INSIDE UNDIVIDED (11)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, and Context by Dara Wier

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Rosamond Purcell, Lawrence Weschler, good people doing amazing things

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Daniil Kharms

Matvei Yankelevich:

“…A work of art has to exist in the world as an object, as real as the sun, grass, a rock, water, and so on. It must also possess a ‘slight error’—–in other words, to be ‘right’ it has to be a little bit ‘wrong,’ a tad strange, and thereby truly real. Art, for Kharms has an ‘independent existence’…”

(p. 13, TODAY I WROTE NOTHING: THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF DANIIL KHARMS, edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich)

This is important, this distinguishing between kinds of logics we can encounter:

“…Kharms seems to have absorbed quickly all the new ideas in the artistic air at that time, and these served as a springboard for his idiosyncratic aesthetic theories that would center on fragmentation and disruption, and the autonomy of art from logical thought, practicality and everyday meanings…”

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And I can’t help myself, I am going to be typing here a lot from Matvei’s intro, it is good to think about it:

………Beckett and Ionesco didn’t  like Martin Esslin’s: “Theatre of the Absurd” label either.  But Kharms and his “school” are not around to complain, as their writings didn’t reach the West until long after most of them were dead.  The domestication may be pardonable, but it’s not subtle.  To quote The Village Voice writer on the the OBERIU poets, “Their shit is hilarious.  But it got them killed.”  We stumble on (or over) this kind of oversimplification again and again in our culture’s popularization of difficult writers in difficult times.

In fact, Kharms consistently denies us our desire to draw any moral conclusions from his work.  “What big cucumbers they sell in stores nowadays!” the writer exclaims after one of his characters beats another to death with an oversize cuke.

A series of events in which one character after another meets an accidental and senseless demise concludes with the lamentation:  “All good people, but they don’t know how to hold their ground.”………………Every fable ends with a false moral, or none at all.

By imposing a logical reading, this “translation” does violence to Kharms, for whom  chance itself is a transcendent category; error and accident, the very glue of the universe, constitute manifestations in this world of the miraculous, which is otherwise hidden in some parallel dimension behind or beyond mundane reality.

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……..as the chance encounter on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella………(Lautréamont?  or Rimbaud?)  (who should I think of when I think of this)

and I like to think of this, or at least two of three parts of this, however the part I prefer not to think of is necessary to the equation of all 3 together, I guess

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L I V E

love

lore

lord

load

lead

D E A D

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Manufactured spontaneity, what is there about it that is not the same as spontaneous spontaneity?  Each is fine in its own way.

Bi-furcations of functional passageways lead to ever more difficult to maneuver portals.  To get to the source of a river one manages and navigates and follows ever more narrow waterways.

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scale for books investigating borders of bitter cynical misanthropic points of view:

(* indicates degrees of biting/grilling evidence of evidence we can be understood to be a difficult species)

* mild

**disconcerting

***scathing;

****irrefutable

*****satisfyingly hyperbolic

tiny sample:

THE ASSISTANT Robert Walser * WHY DID I EVER Mary Robison ** POINTS FOR A COMPASS ROSE Evan S. Connell *** THE VOICE IMITATOR Thomas Bernhard **** COLLECTED STORIES Lydia Davis ** THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN E.M. Cioran ***** IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW Jerome K. Jerome *

etc.  noticing there is no poetry there, correcting this indicatively:

C.P. Cavafy **** Emily Dickinson ****

Walt Whitman * James Tate ***

(addendum:  “scathing” on certain occasions may be exchanged for “painfully realistic”)

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from an interview in a recent TINHOUSE (out of Portland, Oregon)  by Tony Perez in which he interviews Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad of Radiolab:

TP:  When do you know that it’s done, that it’s perfect?

RK:  That’s Jad.  I’ll make suggestions, but he doesn’t have to take them. It’s up to him at the end of the day where our final beauty rests.  Though, it’s interesting to me, either because he’s seduced me or because we were doppelgangers from the beginning, we often agree.  It’s one of the crucial things whether you’re making a movie or a radio show—-and maybe it’s true about writing—-to know when you’re done.  It’s sort of like flower arranging.  You have elements.  You put them in a bowl.  There are incomprehensibly large numbers of combinations that could be made, but at a certain point, you feel somehow satisfied.  It’s a mysterious feeling.  And if you feel satisfied together, it’s a doubly mysterious feeling.

