This is Just to Say; Or, A Reflection on Desire

William Carlos William's very short poem "This Is Just To Say" frustrated me on my first read. Is this a poem? These few words? 28. Words. Seem to say everything. At least something. Not nothing. Something to say about desire, I take it? A fresh plum in the refrigerator that sits there expectantly, wanting to be eaten. I eat it. It is so cold, sweet, delicious.

The beauty of the poem is that it cannot be said any other way. What I mean to say is that if I wanted to tell someone about this poem I would have to read it out:

This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
...that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

I cannot paraphrase it. It is the poem itself that utters its meaning. I could translate the poem.

C'est juste pour dire
par William Carlos Williams

J'ai mangé
des prunes
... qui ont été
dans la glacière

et qui
tu as probablement
épargne 
pour le petit dejeuner

Pardon moi
ils étaient délicieux
si doux
et si froid

Is my translation adequate? No matter. 
The translation would have to be another poem. I mean. The same poem. Written under the same conditions. I am afraid I am not a poet. Even if I were a poet I would have to be convicted to write a poem such as this one. I would have to be William Carlos Williams. I can only present an ersatz -- both in translation and in paraphrase. It would have to be a translation written by a poet in the same mind as Williams. The translation would have to stand alone as a piece of poetry as simple and beautiful as the original English. A bad translation would take away from the poemness of the original. Worse than a bad translation is a bad paraphrase: to say, "Oh, that poem is just about some guy who ate his girlfriend's plum that was not his to take that he took out of the refrigerator." There are two things wrong with the previous statement. First, it is a gross estimation of affairs. Second, it adds its own interpretation that was intuited, absconded, I should say, from the original. I cannot intuit from a poem and call my intuition the poem. The intuition, that it was a girlfriend's plum, is an intuition that could be countered. It may have been a boyfriend's plum. It could have been a plum in the icebox at work. 
The intimacy of the poem seems to suggest something intimate, something personal, something non-work related. 
To take the plum from a stranger, a co-worker, even someone who lives with you, but is not a lover, is not what is evoked in this poem. I just know it is an intimate partaking of the plum uninvited. It is at the level of togetherness and separation that this poem speaks. The three ellipses in the first stanza attest to the hesitation I speak of. The probably hints at "knowing your habits," the "you" an instance of the intimate second person. The forgive is only to be understood by the confession itself: a declaration, not a confession. It is not so much the narrator admits to eating the plum but he declares -- and here is the simplicity — that they were "delicious / so sweet / and so cold." The guilt is not there. Not even in the forgiving. Is the narrator asking to be forgiven for his own desire? No. If he knew it to be wrong he would not have done it. Or he would have given another reason. "Forgive me / they were not mine/ but yours / not mine to take." There is no impunity either. This is not a poem about release from moral obligation. A simple declaration of desire. Desire qua desire. Desire that happens upon an encounter with an object of desire. The natural affinity of a person to sate his desire. And to realize, perhaps, afterward, oh wait, the desire is yours to partake as well. In my desiring the deliciousness, the sweetness, the coldness, I forgot about our togetherness, or co-habitation, our couplehood. And only here, in my presentation. It is an ersatz.

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For William Carlos Williams's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" click here.

Quotation: Alfred North Whitehead on Great Ideas

A great idea, says Whitehead, "is like a phantom ocean beating upon the shores of human life in successive waves of specializing."

— Alfred North Whitehead

Source: Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. United Kingdom, Free Press, 1967.

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"Apparently" and "Weird": A Report on Colloquial Usage

I overheard a conversation on the subway today between two college kids: "It's weird, you know, apparently she was his girlfriend, but now it's so awkward, I'm like whatever."
The words "apparently" and "weird" have taken on a nuanced meaning in contemporary Americana. Jonathan Franzen, in his novel Freedom, first alerted me to the phenomenon of "weird." Everything Patty Berglund notices that should be contested, like her son living with the next-door neighbor, instead of in his own home, is just weird, she says. Anything Patty Berglund doesn't like, "it's weird." The neighbor flicks cigarettes from her window into the baby pool below. Patty Berglund just says, "It's weird."

"Weird" no longer means oddly strange or not normal. Weird is a catch-all phrase for anything a person doesn't understand or agree with. "It's weird," a student told me. I thought she would tell me about a strange occurrence on the way to class, but she only meant her grade. "You gave me a C-."

