, nor binde my faith; neither opinion, that it is, or is not so, doth command our reason so, but that probable reasons may be brought on the other side; neither opinion doth so command our faith, but that a man may be saved, though hee thinke the contrary; for in such points, it is alwaies lawfull to thinke so, as we finde does most advance and exalt our owne devotion, and Gods glory in our estimation; but when we shall have given to those words, by which hell is expressed in the Scriptures, the heaviest significations, that either the nature of those words can admit, or as they are types and representations of hell, as fire, and brimstone, and weeping, and gnashing, and darknesse, and the worme, and as they are laid together in the Prophet, Tophet, (that is, hell) is deepe and large, (there is the capacity and content, roome enough) It is a pile of fire and much wood, (there is the durablenesse of it) and the breath of the Lord to kindle it, like a streame of Brimstone, (there is the vehemence of it:) when all is done, the hell of hels, the torment of torments is the everlasting absence of God, and the everlasting impossibility of returning to his presence.

John Donne, sermon Preached to the Earle of Carlile and his company, at Sion [? 1622], Mark 16:16 "He that beleeveth not, shall be damned"

Fresco in the porch of the Church of St. Nicholas - Udricani (1735), Bucharest

St. Symeon the New Theologian

2010-03-12T12:37:00.002+02:00

12 March, the Repose of St. Symeon the New Theologian

Dorotheos of Gaza on encystment within the passions

2010-02-01T15:02:00.007+02:00

Doctrina XII, De timore et poenis inferni (Migne, Patrologia Graeca, 88, 1752)

Through the body, the soul is distracted from its passions and is comforted, it eats, drinks, lays itself down to rest, keeps company, finds diversion in loved ones. But when it goes out of the body, the soul remains alone with its passions, and ultimately it is tormented by them forever, dwelling upon them, consumed with their agitation, rent asunder by them, so that it is no longer able to remember God. For remembrance of God comforts the soul, as it says in the psalm: I remembered God and was gladdened [Ps. 76:4]. But the passions do not allow the soul even this. Will you learn by a parable what it is I say? Let one of you go and shut himself up alone in a dark cell, and for three days let him not eat, drink, lay himself down to rest, meet anyone, sing psalms, pray, or remember God in any wise. Then shall he learn what the passions do to him. And this while he is yet here, but how much more so after the soul goes out of the body, and will have given itself up to the passions and will be alone with them.

Infinitely less than nothing

2010-01-21T15:46:00.006+02:00

That great Library, those infinite Volumes of the Books of Creatures, shall be taken away, quite away, no more Nature; those reverend Manuscripts, written with Gods own hand, the Scriptures themselves, shall be taken away, quite away; no more preaching, no more reading of Scriptures, and that great School-Mistress, Experience, and Observation shall be remov'd, no new thing to be done, and in an instant, I shall know more, than they all could reveal to me. I shall know, not only as I know already, that a Bee-hive, that an Ant-hill is the same Book in Decimo sexto, as a Kingdom is in Folio, That a Flower that lives but a day, is an abridgment of that King, that lives out his threescore and ten yeers; but I shall know too, that all these Ants, and Bees, and Flowers, and Kings, and Kingdoms, howsoever they may be Examples, and Comparisons to one another, yet they are all as nothing, altogether nothing, less than nothing, infinitely less than nothing, to that which shall then be the subject of my knowledge, for, it is the knowledge of the glory of God.

John Donne, from A Sermon preached at the Spittle, upon Easter-Monday, 1622

Hê thlipsis hê aporrhêtos

2010-01-04T13:32:00.003+02:00

As to those that fall away from God, I wonder where it is they exist, those that are far removed from Him that is everywhere, and verily, O brothers, is it a wonder full of great trembling, one that requires the reasoning of an illumined mind,

in order properly to understand this thing and not to fall into heresy as a result of ignorance of the words of the Holy Ghost. They, too, will wholly have existence within the universe, but outside of the divine light and even outside of God.

For, just as those that cannot see the shining sun, although they are wholly bathed in its light, end their days outside of the light, severed from any sense or sight of it, so too in this universe is the divine light of the Trinity,

and in its midst the sinners that are enclosed in darkness, unseeing, bereft of any divine sense, but consumed and chastised by their conscience, will know for all eternity unspeakable affliction and ineffable pain.

St. Symeon the New Theologian, Hymns, I, 215-231

(English translation: Alistair Ian Blyth)

Two sub-hells: Nyôfunjo and Nôketsujo

2010-01-03T21:59:00.008+02:00

Depiction of the torments of the damned in the Buddhist sub-hell of Nyôfunjo (Dung Pit), or the shifunsho (place of excrement), one of the paintings in the Jigokuzôshi (Illustrated Stories of Hell) found in a Heian period (794-1185) emakimono (picture scroll) kept in the Nara National Museum ("Genkahon"; height 26.66 cm, length 433.42 cm). The text of the emakimono describes the sins and the torments of those who wallow in the Dung Pit as follows:

While these men lived, they considered dirty what in reality was not; they also considered clean what was not, due to the foolishness of their heart. (...) The pit in which they are is deep, and they are sunk in it up to their necks; it smells very bad there. This filth is beyond comparison with anything of this world, and the pains of the damned are unbearable.

(translated by Fernando G. Guttiérez, "Emakimono Depicting the Pains of the Damned," Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 22, No. 3/4 (1967), p. 285)

The scroll also illustrates the sub-hell called Nôketsujo (Place of Pus and Blood):

Those who suffer eternal anguish therein are said to have been of foolish heart and wicked intent during their lives, and to have forced others to eat filthy things:

This is why they are in hell now. An enormous amount of pus fills this place up to the mouth and nose of the damned. There are also terrible insects called Saimôshô that devour the damned to the marrow of their bones, and break their tendons. It is impossible to describe how terrible this pain is.

(translated by Fernando G. Guttiérez, "Emakimono Depicting the Pains of the Damned," Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 22, No. 3/4 (1967), p. 286)

Irremediableness

2010-01-02T12:12:00.004+02:00

I fall sick of Sin, and am bedded and bedrid, buried and putrified in the practise of Sin, and all this while have no presage, no pulse, no sense of my sicknesse; O heighth, O depth of misery, where the first Symptome of the sicknes is Hell, and where I never see the fever of lust, of envy, of ambition, by any other light, than the darknesse and horror of Hell it selfe; and where the first Messenger that speaks to me doth not say, Thou mayest die, no, nor Thou must die, but Thou art dead: and where the first notice, that my Soule hath of her sicknes, is irrecoverablenes, iremediablenes.

John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), Expostulation 1

The bees of the invisible

2009-11-24T15:33:00.013+02:00

Wir sind die Bienen des Unsichtbaren. Nous boutinons éperdument le miel du visible, pour l'accumuler dans la grande ruche d'or de l'invisble.

Rainer Maria Rilke to his Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz,
13 November 1925 (Briefe aus Muzot, 1921-26)

The bee-swarm of the dead drones and comes upwards

Sophocles, fr. 795, Porphyr. de antro nymph. c. 18
(August Nauck, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, 2nd edition, Leipzig: Teubner, 1889, p. 317)

Speculation on debasement: philosophies of "nothing but"

2009-11-18T21:39:00.002+02:00

The last and lowest region of the Bardo [is] known as the Sidpa Bardo, where the dead man (...) begins to fall a prey to sexual fantasies and is attracted by the vision of mating couples (...) Freudian psychoanalysis, in all its essential aspects, never went beyond the experiences of the Sidpa Bardo; that is, it was unable to extricate itself from sexual fantasies and similar ‘incompatible’ tendencies which cause anxiety and other affective states (...) anyone who penetrates into the unconscious with purely biological assumptions will become stuck in the instinctual sphere and be unable to advance beyond it, for he will be pulled back again and again into physical existence. It is therefore not possible for Freudian theory to reach anything except an essentially negative valuation of the unconscious. It is a ‘nothing but’.

Carl Gustav Jung, Collected Works. Psychology and Religion: West and East, 2nd edition, 1966, pp. 515-516

“Materialism is the reduction of any higher form to its lower matter. Materialism tells us that organic life can be reduced to physicochemical processes, that humans are in essence only animals, that consciousness is only a neural network. Materialism tells us that the statue is only marble, that music is only a sound wave. But materialism will also tell us, in exactly the same way, that culture is only a particular form of the economy (“economic materialism”), that spirit is only a particular form of the basic sexual energy, as Freud has done (...) A downward movement through the levels explains nothing: the movement must go upward. But as soon as we say: “not only, but also,” we can immediately run through the hierarchy of levels from bottom to top: “not only marble, but also a form of beauty,” “not only a sound wave, but also harmony,” “not only nature, but also freedom,” “not only the processes of consciousness, but also the creative spirit,” and, finally, “not only relative but also absolute.” Here is the ascent that Marxism cannot accept, for it leads to the Absolute Spirit, it ascends to the absolute summit, to the sublime God himself. The opposite path leaves us only with speculation on debasement: always to say “only”, always to reduce every form to lower matter.

B. P. Vysheslavtsev, The Eternal in Russian Philosophy, trans. Penelope V. Burt, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002, pp. 67-68

The Cockroach in Russian Literature (1): Gogol

2009-11-18T12:24:00.012+02:00

Надобно вам знать, милостивый государь, что я имею обыкновение затыкатьна ночь уши с того проклятого случая, когда в одной русской корчме залез мне в лебое ухо таракан. Проклятые кацапы (1), как я после узнал, едят даже щи с тараканами. Невозможно описать, что происходило со мною: в ухе так и щекочет, так и щекочет ... ну, хоть на стену! Мне помогла уже в наших местах простая старуха. И чем бы вы думали? просто зашептыбанием.

Н. В. Гоголь, "Иван Федорович Шпонька и его тетушка", Собрание сочинений, том первый, Художесвенная литература, Москва, 1976, стр. 184

You ought to know, dear sir, that I'm in the habit of stopping up my ears at night, ever since that damned incident at a Russian inn when a cockroach crawled into my left ear. Damned goat-beard Russians, as I later discovered, they even eat cabbage soup with cockroaches in it. It defies description what happened to me: it kept tickling and tickling away in my ear ... well, I was on the point of banging my head against the wall! It was a simple old woman from around our way that helped me in the end. And how do you think she did it? Simply by whispering.

