Nature Is Cruel, Staros

In terms of fashion, the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever is fixed in time and place. Its disco beats, big collar polyester shirts, bellbottoms and platform shoes place it squarely in late 1970’s big-city America. The economic milieu of the film situates it less. The time we’re living in now bears some similarity: young working class people living with their parents skeptical of the future. Beyond purely artistic considerations, which are prodigious (fine performances and cinematic flow, stellar dancing from John Travolta and music), the enduring power of the film comes from universal human characteristics. It is not some peculiarity of 1970’s America that determines characters like those we see in Saturday Night Fever—dancing joyously one moment, plunging into abysses of self-doubt the next. This is the human experience itself.

A Note On John Ashbery and Charles Sanders Peirce

I was reminded of Ashbery’s phrase, “notes from the air”, the title of a poem from Hotel Lautréamont and part of the title of a selection of his poetry published in 2008, while reading an essay published in 1878 by Charles Sanders Peirce.

Karin Roffman On the Young John Ashbery

In the summer of 1992 while traveling out west I lingered in Austin Texas long enough to go to a club and see a rock band called the True Believers.

Paul Auster’s 4321

 

4

In an essay from the mid-1970’s on the poet Charles Reznikoff, Paul Auster wrote of the poet’s ability to

choose the exact detail that will say everything and thereby allow as much as possible to remain unsaid. This kind of restraint paradoxically requires an openness of spirit that is available to very few….
–from The Art of Hunger

Paul Auster wrote that before he had written the novels that would make him famous. And while I have not read the poetry he had written, I’m willing to grant—because of those novels—that he was writing here from experience. He knew, from the inside, what he was talking about. The New York Trilogy proved it.

Another attribute available to few: the ability to write a successful long novel, long in my estimation being more than 400 pages. Auster has written brilliant short novels, surely some of the best of our time. Could he now, pushing 70, write a successful long one? And why would he want to? Isn’t that like moving backwards? Isn’t leaving out a greater challenge than putting in? Those are the questions that drew me to 4321, Auster’s new novel of nearly 900 pages. Why in God’s name would he want to do it?

54 Ice Crystals

Learn to accept a thing before it is named, they say, since the act of naming curtails the potential of process without end

It will neither dress me nor reveal me

If the sentence you’re on breaks in half

It’s just survival, but it can be more

How is one to journey in safety

Thrusting his life-force out of his body with every earth-clogged step

I blind myself to it

Polished floor

Back to the game of polishing

Emotions are never wrong/Reactions to them often are

If you’re too young

That much I’ve learned

Like a gear disengaged

My doppelgänger I am again

A whale

One black one white

Inner space is not infinite

They wave still

And you can do nothing for it

On a tumbling shore

To black memories of crow

For new detergents to try

And you don’t know me at all?

Felt, no, lived, by such bugs

In thought, in thinking, in swatting away

Until they are cast

That man also learned, as a boy

Paint the daisy chain that rushes the four borders much too fast for ordinary eyes

My knees

You could dare to add one more

Ah, ladies

Beyond the black edge of brow

Seeing him eye a Picasso, Rockefeller took the man’s hand and placed it on the impasto

His soul rolled over

Set my wheel to the clock of rain

In the void the opportunity

Your eye

Will surely shine

Sea foam sugar meringue

Take your vitamins, get your exercise

In your pursuit of wholeness

Tremors back and forth gently sawing

Run rough with a god-awful sound

Just like you

A multitude of familiar paths lead off in every direction

Every street in this city is known

The limits of matter

But home was on the Champs-Elysées

Like a color wheel in the hand

Sameness

One half dangling by a vowel, use that

Form is unavoidable

Taste for waste

And staring out at the neighbor’s tree

 

NOTES:

Conrad Aiken and the Anthropological Machine

Titian, The Three Ages of Man, 1511-12

Linnaeus’s genius consists not so much in the resoluteness with which he places man among the primates as in the irony with which he does not record—as he does with the other species—any specific identifying characteristic next to the generic name Homo, only the old philosophical adage: nosce te ipsum (know yourself)…. It is worth reflecting on this taxonomic anomaly….

If the anthropological machine was the motor for man’s becoming historical, then the end of philosophy and the completion of the epochal destinations of being mean that today the machine is idling.
—Giorgio Agamben

It seems to me the “idling machine” that Agamben writes about in The Open is illustrated in the works of Conrad Aiken. In the circle of consciousness that operates in all of Aiken’s works, we see an imaginative articulation of the human as adjustments in his relationships are constantly made, next to, or interrupted by more or less florid, more or less beautiful passages one might describe as “poetic” or more unflatteringly as a deer granted the gift of language caught (willingly or no) in a beam of light.

Thorn Ladder

Blood rose
your body
the earth
line scorched
barbed too
within it
I’m caught
if you can’t move
I’m stuck
post-human
you and I
wedded
beyond mystery
on the cusp
caught
or idled
in line
on the line
to be named
anew