Instead of, confused, or give me a reason, the epithet I get is weird.
"Awkward" deserves its own post. It's like weird in that it replaces what we'd rather say about a situation or unable to say, so we say weird or awkward instead. Everything is either weird or awkward. I think Franzen is keen to the usage of words, like weird, because the word becomes a substitute for whenever we rather not say what we would like to say, so we just say it's weird or awkward. It's similar to standing in front of a painting at a museum and saying, "That's interesting." We know we like the painting. We just can't give words to what we feel. Weird works like this, but it masks a moral attitude. Patty could have said the neighbor was sociopathic, or mean, or just plain bad. But it's weird. Nothing beyond weird was in her vocabulary. She avoids placing moral blame on an action by substituting right or wrong, just or unjust, with weird.

The word has taken on a moral ambiguity that Franzen links to a propensity to choose not naming an action for what it is out of fear of being labeled weird. By taking the weird stance, I protect myself from being weird.

Anything that threatens becomes weird. Weird is the neologism that defines fear of otherness. Building a Muslim Community Center in Tribecca? That's just weird.

Then there's "apparently." This adverb is everywhere in speech patterns I've overheard. It's supposed to be a useful way to suggest an inductive conclusion based on surface knowledge. "Jorge apparently had not studied because his answer sheet was blank when he turned it in to the teacher."

If something is apparent, it means I know it to be true only at the level of appearance.
People use the word incorrectly to talk about events that are known. "The J train's not running, apparently." Is it running or not? There is no "apparent" in sight. The word insinuates suspicion of a claim on certainty when no such suspicion is necessary. It's weird!

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Quotation: Walker Percy on Gentilly

"The swamps are still burning at Chef Menteur and the sky over Gentilly is the color of ashes."  (p.17)

Walker Percy,The Moviegoer.

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Source: Percy, Walker. The Moviegoer. Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. 1961. Print.

On the Manufacture of Childhood Innocence

In this post, we present a quote by James R. Kincaid on the production of childhood innocence in contemporary culture.

The Author as a Child From a Department Store Photo Shoot (c. 1980s)

Few would question that the innocent child was manufactured by Rousseau, with refinements by Wordsworth and thousand lesser writers, interior decorators, and producers of greeting cards.

— James R. Kincaid

Source: Kincaid, James R. Child-loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Literature. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

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Quotation: Walker Percy on Bourbon Drinking

Bourbon, Neat

Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth — all real enough dangers. I, too, deplore these afflictions. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking, that is, the use of Bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic.

Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land, "Bourbon", 1991

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Philosophy Thought Experiment: Nietzsche's Allegory of the Demon

Friedrich Nietzsche's most famous articulation of eternal recurrence of the same is imagined as a thought experiment.
The question Nietzsche poses is, ‘Would you live this life over again under the same conditions?’
After reading the quote, think of Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day and the allegory makes more sense.

 

Here is an excerpt from the text:

The greatest weight.— What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science, s.341

translated by Walter Kaufmann

Source: Nietzsche, Friedrich W, and Walter Kaufmann. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York: Random House, 1974. Print.

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image source: fractal ontology

Book Review: Virginia Woolf as Philosopher for the People

Three Guineas Journal

In this post, I offer a review of Virginia Woolf’s searing report on the devastating effects of war. It's her most articulate contribution to the history of ideas because it articulates quite well, and cogently – in the manner of classical rhetoric — ideas about pacifism, women, and war. Having lived through the First World War, Woolf dreads the possibility of another one to come . . .

     