N. V. Gogol, "Ivan Fyodorovich Shpon'ka and His Aunt"

(1) кацап, укр. прозвище великорусов (Гоголь и др.). С приставкой ка- от укр. цап "козел" : бритому украинцу бородатый пусский казался козлом. (Max Vasmer, Russisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, Heidelberg, 1950-1958. Макс Фасмер, Этимологический словарь русского языка, Перевод с немецкого и дополнения члена-корреспондента РАН О. Н. Трубачева, Том II (Е-Муж), Издательство Азбука, Санкт-Петербург, 1996, стр. 213.)

Cf. H. Tiktin, Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 3, Staatsdruckerei, Bucharest, 1925, p. 1557: țap sm. 1. (Ziegen-, auch Gems-) Bock m. Barba ... foarte pe jos pe supt bărbie ca de țap (Gaster, Crestomatie romînă) (...) Fam. scherzh. verträumt: ca un țap logodit vertraümt: Ce te uiți așa la mine ca un țap logodit? Poate-i fi amorezat (Sadoveanu). (...) - 2. Spottname a) für Griechen, wegen ihrer Gesischtzüge. Ho, țapule, că mai sînt și eu pe-aici (Alecsandri). (...) - b) für Geistliche u. Mönche, wohl wegen ihrer Bärte. Sînt vr'o zece mii de țapi cu călugărițe cu tot în țară (Jipescu). (...) Et. Vgl. alb. skjap, ts(j)ap, tskjap. Nslov. serb. poln. cap, czech. magy. cáp stammen aus dem Rum.

Stimmung

2009-11-16T15:11:00.005+02:00

Da sind Tage, wo alles um einen licht ist, leicht, kaum angegeben in der hellen Luft und doch deutlich. Das Nächste schon hat Töne der Ferne, ist weggenommen und nur gezeigt, nicht hergereicht; und was Beziehung zur Weite hat: der Fluß, die Brücken, die langen Straßen und die Plätze, die sich verschwenden, das hat diese Weite eingenommen hinter sich, ist auf ihr gemalt wie auf Seide. Es ist nicht zu sagen, was dann ein lichtgrüner Wagen sein kann auf dem Pont-neuf oder irgendein Rot, das nicht zu halten ist, oder auch nur ein Plakat an der Feuermauer einer perlgrauen Häusergruppe. Alles ist vereinfacht, auf einige richtige, helle plans gebracht wie das Gesicht in einem Manetschen Bildnis. Und nichts ist gering und überflüssig. Die Bouquinisten am Quai tun ihre Kästen auf, und das frische oder vernutzte Gelb der Bücher, das violette Braun der Bände, das größere Grün einer Mappe: alles stimmt, gilt, nimmt teil und bildet eine Vollzähligkeit, in der nichts fehlt.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

La révélation

2009-11-03T11:33:00.004+02:00

Je crois et avec foi, peut-être que comme la vue en rêve d'une personne est, à certains points de vue, une preuve de sa réalité métaphysique, la révélation est sur les mêmes points la preuve de la réalité métaphysique de certains hasards qui nous arrivent par moments ; de la façon, de la disposition dont quelquefois des choses se présentent et réveillent en nous des sensations inconnues de joie et de surprise : les sensations de la révélation.

De Chirico

Regressionstendenzen

2009-10-02T14:33:00.008+03:00

Craterium aureum

Ach, nie genug dieses einen Erlebnisses: das Leben währet vierundzwanzig Stunden und, wenn es hoch kommt, war es eine Kongestion! Ach immer wieder in diese Glut, in die Grade der plazentaren Räume, in die Vorstufe der Meere des Urgesichts: Regressionstendenzen, Zerlösung des Ich! Regressionstendenzen mit Hilfe des Worts, heuristische Schwächezustände durch Substantive – das ist der Grundvorgang, der alles interpretiert: Jedes ES das ist der Untergang, die Verwehbarkeit des Ich; jedes DU ist der Untergang, die Vermischlichkeit der Formen. ‘Komm alle Skalen tosen Spuk, Entformungsgefühl’ - das ist der Blick in die Stunde und die Glücke, wo die ,Götter fallen wie Rosen’ - Götter und Götterspiel. Schwer erklärbare Macht des Wortes, das löst und fügt.

Gottfried Benn, Lyrisches Ich (1927)

Lycogala conicum

Cribraria vulgaris

Photographs (c) The Eumycetozoan Project, 2006

Нос / Nez / Nas / Nose

2009-09-28T16:13:00.005+03:00

Le mal n'est donc pas une simple absence (...) c'est un mélange de l'être et du non-être. Toutes les manifestations du Malin dans le monde sont conditionnées par les trois formes de son essence : il est parasite, imposteur et imitateur, faisant du monde une parodie du Royaume. Le récit intitulé le Nez nous apporte une claire démonstration de cette triple nature. En effet le Mal se sert du nez comme d'un point d'attache parasitaire. En devenant le double du major Kovalev, il usurpe quelque chose de sa personne en véritable imposteur qu'il est. Enfin, en prenant possession de la Cathédrale de Saint-Pétersbourg, il imite et parodie Celui qui est le Maître du Temple.

Paul Evdokimov, Gogol et Dostoïevski. La descente aux enfers, Desclée de Brouwer, 1961

Epistola obscuri viri (Malbrough theme 3)

2009-09-10T12:10:00.006+03:00

Herbordus Mistladerius Magistro Ortvino incomparabili in doctrina praeceptori suo sulsissimo Salutem dicit quam nemo dinumerare poterit

Illuminatissime magister, quando discessi a vestra dominatione ad Suollis ante duos annos, promisistis mihi ad manum meam quod velitis mihi frequenter scribere, et mihi modum dare dictandi in vestris dictaminibus: ast non facitis, et mihi non scribitis sive vivitis, sive non vivitis; sive vivitis sive non vivitis, non tamen scribitis ut scio quid est, quomodo vel qualiter est. Sancte deus, quomodo me sollicitatis: rogo vos propter deum et sanctam Geogium [sic.], liberate me ex mea cura, quia timeo quod caput vobis dolet, vel quod habetis infirmitatem in ventre, et estis laxus, sicut olim fuistis quando permerdastis caligas vestras in plateis et non sensistis, donec una mulier dixit: "Domine magister, ubi sedistis in merdis? ecce tunica et pantofoli vestri sunt maculata": tunc ivistis in domum domini Ioannis Pfefferkorn, et mulier eius dedit vobis alia vestimenta: vos debetis comedere ova dura, et castaneas in fornace assatas, necnon fabas coctas aspersas cum papavere, ut fit in Westvalia patria vestra. Mihi somniavit de vobis quod habetis gravem tussim, et multum de flegmate: comedite zuccarum, et pisas contusas mixtas cum serpillo et allio contrito, ac ponite unum assatum caepe ad umbilicum vestrum, et per sex dies debetis abstinere a mulieribus; tegite caput et lumbos vestros bene, et sanabitis. Vel sumite receptum quod uxor domini Ioannis Pfefferkorn saepe languentibus dederat, quod est probatum saepe. Ex Suollis.

Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, I, 40.

The Digestionary Theory of Literary Genre

2009-09-03T18:56:00.006+03:00

On pourrait ranger (...) le genre humain civilisé en trois grandes catégories : les reguliers, les resserrés et les relâchés. (...) Pour me faire comprendre par un exemple, je le prendrai dans le vaste champ de la littérature. Je crois que les gens de lettres doivent le plus souvent à leur estomac le genre qu’ils ont préférablement choisi. Sous ce point de vue, les poètes comiques doivent être dans les réguliers, les tragiques dans les resserrés, et les élégiaques et pastoureaux dans les relâchés : d’ou il suit que le poète le plus lacrymal n’est séparé du poète le plus comique que par quelque degré de coction digestionnaire.

[Brillat-Savarin.] Physiologie du goût, ou méditations de gastronomie transcendante, Ouvrage théorique, historique et à l’ordre du jour. Paris: Charpentier, Éditeur, 1838. P. 231 "Influence de la digestion"

One might separate civilised human kind into three broad categories: the regular, the constipated and the lax. (...) In order to make myself understood, I shall take an example from the vast field of literature. I believe that men of letters for the most part owe their preferred choice of genre to their stomach. From this point of view, the comic poets are to be found among the regular, the tragic poets among the constipated, and the elegaic and pastoral poets among the lax: whence it follows that the most lachrymose poet is separated from the most comic poet only by a degree of digestionary coction.

De Chirico on the Surrealists

2009-08-30T12:12:00.007+03:00

Les surréalistes

Poco dopo esser giunto a Parigi trovai una forte opposizione da parte di quel gruppo di degenerati, di teppistoidi, di figli di papà, di sfaccendati, di onanisti e di abulici che pomposamente si erano autobattezzati surrealisti e parlavano anche di "rivoluzione surrealista" e di "movimento surrealista". Questo gruppo di individui poco raccomandabili era capeggiato da un sedicente poeta che rispondeva al nome di André Breton ed il quale aveva come aiutante di campo un altro pseudo-poeta di nome Paul Eluard, che era un giovanottone scialbo e banale, con il naso storto e una faccia tra di onanista e di cretino mistico. André Breton, poi, era il tipo classico del somaro pretenzioso e dell'impotente arrivista.

Memorie della mia vita, Astrolabio, Rome, 1945

De Chirico

Shortly after arriving in Paris I encountered strong opposition on the part of that group of degenerates, hooliganoids, spoiled brats, meddlers, onanists and idlers that had pompously baptised themselves surrealists and even talked about a "surrealist revolution" and a "surrealist movement". That group of unsavoury individuals was led by a self-styled poet who answered to the name of André Breton and as his second-in-command he had another pseudo-poet by the name of Paul Eluard, who was a pasty, dull young man, with a crooked nose and a face between that of an onanist and a mystical cretin. André Breton, besides, was the classic type of the pretentious ass and the impotent self-seeker.

André Breton

Stimmung

2009-08-20T10:59:00.011+03:00

Cette nouveauté est une poésie étrange et profonde, mystérieuse et solitaire infiniment, qui se base sur le stimmung (j'use de ce mot allemand car il dit bien ce qu'il veut dire ; on pourrait le traduire par le mot atmosphère, pris dans le sens moral), qui se base, dis-je, sur la stimmung d'un après-midi d'automne quand le ciel est clair e les ombres plus longues que pendant l'été, car le soleil commence à être plus bas.

