November 13, 2014

Frost and Fog, Eragny 1892Camille Pissarro d. November 13, 1903

Now This is Now Happening Now is This Now: An EssayLoie Merrittlemon hound

Introduction: (Listen) Between the wheels of a subway train and its tracks or off the crags of stones or even the space between your dog’s toes, between a curtain and its stage, or the air vibrating between two bodies, we may hope to find a world apart. Where time envelops space, shadowing it, scrambling it and then gluing it back together in a different scene, in quiet, anxiety-ridden hovels of pleasure lifted from pain. This is happening now. Unobjectionable inexpressibility is best formulated by overwhelming all of the senses. How do we attain sensorial overload? Where do we find such drastic heights or such terrifying depths? Lights go out, shadows fall, the players emerge, this is the avant-garde. Longinus’ stenographer can’t stamp out the rules any longer. Rhetoric fails in shadows. We are left naked in our own production, subject to sensual whims of the blissfully blasphemous sublime. (Stop the noise now)

from Against the Current Tedi López Mills translated from the Spanish by Wendy Burk

How always the cipher appears under every avatar's line. —César Vallejo (trans. Rebecca Seiferle)

Synthetic saint, my saint, my rat-and-plaster street, my alibi of imagined mosaics among veins of a gold hardly to be recognized as such, gold of an air that goes against gold, no one's gold, my habitual turn of phrase: once more I don't know what I know, leafless trunk, hollow wood left over when I construct myself, splinter of mine, not again, the bolt jumps out at me, lacking the tools I postpone myself, pause of mine as I hear the structure, the street itself where a sound is polished until it is as seditious as its idea, undermining wary sight, look at the park, the park as process, reality's onset, displacing the tree towards its archetype when there is no story in reserve, no world inserted with room to hold it, reticent brother, tugged by my refrain, the past is only a duplicate of death, a worthless card, there's hallway enough for the long queue,

The Footbridge, Lidingobron1918Carl Wilhelm Wilhelmsonb. November 12, 1866

Separating Flesh From Bone Trip Starkeyfull stop

Humans understand ourselves as the earth’s great dominion-bearing beings. We have used that dominion as an excuse to ransack our world, tearing limb from limb, until it became an unrecognizable web of asphalt and damaged landscapes. Mountains have been toppled in search of resources, while ocean and atmosphere have been plugged with our chemical waste. Living organisms are sacrificed daily in the name of human progress. We boast in these accomplishments, delight in converting verdant trees into verdant dollar bills. In recent years, the figurative scales have shifted, and the very real threats of irreversible, life-altering damage have emerged at the forefront of world issues. Nature, if not from sheer frustration with the exploits of our race, has continued to act out in violence, warning us of its displeasure. Now, more than ever, there is a need for returning to the literature penned in nature’s defense. However, as we do this, we must be weary of blindly accepting the ideas of nature’s past prophets. We must avoid falling into the same old wooden elucidations, which obscure the notion that this world in which we live is fully alive. Instead, we must separate the dead bones of outdated thought from the lively flesh of our world. Literature overflows with perspectives on how we ought to carry ourselves as citizens of the natural world. It is up to us to wade through this ocean of thought, and emerge with more refined translations of the wild tongues that seek to save us from our own destruction.

footpath, PontoiseCamille Pissarro 1874

Fallen Angel The tragic life and enduring influence of critic Walter BenjaminIan Penmancity journal

Some of the current vogue for Benjamin may stem from our nostalgia for the vanished dream of grand European culture to which he belonged. Photographs of Benjamin at work in elegant libraries, or strolling along tourist-free Mediterranean streets, provoke feelings of awed and envious benevolence. In today’s insipid, rigorously PC academy, Benjamin represents a burst of real flavor. He’s kind of sexy, by academic standards. As well as doing literary criticism (and conducting a pitiless interrogation of the status and value of same), he also wrote about window displays, travel, children’s books, drugs, food, and films. The gorgeous One-Way Street (1928) reads like a textual kaleidoscope: a glinting mix of views, shadows, memories, and jokes. His is a nomad thought: unmoored and unhurried, sometimes flinty, sometimes a bit vague and stoned. Benjamin works in starts and stops, to a strange fugue-like pulse. His sentences have a hesitant, leaning rhythm, not unlike the playing of Thelonious Monk: you’re never quite sure where the next emphasis is going to fall. Benjamin was a stroller around the boundaries between serious thought and everyday pleasures, high culture and low tastes. His preferred place to think from was always a threshold. Sentences are constructed from memories of holiday walks, sundowner moods, and the rhythms of travel. There are deep sallies on baroque theater and the metaphysics of illusion—but also chatter about children’s-book illustration and how fish is prepared in Marseilles. When he produces what’s ostensibly a travel piece, it supplies the required “local color” about cooking smells and religious customs but also other, less wonted, observations: how porous Naples feels, a subtle commingling of private and public space so that you can no longer tell one from the other: buildings for which you don’t know if they’re still being built or slowly falling into vacancy.

Neither capitalism, nor fascism, nor the cruel whims of the marketplace finally extinguished Walter Benjamin. His own life killed him—a sudden overdose of time. He hobbled his own escape route with a prevaricator’s endless last-minute stalling: adjusting the sail and testing the wind. He had always had periods when he was unable to think, move, or see a way forward. Eiland and Jennings refer to intermittent periods of depression—but this is very much a postwar reading and not at all the same thing as melancholia, in the vital and many-edged sense that this word had for Benjamin. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton includes in the class of those most subject to saturnine humor: “such as are solitary by nature, great students, given to much contemplation, and lead a life out of action.”