Three Guineas is a bitter discourse on the prevention of war, and defense of philanthropy, and women; it is also an attack on the growing hegemonic power afloat in Europe before the Second World War; it is an older and hardened view, distinct from the more playful A Room of One’s Own she had written earlier, which is more about the sexuality of women, the spirit of women. However, it touches on some of the issues she expounds upon in Three Guineas. In a way, it is like a sequel; actually, I think this is how Woolf intended it. Three Guineas comes out of the work she did on The Years, her most famous novel, about the Pargiter family, their history from the 19th century to Woolf’s present day.
      Woolf published the book Three Guineas out of her own Hogarth press. I wonder how many people actually “got it” or even took the time to read the book? I wonder how many people actually read A Room of One’s Own and “got it”? The slim volume deserves a second look. I think Woolf is important to intellectual thought. Woolf is part of what I call intellectual talk within intellectual circles and also, by her own admission, critical to the public sphere of intellectualism. Woolf attempts to speak to everyman. She is a philosopher for the people. Three Guineas is filled with harsh condemnations. She accuses society of having an infantile fixation (134-135); of the widening gap between the public and private sectors and the use of clothing to deceive young men into joining the war effort (14). I find Woolf to be candid in this book. I think she states some hard arguments. The difficulty of the book is following Woolf’s train of thought; Woolf reads like an autodidact, which she was, and her arguments sometimes feel more passionate than systematically thought out; but, I reason, she has spent so much time, energy and words on these issues; I feel ill at ease following her passion because I sense she doesn’t have to convince me; I know she must be right!

     One significant contribution she gives in this work is that she nuances the stance of feminism. Feminist thought is not dead even though women can now vote and work, Woolf argues. We can’t stop now as if everything is equal and normal for women. As if women and men are the same. There will still be Creons abusing Antigones. But, Woolf is not fatalistic. She does see that something must be done. There is a web site I found about an organization founded in 1993 called the Three Guineas Organization. It helps women and girls through education, similar to the groups that were writing to Woolf asking for aid.
     I say Three Guineas is a bitter discourse because it is written not as a romp through Oxford and the British Library, but an attempt to ask the hard questions and a realization of forces greater than our control. Woolf intuits the horror of the World War and the seeming repetition of war, the misuse of women throughout history; “Things repeat themselves it seems. Pictures and voices are the same today as they were 2,000 years ago” (141). I think she sees Hitler and Fascism for what it really was: not for true freedom and liberty but rather threatening to Western Civilization. Of course, war is threatening. But she asks: how does war deplete society? Why are women asking for money? How does war take away resources, thus eroding the cornerstone of liberal arts education, the workforce, and liberty in general? Why are these three different organizations, even asking for money in the first place? Will a guinea also help them? Shouldn’t society be asking why they must plead for money in the first place? Why are the administrators of a woman’s college living under deplorable conditions, begging? In a letter to Woolf, an accountant for the college asks, “Will you send a subscription to [our society] in order to help us to earn our living? Failing money … any gift will be acceptable – books, fruit, or cast-off clothing that can be sold in a bazaar (41)”.
     Woolf wants to know why is this school asking for money? Haven’t women been liberated for the past twenty years? She includes a response to such a request for a subscription, asking, “How can it be, we repeat? Surely there must be some very grave defect, of common humanity, of common justice, or of common sense” (41-42).
     I noticed in this book that Woolf is aware of the influence of photography (at least 11 and 142). She writes about the horrors of war recorded by the camera. This book is timely today because we can trace how the influence of the camera has made an arc to the television set, to the Internet. We are inundated with images that dictate how we are supposed to look at the world. I love how she is so contemporary with this issue.
What is the meaning of these words that we are willing to die to defend? Freedom? Liberty? Rights of Man?
      She lambasts an army general’s debonair suit by pointing out that in battle, soldiers do not wear finery. Woolf concludes that the regalia of uniforms is a lure to get young men to join the military. The suit does not tell the truth; uniforms are deceptive instruments to get people in the ranks, to fight the countries wars.
      Also, isn’t it interesting that Woolf questions giving the money to these different organizations? She challenges us to look at things from all the different points of view, preferably three. She has three newspapers on her desk. “Therefore if you want to know any facts about politics you must read at least three different papers, compare at least three different versions of the same fact, and come in the end to your own conclusion” (95). Woolf challenges the reader to think critically. Not to look merely at one source and form our opinion. We should have at least three sources about the same topic in front of us. Librarians probably agree; parts of this book could serve as an introduction to Library Science. How many times do I get letters in the mail asking for money? Do I ask myself the reasons behind their requests for money? Do I wonder why they really need the money in the first place? Woolf, I bet, surprises the honorary treasures by questioning their requests. Partly to get them to think about their situations and partly, for Woolf’s part, to answer the real questions.
Why does she attack H.G. Wells? I was surprised to see Wells included in this book; I didn’t think Woolf would go after a particular person in this polemic. But she does. She seems to see him as superficial. Wells obviously does not fight for the same principles as Woolf.
      We are not fighting for the rights of man or for woman. We should be rallying the cause of humanity; because, isn’t it, like Georges Sands says – “all beings are interdependent of one another”? Who of us can present ourselves as insulated, cut off from one another? Because we are a man? Because we are a woman? Most of our problems stem from the insistence on creating sharp distinctions between man/woman; free/slave; public/private. Maybe Woolf is calling for, in this book, is a common interest; “it is one world; one life” (142).