Soudain tout ce plein air perdit son atmosphère, sa stimmung ; les poutres du plafond et les lames du plancher apparurent violemment éclarées de côté ; « c'est un truc du photographe du pays », chuchotait-on dans les cafés et sur les places publiques.

« Mes chers amis, vous avez probablement senti, aussi bien que moi, la stimmung (atmosphère) toute particulière qui se dégage lorsque sortant dans les rues, vers le coucher du soleil, à la fin d'une chaude journée d'été, après avoir dormi pendant l'après-midi (rappelez-vous ce que je vous ai dit, plusiers fois déjà, à propos du sommeil de l'après-midi) on sent l'odeur des rues fraîchement arrosées. Si la ville est située au bord de la mer, la puissance suggestive de cette odeur se trouve par le fait même doublée et même triplée. »

Giorgio de Chirico

Bacovia, Melancholy, Stimmung

2009-08-19T13:10:00.012+03:00

George Bacovia (1881–1957) is widely regarded as having been one of the most important Romanian poets of the twentieth century. Although his work has its origins in and draws much of its imagery from late Symbolism, Bacovia was a modernist whose work bears comparison with the poetry of German expressionism. The poetry of George Bacovia might also be defined in terms of Stimmung, a term employed by Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to designate atmosphere in the moral or lyric sense: the inter-penetration of subjective mood and the atmosphere immanent in the external setting. The mood that is evoked in Bacovia’s work is one of isolation, neurosis, lovelessness, despair, and existential anguish. It is a subjective state that simultaneously permeates and is exuded by his poetry’s décor of muddy, provincial streets, pluvial autumn weather, deserted municipal parks, claustrophobic salons, railway sidings, abattoirs, ramshackle slum dwellings, cemeteries, and insalubrious taverns. The boards of this eerie, expressionist stage set are trodden by a cast of consumptives, suicides, alcoholics, madmen, funeral processions, the sniggering ghosts of Poe and Rollinat, and the alienated, anguished persona of the poet himself, assailed by disembodied voices boding imminent self-annihilation.

In spite of the theatrical intensity of his poetry, Bacovia’s life can be said to have been unspectacular. Although he lived through two world wars and a period of social and political upheaval, his biography is singularly lacking in incident. He was born Gheorghie Vasiliu in the Moldavian town of Bacău, which was to provide him with the pseudonym ‘Bacovia’ as well as the bleak provincial setting of much of his poetry. His entire adult life he was to be afflicted by ill health and chronic depression, which led to a number of nervous breakdowns and hospitalisation. His poor health and nervous condition also meant that he was unable to practise as a lawyer, the profession for which he had studied, with frequent interruptions, from 1903 to 1911. Instead, he led a reclusive, solitary life, eking a living variously as a clerk, supply teacher, and librarian.

Bacovia published his first poem, ‘Și toate’ (‘And All’) in 1899 in Literatorul, a review edited by flamboyant Romanian symbolist poet Alexandru Macedonski (1854-1920). The poem, which concludes with the line “In my heart it is autumn”, is in itself unremarkable and, if anything, a cliché typical of the period. Notably, the year it appeared also saw the publication of the last, autumnal works of the crepuscular ‘decadent’ movement in European literature, including Ernest Dowson’s Decorations and Jean Moréas’ Les Stances. The 1890s, as Ezra Pound once put it, were a period of putrescent ‘muzziness’ (1), preliminary to that radical change in human nature which Virginia Woolf identified as having occurred “on or about December 1910”.(2) However, despite his fin-de-siècle debut, Bacovia’s first collection of poems, entitled Plumb (Lead), was not published until 1916, and was contemporaneous not only in date but also in its innovation with major modernist texts such as Ezra Pound’s Lustra and Gottfried Benn’s Gehirne. Plumb earned widespread critical praise in Romania for its originality, although it would take many decades before Bacovia’s radical newness was fully appreciated or understood. Having said that, Bacovia was compared early on to major expressionist poet Georg Trakl (1887-1914) (3), whose posthumous Sebastian im Traum had been published the year before Plumb. However, after Plumb, the work that established Bacovia’s reputation, other volumes of poetry followed only intermittently: Scîntei galbene (1926) (Yellow Sparks), Cu voi… (1930) (With you…), Comedii în fond (1936) (Comedies After All), Stanțe burgheze (1946) (Bourgeois Stanzas). Scîntei galbene and Cu voi… still included poems that had been written decades previously, in the late 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, thus producing a somewhat deceptive impression of Bacovia’s development as a poet. However, as is evident in his last published collection, Stanțe burgheze, Bacovia’s later style, which reduces verse form to elliptical, almost telegraphic utterances, is radically different from his youthful ‘symbolism’.

In the early years of the communist regime, Bacovia was viewed with official disapproval as a “decadent”. Between 1948 and 1949 he briefly held a sinecure as an adviser to the People’s Theatre in Bucharest, but the post was abolished and he subsequently entered a period of protracted obscurity. Publication of his work was officially blocked until 1956, the year in which he published three poems in two separate periodicals as well as a new collection of his pre-war poetry. In the same year, the communist state, which had decided to exploit Bacovia for his propaganda value as a ‘proletarian poet’ (4), awarded him the “Order of Labour”. The attitude of Bacovia himself to his new-found celebrity was typically ambiguous and ironic, as is evident in a poem entitled ‘Festiva’, written on the occasion of the official celebrations to mark his seventy-fifth birthday, but not published until 1961 (5):

Da, fusei în castelul
Nababilor
Cu cristale, oglinzi și marmoră…

Iată! Am venit ca Hamlet
În hainele mele
Cernite.

“Yes, I was in the castle / Of the nabobs / With crystal, mirrors and marble … // Look! I arrived like Hamlet / In my inky garb.”

When he died the following year, the reclusive poet was honoured with an official funeral ceremony, which was attended by state dignitaries.

****

Bacovia’s early critics regarded him as a minor, provincial poet and pointed to what they saw as his primitivism, describing his poetry as an authentic, albeit naïve, outpouring of raw emotion. For example, in an article published in 1916, representing one of the earliest critical reactions to Plumb, N. Davidescu interprets Bacovia’s poetry as being unaffectedly ‘sincere’. The poems in Plumb would thus represent a raw, unpolished proto-poetry, an expression of the “elementary stirrings of life, impulsively manifested through cries of pain, surprise, sadness.”(6)

The supposed ‘primitivism’ of George Bacovia’s work might be discovered even in the physical appearance of his books as objects, with their low quality paper and shoddy typography. Critic Vladimir Streinu, in particular, was appalled by the shabby aspect of Bacovia’s printed works: “All his volumes are squalid in appearance, so squalid in fact that the reader is even put off opening them… The second, third and fifth collections are truly repugnant in appearance.”(7) He contrasts this with the evident penchant of other, more pretentious, poets for elegant deluxe editions.

On the other hand, the physical neglect evident in the volumes that were published subsequent to Plumb is the natural and tangible manifestation of a “declining talent”, what Streinu defines as “resignation of spirit and moral regress”. However, although he recognises that the reading public would probably scoff at such a claim, Streinu is quick to affirm that Bacovia is a poet unique not only in Romanian letters but also in the context of universal literature. In spite of the fact that his poetic line often fails to achieve full articulation, George Bacovia is, Streinu argues, a profoundly suggestive poet, whose originality lies in his exploration of the process whereby consciousness tends to extinction and is reduced to a physiological state, a process of involution, of collapse that attains the primary state of matter.(8) In this context, we might compare Bacovia to Gottfried Benn, in whose poetry the agony provoked by the world of consciousness (Bewußtseinswelt) brings about the urge to regress to the primitive, ‘deforeheaded’ (entstirnt) condition of protoplasm. Certainly, in many of Bacovia’s poems the ‘primitive’ and the ‘barbarous’ threaten to overwhelm with elemental madness the enervated consciousness of the lyric ‘I’, such as in ‘Plouă’ (‘It’s Raining’), collected in the volume Plumb:

Oh, plînsul tălăngii cînd plouă!

Și ce enervare pe gînd!
Ce zi primitivă de tină!
O bolnavă fată vecină
Răcnește la ploaie rîzînd…

Oh, the sobbing of cowbells when it rains! // And such enervation of thought! / Such a primitive day of clart! / A sickly girl from next door / Is yelling at the rain laughing…

In ‘Seara tristă’ (‘Sad Evening’), for example, whose setting might be compared with Gottfried Benn’s ‘Nachtcafe’ (in the volume Fleisch, 1917), it is the ‘barbarous’ singing of a woman to the accompaniment of zithers that threatens to obliterate the intoxicated, fragile awareness of the poet. Ultimately, the poetry of Plumb is not so much the expression of a primitive awareness as that of an exacerbated self-consciousness whose hypertrophy now threatens collapse and regression to animal oblivion.

Later critics have tended to interpret Bacovia’s poetry in precisely the opposite terms to primitivism, emphasising its artificiality and almost hysterical theatricality. In Istoria literaturii române de la origini pînă în prezent (1941) (The History of Romanian Literature from its Origins until the Present), George Călinescu dismisses earlier interpretations of Bacovia as a provincial primitive: “It is curious that the poetry of Bacovia has been regarded as lacking in any poetic artifice, as a poetry that is simple and artless. For it is precisely its artifice that strikes one and ultimately constitutes its worth.”(9) Indeed, Bacovia’s work is highly stylised: the obsessive repetition of a limited number of words, images and tropes creates a monotonous, claustrophobic and almost hallucinatory effect. The seeming lack of artifice is in fact a highly artificial construct that is a response to a profound crisis of language and spirit.

Like Georg Trakl, the great modernist poet with whom he was contemporary, George Bacovia is an autumnal poet. The autumn of the modernists is, however, no ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, but rather a state of spiritual and historical crisis. It is a dissonant, dyspnoeic fugue, in which world, language and self enter into putrefaction and ultimately cave in on themselves. Certainly, in the poetry of Bacovia, autumn is the manifestation of a generalised malady, which affects mind, body and world. In this context, his work is notable for the frequent occurrence of neologisms drawn from medical and psychiatric terminology: a delira, delir, (French délirer, délire); a enerva (French énerver); a histeriza, histerie, (French hystériser, hystérie); nevroză (French névrose); paralizie (French paralysie); ftizie (French phtisie). Striking in this category is the term alcoolizat (‘alcoholised’), the past participle of a verb derived from the French alcoolizer. When, in ‘Nervi de toamnă’ (‘Autumn Nerves’), Bacovia imagines himself as an “alcoholised skeleton” lost in the rain, he does not, therefore, refer to a temporary state of inebriation, but rather to a chronic medical syndrome, that of physiological saturation with alcohol as a result of protracted abuse. Existential states become identical and interchangeable with chronic medical conditions. Nature, or rather the urban landscape, also manifests the symptoms of chronic ailment: a garden is “gangrened” (‘Poem in the Mirror’); a park is “consumed by cancer and phthisis” (‘In the park’); the town is “paralysed” (‘Autumn Notes’).

