Devotion Over Time Equals Meaning: Proust's Mysticism

From Giotto's St Francis cycle

The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is analogy. By these means we are able to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world. 

-Oswald Spangler, The Decline of the West, Charles Francis Atkinson, trans.
[NB-- I started reading this after coming across a reference in KOK's second volume. Haven't finished yet, but found the quote interestingly close to Proust's formulation.  With Proust though, the formulation seems to apply more to personal history.  From what we see of capital H history in In Search of Lost Time, it is attended to and created by people caught in the pettiness of the former, so perhaps there is its fingerprint.]

Diverting Analogies, Pleasurable Loops

Walter Benjamin, in The Image of Proust, trims an outline of the author, from youth to recluse that when held against up against the life of say St. Francis or the life of Buddha, makes Proust's epiphany resemble a kind of holy conversion.  The story is there-- the wealthy young man, leading a life of luxury and excess, experiences a moment that recreates his entire being.  St Francis found his catalyst in a dream, followed by the public humiliation of his early return from the Crusades. He is then moved toward an ascetic life after encountering a leper. Buddha grew up in a palace where his every need was cared for. It isn't until he leaves his palace and encounters a sick old man and a funeral that he begins to seek austerity. Both of their conversions occurred over years and our accounts of them are given from the outside, mediated by dogma.  There is something to be said about the relative seclusion and opulence that attended their youths and the sensitivities that these childhoods bred and there may also be something superhuman about Proust.  The eloquence he displays in synthesizing his memories, in limning the ways in which the significances of a moment, of a belief, or of an idea yield over time, ripen and rot and grow anew, transcends his experience. It transcends the form of the novel and vibrates between novel, essay and memoir, using novelistic tropes as foils for deepening his reader's relationship to the progress of character. If there is within the Bildungsroman the remnants of the Medieval confession, its shape can be found here as well.

What benefit can Proust see in self-study outside of the ability to reach a synthesize, to find his life?  He makes the point that a life without review is basically un-lived, but if this is a question about capacity, it is a deeper question about Modernity. If Proust's epiphany can be taken as a kind of conversion, what quantity should we assign to this shape of mysticism?  If it is a reflex within the human organism, then perhaps we can use it as a bridge to understanding those earlier conversions. If it is separate, irrevocably apart and situated in the a-historical moment of life after the WWI, perhaps it is a new form.

I spent about nine or ten posts devoted to the concept of modern literary capacity (see the IPoStHL tags, if you're interested). The Modern mystic is a kind of oxymoron and, in Proust, the irony of his withdrawal seems convenient to his illness, to his heart-brokenness, and to his misanthropy-- not that any of those reasons would be excluded from the lives of earlier mystics, but in the context of The Search for Lost Time they form a brittle portrait of the author, a human rind that protects the fruit of the work and it seems we can't have one without the other, so the only remnant is devotion-- and I may have mentioned this earlier, but Proust's only true avowed devotions seem to be to time and music.

I recently attended a Bat Mitzvah that my father-in-law, who is not a rabbi, officiated.  The Bat Mitzvah was held in the basement of a home in New Jersey and he mentioned that traditionally synagogues are humble buildings, that the buildings don't matter. Jews worship within the cathedral of time. The phrase struck a chord.

In considering the progress of Charles Swann through In Search of Lost Time,  his assimilation and his rejection from the Faubourg St Germaine, plotted against the backdrop of the Dreyfus Affair, provides ample insight into the anti-semitism of the time. I learned recently that Proust's mother was Jewish but Proust himself was baptized and confirmed as a Catholic (a faith he later rejected). In considering the way in which Proust foregrounds Swann's struggle within society and studies it with such an obsessive eye, I felt as a reader almost assured that the narrator too would fall into the same traps as Swann and lose his standing. The novel instead uses this kind of false foreshadowing to highlight the great folly of youth, that in seeking our models we mistake their errors for our own and remain blind to the personal monstrosities we have been nursing all along. There is an added soupcon to consider Swann as well as a kind of model for the narrator-Proust's assimilation.

Within Jewish history there is the story of historical recursion, of repeated pogroms, depredations and struggle. Recursion is written into the Jewish story. But within rituals, the Bat Mitzvah for instance, we find the routinization of struggles and the joyful celebration of their conquest-- momentary as it may be.  Here we have an adequate parallel to Proust's temporal analogies, the celebratory moment in survival.  However, the kind of experiences that strike the sympathetic memory cannot be ceremonial. The analogous moment must sneak up on the intellect, it needs the element of surprise to strike the deepest chord, which is precisely where the routinization of faith fails.  It's not to say that the faithful are exempted from these kinds of experiences. The tragedy of the content of faith is that it is lost to repetition. It dies to provide the structure to the living part of ceremony. The spiritual crisis of Modern man may in part be due to the failure of religion to adapt out of cyclical and stale repetitions. In Proust's attention to phenomena we may find a temporary antidote.  To see it from a humanist perspective, Proust's --or any -- purported mysticism is interesting only in that it reveals an order apart from that of the mundane senses.  Its reward may be a constant inward search for similitude that cracks out the endorphins, that and a kind of kinship born across the several selves we leave in time. Its price is solitude.  Its corruption is nostalgia.

For another time: song structures and recurrence, Girl Talk and the memory of music, Nick at Night, the memory content of memes, Beckett and forgetting...

The Ear

He cannot move the furniture
through that small aperture, yet
expects it must serve
used with reserve,

To wit, the company that comes
runs to be first in,
arranges what it can
within the man,

who (poor fool) bulges
with secrets he never divulges.

-Robert Creeley

E-Z Listening: Schubert Six Moments Musicaux No. 3

Takashi Murakami Buddha at Versailles. Image by Christophe Ena

Human Sacrifice v. Extra Lives

Boris Vallejo...
I want to say more here, but, really: Boris Vallejo

The upper register of Axl Rose's voice rose over the noise of the dozen arcade cabinets and their light and the light of the dim overhead flourescents made the slice of pizza he bought and set on the glass of the unused pinball machine, Raiders of the Lost Ark, look like something from a Robert Williams painting. The teen with two quarters placed beside the player 2 start button who had been standing there all day popping button combos, dispatching challenger after challenger with his casual joystick grip (three loose fingers), had not given up a life.  He had held his own hunger ransom, setting the slice aside before he started playing with the idea that it would somehow be a bigger challenge than the 5th and 6th graders who pumped quarter after quarter into the glowing red coin slot and slapped the player 1 button.  I was one of them, wondering if the action on the second player joystick was that much better as my avatar was immediately cornered. I hammered furiously on the buttons to try to get free, while he executed a few nonchalant circles with the joystick and tapped his buttons.  My power bar declined to zero and the teen stepped back from the cabinet to do a quiet little two step.

A pinball machine always looks fun, but it seldom satisfies the way even a quick 16 bit death does.  Lights and bumpers. A glass coffin showing the height of mechanical-age fun.  From the speakers mounted near the ceiling, the sound of an intergalactic arrival broke into the rude quick bird whistle of Steve Miller Band's Jungle Love.  I looked at the teen.  He was old enough to drive, to have a steady girlfriend, to have a part-time job, to under-age drink and casually use drugs, to jerk-off.  He was wearing fingerless black pleather gloves.  He was thin and he never acknowledged the other players, never chatted with the other teens who controlled the other machines. He just played.  