source: Woolf, Virginia,  Three Guineas.  Harcourt Brace. 1938, 1966. 

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Book Review: Repulsion as Metaphor in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Met Go

Never Let Me Go

    Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go has recently been released as a film, due out in theaters today. I am anxious about the film because I want to see how the adaptation treats the theme of repulsion, which is my interest in the novel. Ishiguro describes a world where humans have become obsessed with extending one's lifespan. To reach this goal, humans have created a subset of human beings, manufactured in test tubes to serve as body farms for organ tissues. The novel is ostensibly a science-fiction narrative about clones used for organ harvesting in an alternative, but possible dystopic posthuman future in Britain in the late 1990s. Humans, because of the rapid advance of biotechnology, have developed an industry by which cloned human beings are manufactured as “gifts” to stave off death.  These “beings” then, can be picked off when needed — a lung here, skin graft or a heart, there.

Photo: Library of Babel

Photo of the interior of New York University's Bobst Library - taken from a few floors up.

Bobst Library, NYU

People say walking the upper floors of the Bobst Library — the main college library at New York University surrounding Washington Square Park — grants a feeling of vertigo. It's true. Also, I get a feeling I am inside the infinite library written about in Jorge Borges's short story "The Library of Babel".

Location: Bobst Library NYU
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Book Review: On the Punctum in Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida

    Unary Image

     In a world where we constantly make subjective judgments on the images we peruse — take for example, the host of websites that displays portraits of users that can either be voted as “hot or not” (I am ashamed to say I have indulged in this entertainment) — the object of the observer is to rate images according to subjective tastes.  Roland Barthes's idea is that the host of images flashed across our eyes on any given days are what he calls “unary” images. The unary image lacks a phenomenological “prick.” These naïve images are at the level of what Barthes calls “the pornographic” (41).  For Barthes, these images are “without intention and without calculation” (41).

The Punctum

    Barthes calls the punctum a “prick, sting, a speck, a cut, a little hole.” (27).  For Barthes there seems to be something at stake in the interplay between the photograph and the subject’s gaze.  What fascinates Barthes is that the photograph can lack its punctum, this sting that he calls it, between the image and the observer. This lack of sting is the unary image (41).  There is no shock, Barthes says, in the image that does not “shout.”  For Barthes the experience of the punctum is a purely subjective experience that designates a “I like / I don’t like” posture.

Sontag and Barthes

This lack of a “sting” in the photographic unary is probably what Sontag has critically noticed.  For Sontag and for Barthes, the unary image offers itself only to be consumed by the observer.  This leads to desensitization.  And a lack of empathy in the suffering of others.  This is the “pornography” that Barthes talks about as a quality of the unary image.  What the unary image places before us is the hope of a gift.  This is the punctum and what Barthes calls precisely eroticism.  This is the photograph’s ability (or inability) to evoke a response that rises above the level of sentimentality or at the risk of becoming over-stimulated by the image.

     The Good Photograph 

     For Barthes, a particular photo, for example, of Napoleon’s brother, that he mentions in the first lines of the book (but does not offer an image) is insufficient to tell us anything about what photography is in of itself.  What we are struck by is the eyes of the emperor’s brother.  But the eyes simply point.  And it hopely goes beyond the tedium of the studium.  When I see a photograph in a magazine or in a family album, I am drawn to the image as a particular image, chosen out of a seemingly infinite array of images and I am distracted by the particularness of the image which evades the eidos (the idea) of the image itself.  What Barthes seems to be saying is that I can never get at the being of photography for photography is written in a deictic language, he says, that by its very essence can only refer.  The picture of my cousin Zack which hangs sits on my bookshelf is an image of Zack, a particular shot of him taken at a particular moment in time. His eyes are looking awry outside of the borders of the frame.  And his mouth is formed in a slight smile.  He is posing.  His look shows that he knows that a photograph is being taken of even though he gives this recognition away only minimally.  I cannot, as Barthes says, remove the photograph from the image nor can I remove the image from the photograph.  The photograph has meaning only because I can situate the picture within the point of view of an observer or from the subject observed.  The good photograph, for Barthes, is the photographer having found the right moment, the kairos of desire” (59).