Spiritual crisis is also evident in the secularisation of external reality in Bacovia’s poems. In Plumb, for example, a park is given precisely the epithet ‘secular’ (‘Décor’), while elsewhere the snow is described as falling “secularly” (‘Winter Lead’). In the poem ‘Yellow Sparks’, from the volume of the same name, a “positivist voice” wakes the poet at a “melancholic window”, while in ‘Ballet’ white ballerinas mysteriously arouse “the organic complex”. This secularisation (or de-sacralisation) of reality is ultimately part of a process whereby humans themselves become reified: “man has become concrete” (‘Winter Lead’, in the volume Yellow Sparks).

Although man, nature and abstract qualities become reified, are reduced to things, the poems of Bacovia themselves are eerily devoid of concrete things. In the volumes Lead (1916) and Yellow Sparks (1926) the world becomes a bare stage set, like the “large, empty salon” where the histrionic action of the poem ‘Marche Funèbre’ takes place. Such objects as do appear acquire almost the function of theatrical props or costume: a coffin, an armchair, a large oval mirror, a handkerchief, funeral vestments and so on. Other things are not physically present except insofar as they are able to produce a sound effect from off-stage: the mournful clank of cowbells in the distance, a military bugle from the barracks at the edge of town, or a primaeval alpenhorn booming from the depths of a remote valley. Everywhere there is a neurasthenic hypersensitivity to sound: branches scraping against roofs, creaking woodwork, and, ubiquitously, the sound of the falling rain.

Otherwise, the world of things is reduced to amorphous, indeterminate ‘matter’, which impinges upon the awareness acoustically rather than visually or tactilely: “I hear matter weeping” (‘Lacustrine’). Similarly, colour becomes an acoustic rather than visual quality. This is nowhere more evident than in the obsessive repetition of the colour epithet ‘violet’ in numerous poems. Bacovia frequently employs the word ‘violet’ purely for its synaesthetic quality, a combination of colour, odour and sound, such as in the following lines, from ‘Nervi de Primavara’ (‘Spring Nerves’):

Primăvară…
O pictură parfumată cu vibrări de violet,
În vitrine, versuri de un nou poet;
În oraș suspină un vals în fanfară.

O nouă primăvară de visuri și păreri…

Spring… // A picture perfumed with violet vibrations, / In shop windows, verses by a new poet, / In town the brass band sobbing of a waltz. // A new spring of vagaries and views…

As the phrase “violet vibrations” and the obsessive alliteration of the consonant ‘v’ might suggest, the adjective ‘violet’ is primarily acoustic rather than chromatic. Of course, the adjective ‘violet’ and alliteration of the consonant ‘v’ situate Bacovia within a Symbolist tradition of melic language that can be traced back to Edgar Allen Poe’s poem ‘The City in the Sea’ and its line: “The viol, the violet and the vine.” For example, the word ‘violet’ also occurred repetitively in the work of English decadent poet Ernest Dowson, who held that that ‘v’ was the most beautiful sound and regarded his poetry as mere “sound verse, with scarcely the shadow of a sense in it”.(10) In the nineteenth century, Walter Pater had famously argued that ‘all art aspires to the condition of music’. In the context of decadence and symbolism, ‘sound verse’ was therefore another product of the spiritual crisis provoked by secularisation, a consequence, as Pater put it, of the decay of the ‘primitive power of words’, of the dissolution of the ‘natural bond between word and thing’.(11)

Nietzsche, in Der Fall Wagner (1888), defined decadence as the sovereignty of the individual word at the expense of the whole, as an ‘anarchy of atoms’. Such fragmentation of language is already present in Bacovia’s early texts, written at the end of the nineteenth century, and becomes increasingly advanced in his later work. The verse as a unit ultimately breaks down so completely that all that remain are isolated, often monosyllabic words, as in the posthumously published poem ‘Gîndiri’ (‘Thoughts’) (12):

Frumos
Vesel
Bun
Urît
Trist
Rău
Cauze din etern
Și social…

Beauteous / Joyous / Good / Ugly / Sad / Bad / Eternal and social causes …

Poetry in any traditional, technical meaning of the term has collapsed: after all, a metrical foot requires at least two syllables. For Bacovia, however, this extreme askesis of verse form was already present during the very first decades of his career as a poet and, in this respect, he was very much ahead of his time. Poet and critic Ion Caraion compared Bacovia’s poetic experiments to the later ‘poem-objects’ of Dada and Futurism, or the radical dismemberment of language practised by e.e.cummings.(13) For example, in one of Bacovia’s notebooks, dated 1906-1912, can be found the following metrical experiment, entitled ‘Bisyllable and Monosyllable’ (14):

Am fost
Prost.
Exist
Trist.
Exist
Prost.
Ce trist
Rost.

I was / Badly. / I exist / Sadly. / I exist / Badly. / What sad / Sense.

In the volume Plumb, such implosion of traditional verse form is represented by a metrical experiment entitled ‘Monosilab de toamnă’ (‘Autumn Monosyllable’), positioned, significantly, as the penultimate poem in the collection, in which ten-syllable lines alternate with monosyllables in an abab rhyme scheme:

Toamna sună-n geam frunze de metal,
Vînt.
În tăcerea grea, gînd și animal
Frînt.

Autumn sounds metallic leaves in the window, / Wind. / In the heavy silence, thought and animal / Exhausted.

Elsewhere, words themselves break down into inarticulate exclamations (‘oh’, ‘ah’, ‘ugh’ and so on). Sentences break down into isolated noun phrases; sub-clauses break down into isolated adverbs. Again, this fragmentation can reach such an extreme that an individual verse might consist entirely of isolated lexemes separated by commas, as in the following example:

O, dormi, adînc, mereu, așa.

‘Serenada Muncitorului’, from Scîntei galbene (1926)

O, you sleep, deeply, always, thus. (‘The Worker’s Serenade’, from Yellow Sparks)

Moreover, punctuation no longer connects or separates, but continually decomposes into the three points that indicate suspension or interruption. In ‘Din Urmă’ (‘Latterly’), the last poem in the volume Cu voi (1930), total fragmentation is achieved, with all but two verses petering out to form an ellipsis before any verb can be articulated:

Poezie, poezie…
Galben, plumb, violet…
Și strada goală…
Ori asteptări tîrzii,
Și parcuri înghețate…
Poet, și solitar…
Galben, plumb, violet…
Odaia goală…
Și nopți tîrzii…
Îndoliat parfum
Și secular…
Pe veșnicie…

Poetry, poetry… / Yellow, lead, violet… / And the empty street… / Or else late waits, / And frozen parks… / Poet, and solitary… / Yellow, lead, violet… / The empty room… / And late nights… / Fragrance mournful / And secular… / For eternity…

It might be argued that Bacovia’s monosyllabic ‘dialogues’ are also a formal anticipation of the theatre of the absurd. In any case, they are the literary equivalent of the psychopathological symptom of echolalia, as well as a harrowing expression of the impossibility of communication in a world of alienation. Ultimately, it becomes impossible to follow which voice belongs to whom, as one repeats the other, seemingly in a void (15):

- Te-am pierdut.
- Înnebunesc.
- Înnebunesc.
- Cum?
- Cum?
- Mai bine-atunci.
- Atunci.
- În infinit.
- În infinit.
- Dar cum?
- Cum’s toate.
- Cine știe…
- Cine știe…
- Poezie.
- Poezie.
(…)
- Eu, eu, tu, tu.
- Fum.
- Fum.
- Ce-a fost asta?
- Ce să fie?…
- Poezie.
- Poezie.

“I have lost you.” / “I’m going mad.” / “I’m going mad.” / “How?” / “How?” / “Better then.” / “Then.” / “In the infinite.” / “In the infinite.” / “But how?” / “How all things are.” / “Who knows…” / “Who knows…” / “Poetry.” / “Poetry.” / (…) “I, I, you, you.” / “Smoke.” / “Smoke.” / “What was that?” / “What do you think?…” / “Poetry.” / “Poetry.”

Thus, the boundaries that define the enunciating self are dissolved once and for all; we participate in the schizophrenic inner monologue/dialogue of the fractured self. The dramatic possibilities of this kind of dialogic monologue were later successfully exploited by Romanian poet Marin Sorescu (1936-1996), whose play Jonah, for example, is a dialogue for a single actor.

The schizoid quality of Bacovia’s poems might be compared to that eerie atmosphere of heightened but empty significance experienced by sufferers of dementia praecox during the so-called ‘aura’ (which has been likened to experience of Stimmung in art (16)) that precedes complete rupture with reality. External phenomena are imbued with a sense of intense but ineffable significance. For example, in one poem the falling autumnal leaves are “like a sinister sign”. Similarly, Bacovia describes how railway signals jerk meaninglessly, “în gol” (“in a void” or “emptily”). Signs are emptied of significance and continue to function mechanically but meaninglessly. Human gestures too become alien and uncanny: passers-by gesticulate theatrically but senselessly, producing a sense of foreboding.

In many poems, the self experiences its own primal, irrational urge for self-annihilation as an insistent, persecuting voice that originates from outside itself:

Pe drumuri delirînd,
Pe vreme de toamnă,
Ma urmărește un gînd
Ce mă îndeamnă:

--Dispari mai curînd!

‘Spre toamnă’, from Plumb (1916)

Raving along the roads, / In autumn weather, / A thought pursues me, / Which urges me to: // “Get on with it, vanish!” (‘Towards Autumn’, from Lead)

This voice seemingly comes from the depths of the earth:

Ascultă cum greu, din adîncuri,
Pamîntul la dînsul ne cheamă…

‘Melancolie’, from Plumb (1916)

Listen to how, from the depths, heavily, / The earth is calling us to her…
(‘Melancholy’, from Lead)

The word fund (meaning ‘bottom, lowest part’, from Latin fundus) recurs obsessively in the poems of Bacovia. In the poem ‘Winter Twilight’, for example, “un corb încet vine din fund” (a crow comes slowly from the depths), or, in ‘Pulvis’:

Imensitate, veșnicie,
Pe cînd eu tremur în delir,
Cu ce supremă ironie
Arăți în fund un cimitir.