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At my outpost, my secret headquarters, I am always waiting for something to come along.  Waiting on the banks of a river provides this luxury, there will always be something coming.  And it may be coming from far away.

It might be coming from Minnesota (land of a thousand lakes) (and CONDUIT and RAIN TAXI and THE LOFT and Minnesota Center for the Book and The Walker Center for the Arts and The Ashbery Bridge and  Coffee House Press and Greywolf and I think, but maybe I’m remembering wrong……..Quaker Oats…..no, that can’t be, can it……….) and Steve Healey’s great book TEN MISSISSIPPI, for one.

I know people throw things in a river, I know weather put things on the water, I know things and people fall in the water, I know some things are meant to float by (appearing first from around a bend to the north and then disappearing eventually around a bend to the south) (one of the bends is called Jesuit Bend, this is where a little mission church sits mostly empty except for when a priest manages, often for a holiday or a holyday to come by to say a mass or something).

Driftwood’s allure.

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What to do about flotsam and jetsam?  The exponential potential of all that.

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Here’s Ron Padgett’s translation of Pierre Reverdy’s THE WRONG SIDE RIGHT SIDE OUT   (The Brooklyn Rail Black Square Editions,  2007)

He climbs without stopping, without even turning around, and no one but he knows where he is going.

The weight he pulls is heavy but his legs are free and he has no ears.

At each door he called out his name.  No one opened.

But when he knew that someone was expected and who it was, he knew how to change his face.  Then he went in, in place of the person who wasn’t coming.

♣

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Dara Wier is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, and Hat on a Pond. She teaches in the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Her awards include the Poetry Center and Archives Book of the Year Award, a Pushcart Prize, the American Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She edits Factory Hollow Press. Visit her author page at Wave Books or read an interview.

INSIDE UNDIVIDED (10)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, and Context by Dara Wier

Noah Saterstrom, a founder and curator for TRICKHOUSE, in a recent interview on Flying Object’s feature:  THE MACHINATIONS OF, says as he says, also others say:

we need a stable form to hold unstable content

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Most likely growing up beside the Mississippi River shaped my mind’s measures.

One cannot watch a river for hours, days, weeks, months, years without having it determine some things about how one thinks.  One can’t tell how much water, currents, light on water, sunlight, moonlight, starlight, the lights of a seaplane nearly on the water, the shadows of seaplanes on the water’s surface, the lights of a passing ship,  waves, wake, what floats by, what boats by, what will come, what is coming, what might come, what went where, one can’t tell what a river will do as it enters one’s mind.

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Here’s something from something written by Jeremy Denk (New Yorker, FLIGHT OF THE CONCORD,  February 6th, 2012).  He is writing about among other things how when he was 20 and at a music camp at Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts he came to understand how to play a certain piece of music (Charles Ives’ Piano Trio):

one afternoon, the violinist of the group and I were driving off campus and happened to cross the Connecticut River.  Looking out the window, he said, “You should play it like that.”  From the bridge the river seemed impossibly wide, and instead of a single current there seemed to be a million intersecting currents—–urgent and lazy rivers within the river, magical pockets of no motion at all.  The late-afternoon light colored the water pink and orange and gold.  It was the most beautiful, patient, meandering multiplicity.

Instantly I knew how to play the passage.  Even better, Ive’s music made me see rivers differently………….cross-currents, dirt, haze—-the disorder of a zillion particles crawling downstream. {Ives} rivers aren’t constrained by human desires and stories; they sing the beauty of their own randomness and drift.

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Remember when I told you, that phrase, remember when I told you I had a Memory Bank, no– and, a Title Bank, storehouses that get bigger and grow bigger, and to which I add a Word Bank, a small neighborhood branch of the OED.  Any of which might bifurcate at any moment, there goes the Syntax Bank, there goes the Preposition Bank, here comes the Color and Black and White Bank, the Line Bank, the Bank of Tones, the I Wish I’d Said That Bank, the Bank of  Everything Lost, the Bank to Come, the Bank of Fire in Every Kind of Light, Bank of Explosions, Conjunctions Bank, Bank of No Return.  I could see this another way, too.