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Recently, I met a former boxer at an end of the summer pool party.  We spoke a little bit about diet and he explained boxing to me.  My appreciation for the sport has always been limited, but boxing, he told me, was a mental sport.  You take two men who weigh the same and who are more or less evenly matched and the sport comes down to their preparation, their mental toughness.  He was still going through a prolonged period where he forbade himself most meat, sugar, wheat, dairy.  In the months before a fight, he did little other than exercise. He refused sex, coffee, alcohol, and nicotine. He went to bed on time and woke up early.  I was struck by his sense of dedication, his self-discipline. It was this time, he said, that mattered-- the months before-- that decided the match.  

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I finished In Search of Lost Time at the end of this summer.  At a point soon after Proust stumbles upon his epiphany, that life is joyless unless we learn how to live outside of time by finding those analogous moments within our lives and allow their resonance to take hold, once he has decided upon his life's work, he offers a statement about friendship that, while appearing partially true, and certainly apt within the confines of the Parisian society he has described within the preceding volumes and doubly apt as a justification for the hermitage he undertook to write his masterpiece, it misses what may have been one of the keenest portions of the novel's deeper play.

...the artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive)...

This is different than both Lemuel Gulliver and Friedrich Nietzsche (who wound down their lives talking to horses). This is the man who sees the horse as his contemporaries and who reluctantly obliges the social norm by passing time with another person. There are a number of inconsistencies through the last volume, Proust worked on Time Regained up until the moment of his death. And though elsewhere in the volume, he states that the novel itself is only an optical apparatus that allows the reader to discover a greater portion of his or her self, this point strikes me perhaps as the last tragic sliver of Proust's blind spot, of the depth of his loneliness.  Though our lives are plagued by uncertainty and the experiences of our growth and education are in fact just the shedding of layers of ignorance and misunderstanding, it is precisely the play of these points through time that allows us ever to achieve any claim to clarity or transcendence, even if that transcendence is only turned inward.  We may misunderstand one another in situ so that later, when we are ready, we can misunderstand to a lesser degree.                
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The boxer went on to tell me about a man called Electrolyte, who he visited in the Bronx. Electrolyte ate only bland foods. He kept a battery pack on his belt.  He could turn on a lightbulb by holding it in his bare hand. He pulsed energy directly into the boxer's muscles.  I mentioned I had heard of yogis in India that had gained control of their involuntary reflexes by deep meditation and could turn their body temperature up high enough to light a small piece of paper on fire.  It occurred to me, to be a boxer, to be alone in his kind of physical and mental discipline, it would be a relief to find a man like Electrolyte, a man who had mastered his body and and broken through the daily discipline to find some strange deep power lurking within, but I noticed the boxer was smiling and I couldn't tell if he was putting me on.  

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In 2666, Ingeborg recounts in one of her early meetings with Reiter (later to be Archimboldi) that the capstone on Mayan temples would be a block of obsidian polished to transparency and that the tribe would gather in the temple in the midst of a human sacrifice and the light in the temple would be filtered through the blood and the obsidian and this is the light in which they would see one another.   

-----------------

A sacrifice is made in Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle.  Volume 1 shows Knausgaard propelled through adolescence on a marvelous vapor trail of petty happenings and deep transformations.  While reading I had the sense that the author was confronting his feelings about his life and his family in real time, that he was not editing.  The use of his family's names in part provides this, but so too do those half-digested bits about his older brother, Yngve, that breakup the breath-taking house-cleaning sequences (seriously-- the command of detail in the house-cleaning parts gives order to the whole book) to his time finding suitable writing space in Sweden. He admits to as much when he mentions that he had attempted to write about his father several times before and here he has done it, but it seems he still could not express his feelings about his father, instead he exposes his father's death and his family's role in enabling or allowing it to occur.  The key seems to reside somewhere within all of those mundane details, all of those hours poured out in the first volume, an inability to grasp time as it passes at its slowest and an equal inability to grasp reality, to seek a redemption from time's passage, an absolution.

It may be worthwhile to note here that though Proust speaks a little about his father in the early volumes of In Search of Lost Time, his father is otherwise unmentioned as the books progress and remains a kind of sphinx written in to Proust himself and his desire to make good on his literary ambitions, his detailing of the life of Swann and the other men of the Faubourg Germain.  I don't know whether this was an act of conscious or unconscious suppression.

Knausgaard's expression feels compulsive, but it also feels willed.  In breaking the rules, in sacrificing the names and his impressions of those in his life, Knausgaard takes away a measure of their dignity, their privacy.  He is solitary and presents himself as much, as an outsider within his own family (even his grandparents asked him to stop hanging around so much) and the act of publishing his book establishes this isolation and ensures it. He cannot, at least at this point, navigate past his need to speak out and may in that adolescent way seek to redeem himself and his family by decimating that same silence and coolness that allowed his father's death. He sacrifices his own humanity to try to get at the truth.

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As an aside: even saddled with picking up the fractured plot pieces from the ends of the various Marvel movies that have been running the shew-biz game for what feels like a decade now, Guardians of the Galaxy may be the best American movie I've seen in years. It takes a painfully accurate CGI raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper to deliver the message that everyone has dead people, it doesn't excuse stupid acts of revenge. Even better, it just knows how to have fun.

Knowhere-- the floating head of an ancient alien being/ mining outfit.  If you want to speak to twelve-year old me, he'll be wintering there this year.   

             
Steve Miller Band Serenade
Panda Bear Last Night at the Jetty

She Got the Ruins of Him (IPoS,tHL Part 9)

I started this post considering the expansive style Proust deploys throughout In Search of Lost Time as a hedge against the callousness of history, writing as a cultural biodome for the society and manners all but wiped out by the first World War. Writing for posterity.

In The Recognitions, when asked to forge a Fra Angelico, Wyatt Gwyon answers that it would be impossible. Fra Angelico painted on his knees.  Gaddis, in his letters, mentions that he wrote The Recognitions to be the last Christian novel. When coupled with his obsession over what he saw to be the loss of techne or the technical prowess earned and defined by genius to the ease of mechanical reproduction (will someone turn off that fucking player piano), I get the sense of his historical comment: that man, in losing his connection to god, loses that which can enable the best in men, that is divine inspiration.  When abutted against J R, the historical moment is characterized further as we edge deeper into entropy, we don't just lose inspiration, but we lose its fruits, we ultimately lose the ability to discern the truth.

In reading some of the press around Karl Ove Knausgaard, I have begun to think of his work, My Struggle, as fitting in this place of entropic expansion, where a bowl of corn flakes can carry equal weight to the death of a father, the exact place of anxiety where every moment must be recorded to show it is both everything and nothing, the terrifying place of historical disappearance.  His recent piece in the Times Style section of all places discusses the meaning of fame in the face of a culture that emphasizes and rewards sameness. I'll have to bar myself from completing this prolonged post until I've had my chance to read his books, at least the first, but this I am prepared to say: There are no modern ruins outside of the moment.