Immensity, eternity, / While I convulse in delirium, / With what supreme irony / You reveal a graveyard at the bottom!

At one level, the crow and the cemetery are elements of décor, pasteboard scenery in an affected melodrama; at another level they arise from the depths of the ineffable. The fund is the abyss, the Abgrund of nothingness that gapes open as meaning caves in, fatally eroded by the ineffable.

Bacovia, as we have seen, explores extreme and limit states of consciousness: disquietude, depression, and delirium. However, these states are presented in a highly ambiguous, ironic way. The neurotic poet is a pose, a self-parodying persona, but at the same time a means of hinting at an authentic, although ineffable, existential condition. In many poems this contradiction or fissure in the self is frequently conveyed by Bacovia’s reference to himself in the third rather than first person:

Un bolnav poet, afectat
Așteaptă tușind pe la geamuri.

‘Toamnă’, from Scîntei galbene (1926)

A sick poet, affected / Waits coughing at windows. (‘Autumn’, from Yellow Sparks)

The poet’s illness is at once genuine and histrionic, authentic and affected. Notable is the peculiar sense of indeterminacy created by the use of the indefinite article (‘a poet’ rather than ‘the poet’) and, curiously, the plural ‘windows’, rather than ‘the (definite) window’ or ‘a (particular) window’. This indeterminacy is heightened when, in the poem’s penultimate line, the scene being described is referred to as a “painting” (tablou). For Bacovia, the world cannot be experienced directly, except as art and insofar as it imitates art:

Brumă, toamna literară,
Pe drum prăfăria se duce fugară.

Și-am stat singur supărat
În zavoiul decadent,
Și prin crengile-ncîlcite mi-am notat
Versuri fără de talent.

‘Vînt’, from Scîntei galbene (1926)

Hoarfrost, literary autumn, / On the road the dust-cloud goes fleeing. // And I stood alone sorrowful / In the decadent copse, / And amid the twisted branches I jotted down / Verses without talent. (‘Wind’, from Yellow Sparks)

Bacovia’s autumn is a ‘literary autumn’, a poetry about the poetry of autumn, an artificial, stylised autumn that is the reification of an ineffable state of inner crisis. Even the ubiquitous ravens in Bacovia’s work are not physical ravens perceived directly by the poet but rather “the ravens of the poet Tradem”.(17) Tradem was Traian Demetrescu (1866-1896), a minor Romanian symbolist, who died of phthisis aged thirty and whose poetry, particularly his most famous poem ‘Corbii’ (‘The Ravens’), was a source for much of Bacovia’s stylised imagery.

Ultimately, the peculiar complexity of Bacovia’s deceptively simple work lies in the fact that it is simultaneously sincere and ironic, self-parodying and in deadly earnest, authentic and artificial. It is this antinomy which makes Bacovia one of the great modernist poets.

(1) ‘Lionel Johnson’ (1915), reprinted in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London, 1954, reissued 1985), page 363.
(2)‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924), reprinted in Collected Essays, volume 1 (London, 1966), page 321.
(3) By Oscar Walter Cișek in Cugetul românesc 1.6 (1922).
(4)Largely on the strength of a poem of 1914, entitled ‘The Worker’s Serenade’, which in 1956 and 1957 was reprinted in periodicals, including Steagul roșu (The Red Flag), and became a favourite in anthologies of socialist poetry.
(5) Viața românească 14.9 (1961), page 107. George Bacovia, Opere, edited by Mircea Coloșenco (Bucharest, 2001), page 320.
(6) Quoted in Rodica Zafiu, Poezia simbolistă românească: Antologie, introducere, dosare critice, comentarii, note și bibliografie (Bucharest, 1996), page 242.
(7) Pagini de critică literară. Marginalia (Bucharest, 1968), pages 35-41. Quoted in George Bacovia. Opere, edited by Mircea Coloșenco (Bucharest, 2001), page 973.
(8) Ibid. Quoted in George Bacovia. Opere, edited by Mircea Coloșenco (Bucharest, 2001), page 974.
(9) Quoted in Rodica Zafiu, Poezia simbolistă româneascâ: Antologie, introducere, dosare critice, comentarii, note și bibliografie (Bucharest, 1996), page 243.
(10) The Letters of Ernest Dowson, edited by Desmond Flower and Henry Maas (London, 1967), page 189.
(11) Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (1885), edited by Ian Small (Oxford, 1986), page 58.
(12) George Bacovia. Opere, edited by Mircea Coloșenco (Bucharest, 2001), page 266.
(13) Ion Caraion, Bacovia: Sfîrșitul continuu (Bucharest, 1977), pages 169-71.
(14) George Bacovia. Opere, edited by Mircea Coloșenco (Bucharest, 2001), page 293.
(15) George Bacovia. Opere, edited by Mircea Coloșenco (Bucharest, 2001), pages 297-300.
(16) See the chapter ‘The Truth-Taking Stare’ in Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
(17) ‘Amurg’ (‘Twilight’), in the volume Plumb (1916).

The Seductiveness of the Metaxy

2009-06-26T15:10:00.028+03:00

The Interval is the metaphysical space between the eternal world of Forms and the perishable world of perceptible things, between the noumenal and the phenomenal, between the immanent and the transcendent, between Being and becoming. It is the mystical medium which enables communication between the higher and the lower regions of the spirit. It is the eschatological liminal space between heaven and hell. It is the neutral, morally ambivalent intermediate zone between good and evil.

When we speak of the metaphysics of the Interval we are, however, using a term whose primary meaning could not be more mundanely material. For, the interval is a dead metaphor that originates in the earthworks of Roman military architecture. The intervallum was literally that which lay between two lines of stakes (a vallum, or palisaded entrenchment); it was the space between the ramparts of a legionary camp. In Greek, however, “the interval” is abstract from the outset, referring to spatial or temporal relation rather than to any definite physical space. It is τὸ μεταξύ, the metaxy, a substantival use of the compound adverb/preposition μεταξύ (“in the midst of”, from μετά “between” and ξύν “together with”), used of place (“between”) and time (“between-whiles,” “meanwhile”). In grammar, τὸ μεταξύ is the name for the neuter gender, the class of declensions that are neither masculine nor feminine. Derived from μεταξύ, the noun metaxytês (ἡ μεταξύτης) is another term for the diastema (τὸ διάστημα – “space between”), or interval in music. In the sixth century A.D., the Greek philosophical scholiasts of the late Roman period, for example Olympiodorus Philosophus, who wrote commentaries on Plato and Aristotle, coined the term metaxylogia (μεταξυλογία) to refer to a digression, an intermediate passage within a text, a temporary lapse from the main subject. The text that follows might therefore also be named a metaxylogy, in the sense that it is a digression in between texts arising from the “Seductiveness of the Interval” exhibition installed within the space of the Romanian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Art Biennale, but also in the sense that it is a discourse, a logos concerning the Interval, or metaxy.

In the singular, τὸ μεταξύ does not occur as such in the extant works of Plato, although Aristotle (Metaphysics, 987b) reports that his teacher admitted an “in-between” (μεταξύ) class of things, in the interval between things perceptible to the senses (τὰ αἰσθητά) and the Forms, or Ideas (τὰ εἴδη), knowable by the mind; these are the objects of mathematics, eternal and immutable like the Forms, but unlike them multiple. The interval is therefore necessarily a space of multiplicity, participating in both the immutability of the eternal and the plurality of the temporal. Indeed, it is as a neuter plural (τὰ μεταξύ), referring to “intermediate” or “in-between things”, that the metaxy occurs in Plato’s Gorgias (468a), where Socrates discovers through dialogue with Polus that there is a neutral class of things, qualities, states and actions which are neither good nor bad (τὰ μήτε ἀγαθὰ μήτε κακά). While our actions may in themselves be neutral or intermediate (Socrates gives the examples of sitting, walking, and running), we always act in pursuit of the good, however. Even evil actions are committed for the sake of the good; they are evil as a result of their agents’ perverted understanding, whereby the Good and the Truth become obnubilated in the soul. Similarly, in the Neoplatonist philosophy of Plotinus, the metaxy occurs with the masculine plural definite article: men are οἱ μεταξύ (“the in-between ones”), in the middle place between gods and beasts (Enneads, III, 8, 10-11). Just as the earth lies in the middle point of the heavens, so man is suspended between god and beast, matter and spirit, time and eternity, corruption and perfection. This position is not, however, one of inertia, but rather one of continual tension: caught between the lower and upper strata of the cosmic order, man alternately inclines towards both (ῥέπει ἐπ᾽ ἄμφω).