    The Studium

    But is there a capture of the image from the point of view of eternity? Apparently, for Barthes, the image always evades.  It always points to something — like desire points to an object or essence to existence, but to grasp the thing-in-itself is impossible.  But, it seems, what Barthes is really trying to say. is that the image cannot be thought of in this platonic way. The image’s something “has triggered me, has provoked a tiny shock, a satori, the passage of a void (it is of no importance that is referent is insignificant)” (49).  The studium of the image is its landscape, it is the broadened face of the image that can garner our interest, even our passion, but in the banalest of ways.  The studium is the part of the image that is “anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies” (57).  It is the punctum — the image’s tiny shock — that grabs our attention and attracts us to the picture.
                                                                The Hope of the Punctum
    The hope of the punctum — if I can call it a “hope” — is to stumble upon the image that goes beyond the stagnancy of the studium.  The viewer hopes to stumble upon an image that proves a “punch”!  If I take an image that Barthes uses as an example at the end of the book, I can take this a little further.  The image is a striking, handsome image of a young man.  The caption reads, “He is dead and he is going to die …” (95).  The image is Gardner’s photograph of Lewis Payne who was condemned to die for the assassination of the Secretary of State Seward in the late 1860s.  His hands are cuffed and he sits abrasively against a prison wall.  For me. the eye of the subject provides the punctum.  His eyes at first seem vacant, but on a second look, coupled with his strange wan smile, and a thick neck.  But for Barthes, it is the knowledge that he is about to die — or that he is dead.  The point of departure that brings the image to the level of the punctum is that the man is going to die.
    What this means then, and I think is the weakness of Barthes’s book is that the punctum rests on something outside of the image — that he is dead is the knowledge that we glean from the text.  The punctum — which is supposed to prick our consciousness is exterior to the experience of the photography itself.

Experience of the Photograph   

    The penetration of the image relies on the experience of the photograph and not the photograph itself which Barthes states clearly at the beginning of the book.  But this is a problem and I think what Sontag seems as lacking in the punctum — that the observer has to rise to the level of the punctum.  If we do not have the aesthetic or phenomenological capacity to rise about the photographic landscape, or even beyond the intention of the photographer. there is no “punch” to be gained.
    The photograph, then, cannot stand on its own — and what gives it status then, is not its essence — but what the image points to is important.  If the image’s essence cannot be apprehended, then, the punctum of the image, then, relies on the capacity of the observer to be pricked.  This, I think is a high call.  But, an admirable one. 

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“A Mere Labyrinth of Letters”: Preoccupations of Librarianship and Epistemological Conjecturing in Borges’ “The Library of Babel”

An illustration of the Library of Babel by Erik Desmazieres 

Librarians share two major philosophical preoccupations:

1. The idea of a total library
2. The futility of such a library.

Librarians are “total” in their desire for a perfect, or a complete library, but, unfortunately, the totalitarian nature of librarians has fossilized the notion that if it isn’t in the library then it doesn’t exist. The "if it is not in the records it does not exist" idea is as old as recorded history. The promise of complete, total, accessible knowledge (the first preoccupation) is shadowed by the librarian's futile wading through miles and miles of totality (the hell) to search and find that one piece of totality that one is looking. The total nature of the catalog is supposed to mirror precisely what is on the shelf. But the maddening job of the cataloger is to constantly check the catalog against what is on the shelf and fix any errors; this process has the hope of finish but is bound to be endlessly nonfinished. Librarians spend hours cleaning records, assigning call numbers, shelving books in an endless cycle of return. This nature of librarianship is actually not only the preoccupations of Library Science but of Western Philosophy in general.  Ever since the philosopher Thales posited that there must be something material that underlies all existence — we will forgive him for positing water — philosophers have searched for a univocity, or an absolute to explain that which undergirds reality. Of course, the philosophical search comes short. There is a futility in this search (think of Adam futile search to name all animals or Aristotle's futile search to give names to everything) although it does not cancel out the desire to search. That, my dear, is the paradox of the quest.