However often I see New York City destroyed on screen, whether it's the remains of the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, or whether it's the eagles on the Empire State Building gushing water in AI, or the weed-ridden Times Square in I Am Legend, or the towers of the Time Warner Center in Cloverfield, or the intergalactic melee at the close of The Avengers (how much fun is it to watch the Hulk shred aliens and city scenery both in that scene?), or yes the Empire State Building again getting decimated by the alien laser in Richard Ford's Michael Bay's Independence Day, I wonder what it is I'm being asked to consider.  We are entertained by the prospect of our own destruction so regularly that it takes on a Buddhist character of non-attachment rather than as a tragic Cassandra-esque prediction. It brings to mind as well the habit of thought Herman Kahn proposed in On Thermonuclear War, that by bringing ourselves to imagine the worst, we can overcome the fear of it. As recently as a decade ago in India, there was a support group for women who had suffered domestic abuse. The women would sit together and visualize themselves receiving beatings, horrible beatings at the hands of their spouses, fathers and brothers. In doing so, a number of them found the strength to stand up to the abuse, to stop it. After September 11th, I remember wondering how long it would be before New York City could be destroyed again on screen. It would allow us to return to a sense of normalcy.

What is it about NYC that we're so thrilled to see it destroyed? The impersonal city filled with its invulnerable skyscrapers, it's like a great uncle with a face full of cigars shouting for you to knock him one on the chin. Come on, tough guy, come on! By watching its perpetual destruction we are reminded of its importance, its singularity.  We are fragile because of its importance, its centrality to everything, we can't help but to heap more importance on it, add more authority to the place, imagine it as the place where all old world arguments dissolve into currency, the central totem of the New World amnesia.  Of course, New York City has been erased. The idiom of each street runs: Duane Reade, American Apparel, Chase, Starbucks, Payless Shoes or Rite Aid, Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins, pizza place, Virgin Mobile store, TD Bank, Radioshack. I have to pay attention to the street signs. It's amazingly easy to ignore where you are when your street turns into a corridor of chains. The ruins we leave will be like a labyrinth of ice.

Almost two years ago, I got to work about an hour early so I could walk up the street and watch Christian Marclay's The Clock. They were showing it at the Lincoln Center atrium and I got there early enough that I didn't need to wait in line.  I walked right in and found a seat.  They had set up a provisional theater in the atrium, behind dark curtains you crossed through. I sat alone. Marclay edited together a twenty-four hour film made up of shots of clocks from thousands of movies, edited together to become a working clock.  Each scenario I saw occurred within the span between 8 AM and 9 AM and despite showing a kind of pluralism-- the imaginations of hundreds of film makers, the actions of thousands of actors separated by decades, by film stock, by technicolor, split up by the minutes in the day but unified in their purpose-- they were all there to count the time. Each time a clock appeared on screen, it was like the true star of the film had just appeared.  I sat enthralled. Time was passing me by. I was late for work.

Bat Conlon has a forehead like the Merrick's retriever... (William Trevor, The Piano Turner's Wives)

It may be a fair question-- was art more beautiful when god was central to the artist's pursuit?--but it is only fair if it shows us a way forward. In other words, how do we account for the effect of what was once deemed divine inspiration. Part of it seems coeval with the faulty belief that morality can't exist without religion, but the part that is deeper, the question as to what informs great art, because great art still happens and whether that constitutes a true difference between people, a talent that would set aside one person or give that person power or special vision over others may be irrelevant. I think of Rimbaud, the fed up poet turned arms dealer. Perhaps there's a fine line. The best writers are just borrowing our words.
____

Back in the winter of 2006, I visited Beijing.  I was informed then of the rapid changes that the city was realizing in order to host the Olympics.  Whole neighborhoods were evacuated then leveled, the people relocated, sometimes officially sometimes not.  There was an international shortage of cement and cranes due to the amount of construction happening in Beijing.  It was February and a lot of people burned coal to stay warm.  There was so much dust in the air that when I chewed gum (with my mouth shut) the gum grew gritty. The changes that were happening meant little too me, though I registered the appropriate culture shock that a government could so indispose its citizens without there being some kind of reciprocity-- and there may have been but I didn't hear about it.  Instead, I heard about how the Beijing branch of Hooters set to open prior to the Olympics had stacks of resumes from college graduates fighting over the open waitressing jobs.  In tips alone, the job could provide a middle class life in a country where there was still no sign of a middle class. I think about this in relation to a line I read recently in Jack Gilbert's A Brief for the Defense:

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, 

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight...    

It struck me first as sentimental and a little reckless. Gilbert positions these lines after speaking of women in Calcutta laughing in spite of their pain, but as I considered it against the hardness of Gilbert's other poems, the sentiment went away.  It is just the way we live now. We risk delight.

Elegant Opposition, Inside Out, A Little Break (IPoS,tHL Part 8)

Elegant Opposition

Perhaps you know the person offering you a light is a martial arts master, perhaps you don't.  Perhaps you know that the offered match will approach with a physical precision and authority that will require a response, a minor contortion, but a move of equal elegance that preserves space and precludes any action further than a single gesture.  Perhaps you know you are being filmed by Wong Kar Wai and the fluidity of the camera will perfectly frame your action and the editing will assemble the scene in an equally fluid balance.  If you know this then you are Tony Leung and the fluidity of your movement can only mean you are playing Ip Man, the kung fu Zhivago, and that you are in the midst of redefining the idea of the kung fu movie and that you exist in one of the best records of motion put to film. But if you are this version Ip Man, the Ip Man who dulls a straight razor with a swipe from a single steel rod, who turns a two story fight with Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi) into a lighter than air Fred and Ginger number while retaining an edge of lethalness and you know that the strategy of living is in anticipation. Self-protection and self-preservation are slightly different than the mechanics of game theory, at least Ip Man's rendition of self protection. Within Ip Man's world, an opponent will adhere to a certain set of rules, that ruthless as the opponent may be, the object of the study of kung fu is to practice and not to fall back on a submachine gun, atomic warhead or other cheap tricks. There is a code of conduct, power built out of restraint.

Inside Out

Yukio Mishima once challenged his translator, John Nathan, that westerners could not understand Japanese culture. I'm not going to pretend to contradict Mishima, but the challenge has always bothered me, like the lyrics in Pink Floyd's Eclipse or David Hume's box. In each there's the premise of a closed system, and maybe less so with Pink Floyd, a trap of inscrutability, isolation or solipsism. But what I think Mishima was getting at was the role of individual in Japan versus the Western artist as individual. In traditional Japanese culture, what may appear as a performative or an aestheticization of a social role stems from a unification of mind, body and purpose, a formative concept that would recreate the western idea of the individual as belonging first to a society then to oneself. In this way the surface comes under a different kind of scrutiny in Japan. Where a westerner may speak of the performative as false, there it would be genuine, essential and indistinguishable from the act of living. I only go here to point out that fraught relationships with appearances have a cultural basis in the US that may not be found elsewhere in the world or get branded differently depending upon the inclusiveness of genuine difference and the strength of a central cultural identity that can be enforced. 