Whereas for Plotinus man is the interval, the middle term between lower and higher, between beasts and gods, with a shift of metaphysical perspective man himself might become the lower term, with a further interval opening up between him and the gods. Likewise, the earth, instead of being the middle point, might equally be seen as the lowest point on a vertical scale at whose pinnacle are situated the heavens. In a dialogue entitled On the Obsolescence of the Oracles, by Platonist philosopher Plutarch, we learn (the speaker at this point in the text is Cleombrotus) that there is an interval between earth and moon (μεταξὺ γῆς καὶ σελήνης). Far from being void, this interval is filled with air (ἀήρ, “(lower) air”, as opposed to αἰθήρ, the “upper air”, “aether”, or “heaven”), which, were it removed, would destroy the consociation (κοινωνία) of the universe. The lower air is also the abode of the intermediate race of daimons (δαιμόνων γένος), whose function is interpretative, hermeneutic, and without whom man would either be severed from the gods altogether or subject to the confusion of unmediated contact with them (De defectu oraculorum, 416e-f). According to Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (De somniis, I, 141), on the other hand, the daimons of the philosophers are, in fact, the “angels” of “the divine word” (ὁ ἱερὸς λόγος) of Hebrew scripture, intermediaries of the Interval, who convey back and forth (διαγγέλλουσι) the exhortations of the Father to His children and the wants of the children to the Father.
The plastic image of this traffic or commerce between the world above and that below, which occurs within the ambi-directional space of the Interval, is, of course, the ladder. Philo of Alexandria, in his commentary on Jacob’s vision of the ladder (Genesis, 28:12), says that κλῖμαξ (“ladder”) is a figurative name for ἀήρ, whose base (βάσις) is the earth and whose top (κορυφή) is heaven (De somniis, I, 134). Furthermore, just as the universe is, figuratively, a ladder, or interval, so too is the soul. Here, the foot of the ladder is sense perception, corresponding to the earthly element, while the top is the mind, the nous (νοῦς), corresponding to the heavenly element (De somniis, I, 146). Like the angels, the words of God move up and down the entire length of this ladder, reaching down through the interval to draw the mortal mind upward.
The mind’s ascent of the ladder is an arduous undertaking, an exertion of the soul that Philo names ascesis (ἄσκησις, “exercise, training, practice”). The ascent is not continuous, but rather oscillates, with the practiser/ascetic alternately gaining and losing height, now wakeful, now asleep, pulled in opposite directions by the better and the worse (De somniis, I, 150-152). The practisers thus dwell in the interval; they are “midway between extremes” (μεθόριοι τῶν ἄκρων). At the topmost extreme dwell the wise, who have always striven for the heights, and at the bottommost extreme dwell the wicked, who have ever made dying and corruption their practice.
Man’s condition as one of “those-in-between,” pulled between good and evil, inclining now toward base perdition, now toward the transcendent, is conditional upon his existence within time, within becoming. For those in Hades or Olympus, in hell or heaven, which exist outside of time, further change is impossible, however. Yet even at this eschatological level there is an interval, an intermediate state that is neither good nor evil, wisdom nor wickedness, hell nor heaven, angel nor devil. According to a mediaeval popular tradition, traces of which can also be found in the legend of the Voyage of St Brendan, there was a third, neutral faction of angels during the revolt in Heaven, who were neither for God nor His enemy, Lucifer. These angels were cast out of Heaven, but rejected by Hell. Instead, they dwell in the interval between the two eschatological planes, an indeterminate zone that is neither good nor evil. In the Divina Commedia of Dante, they are to be found in the vestibule or threshold of Hell, among those who are neither dead nor alive, “the sect of caitiffs, hateful to God and to His enemies” (“la setta dei cattivi, / a Dio spiacenti ed a’ nemici sui” – Inferno, 3, 62-63).

The interval as threshold is also the locus of a peculiar, intermediate genre of literature, the σπουδογέλοιον or joco-serium (“serious-jesting” or “jesting-serious” – серьезно-смеховой), whose history is traced by Mikhail Bakhtin in Chapter Four of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. The genre springs from the tradition of the Socratic dialogue, of which, apart from Xenophon, Plato is the only extant exponent. In itself a discursive form of the interval, a polyphonic intermediation whereby latent truth and knowledge are brought to birth by the participating speakers, or “ideologues”, as Bakhtin names them, the σπουδογέλοιον is an eschatological “dialogue on the threshold” (Schwellendialog, or диалог на пороге, in Russian) that takes place in the interval between earth and underworld or between earth and heaven. One of the most famous classical examples is Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (Pumpkinification), a parodic apotheosis, in which the Emperor Claudius, having given up the ghost via the back passage, is turned away from the gates of Olympus.

Menippus, Diego Velázquez

The chief protagonist of the serious-jesting eschatological dialogue on the threshold is, however, Menippus of Gadara, a third-century B.C. Cynic philosopher of Phoenician origin, who is said to have been the originator of this literary genre, known also as “Menippean Satire,” although none of his writings are extant. (In Lives of Eminent Philosophers (6, 101), Diogenes Laertius reports that Menippus composed, among other writings, a Νέκυια, or Journey to the Underworld.) Menippus, as satirical ideologue of the Interval, is the central character in a number of dialogues by Lucian of Samosata, all of which take place on the threshold between worlds: for example, the Icaromenippus, in which the Cynic fashions himself wings and flies to heaven to discover the (less than flattering) truth about the gods; and the Necyia, possibly inspired by the lost writings of the Gadarene, in which he descends to Hades to mock at the miserable fate of kings and millionaires in the afterlife.
The σπουδογέλοιον continues as a distinct, recognisable genre until as late as the seventeenth century, a fine example being the monumental anthology Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Socraticae Joco-Seriae (Amphitheatre of Jesting-Serious Socratic Wisdom), published by Caspar Dornavius in 1619. The Amphitheatrum contains liminal, intermediate texts, ambiguously situated between high and low, which treat derisory subjects in a grandiloquent way, or which are simultaneously scholastic and absurd, such as the Disquisitio Physiologica de Pilis (Physiological Disquisition on Hair) by Joannes Tardinus, which painstakingly exhausts all the philosophical, theological, historical, geographical, medical and scientific possibilities of the subject, or the De Peditu eiusque Speciebus, Crepitu et Visio, Discursus Methodicus, In Theses digestus (On Farting and its Species, Crackle and Stench, Methodical Discourse, Arranged in Theses), by the pseudonymous Buldrianus Sclopetarius, a mock philological, historical, scientific and even musicological tract whose title speaks for itself.

In conclusion, as a space of tension between two static extremes, it is only the existence of the metaxy that enables the possibility of ambi-directional movement, thereby creating a medium of communication. The metaxy can also be ambivalent – Bakhtin would say “carnivalesque” – abolishing and merging hierarchical opposites. And hence the seductiveness of the metaxylogical.

(c) Alistair Ian Blyth, Bucharest, 2009
Published in The Seductiveness of the Interval. Romanian Pavilion - 53rd International Art Exhibition. La Biennale di Venezia 7th June-22nd November 2009 by the Romanian Cultural Institute of Stockholm

Homo illiberalis (1)

2009-06-07T13:43:00.007+03:00

The very manner in which one walks along the street reveals whether one is civilised or not: two civilised men, on approaching each other along a narrow section of the pavement, will each turn their facing shoulder back in mutual respect, allowing each other to pass; the uncivilised boor, oblivious or contemptuous of other pedestrians, will give no ground and aggressively bump into the other, should the latter fail to move sufficiently out of his way, and at whom he will then unleash a torrent of foul language.

For ancient Greek playwright Alexis Comicus (fr. 265), walking along the street in a disjointed, graceless way is the very definition of the "aneleutheros", or "homo illiberalis", in other words, it is behaviour unworthy of a free citizen:

(Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, I, p. 21, C; August Meineke, Poetarum Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, Paris, 1855, p. 576)

Closer to our own times, Daniil Kharms was horrified by the ill-bred rustic boorishness that invaded Petersburg, or rather Leningrad, after the levelling revolutionary triumph of the proletariat over formerly civilised manners:

Дом на углу Невского красится в отвратительную желтую краску. Приходится свернуть на дорогу. Меня толкают встречные люди. Они все недавно приехали из деревень и не умеют еще ходить по улицам. Очень трудно отличить их грязные костюмы и лица. Они топчатся во все стороны, рычат и толкаются. Толкнув нечайно друг друга, они не говорят "простите", а кричат друг другу бранные слова.

"Утро" (25 октября 1931 года, воскресение)

A house on the corner of Nevsky is being painted in a revolting yellow colour. You have to go around it by walking in the road. The people coming the other way bump into me. They have all recently arrived from the country and they do not yet know how to walk along a street. It is very hard to tell their filthy suits and faces apart. They trample each other on every side, they growl and they bump into each other. When they unwittingly bump into each other, they do not say "excuse me", but yell abusive words at each other.

Melancholia

2009-05-06T21:57:00.002+03:00

Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Johannes der Täufer, 1631

Whereas, if I sinke in this sorrow, in this dejection of spirit, though it were Wine in the beginning, it is lees, and tartar in the end; Inordinate sorrow growes into sinfull melancholy, and that melancholy, into an irrecoverable desperation.

John Donne, Sermon preached upon Trinity-Sunday, 1621

Early Morning

2009-05-04T09:24:00.003+03:00

Early Morning - Samuel Palmer (1805-1881)

"Neo-Platonism may be compared to an underground river that flows through European history, sending up, from time to time, springs and fountains; and wherever its fertilizing stream emerges, there imaginative thought revives, and we have a period of great art and poetry."

Kathleen Raine, Blake and Antiquity, 1979

The "Malbrough theme" (тема Мальбрука) - 2

2009-04-30T17:00:00.008+03:00

"Eho tu concacavisti te?"

("And hast thou besmirched thyself with thine own ordure?")

Link to further information on the "Malbrough theme".

Cartoon reproduced with the kind permission of Mr Ion Barbu

The Hieroglyphic History

2009-04-13T10:52:00.008+03:00

Dimitrie Cantemir (1673-1723)

Istoria ieroglifică / The Hieroglyphic History (1703-5)

The Hieroglyphic History, written between 1703 and 1705 in Constantinople, is a dense, hermetic text, an allegorical novel describing the Byzantine power struggle between two realms: that of the beasts (Moldavia), ruled by the Lion, and that of the birds (Wallachia), ruled by the Eagle. A whole host of beasts and birds represent historical figures and moral types: for example, the Unicorn (Dimitrie Cantemir), the trusty Hawk (Thoma Cantacuzino), the tyrannical Crow (Constantine Brîncoveanu), and the dissembling, villainous Chameleon (Skarlataki Roset), who betrayed Cantemir to the Turks and who is described as “the seed of perfidiousness, the root of evil, the scion of squalor, the branch of infamy, the touchwood of sycophancy, the fount of perjury, the parable of insolence”. The Hieroglyphic History is at once a political treatise and philosophical essay on the nature and discourses of power. Labyrinthine in structure, the text is baroque in the true sense of the word, with highly ornate periods encrusted with humanist maxims (“seven hundred and sixty sentences”) and parenthetical explanations. In addition, the novel is interspersed with twelve exemplary tales, such as that of the swineherd whom Fortune causes to be made king but who governs according to the spirit of the pigsty. The world Cantemir envisages is governed by hunger and a permanent struggle for either survival or the satiation of greed. Ultimately, only higher spirits, such as the Unicorn, which represents the ideal of the enlightened ruler, can rise above the bestial turmoil.