Maybe all the banks should be boats, and added could be tributaries and false rivers, and channels, and levees, and battures, and banks (oh, that kind of bank, not that other kind) and driftwoods and flotsam and jetsam and some boats could be skiffs and some barge boats with tug boats, and some ponderous ocean going ships, and some keen battleships, and there will be a ferry, a houseboat and a few might be canoes and one could be a pirogue.

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Sebald writing about writing that is out of portion to its subject.  This is perhaps related to Prufer’s writing about what has sometimes been called sentimental.

And so back to sentences………more about elaborations of style which is not at all to call into question any particular elements of all materials one might find useful and good and at hand at any given time.

It has been making me a little crazy to listen to the SENTENCE-fetish police treat the rest of us (as if any writer worth her salt knows and loves as many kinds of sentences as she can encounter and or invent, shape-wise, content-full, combination-wise, sonic-wise, etc.) really—-it kills me when anyone acts as if he owns (and knows who else owns) THE SENTENCE, that is laughably narrow-minded, foolish.  It’s a joke, right?

Now I am in the midst of risking making a very good fool of myself while I labor away in the fields of didacticism, ambiguity, all things epi and aphoristic, motto-like, manifesto, too, mission statements, rules, laws, truisms, definitions, faux definitions, definition as genre, encapsulations, summaries, tendencies within many of these forms.  As it seems so always, once you start looking it’s everywhere, once it’s on your mind, permutations and hints of it surround you.  There is a roomful of us doing this on a weekly basis here in Flying Object.

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Here is Rosamond Purcell:

(here is her bio note from flap of DICE, her collaboration with Ricky Jay:  it says:

ROSAMOND PURCELL works as a photographer in the back rooms of old museums.  She is the author of Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters. Photographic monographs include A Matter of Time and Half-Life. Other books include three collaborative works with the late Stephen Jay Gould, including Finders Keepers: Treasures and Oddities from Peter the Great to Louis Agassiz.)

(her photographs of Jay’s decaying and disintegrating dice are out of this world, try to find these and look at the them, you may love them)

Here is something she writes:

I have seized upon it in a fit of appreciation for the ambiguity of windows and mirrors that neither protect nor reveal but suggest.

And because she is amazing here she is again:

……………..still I had not seen so much stuff to which so much had happened. 

Fraying, tattered, cracked, flattened, swollen, dried, scrawny, collapsed, shredded,

peeling, torn, warped, weathered, faded, bristling, moldy, clenched, tangled, punctured,

battered, bashed-in, scooped-out, withered, engorged, trampled, toppled, crushed, bald, listing, leaning, twisting, hanging, buried, wedged, skinned, docked, gnawed, entrenched.

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Rosamond Purcell is instinctively obsessed with something so thoroughly she finds all she needs through her carefully defined, shaped, inherited (she says so when she’s telling about eating the corners of books that her mother also ate library glue and various book-related materials), refined, blissfully rich as she searches with her particular eyes and sifts through the material world as it changes.  Her book OWLS HEAD is amazing.  If you haven’t encountered it, see if you can find it.  If you have, you know what I’m saying already.

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Some notes about emotional extortion:

It is most often not a good thing.

Kevin Prufer, poet, essayist, teacher, he writes about “sentimentality” and combines in his contemplating many excellently presented examples concerning what we sometimes call sentimental.  Knowing and feeling being entwined with little possibility of escaping one another, at least in our heads.

Once anything or something appear outside of our heads:  on a page, in print, in a book, in a chapbook, on a broadside, on film, by any means of any kind that we can see or hear or use our senses to approach, once outside of our heads we can at least pretend we can know many things in semi-isolation in order not to distort these but to experience these in various ways.

Things that exist outside of my head are what I live for.  I think.  I’m pretty sure of this.

I’m pretty sure this is what poems can be for.

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ECHOPRAXIA OR ECHOPRAXIS or Echolalia, which do you prefer?

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Go here to listen to Jeremy Denk’s version of  Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives, Op 22.  Above you see Jacqueline DuPre.

♣

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Dara Wier is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, and Hat on a Pond. She teaches in the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Her awards include the Poetry Center and Archives Book of the Year Award, a Pushcart Prize, the American Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She edits Factory Hollow Press. Visit her author page at Wave Books or read an interview.