Mishima's work by and large portrays the point where the spirit outgrows the form. I think of the tortured acolyte who burns down the Temple of the Golden Pavilion because he cannot stand its beauty. Or the children who murder the eponymous sailor in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea for choosing the beauty of a woman over the beauty of the sea. In a radio interview, Mishima once said that while most people believe themselves to be secretly evil, he knew himself to be evil. Mishima was in the generation that came of age in the years following the second world war. His ultimate act, haranguing the assembled troops of the Japanese Diet to rise up and embrace Japan's militaristic past and his subsequent death by seppuku, speaks to the paradox of the performed interior. There's a moment in his short story, Patriotism, when the protagonist commits seppuku and the author pauses to relay the vitality and color of the spilled intestines: the interior becomes another surface, a proof. In the case of Mishima, his message was met with jeers from the assembled troops, so it may be that personal myths die the hardest or it may be that he was one of the emperor's last casualties (though Kawabata also took his life a few years later in a much quieter manner and there was that soldier found in Guam in 1972 who still believed the war was going on).  

So often in art, the unspoken is the sign of the true self, the character finally tricked into a revelation. As in love or crime, confessions serve to drive the drama.  In that confessions uncover a secret, they work to gel the audience's perception of a character and so to tie them to their fate. In as far as we are defined by our actions, we undervalue the character of silence.  Silence is a shadow.  It's a quality born from an absence. The silent character is on the side of the image, in that every image is latent, an event to unpack either immediately in the case of icons, or eventually in the case of symbols. While visual memory can function without the aid of language, when we begin to tell ourselves what we are seeing, images become subject to the conditions of our abilities to describe.  As a movie fades to black and the silence hangs before the credits role, there is a kind of death that occurs for each of the characters in the film that preceded.  Their story has been truncated and so we consider it complete.  They live within a reducible truth. What we saw, or thought we saw, was all we have been told is worth knowing. But the image persists past the credits. The image recurs each time we see a cop and Mahoney or Tackleberry come to mind. In this way, they live in echoes each time their associated features of actions are invoked and we smuggle bits of reality back into our fantasies or project our fantasies on the world. But in silence, in primary silence, say in the scene between Nick Nolte and John Travolta in The Thin Red Line  or in the complex of unexplained images that pass in Inland Empire where the widening context of the film only works to retain the original complexity of the image, the opacity of silence may at times be the point, or if John Cage has his way, that demonstrated silence is an illusion and that the experience we point to as silence may occur in nature, it is less compelling than the psychological force of a silence imposed.      

I will be forgiven more than this when I am forgotten...
- Samuel Beckett First Love

A Little Break

I'm taking a little break from Proust to read 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (thanks in part to the excellence of The Savage Detectives and Richard Marshall's piece on it at 3AM).  I was reading the first book of the trio that come in my slipcased version at a local barbecue place. I sat at the bar, which is right next to the kitchen and prep area and one of the staff called me out on the book.  I was called out twice on the subway as well, by complete strangers who wanted to tell me how good 2666 is.  The guy at the barbecue place told me some advice he had heard from and interview with Bolaño, advice Bolaño had received from an older writer: work on one piece, only piece, until it is perfect then submit it everywhere under different titles.  Bolaño asked what he should do if it was accepted at more than one place and the older writer said he should publish it everywhere it gets selected.  But won't I get in trouble for publishing the same work in two places? Bolaño asked.  If it's got a different title, how are the stories the same? the older writer asked.  The guy at the barbecue place then told me how highly he regarded Bolaño and that Haruki Murakami was the other writer he was currently holding in equivalent esteem. Murakami is another writer, whenever I read his books on the subway, someone mentions how much they like him.  

A while back, I took a class on globalization at the New School and the professor who was very much into Japanese culture mentioned this phenomenon of near universal Murakami reading on the NY subway system and the subculture he'd noticed of complete strangers talking to one another about Murakami. His opinion of Murakami was pretty low and he was more dumbfounded that New Yorkers thought of it as culture, but he also belittled Koyaanisqatsi for not supplying labels or any cultural information aside from the images, a move he believed to be intended to equalize all cultural differences and to negate them. In his class we watched footage of a tribe within the amazon that had been isolated for the length of its existence and was now part of a network of tribes in the amazon seeking a way to stop deforestation. As part of this footage, they showed a ritual the men of the tribe undertook to make themselves courageous which involved getting shit-faced on a fermented brew standing arm in arm in a line and chanting songs. When they watched the footage of themselves they asked for the documentarian to destroy it.  They didn't want the loggers to know the secrets of their courage.

When I was reading book five of In Search of Lost Time, I sat on the train beside a guy with an open laptop, who seemed to be taking up two seats. I moved into a window seat without really asking him to move, but he did and put the laptop more squarely on his lap and continued to work.  After a while he stopped and asked me if I was reading Proust.  He had just finished book five. He was reading it in French.  He was originally from Montreal and came to New York to advance his studies in neuroscience. He thought Proust's jealousy would make an interesting case study. We swapped some thoughts on Proust in a guarded conversation with extended silences. When we both got off at the same stop I said good bye. Though I thought about asking if he'd like to correspond further on Proust, I stayed silent and moved to the other side of the platform to await my train.         

The guy at the barbecue place mentioned that he thought Murakami's work functioned entirely through coincidence.  That coincidence was the engine that made the various pieces of Murakami's world work.  I agreed that coincidence was a strong feature in the works I had read of Murakami, but I also mentioned something about the space of the personal, which may have come out as a remark about personal space and may explain why he stopped talking to me, but what I meant was that Murakami's works all explore forms of the uncanny by way of interiority, the collapse of shared meaning in symbols or historical moments remade so they become unique and temporarily personal, the way a good daydream can pry a moment free from the grind. I recall an interview with Murakami where he states the Japanese word for different is the same as the word for wrong and his project seems to be finding the space for difference within contemporary Japan.   

Today on the train, I was reading the second book from my slipcased edition of 2666, The Part About the Crimes, when I noticed two 4 x 6 photos had been slipped inside the case of a poster advertising a health plan. Both of the photos that had been slipped inside the poster case were of the same woman, a fit black woman with a large afro, sitting on a couch in front of an elaborate case that held a few large bottles of alcohol, maybe magnums of champagne among cognac and sake, bottles I did not recognize.  On the floor beside the couch there were boxes, which made me think the pictures were taken in the store room of a liquor store or a back room in a club or lounge. One picture showed the woman on the couch within the room. The other showed the woman up close. The zoom had been used. The scene made me wonder about the relationship between the woman and the photographer.  Her right upper arm was slightly tensed and it showed good definition.  Her hairstyle and her clothes placed the photo from any time between the 1970's and the present, except she wore white high tops and the photo paper itself looked new, the edges of the photos appeared crisp and white. Her expression seemed neutral and her look didn't directly engage the camera. The photos had ben placed in the bottom corners of the poster frame, so they sat on either side of a commuter's hair.  The commuter was sitting in front of the poster looking down, maybe at my feet or past me into the central void eyes find on the train. The commuter's hair was a set of elaborate coils, professionally tended and she wore a raspberry skirt suit so she was likely on her way to work. My eye moved from the book, to the commuter's professional hair to the photos, to the afro in the photos and the toned upper arms. The part of the book I am reading describes a series of killings in Mexico. I was reading a description of one of the women that had been killed in a particularly violent way and it put a pall on the pictures and made me wonder why someone had placed them in the ad's poster frame on the train. The act itself is already strange, but people slide cards and tags and other images into the poster frames all the time.  The light in the photos was dim and muddy and the whole thing looked amateurish to the point of questioning why the photo was taken in the first place and in the second why it was printed and not digital. They would have been deleted if they had been taken on a phone. Instead they were left behind. At a certain point, the commuter got up and left the train, leaving her seat open for me.  I took it and looked from side to side at the woman in the photo flanking me on either temple, but the mystery stopped when I sat and I returned to my book.   