Quote of the Day: Anne Carson On the Social Contract

photo credit: notjanedoe

I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear.

— Anne Carson

Source: Carson, Anne. Plainwater: Essays and Poetry. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2000. Print.

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Mandeville High School Class of 1998: Graduation Speech I Never Gave

   

I graduated from Mandeville High School (class of 1998).

Here is a transcript of a speech I wrote — but since

I was not selected to be the graduation speech-giver — here is the

speech verbatim (that I never gave).

I walk often behind my house.  I bring my trusty spaniel, and we conquer what there is to conquer.  I notice the turtles and the snakes.  The flowers grow silently, and I stumble their humble beauty.  I become a discoverer.  I lift stones to peer at the scampering centipedes and worms.  I climb aged oaks and jump over running streams.  Sometimes I sit quietly or read the book I had tucked beneath my arm.
    Our journey through these Halls of Learning has been like a journey through the woods.  Close your eyes and remember your school experience.  Remember your discoveries, remember your first-grade teacher, remember your favorite teachers, remember the evil teacher, remember music class, remember recess, remember dances, remember the bully -- were you the bully? — remember tests, remember labs, remember football games.  Remember school like a walk through the woods.  Pick the wildflowers of your school memories and don’t forget the poison ivy.  Remember the sweetness of the one you loved.  Just sit and remember, and it will all come like a stream flowing.
    For twelve years, we have been offered a platter of knowledge.  We were given the chance to pick from its variety of choice fruits.  The Homeric metaphors and the rhythms and workings of the body have been offered us.  E=MC^2.  Supply and demand.  Manifest Destiny.  Endless conjugations of foreign language verbs.  We will leave these halls with a diploma.  It will say more than a graduation certificate.  It says we have gone through the treasures of boundless knowledge and survived.  We have survived the words.  We have been led by Puck, Heathcliff, Virgil, and Prospero.  We have been led by Newton, Einstein, Madame Curie, and Michelangelo.  We have been led by Franklin, Lincoln, Luther, Douglass, Dix, Charlemagne, and Tubman.
    These woods can be dark and brooding like Snow White in the forest with living trees clawing out at us.  Other times the woods are bright and copious.  Wolves are sparse and goodness is near. Sometimes the skies open and torrents of rainfall, like King Lear in the heath, and cleanses us.  We have been nurtured through our journey and now we find ourselves at the edge of the forest, peering out into the wide expanse.  We can’t turn back now but must plow forward.
    I like to think we are all knights of knowledge on our horses prancing toward the rising sun, singing in our heads the Simon and Garfunkel song, “I’ve got my books and my poetry to protect me.  I’m shielded in my armor — safe within my room [or shall we say safe with our diploma?] — I touch no one and no one touches me — I am a rock; I am an island.”  It has always given me comfort to know I have all the poets, saints, sinners, builders, politicians, princesses, kings, slaves, and singers behind us.  We can carry the Divine Comedy, the Principia Mathematica, and the Holy Scriptures, all tucked beneath our arms — ready to go beyond the woods and into the mountains.
    We have so many experiences and emotions that have welled up in us these many years.  My English teacher Melanie Plesh said it so correctly, “We are tender creatures, so affected by words and actions from other people.”  We have been molded by so many people, words, and actions that have sculpted us.  We have watched ourselves develop in our souls spiritually, mentally, and physically.  We were babes, now we are mature — nourished by our fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters.  Thanks for the woods, the cleansing.
    Now we can offer the world our pain, our laughter, and tears.  We can share our poetry and our logic.  I am girded by my friends — my mail is heavy, but I remind myself: “We are the stuff dreams are made of.”

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Repost: The Shortest Story Ever Told

Never worn. For sale. Baby shoes.

-Ernest Hemingway
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Notes on "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"

Walter Benjamin on Marcel Proust on the Madeleine
I remember Walter Benjamin's writings on Marcel Proust's madeleine, the moment, in Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, when an avatar of Proust bites into the pastry, memories of his childhood flood into his brain, what Proust calls a memoire involuntaire; but, I never noticed before this statement Benjamin (writing about Proust) makes about the search for an object related to a lost memory:

"As for that object, it depends entirely on chance whether we come upon it before we die or whether we never encounter it" (Benjamin Illuminations 158).