excerpt from The Hieroglyphic History

The Unicorn, on hearing these words that flamed with the ardour of truth and spoke of the woes he saw would befall justice, readily understood and not drawing out any further talk, he thanked the Hawk for not having concealed the whole truth about him, and in this fashion he said: “After the oaths which for love and friendship between us thou hast made from the sole inclination of thy heart, henceforth I am beholden to name thee brother. So, my dear brother, I shall in brief tell thee a tale, I pray thee hark not idly, for in threefold wise and as though through three gates may we enter within the palaces of the knowledge of things: by examples of things past, by familiarity with things present, and by right reckoning of things to come. As histories are one part of this sentence, from the many here is but one: Once, brother, there was a swineherd, who on wages from all the village wherein he dwelled made his living day by day; passing his days in such a lowly life as this, other than the sound of grunting pigs, and other than the sight of that lowly village, nothing else did this man learn; but one day, he fell to talking with another, who was from the city and chanced to be passing through that place, and the name of the city sounded in the swineherd’s ears. The city, howsoever it might be, could in no wise find room in his mind, and oft he imagined it as stove, at other times as a chimney, and at still other times he pictured it as a cattle shed, for the imagination of the lowly is capable only of picturing those things it has seen. And so his appetite was inflamed to find out what a city might be, and letting the pigs loose in the field and taking with him some crusts of bread in his hood, down the road whence the traveller had come he stoutly set off. Journeying all day until evening, where the darkness caught up with him there he took his repose and his meal. Fortune, which seeks out both swineherd and potter with the same blindness, had borne the swineherd to close by the gates of the city and the fate that there awaited him. Because the emperor, who once ruled that realm and in that city reigned, had the previous day departed from amongst the living leaving no heir of his flesh, among the lords and senators of that monarchy there was now great uproar and bickering, for all reckon themselves worthy to rule, and not one willingly accepts subservience. In short, as not one of them considered himself second to another, by joint counsel they had agreed to go out of the eastern gate of the city the next day and to elevate to the imperial throne and to the crown of the kingdom whomever they first should meet, whether he be a foreigner or a citizen. So, after the council that evening, they rose in the morning (for nor was the swineherd’s luck slumbering) and discovered the swineherd awakening in the field by the road and rubbing his gummy eyes. They straightway lifted him up in honour, removed his tattered rags and clothed him in the purple. They seated him in the imperial litter and with great pomp bore him to the imperial court. According to the custom of the place, all the ceremonials of coronation were performed; whence the saying today a churl tomorrow an earl. To the swineherd this thing that had palpably and truly occurred oft seemed a dream, oft a semblance, oft a fairy tale. And one of the senators said to the others: “That which fortune works neither the mind nor reflection can undo, but even if the crow’s egg hatched for a thousand years at the peacock’s breast, from the crow’s not the peacock’s shell would the chick emerge, in such a fashion this emperor too in time will reveal not wherefore fortune brought him but wherefore nature bore him; and do not reckon my prophecy to be concocted from vain imaginings, but heed his words and deeds. For behold, as soon as he was elevated to the might of empire, he was seized not by humaneness but by swinishness, and all those against whom he held a grudge in the village where he herded the pigs, some he killed, others he banished, and others he inflicted with divers punishments. It is a vile thing for the new master to triumph according to an old grudge.” And in truth his kingdom, because of his tyranny, arrived at great danger of collapse. And like a fire in dry straw his evil on every side broke out and spread, and was later known to all as an insufferable thing. And thus they all rose up and, finding him in the sheets where he wallowed in all kinds of filth, they put an end to his days and his tyranny.

In such wise, brother, does the epitropy of the Crow appear, for, crow that he is, so his words, sayings and deeds are those of a Crow; and in time, with his own voice he shall unto himself be the chastising judge of his own prophecy and augurs. But when and how the writ of fate will come to pass, mortal eyes will never be able to read.”

Thus, the Unicorn and the Hawk, having drawn morals and talked into the night, rose and, embracing and kissing each other fraternally, again swore by the name of the heavenly Eagle inseparable friendship unto the death, succour and a helping hand to each other in all danger, and eternal and untainted love. And taking their leave, the Hawk returned to his place and the Unicorn, knowing that the mountain paths were barred, for those that dwelled in the mountains were wont to bar the paths until the break of day, and reckoning that thither he was unable to wend his way back, swam across the waters entrusting himself to the waves.

Oh, piteous thing impenetrable to human reckoning, how is it that divine providence allows the righteous to be tormented by cunning traps and suffers the pure to fall into the snare of the defiled? But in truth were it not that the proofs of ancient cases unravelled the aporia of this thing, with no small perspiration of soul would the philosophy of the atomists comprehend the minds of mortals and together with them worldly things; whereby, raising the supposition τῶν αὐτομάτων, an unknown judgement on the unknown touching everything from beginning to end, and firmly setting each case at its time and in its order, it remains that any simpleton can with the eyes of the soul descry from visible things those invisible, and understand, just as evil persists until the evil day, and the good like metal in a fire is necessarily ascertained.

So the Unicorn giving himself up to the care of the unceasing waves of water, a path that was not without great uncertain peril, as was later to be seen, for not his reckoning but the immutable decision of fate deceived him, although from many forms of peril it is a wise thing to choose the smallest and lightest, and at the upper edge of the water, swimming northwards, the greedy beast of prey kept watch by night, wakefully stalking the paths of travellers. Whither came the Unicorn (oh, storm in calm waters! oh, the breaking of the ship upon the shore! oh deed undone and tale untold and unheard, straightway reviled by all! oh, work of the devil wrought by the cunning of the Chameleon! oh, Chameleon more devilish than the devil! oh, creature tainted and more inimical and more savage than any other beast!), and behold calamitously the crocodile crashing and bellowing in the waves of the water was upon him. The Unicorn, first of all hearing the roar of the water, then seeing the visage of the terrible beast, straightway sensed the perfidious trap that had been readied in advance and without resistance gave himself up to his insatiable hunter. To swallow him the Crocodile now gapes wide his jaws, the Unicorn comprehends the whole image of the perfidious trap and the triumph of perfidy, and says: “Sate thyself on innocent blood, O Crow, for which thou hast ever thirsted and craved.”

The Crocodile, on hearing these words from the Unicorn, reined in the greed of his jaws and strove to discover why the name of the Crow had been brought to bear, for not even to the crocodile had the feculent Chameleon revealed his perfidious scheme.

The Unicorn, all of a sudden neither resisting nor willing to answer, like the lamb brought to the slaughter, meekly falls silent, and from the depths of his heart cries: “O, justice! O, victory!” (for in mischance the deed acknowledges the doer, like the son that complains to the parent of his plight). And after a while he fell to reckoning (for in time of need the wise thing is to make use of and to endeavour with the word). And to the beast he thus began to speak: “Do not reckon, O beast, that I am affrighted by thy terrible visage, or because now I am in thy power, or that no comfort is to be found; well do I know that neither my body can be consumed by thy stomach nor my horn be ingurgitated by thy throat. Likewise, let not this seem to thee any new distress, such as has been given to my soul, since from youth and even from childhood I am accustomed and wont to play with fortune and to fight in every wise, so that there is nothing her wrath has not hurled at me, and there is nothing that I have not suffered, and hence it seems to me that she has all the more strenuously emptied the arrows from her quiver, whereby either the eternal design shall be fulfilled or henceforth my indulgence shall mock her trials (for the greater the peril is reckoned, the stronger is its end hoped for). All we mortals bear two fates within our breast, one of which is death, the other life, and by their nature both of them from the hour of our conception accompany us in all parts, in all places and at all times. So, whatever is the design that stretches before us, willy-nilly we must follow it; there is no lack of mortals who think the fate of death to be the ultimate terror; but those truly wise have ever been wont to mock at it. Mockery, I say, but to others fright, and make reckoning with them; fright, I say, to others, for dying is not learnt by living: make reckoning with them, for by living all too slowly is dying learnt, and thus, they do not take fright at the most terrible of terrors, which, whatever the circumstances might be, traversing the period of being, they avoid, they die, and, escaping from the bondage of fortune, they find salvation; which thing seems and is to them not the greatest terror but the final comfort. So as long as my natural fate is known, expected and unheeded by me, all the more vigorously will accidental fate (whose point is insignificant) be unheeded and defeated, against which inimical fate it is fitting to raise the shield of the valiant soul. Indeed, bitter grief would my heart have felt if my foe had snared me for my idleness or miscalculation (for rightly is it fitting for one to sorrow, when, by his pride and heedlessness, he brings upon himself his own fall and distress); and now as the future decision stands unvanquished and on all sides unshaken, it is necessary neither to spread the sails to the wind nor hopelessly to abandon the helm, for the one is a thing for the fool and the other for the coward. And as it was foreordained that the storm should wreak its wrath upon me, in the name of things divine, mortal wiles with goading and synchoresis have sold my inimical fate into thy jaws. And by no means is it the counsel of the wise to say, ah, I deceived myself! ah, I did not reckon that such a thing would come to pass! but when in the name of the divine the earthly succumbs to the deception that might befall it, great comfort and triumphal hope remain to it, for the name that those without law have made an organ and machinery of their evil, let it be to him a protector in troubles, a help in tight places and a victory on the day of his wrath. So, O beast, if, as to the thing they have wrought, the divine powers do not err like earthly men, in the holy one whom thou hast in great heedlessness defiled I have the good and undoubted hope that in a short time (for to him that knows how to suffer all time is short) thou shalt reap thy just desserts. And if not, I defy the cunning of fate and endure all with a good heart. And now, O beast (if in the race of crocodiles there is any inkling of good), dost thou remember that at the edge of three waters, at that city which is the key to two kingdoms, we once found ourselves, and thou having nothing whereby to quell thy hunger, I did assist thee with plenteous food and from the jaws of death (who is a beast more evil and more inimical than thee) did I save thee; therefore, for past good deeds, or for future hope (for the stone from the wall is in time laid again in a wall), look thou not to unfriendly incitements, but by tomorrow set me free from here, for by daylight, either the good or the evil that befall me will remain under the title of thy name; and from tomorrow hence thou shalt be capable of doing me neither evil nor good; for either the hounds that pursue me will transform the face of my fortune or I shall thwart their efforts, for many a time the night bears issue and the day lends support.”