It makes no sense to expect or claim to 'make the invisible visible', or the unknown known, or the unthinkable thinkable.  We can draw conclusions about the invisible; we can postulate its existence with relative certainty.  But all we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it.
...

Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.

-from Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting          

The Silence of Repetition, the Ecstasy of Agreement (IPoS,tHL Part 7)

In Gravity's Rainbow, we have a contemporary equivalent of medieval folly, the point at which all of our sophistication bends back to annihilate us. It differs from Chaucer, Bocaccio and Rabelais in that the articles of faith have shifted toward technology. Man, the maker, has mastered his ignorance of the planet enough to create abundance, but he cannot master himself. Sam Cohen in later reflection after inventing the neutron bomb and seeing his design altered for maximum destruction, was said to have noted that as a child he suffered extensive diarrhea and one of the effects of his bomb, if released at the proper altitude was to inflict diarrhea via radiation poisoning to the population living within the farthest ring of the zones of impact. We can see in this a simple Freudian stencil placed over Cohen's guilt, but we may also ask if there is truth within a claim that we do not know the full content of our inner drives and what shapes they can take in the things we make.

There is a separate destructiveness of the hand, not immediately connected with prey and killing. It is of a purely mechanical nature and mechanical inventions are extensions of it. Precisely because of its innocence it has become particularly dangerous. It knows itself to be without any intention to kill, and thus feels free to embark on anything. What it does appears to be the concern of hands alone, of their flexibility and skill, their harmless usefulness. It is this mechanical destructiveness of the hands, now grown to a complex system of technology, which, whenever it is linked with a real intention to kill, supplies the automatic element of the resulting process, that empty mindlessness which is so particularly disquieting. No one actually intends anything, it all happens, as it were, of itself.

-Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power  

I will never touch the sun. With some advanced optics, I can see the surface of the sun and I can feel the warmth of its rays, but I will never touch the sun itself. There's naturally the theory that everything I touch necessarily spun out of the fusion of simple gases into heavy metals and that the sun itself is our local representative of this massive living fusion, the grounding of our orbit and so the source of the mass on earth (unless there is a deeper massiveness I am missing contrived from our solar system's rotation within our galaxy or the larger motion of our galaxy, but these too are extensions of the same counterintuitive principle: though I cannot touch the sun, I can feel its influence through the resistance of every object or body on Earth). It is a statement about the particular fragility of human life- that we can only be sustained en masse at our current distance from the sun - our senses evolved at this distance, so we are necessarily separate from the fundamental source of our life.

You taught me these words. If they don't work anymore, teach me new ones.

The shared nature of language is it's greatest mystery. A population assimilates to varying degrees the rules of speech, adapts and performs its idiosyncrasies. This creates the tension between experiential language, that is private language or the language that reflects back on our subjective place within culture and time, and public language, the language we adapt when are out of our element or when attempting to achieve a sense of timelessness. No doubt there's a spectrum in between that grades that tension, and there are certainly people who speak to themselves in a voice they consider timeless, using what would seem to be a public voice to dictate their inner moods, but in those two modes I generally find the space where we each begin to translate one another, where even within spoken 'Merican, we perform fleeting minor translations of relatability to synthesize what someone is saying. It happens on a nearly unconscious scale, unless you live and work among people who are different than you, then the act of translation can take on semi-consciousness. In resolving semantic differences, exhausting as this can be, the exact points of  exchange between private languages, or things understood tacitly within a specific context, become parsed and the associative webs in which our words are wrapped, come a little more unspooled.

I love Ummmmms. In conversation, ummmmms can signify so much: the brain's attempt to catch up to a line of thought, the brain's inability to properly express an idea, a linguistic gap where the word may not exist for a thought that needs to be expressed-- in short it becomes a catch-all expression for the gap between language and thought.  I happen to love clichés as well.  A good cliché can stave off an ummmmm.  It can work as a distancing mechanism.  A good comment about the weather in the elevator at work can set off a series of shielding words that transfers the tension built by the otherwise ominous silence that goes with being a group of relative strangers in a steel box suspended 100 feet above the ground.  The tension then moves to either extending the cliche, responding in kind or adding some small witticism or personal anecdote about the weather, or in refusing the offer and maintaining your part of the silence. The point being that through clichés, people come the closest to animal calls, to jungle noise-- it's precisely when we have nothing to say to one another that we feel the need to speak.

In art, clichés simply point to the saturation of certain approaches, identities and tropes.  In mass media, the ultimate aim for a work is to become a cliché, something infinitely repeatable that ultimately stands only for itself, but at the same time minimizes any personal content to allow for the maximum number of people to associate with it, to sit inside its disposable hollows and allow its temporariness to be carry the weight of expression, or tune out completely.  There are some images and some songs that I've seen or heard so many times that when they recur, as they inevitably do, I can no longer see or hear them directly.  They have been so effectively imprinted themselves in my brain that my eye or ear skips over it. It's like a type of silence, the silence of repetition. This sadly happens with a lot of my favorite songs and films.  They get played out.  In a way, the compulsion to re-listen to a song or re-watch a movie is just a way of taking their power away because they will occupy a space in my head until I find a way to make space for something new.  Songs especially will repeat themselves ad nauseum in my head, and incorrectly so, until I play them. Then I play them and play them until they erode.    

The worm bird catches the early.

Some work is able to reinvest a cliché with meaning.  I looked at John Wayne differently after watching Full Metal Jacket. I thought about MTV spring break specials differently after Spring Breakers. But inevitably, the clichés win out.  The counter-image resolves, if for no other reason than it's out-numbered.

Though the source of language may be physiological, or a physiological adaptation to a social need, language itself (outside of Braille) is intangible. As with the sun, words derive their weight in their distance from or proximity to their subject.

With Proust, we can see certain luminous subjects (the Vinteuil Sonata or Vermeer's yellow wall for example). It is in his tendrils, though long passages where a he slowly turns a subject, that a full gradation of the voice achieved. The personal is made public. That silent inner reworking of a moment over time, he coaxes onto the page then stretches it to its fullest form.  He gives the type of repetition that grows with each recurrence in his processing of grief or his obsession with Albertine's private life.

Future children our are our.

We normally find ourselves debating gradations by proxy by debating extremes- it's often the case that we push or are pushed towards an extreme form of thought by trying to get to it's logical end, but the illusion of a logical end is doubly impoverishing. In abandoning what may at first appear to be a milder or moderate form of a thought or say political position, we lose the personal understanding of that form and it's associative force. Once moved to the extreme, we have built a lattice of assumption, which may be founded in political reality, but which will always make a convenient fit of something that should be finessed and complicated.