Lacan's Objet Petit A
This comment reminds me of Lacan's objet petit a.

It's Lacan's psychological concept for the lost object. The object of desire responsible for obsession and deranged fantasy. It is that object of desire that drives the desirer mad in search of it.

The object of desire, in the symbol of the madeleine, is a marker for that object that we may chance upon, involuntarily, or may never have at all. I think about myself, here, and my desires. If there is a "madeleine" for me, I may taste it, or I may not; the memoire involuntaire is totally necessitated by chance; I happen upon the object, the memory comes flooding in like an impressionistic painting. But, I may never come upon this memory, locked forever in some lost object of desire.

Is the Job of the Poet to Hearken Back to Lost Memories?
If it is the poet's job to unlock these memories, then I applaud the poet. If it is a poet who can open up a madeleine of lost memories, let's laud him with a crown of laurel.

I am sure there is a poem hidden in a taste yet to be eaten.

Am I hedonistic to wish for such a bite?

Proust entrances his reader with the opportunity to invoke memories through the senses. It is the poet who puts these sense impressions into language. Cognitive science confirms Proust's intimation that the senses (e.g., smell and taste) trigger a memory. Proust is right.

Proust Via Benjamin Via Lacan Are Onto Something
The memory Proust, and I think Benjamin is onto something, is alluding to is not a factual memory stuck at a particular moment in time. The memory is much broader than a recollection. Baudelaire (via Benjamin) uses the term shock - an expression meant to suggest a memory linked to trauma. The shock is a sense impression outside of some romantic notion of memory, and instead of a memory of the crowd.

I put away silly notions of private memory. The artist does not pull from something deep inside of him to produce art. It is not a private string of emotions the artist must articulate so others can understand. The memory the artist exposes is already there, involuntary.

Works Cited: 

Benjamin, Walter. Eiland, Howard, et al. Gesammelte Schriften. United Kingdom, Belknap Press, 1996.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. United States, Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

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Why David Remnick is My Hero (But I Don't Want to Emulate Him)

David Remnick, the editor for the New Yorker, and latest biographer of the 44th president, gets up at 5:30 AM to write, goes to work at one of the most eloquent magazines in the country, and still has a few minutes to spend time with family, go back to work, look good, be friends with Malcolm Gladwell - and he commutes by subway. I wish I could be him - but then, I think, maybe not. I don't desire editorial glamour (I'm not a Tina Brown wannabe) but, at least God, please give me a Remnick brain! I wanna write 2,000 words effortlessly.

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Graphic Design: Invocation to the New York Public Library Lions

One of the flanking lions that guard the entrance to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan

I am a reader.

     As a kid, I read fantasy novels and Mad Magazines. As a college student, I read a lot of philosophy (which stimulated my brain). As an adult, I read loads of spiritual books and followed random blogs on the Internet. As a teacher, I read for work so I can teach what I have read.

     In the remaining moments, I read a voraciously the New York Times — and when the new issue of Entertainment Weekly comes in the mail I spent at least twenty-five minutes lying in bed flipping through its glossy pages.

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graphic design credit: Greig Roselli © 2010

What is the Difference between Comedy and Tragedy?

"Midway in my life's journey, 'I stumbled into a wood.'" 
— Dante, Inferno, Canto I, Line 1

