Chaucer
Dark was the night as pitch, as black as coal,
And at the window out she put her hole,
And Absalon, so fortune framed the farce,
Put up his mouth and kissed her naked arse
Most savourously before he knew of this.
Guess who
I've always thought this is a highly illustrative quote:
"On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."
Clue: It's not Hitler.
The work resumes
Rightly, in my view, I don't count BookArmor as writing, just as I don't count journalism, etc, as writing. Simply output, and even when it is articulate, what propels it? In my case, not money, but there are motivations just as filthy as money, for the newspapers (that obsess me), money, I suppose, that needless need to keep serving the BIG YES of Western culture, that requires endless affirmation in the form of productive activity and so on...
I'm more into the BIG NO.
Anyway, in 2008, I wrote a single short story, The Candle Factory, and today I completed the first part of a short story about the time in Taiwan. Finally, I don't know why, or how, but I was able to put the larger picture of the dying world out of mind. Possibly the unfolding of an Obama charade in the Middle East (peace) process cleared my mind. These guys are stuck on repeat.
And I should know!
XXX
That's my life, stuck on repeat as I rebound around the world. Perhaps that is why I have the newspaper obsession, because I am somebody who loves repetition, who loves to repeat things, to repeat thoughts, to repeat reading books, to listen to drones, repetitive beats, to repeat order the one thing on the menu I like in the restaurant I repeatedly visit, where I repeatedly sit at the same table, in the same chair, etc. The better outlet for my repetitions is in the literary work, where I can observe its flow from the perfect vantage point and not keep feeling myself being overwhelmed by the BIG YES (this will become clearer) as I work on my LITTLE NO, that individual possession that marks the collective dispossession...
I've said enough, haven't I? Can I go now...
Concrete poetry
Strange, but at university, the instructors praised and positioned concrete poetry in a way that made it seem something that originated around the formation of the avant-garde.
Now I learn that its provenance reaches back to the Greece of Alexander, and that the Renaissance took a keen interest in it.
See, there was art before Apollinaire! Look, Kurt Schwitters is not that important!
What may seem a strange sentiment
Reading about Immanuel Kant last night, I saw, in his conception of morality, an explanation for my having said the following, while giving help to somebody:
"Don't think I'm helping you because I am a good person..."
This was not something wilful and contrary, but reflected accurately my feelings (or lack of them). And it was certainly not an invitation to consider me "a bad person." It was, in fact, an invitation to move beyond the notion of good and bad itself.
On further reflection, I realise now that what was important to me was that the person being helped not engage in dividing the people in the world into good and bad people, with good people possessing fundamentally different characters and so on. To me, that introduction of a division is a mistake, one that permits those who decline to help others a luxury they do not deserve, to relase them in a way from the duty to help, a duty that I believe all rational people are capable of apprehending and answering to.
The link to Kant is that his conception of morality saw emotions as irrelevant, and that duty was the proper basis of moral action.
The holy sound of ESG
For Clive, once more
I wonder what your thoughts on on mythological cycles and culturally located collections of folk stories, in that they contain almost nothing of an actual author but still tend to arrange a spectrum of difference through he characters they contain and the eventualities they must deal with. Both contain a broad and often times unflinching view of consequential action. - Clive
Does this mean, what input does an author have? As a distinct narrative voice imposing its presence on the text? Perhaps the typical literary writers of today inhabit an extreme, guilty of a “possessive individualism”, as it's been called, where their name has to be linked in perpetuity with their books, and the books themselves contain marks of their presence (Stephen King woz ere) at the text's creation, etc. Also, in this regard, one notes the way the name expands, and so no longer covers works but is also used to cover the papers of a literary figure, thereby protecting them similarly to works, and necessarily magnifying their financial value, academic value, etc. For example, what of this question – precisely when does the 'true value' become injected into a work, as a preparatory sketch, etc, may be something that was waiting to be transformed, with most of the work that produces value being concentrated at the end, close to its final status as being ready for publication. Of course, academics will apply a value in having the papers, if they throw light on the creative process, and so a spectrum of texts at different stages of completion, alternative versions, etc. The agreed value of the completed works is used as a means of irradiating all other materials, more or less, with some of that value. This also ties in with the deriving of biographical value from the works, also.
A traditional folk tale is free of an an author from its very creation, if we talk about historical tales rather than new additions (although urban myths would fit here) as the conception of authorship possessed today is extremely modern, and at the times when books were duplicated by scribes, for example, in the Dark Ages, there was no compunction with regards to the changing of the work, to 'improve' it, etc, the notion of an exact copy that 'preserved' the text simply did not exist in a world without a notion of the author, the two concepts, fixed text, author, being inseparable.
(The modern notion of the fixed text and the permanent linking of writer and work and the biographical impulse, are part of the same thing, and arise from the development of the technology of the printing press. - This needs more investigation.)
Having been spared an authorial creation, and I think this is actually a mode of being, and, as such, perhaps only children can escape from this sense of being an author in the present age, in the West, at the surface level of the practice of literature, while other traditions may persist at the deeper layers, and in other cultures. But the fact is that all major languages now carry this idea of the author, and this single idea is what is always translated alongside the actual text, when books move between languages (as, if there was no way to receive the notion of 'the author' in the destination language, then there'd be no reason for translating it). Folk tales may be seen as arising from and serving the needs of a collective, and corresponding very directly to the notion put forward by Borges' that - “All of literature is the work of a single man.” (I paraphrase) - and the discharge of this function being precisely why they persist, (just as nursery rhymes retain their use value despite their semantic content becoming obscured, but simply by virtue of their sound pattern and likewise, why nursery rhymes pass easily between languages – Twinkle, Twinkle, little star, has the same value in Spanish, etc, as in English). By the time of Nietzsche, we have writers with 'no interest in being understood' and this approach stands in stark contrast to stories that are considered so simple and universal that they are often a staple of the earliest writings that children are read / invited to read themselves. This is not to say that Nietzsche has journeyed far from things simple and universal, but that actually, it may be the age he is addressing that has become lost in specifics, and he does reference often the same locales in a positive manner, lakes, forests, mountains, etc, that are the setting for many folk tales.
Perfect cure for caring about anything
We trawled the spots where the Guatemalan rich hang out yesterday, always good therapy. The sight of these people in their designer clothes, laughing away, their big cars and bodyguards to hand, it soon takes away any wish to give a fuck for the fate of this world.