In art we have the chance to share, on a mass scale, the ecstasy of agreement. The form is always there, the icon we can point to, the scales repeatable. The shape we can recognize and fill with our impressions. As long as we remain silent about the impressions, we can evade the personal, elide our differences and assume an equality of consumption, we can conform to the shape and lose everything we placed inside it. We can become the song without singing it.

For a long time, I found after reading a book, its ideas simply melted in, that the book itself stood as a kind of icon I could tap and skim through the highlighted impressions it left, but the details would vanish.  I would forget that my having read a book didn't necessarily mean that everyone had read that book.  It may be a function of the idea that at best we come to another person's work as a second or third generation reader.  In some circles it was definitely true that I read behind the curve. That discussing a book became an act of working up a reading list. That one book lead to another and that it's usefulness could only be described in its relevance to the next work and that in relation to what was yet to be read-- that unread book I always imagined to be more meaningful and more fulfilling than the one I'd just completed. Then in other circles, I'd realize only after slightly painful misunderstandings that everyone had not read the same things as me, that they wanted to talk about Haruki Murakami and I wanted to talk about Bruno Schulz. Or even if they had read Schulz, their memories differed or the scenes that I found meaningful did not match those scenes that stuck with them- ah well. Sometimes shared knowledge can be an illusion.

Today I passed a woman who shared the coloring, height and demeanor of a friend who is currently living on the opposite coast, yet for a moment, rather than allowing this woman's features to remain strange, I conferred on them a momentary familiarity and noticed how the squareness of this woman's face added a melancholy to my friend's, though by this point I knew it wasn't my friend and they really didn't even look that much alike. I have not thought about this friend for months, but circumstance-- chance-- places an approximation in my path and pulls out my memory of her face, her general appearance. This particular friend is out on the lonely spectrum of petite Jewish strawberry blondes and I hardly find people who remind me of her, though this type may be more likely on the sidewalks of Brooklyn than say Mexico City, so it's not out of the ordinary, just slightly less ordinary than seeing someone with my own features, which happens fairly often. Now I wonder if the next time I see my friend, if her face won't appear the more sanguine for the small change made in my impression by this brief interloper.

In public at any given moment we are surrounded by fragments of our own consciousness.  The elements we recognize can blind us. One element of growing up plugged into mass culture is access to its proliferation of types, of faces associated with character traits. The people I see on the street, in the supermarket, strangers, only appear less strange in relation to the faces I already know. This problem is double-edged. The familiarity is a shallow one, misleading, but provides a kind of balm-- that persistent sense that people are knowable, if not already known.  On the other side, people who are not represented on TV or in movies, those faces which don't have any more than a token form of familiarity may seem even more strange than they would normally. They may carry the full burden of strangeness that I withhold from the people who appear at least partially familiar.This may be an especially suburban concern (i.e. any place where different races and ethnic groups can hide from each other by driving to work or living in different neighborhoods, going to different schools, etc) but the families on sitcoms and their variations (groups of friends, of cast-aways, of house-mates) begin as stand-ins, anodyne extensions of our own families.  The faces on TV become masks for the faces we know and in this way they build off of primary familial recognitions, those parental and sibling features we see or do not see within our own faces.    

There's truth to Buggin' Out's complaint with Sal in Do the Right Thing. When we rely in part on the media to tell us who we are, to be unrepresented is to be invisible, or to be wrong.
 
With every picture there is also the opportunity to turn ourselves into strangers, to allow the camera to capture not the light of friendship or family, but the mere facts of appearance.  Pictures where I don't look like myself are inevitably deleted. The portion of face I never catch in the mirror, the flank-man with a half-open mouth, double chin and mostly closed eyes, who walks ear first into the light of a flash, or just the closed-mouthed unsmiling thing with the rings under his eyes, moving his facial muscles towards an expression-- these images though repeated often enough on the screen of my camera still don't fit-- and who would want them, but they give the visceral recognition of total vulnerability, the poor timing of the self-image surfacing between shutter clicks, vanishing to leave just the transitory animations toward the thing I recognize as me.
   

Here, young Caravaggio is David and old Caravaggio is Goliath.

With Proust, we can only trust that the truth of what someone thinks about us is said after we have left the room.  Such is the case with Swann.  Though Swann's assimilation into Parisian society is aided by his wealth and intelligence, it is his choice in marriage and the concurrence of the Dreyfus Affair which ultimately limits his access to the Guermantes and the fashionable set and acts for those players, M Guermantes especially, as a kind of proof that Swann will always be Jewish first and therefore not a true Parisian, a kind of eternal traitor in their midst.  With the case of Baron de Charlus, the homosexual brother of M. Guermantes, there is a conformism, his masquerade as a lady killer, that allows Charlus full access to society but also a discretion that links the Baron through to the secrets of the society set, which gives him power.  Proust is careful to show the hypocrisy of a culture both enthralled by and unwilling to openly relate their desires.

...the qualities of the heart need darkness and protection against the light of the public to grow and to remain what they are meant to be, innermost motives which are not for public display. However deeply heartfelt a motive may be, once it is brought out and exposed for public inspection, it becomes an object of suspicion...  
--
For Socrates...it was an authentic problem whether something that 'appeared' to no one except the agent did no exist at all. The Socratic solution consisted in the extraordinary discovery that the agent and the onlooker... were contained in the self same person. ...that the Socratic agent, because he was capable of thought, carried within himself a witness from whom he could not escape.. that tribunal which later ages have called conscience.

-Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

In the pursuit of unification or resolution of a blind spot there is a separate pain of wanting to know something unknowable, the pain of Proust's narrator. The pain of wanting to know may be equally horrible as the fate a blind spot can make for us. For some, the vulnerability that comes with an inaccessible blind spot, say from a tic a person may wear but of which they may have no knowledge, can be the exact expression of that person's humanity. In other cases, it can be the exact expression of their inhumanity. If we think of unconscious or semiconscious racist behaviors, for instance, or of hypocrisy, which is the broader context of Hannah Arendt quote above, some examination of our blind spots is clearly requisite to living in the 21st century.

There is a transfixing silence born from where repulsion and attraction meet, that compelling place where it becomes impossible to turn-away.  In fiction, the double or doppelgänger is the physical embodiment of what we cannot admit to ourselves, of the things we find repugnant. Perhaps this is why doubles normally hate each other at first but then buddy up into a kind of odd couple relationship feel the need to kill their opposite. In the double, the tragic counterforce is distilled, the unknown becomes material, fate immediate.

Adrian Piper's Mythic Being

There is also the other.  

There's a moment in J R where a picture of J R's class has been Xeroxed.  The machine reverses the image, so the white children appear black.  The picture is being viewed by the executives in a brokerage firm where J R's class visited on a school trip.  The executives begin to criticize the children. They seem capable of seeing only at this time the kids' flaws and looking at J R they see the raw expression of his greed.  In Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop, of Boston-town, is given a dose of sodium amytal and observed in the hopes of getting a greater understanding of the race problem in North America. While Charlie Parker plays Cherokee, Tyrone drops his favorite harmonica down a toilet.  Who should come and help him find it down in there,but a pre-Nation of Islam Malcolm X, known as Red, but only after first finding Tyrone's rear exposed and vulnerable. Tyrone, to escape certain rape (keep in mind this is a psychedelic peek-a-boo into Tyrone that winds up freeing him from a quotient of his inherited racism, which allows him later to buddy up with Oberst Enzian and the Schwartz Kommando, a battalion of Herero from the Sudwest with a collective death wish, against Major Marvy, southern racist leader of a technical intelligence team and buddy of Bloody Chiclitz of Yoyodyne, military industrial mega-weight) climbs down the toilet and is pulled through a sea of shit (batting dingleberries out of his eye). The sense of repulsion is there and maybe for Slothrop an experiment like Adrian Piper's Catalyst or John Water's Pink Flamingos wouldn't seem so extreme an example of what we confront when we approach the notion of otherness.
 