The Crocodile, on hearing these the Unicorn’s bold words, neither wholly understood the discourse, nor could decide what do first. For one because he well saw, according to the words of the Unicorn, that that fruit and the meal of that throat were not for his teeth, and for another because remembering the good deed that the Unicorn had once done him he felt shame, and that aroused his ire (since for those that know not how to repay a good deed, first shame is stirred up from remembrance and from shame ire). In the end, evil by nature vanquishing the moral good, for the race of crocodiles is famed for its mercilessness, he took the Unicorn to his lair, where overnight he held him fast.

(translation from Romanian (c) Alistair Ian Blyth, Bucharest, 2009)

Caelii Calcagnini Ferrariensis Podicis Encomium

2009-04-07T10:22:00.006+03:00

Caelius Calcagninus (Celio Calcagnini, 1479-1541), Podicis Encomium*

Membra omnia corporis capitales olim inimicitias adversus podicem exercebant: atque illi aliquando apud Hippocratem summum corporis vindicem diem dixere: sellulariam autem illi desidiam foetoremque inenarrabilem, et omnium sordium conceptaculum: quodque nulla pars in toto corpore magis pudenda esset: imputabant. At ipse innocentiae suae conscius minime iudicem recusavit; neque vadimonium declinavit: sed ad clepsydram breviter causam suam dixit. Nam et se ad corporis fores excubare, et quasi ianitorem a natura positum locum summa diligentia servare respondit: quas vero sordes, quae excrementa membra caetera aut alerent aut conciperent, se fideliter evehere atque exportare. Foetoris autem causam non sibi, qui sit natura defaecatissimus, sed iis sordibus, quas extruderet, adscribi debere: quin eo nomine gratiam non accusationem reprehensionem deberi; quod pro reliquorum membrorum salute in perpetuo squallore ac pedore vivat. neque pudendam aut poenitendam partem corporis existimari oportere; sine qua homo diu esse non possit. Tutissimam vero potius ac repositissimo loco conditam; ut pote quam inter geminas symplegadas natura locaverit. Audierat haec Hippocrates summa attentione; reque mature animadversa, pro podice sententiam tulit: accusatoresque sub perpetui palloris atque internecionis comminatione, ad persolvendum certum tributum damnavit. Atque ex eo tempore skatophagou nomen accepit.

Once upon a time, all the other parts of the body bore a deadly grudge against the arsehole. And so they set a date for him to appear in court before Hippocrates, the body’s chief protector. They charged him with sitting around idly, having an unspeakable stench, and being the receptacle of all filth, wherefore no other part of the whole body was more shameful. Aware of his own innocence, the arsehole did not in the least reject the judge or decline to put up a bail-bond, but succinctly stated his case, speaking against the water-clock. In his defence he said that he camped outside the gates of the body and like a door-keeper appointed by nature to that place guarded it with the greatest assiduity. Whatever filth, whatever ordure the other parts of the body ingested or received, he carried them away, conveying them thence. The reason for the stench ought to be ascribed not to him, who was immaculately clean by nature, but to all the filth he had to extrude. Indeed, he ought to be thanked for his services on that account, rather than being censured, because, for the welfare of the rest of the body, he lived in perpetual squalor and dirt. Nor was it proper for him to be reckoned a shameful or reprehensible part of the body, because without him man would no longer be able to exist. Indeed, he was the safest rather than the remotest place of all, inasmuch as nature had set him between the twin Symplegades. Hippocrates listened to all this with the greatest attention. Having considered the matter seasonably, he passed judgement in favour of the arsehole: under threat of perpetual terror and slaughter, he sentenced the accusers to pay a certain toll. And since that day he has gone by the name of skatophagos.

*In a similar jesting-serious (ioco-serium) vein, an anonymous Actio Injuriarum Nasi contra Podicem (The Nose's Lawsuit for Damages Against the Arsehole) (10pp. in quarto) was published in 1680.

Заклятие смехом / Vrăjire prin rîs

2009-02-15T12:39:00.014+02:00

Велемир Хлебников / Velemir Hlebnikov (1885-1922)

Sergei Biriukov citește Заклятие смехом (Звукорежиссер Андрей Boettger. Запись 2004 г.)

Заклятие смехом

О, рассмейтесь, смехачи!
О, засмейтесь, смехачи!
Что смеются смехами, что смеянствуют смеяльно,
О, засмейтесь усмеяльно!
О, рассмешищ надсмеяльных -- смех усмейных смехачей!
О, иссмейся рассмеяльно, смех надсмейных смеячей!
Смейево, смейево,
Усмей, осмей, смешики, смешики,
Смеюнчики, смеюнчики.
О, рассмейтесь, смехачи!
О, засмейтесь, смехачи!

(1908 - 1909)

Vrăjire prin rîs

O, răzrîdeți, rîzangiilor!
O, prearîdeți, rîzangiilor!
Ce rîd cu rîsete, ce prorîzăresc surîzător,
O, răzrîdeți rîzător!
O, rîzăciune a conrîsaților -- rîsul derîziților rîzangii!
O, dezrîzi răzrîzăcios, rîsul înrîsaților rîzari!
Rîzăreț, rîzăreț,
Strărîzi, prorîzi, rîsicici, rîsicici,
Rîsărițe, rîsărițe,
O, răzrîdeți, rîzangiilor!
O, prearîdeți, rîzangiilor!

traducere (aproximativă) de Alistair Ian Blyth

Poetul A. Voznesenskii vorbește despre Заклятие смехом, din filmul documentar Поэты Серебряного Века: Велимир Хлебников, 1885 - 1922. (Авторы: И. Мисявичюс, Д. Чулахина, Ю. Ольшванг, Л. Шевченко и др. Гостелерадио СССР, 1985 год. 61 мин.) (http://www.hlebnikov.ru)

Петрополь / Petropol / Petropolis

2009-02-14T14:15:00.019+02:00

Осип Мандельштам Osip Mandelștam

Мне холодно. Прозрачная весна
В зеленый пух Петрополь одевает,
Но, как медуза, невская волна
Мне отвращенье легкое внушает.
По набережной северной реки
Автомобилей мчатся светляки.
Летят стрекозы и жуки стальные,
Мерцают звезд булавки золотые,
Но никакие звезды не убьют
Морской воды тяжелый измуруд.

Îmi este frig. Primăvara străvezie
Îmbracă Petropolul în scame verzi,
Însă, ca o meduză, a Nevei undă
Mă cuprinde cu lehamite ușoară.
Pe splaiul fluviului septentrional
Farurile automobilelor gonesc,
Zboară libelule și gîndaci de oțel,
Gămăliile stelelor sclipesc aurii,
Însă nici o stea nu va putea omorî
Smaraldul greoi al apei marine.

*

В Петрополе прозрачном мы умрем,
Где властвует над нами Прозерпина.
Мы в каждом вздохе смертный воздух пьем,
И каждый час нам смертная година.
Богиня моря, грозная Афина,
Сними могучий каменный шелом.
В Петрополе прозрачном мы умрем, -
Здесь царствуешь не ты, а Прозерпина.

1916

În Petropol străveziu vom muri,
Unde Proserpina domnește peste noi,
Cu fiece suflare suflul morții bem,
Și fiece ceas ne este sorocul morții,
Zeiță a mării, strașnică Atenă,
Scoate-ți puternicul coif de piatră,
În Petropol străveziu vom muri, -
Aici domnești nu tu, ci Proserpina.

traducere de Alistair Ian Blyth

Орлы/мухи Eagles/flies Vulturi/muște

2009-01-30T22:39:00.017+02:00

Даниил Хармс
(1905-1942)

Я долго думал об орлах
И понял многое:
Орлы летают в облаках,
Летают, никого не трогая.
Я понял, что живут орлы на скалах и в горах,
И дружат с водяными духами.
Я долго думал об орлах,
Но спутал, кажется, их с мухами.

15 марта 1939 года

Cugetam îndelung asupra vulturilor
Și multe înțeles-am:
Vulturii zboară-n nori,
Zboară, nimic neatingînd.
Înțeles-am că vulturii trăiesc pe piscuri și-n munți,
Și-s prietenii cu duhurile apei.
Cugetam îndelung asupra vulturilor,
Dar i-am confundat, se pare, cu muște.

15 martie 1939

(traducere de Alistair Ian Blyth)

De esu ceparum

2009-01-14T15:03:00.022+02:00

A section concerning one particular effect of eating onions may be found in the Physiologia crepitus ventris (The Physiology of Ventral Crepitation) of Rudolphus Goclenius père (1547-1628), professor of Physics, Logic, Mathematics and Ethics at the University of Marburg, eclectic philosopher, polymath and poet. The text was first published in Frankfurt in 1607, and later included (with the title Problemata de crepitu ventris - Questions concerning Ventral Crepitation) in the Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Socraticae Joco-Seriae of Caspar Dornavius (Hanau, 1619), where it appears alongside the De peditu eiusque speciebus, crepitus et visio, Discursus methodicus in Theses digestus (On Farting and its Species, Crepitation and Stench, Methodical Discourse divided into Theses), ascribed to a certain Sclopetarius, an otherwise unknown and possibly pseudonymous author. The authors of the Bibliotheca Scatologica (Paris, 1848) fulsomely describe the two tractates as follows: "L'un est l'alpha, l'autre l'omega de la matière, et tous deux il forment le nec plus ultra de ce que pourront jamais inspirer de plus ingénieux les soupirs abdominaux."

Question VII of the Problemata ("Why is it that the Vandals by eating onions fart frequently?") is both ethnological and physiological in scope, and concerns the onion-eating habit of the barbarous Vandals, who sacked Rome in AD 455, and its less than civilised effects:

Cur Vandali ex ceparum esu frequentius pedunt? An quia sunt Dioscoridi πνευματωτικαι et δηκτικαι hoc est, inflandi atque erodendi seu commordendi vim habent, quae in pituita redundante multos spirituosos flatus gignunt, maxime si cepae longae, ruffae, siccae et crudae fuerint. Vandalos autem cepis vel quotidie victitare, notissimum est, quibus ventris crepitus gratissimi sunt.

Thus, the reason can be none other than that the onion is apt to cause flatulence (πνευματωτικός). Onions are piquant (δηκτικαι) and produce a superabundance of wind (flatus) in the body's excess phlegm, especially if the legumes in question are of the long, red, dry and raw variety (longae, ruffae, siccae et crudae). It is notorious that the Vandals eat onions as their everyday victuals, and so breaking wind is most agreeable to them.

Vandal

Adam Lonitzer, Naturalis historiae opus novum, Frankfurt, 1551-1555.