    What is the difference between comedy and tragedy? We enter the woods; at the threshold of woods and plain are the dividing lines between tragic and comedic, between love and loss. The woods represent chaos in literary symbolism. Or not. Everything depends on the red wheelbarrow. Is it how we see it? In Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, when the eloping lovers enter the woods at night, all hell breaks loose. Lovers are switched. A wayward actors' troop is also lost, set to perform at a state wedding, but one of their players is turned into an ass, being an ass anyway - his name is Bottom. Puck, the mischievous sprite, pours a potion into the Queen of the Fairies' eyes and she falls in love with Bottom.
    In the morning, though, after all the enchantments have worn off, everything is turned right - the basic structure of a comedy. A comedy is technically a narrative that begins with a conflict, like mixed up lovers or lost in a wood, but in the end conflict is resolved - which is why Dante's journey through Hell is called a comedy. Dante goes through the stages of hell and survives to tell the tale. Dante, with Virgil the poet's help, makes it to Purgatory and, eventually, with Beatrice's intercession, ends up seeing the beatific vision (which is quite boring, if you ask me). Isn't the journey in the telling?
    And what is the difference between a comedy and a tragedy? Is the line always direct, written in the sand? I agree the line is a thin one, as played out in Woody Allen's farce Melinda and Melinda. The movie is a demonstration of the thin line between both genres. Is life at its essence tragic or comic? The movie tells the story of Melinda from two perspectives, one tragic, the other comedic. In the tragic version, Melinda shows up at her sister's dinner party unannounced and all hell breaks loose. She dumps her husband for a younger photographer but the center cannot hold and she ends up in the tragic version in a mental hospital. In the comic version, Melinda shows up at the dinner party as a childless and down-trodden neighbor who captures the attention and delight of the guests. The film cleverly goes back and forth between the two stories as a way to illustrate the point the difference between tragedy and comedy. For the ancient Greeks, tragedy was primarily a cathartic experience. To process tragedy, the events of the narrative are re-enacted on the stage and by seeing the horrible events unfold on stage (or on screen) the spectator comes away cleansed from the experience. Thus the invention of drama. Emotion is processed publicly as a way to experience collectively the pain of tragedy. Even today don't we go to a sad movie and cry? What happens in this experience? Are we sad for our own sorrows or someone else's? Are our tears and identification with a character on the stage? Do we cry so we can replace our own sufferings with the sorrows of someone else, an emotional scapegoat? Tragedy is not a private act, but a public one. We publicly place sorrow on the stage to feel better afterward in the same way we laugh collectively in front of a prime time TV show even when it is not funny. Catharsis is a purging of the emotions but the same can be said when we witness, and privately enjoy the suffering of others; a little bit of schadenfreude, gaining pleasure from the downfall of others somehow makes us feel a little bit more exalted. Even though we don't like to admit it, don't we often say to ourselves about someone else's tragic story, I am glad it isn't me?
Odysseus slays the suitors

Comedy and tragedy depend on a slight twist of fate; Woody Allen likes to play with this idea, beginning Melinda and Melinda with a discussion of the difference between the two. It is a gross deduction, but life is a comedy when we are the ones who do not suffer and it's a tragedy when the tables are turned. When Dante is in hell he is a comedy for he goes through hell commenting on the suffering of other people. Dante meets Odysseus in hell, the man of many wiles who was separated from his wife and family for twenty years. Dante punished Odysseus in hell for his extreme pride or hubris, a lack of understanding of his own human weakness. Odysseus in life is punished to roam the seas in a search for home because he relied on his own intellect and not on the gods. Odysseus returns home, rids his halls of the suitors and he reunites with his wife and son. Dante does not view Odysseus so comedically, however, and remains suspicious of Odysseus as if inspired by Poseidon's rage. Dante sees Odysseus as the man of many deceits. The flip flop is directly related to fate, perception, choices, and perhaps luck. If I am deceived to believe life is merely either a comedy or a tragedy, I deceive myself. Pride and self-deception cause war; cause intolerance - the inability to see truth in any given situation. The blindness is our own. Someone may ask, why are seers physically blind? By losing their physical sight, they gain an inner sight of the mind. It is not what you see but how you see it. The narcissist sees only himself. The hero sees his victories. A murder does not see his crime. A lover sees an ideal. I am blinded from truth not because truth is absolute, but I am unable to decode properly what I see before me. The Greeks seem to have understood this which is why they created the blind seer who could see but they also saw that most of us are Cassandra and we do not listen. It is not that we do want to listen, but rather, we are blocked - flustered for a bit, and we cannot read properly. It is in the tangle of interpretation that we go back and forth: comedy, tragedy, comedy, tragedy, comedy, tragedy, comedy, tragedy . . .

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Handout: Invocations Inspired by the Odyssey of Homer

A little handout of made up invocations for the Odyssey (with apologies)

credits: odysseus, penelope, telemachus, athena   text: greig roselli © 2010 with apologies to the muses and to homer.

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