In her Mythic Being project, Adrian Piper attempted to be herself, a person with her own history and background, while dressing as a man. She considered herself anathema while she performed this, everything you most hate and fear, and noted the ways in which she felt herself adapting towards her appearance. This, as well as her Catalyst exercises, are ways of measuring the weight of different social stigmas and the often unspoken limits and expectations they set, specifically in the context of race in America.

Little is said directly about race in Infinite Jest. Canadians are the ghettoized identity, but with physicality at the core of the novel, it instead takes on handicaps as a kind of ontological limiter or intensifier, where there are Quebecois wheelchair assassins, deformations caused by the toxic environment, mutilations, the list of malcontents in the Madame Psychosis hour, Mario Incandenza and addicts, but everyone is defined in part by their addictions, their maladies, their hypertrophied abilities as tennis players or mothers and their tics in a broad spectrum of behaviors and everyone shares at least in part a type of otherness. This is in part why this book cauterizes the post-modern aesthetic. The other is the norm, to the point that all claims to otherness become flat, but this is also one of this book's biggest weaknesses.  Just read about Uncle Nathan in Scott McClanahan's Crapalachia and you'll see the difference.

Everything Crash (IPoS,tHL Part 6)

Tadanori Yokoo

In the previous posts, I have taken up a lot of time to talk about a number of works that have been celebrated fairly widely within the world of letters.  In part, I wanted to acknowledge that within our culture, the currency of exchange is generally trafficked around attention.  That is, certain works are spoken about more than others because they serve as functional vehicles for the most number of ideas, or as caches for meaning.  This is only one need for writing or art.  On the other side resides those works that measure personal feelings, sentiments or ideas, that always appear as under-appreciated treasures. Often, the preciousness of the text is in direct proportion to its relative obscurity. In some cases, the level of idiosyncrasy assures that while a reader may identify with the work, love it, empathize with it, they may lack the language to describe it or a means to pull it into their everyday thinking.  Mark Costello's Murphy Stories is one of those books for me.  Christine Schutt's Nightwork is another. In both of these cases, I felt the writing dissolve some essential structure in my thinking that then made me a better reader and lifted a psychological burden I didn't know I'd been carrying.  I could add a few more (The Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine, Motorman, Firework, Stories in the Worst Way) but I mostly want to stop to acknowledge that though I've taken pains to pace out my thinking here, I am still missing some points and I'll make an effort to pull this out a little further, but that in casting off with this idea I really wanted to get a handle on the means by which Proust makes himself understood and consider the reasons for that form of expression, its value and its short-comings in contrast to other styles as well as to a number of writers I find valuable to find a balance to the means of self-expression and ultimately what is made public within any given form of writing.

Through the pain, I always tell the truth

In this light, I was thinking about Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, and considering the text as an inquiry into meaning that withholds meaning and simply presents the actions of character in their search. As a Vietnam novel and one that deals with the intelligence community leading up to and following the conflict, we already have the cultural implication of a meaningless war, an implication that isn't spelled out in the novel, but instead exists as the fundamental question within, but also the idea of hidden meaning and the variety of truths people seek.  The novel unlocks for me around the early use of the word infestation-- the only four syllable word spent in a sea of single or double syllable words within the early portion of the book and used to describe the state of a tree in a jungle with ants-- then following the assassin Fest and the change in meaning that association ascribes to his name and actions within the book we get to the prime contrast of intelligence, agents of meaning and meaningless death. Not as overt as Harry Mathews, who includes actual cryptograms within the text of Tlooth, but along those lines-- the question of the ways in which people conceal and reveal political truths contrasts to the larger search for meaning and the ways in which we interrogate nature to fulfill our needs.     

Mark Lombardi Global Networks

Everything Crash

Despite all of the energy put into a system, there is always a point of diminishing returns, a point where the system becomes supersaturated and cannot continue to perform the function of its design.  Within the natural world, the system breaks down and transforms through decay into its reduced, constituent parts, nutrient and toxic.  It's written into the second law of thermodynamics.  

Consider what came out of the second world war.

Proust and Pynchon, separated by Puig and Puzo on my shelf, separated by two world wars, separated by an ocean, separated by titanic differences in form, style, and thought. Considering Proust as one removed from Parisian society, sitting in his cork lined room limning the evanescent stuff of memory and its extensions then considering Pynchon, removed as well from the old monied New England and Mid-Atlantic society, self-exiled and wandering, I assume, through bars and back rooms and scenes intellectual or non, it may be worthwhile to consider the type of reclusiveness an author adheres to.

Pynchon has cultivated a charismatic absence. Gaddis's reclusiveness, because of the tone of his writing, the anger, came off with a kind of disdain born of superiority (a Jonathan Edwards type severity and distrust of people).  Nevertheless Gaddis has his followers too and for many Gaddis's and Pynchon's concerns are so close that some assumed they were the same person. I'm assuming someone put this forward before, but I always thought that Pynchon could have been the name Gaddis and Ralph Ellison put on the work that came out of Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute (the institute does pre-date V. by two years).  Come to think of it, Ellison too went into reclusion after The Invisible Man. 

In the absent author, I've found surrogates for other absences within my own life, but  I think of Thomas Pynchon as a kind of reverse Batman. His name appears in lights and he disappears to allow the citizens of Gotham to learn krav maga and assemble the clues left behind in the Riddler's latest puzzle, only the tools he leaves us are our own paranoia, our foibles, our follies and a deep mistrust of authority. Gravity's Rainbow is about the collapse of Europe after WWII and what rose up from its remains. In Search of Lost Time is an attempt to reconstruct in part the society that stood before the first World War.  The two works stand as book ends for the first half of the twentieth century: one looking backwards and the other looking forward (I had read online a while back a letter Dow Mossman had written about GR stating that it goes into the past to talk about the future-- thought that was a good way of putting it, but can't find the link to save my life now).  

Going back through his work, Pynchon presents himself as a kind of paradox.  His books avoid a build to hierarchical meaning, instead setting his balance so that all elements can carry equal weight, a novel in suspension and novels that would appear to highlight the means of control and relinquish the more obvious elements of authorial control.  Indirection, discourse and expansion as the methods of understanding the world. The variety of epistemologies that he uses as lenses (organic chemistry, horticultural, behavioral psychology, parapsychology, film theory, electrical engineering, rocket science, etc) underpins the basic idea that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently Faustian, but also the only means of alleviating the human condition of unknowing, ignorance, subjection and subjugation. While there's always a sense of the absurd, Pynchon is more interesting for his ability to maintain a concept of the tragic, that notion of the innocence lost in the path toward total knowledge (Gnossos and Mathemesis for the Gnostics out there).  To consider Tyrone Slothrop, swabbed by Q-Tip as an infant to build the response that would turn him into the V-2 divining rod he becomes as an adult, that he was sold into said swabbing by his father, so that Tyrone could be eventually the pawn within the questing of industrial, governmental, clandestine and military plots gets at the level and degree with which Gravity's Rainbow points at the embedded corruption, but despite still retains the character's humanity (ironically, the swab in this case).      

Pynchon adapts the Joycean strategy of reference, inference and invocation to attempt a text that addresses a pluralistic readership.  If there should be any one reader who comprehends the whole of Gravity's Rainbow  without additional research, that reader may feel  a bit like Maxwell's demon. The book is there to prompt us out of specialized roles, to sort through the elements of the story to come away with their own sense of understanding, or the reader can simply allow the work to flow, to take it for its ride. Joshua Cohen's review of Bleeding Edge in Harper's captures the effect of Pynchon's influence: people come together to solve the mystery. That this type of collective pursuit of meaning is in a way the best antidote to a corporate system that propagates single, easily replicable solutions may be the unintended extension of Pynchon's charisma.  It reminds me in ways of the work of early Christians, or of Talmudic scholars-- readers can inhabit and question the text in pre-political communities and come away with their own pet theories.

To think of Pynchon's work within the question of publicity, it seems that in his pursuits he has created a matrix of books that would allow for the maximal expression of latent meaning, but that those connections are left for the readers to discern.  The ways in which Pynchon plays with the explicit is always tempered with a healthy dose of the unknown.

Get 'Em in the Guts (IPoS,tHL Part 5)

Get 'Em in the Guts

Of the decisions made within the creation of a book, it is worth commenting on how a series of words can come to take on a shape and that shape may be perceptible, but latent. A novel's shape isn't necessarily apparent. It belongs most-frequently to the unspoken quotient of subtext that fills in the space between words, the area where the author and the reader are meant to interact.   The Recognitions, for instance, takes on the shape of a screw, following the lives of a circle of people and pulling the action in tighter and tighter until the final collapse. Infinite Jest (in printed, not e-reader format) becomes a piece of exercise equipment: problem and solution bound in one hefty volume. To take a different tack, or to apply an anachronistic empiricism to the written word, what appears on the page and what appears within a reader's mind as the words begin to aggregate are separate and almost unaccountable phenomena, unless of course you suffer from perfect comprehension (zero noise as Wiener might have put it).

Determining where exactly meaning appears within a text or parsing the meaningfulness of a text is both personal and contextual.  It's personal in that whatever is being written must flash against some existing question within a reader's head for it to gain priority over other text.  It's contextual in that more often than not, meaning is a product of the subtextual games an author has deployed to manipulate our attention and bring us to a point of focus. We can see these quotes and excisions dragged out and held to the light and at times find enough in it to think we agree or to empathize with its sentiments or if we've seen it before, we nod in recognition and see that someone else found value in a statement.

In Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet another problem is introduced.  The narrator lets us know that he can only speak of dead ideas, that, much like the light from stars, we are reading something cast off, something that may have once been precious, but has now been outgrown. I extend this idea in part to some of the decisions Marcus makes within the novel, some of the themes he pursues and the slanted pieces of his own identity on display within the work.  The novel itself is about a language virus, so we already have a level of alienation from the text, but to get more into the lower guts, Marcus has provided a context where-in he can produce a special language, an enriched syntax and a means of exploring the written word that is jarring in its novelty but applicable to the world which he creates, but the writing is another cast off and perhaps part of the problem inherent with the form of the novel, we will always be reading something dead. Whatever life we try to bring to it is a kind of revival or resurrection, secondhand pants that may or may not fit but may also be toxic.

In The Captive, we encounter what seems to be the central problem of modern rationality. The narrator, who Proust shruggingly allows us to call Proust in this volume, has arranged for his mistress (Albertine) to live as his cousin, in secret, to share his home.  Obsessed by what she does when she is not with him, Proust has her surveilled, prods and manipulates her into staying at home. Considering his navigation against the history of Swann's path in society, the ways in which he strains to glimpse into Albertine's secret nature provides a perfect picture of his limit. Proust wants to know at all costs, even if it breaks his heart and it drives him mad that he cannot see around this particular blind spot. In part, it reminded me of an updated Oedipus myth, one where Oedipus is ever vigilant against the fulfillment of his fate, but where as well the vigilance is the signal of his character's flaw (a flaw crafted from a great strength) to the point where whatever peace we allow ourselves in the shade of our ignorance is ruined in an attempt at comprehension of our own particular place within the world. The way in which his thinking is bent by this blind spot shows that there are things that rationality cannot process, that knowing only begets further suspicion.

Walter Faber and to an extent Oedipa Maas both extend this concept of the rationally tragic. Homo Faber, the novel by Max Frisch, borrows its name from a concept co-created by Hannah Arendt and Max Scheler (it means "gay pencil" "Man, the maker"). Faber's rationality is that of a survivor looking to recreate the world in the wake of WWII.  His rationality is built upon a movement away from history, his own personal history and its resonance with the war, and a genuine need to put the past behind oneself in order to continue living.  The mechanics of Faber's tragedy are all folded within the folly of that very real need on the part of Europeans to not look back, but we can also extend his brand of hubris to the engineer and scientist castes of the 50's and of the supposed rationality of the play between the super powers built upon the mountainous irrationality of thermonuclear war.  Oedipa Maas on the other hand inherits the tragedy of lost knowledge (oh the sweats expired in the mattress fire) in the face of mass of culture and communication (Rich Chocolatey Goodness) censorship and greed.

To take a brief side step, the themes of Homo Faber find a number of echoes in The Crying of Lot 49, but the two books are deeply divergent in terms of style. Frisch's cool, collected plotting and descriptions vary widely from Pynchon's discursive plunge through southern California in the mid-60's. One difference may be psychedelia and Pynchon's great co-author, the substance, but another may be best stated as James Joyce. The best counter to the sequence above in the Captive, where Proust obsesses over the unknown, may be that epiphanic moment near the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Stephen Dedalus grasps the louse crawling near his neck and crushes it. It echoes back to the description of his mother's finger stained with louse blood through to his confrontation with the British soldiers in Ulysses. It may be safe to say that Joyce was much more comfortable with inference than Proust.  That Joyce's poverty, relative to Proust, provided him early on with a sense of the place people saw him in, so in Joyce instead we have the fight against that fate, toward greater artistic freedom. And while both authors are capable of investing a single sentence with several layers of resonance, in Proust I find most often the meaning is organic to the book, the shade of meaning and the precedents provided in the pages that came before, even external references to authors or art are contained within the construction of the novel to ensure its significance is rooted in the perceptions of the characters.  Joyce on the other hand is constantly sampling referencing outside works, either pulling the knowledgable reader further into the plot and characterization or sending the reader to the library or whizzing the references right past the reader's head. With Finnegan's Wake we see Joyce's language freed wholly from the waking world and subsumed through the unconscious. Here we have sentences that read aloud as if written phonetically in brogue, but reveal puns in multiple languages, the simultaneous collapse and extension of the syntax, the English language broken and freed and we can see that the unknown may be best handled obliquely.