about Robert Musil

The Unbounded Vision of Robert Musil

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

1874 - 1929

"Hofmannsthal's world"

"Radical, Modern Hofmannsthal"

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A poem:

Remembered

Your little sister

Has tossed her 

Untied hair forward

Like a living veil,

Like a fragrant hedge,

And peers, with such eyes!

Through a fragrant veil,

Through a dark hedge ...

How sweet it is to only

Think of such little things.

Fruits have ripened

On all the longing branches 

In your nightly garden,

Chinese lanterns like red fruits

Sway and illuminate

The longing branches

Rustled by the night wind

In your little garden ...

How sweet it is to only

Think of such little things.

Translated by Johannes Beilharz

dream trauma

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
                                          -- from Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger


I had a dream. 

I was somehow tuned into an international radio show (90.5 on the dream dial). It was a culture show, with an English-speaking announcer. Someone known to me began speaking their poem-song. A voice in a language I don't know. A voice imbued with great and worldly qualities. A poem-song beautiful, poignant, and profound. About things beyond my experience and existence. Of things in a realm to which I don't belong. Spoken-sung in a transporting cadence. The lyrics moving on a subtle melody. Her voice was so very far above me in its rich conveyance of poetic atmospheres, of visionary eloquence. In a language I don't know, yet the gist of the poem-song came to me between the lines. As if the music of her voice translated the words.

When her poem-song was over, I turned off the radio. I went outside, eventually wandering into an unknown, colorful little neighborhood.  A car stopped to pick me up. Inside were four men, belonging to an ancient and foreign religious affiliation. I settled into the back seat. In the front seat, one of them began speculating about a secret, apocalyptic code. A number gleaned from his studies in Kabbalah. 

I soon realized they were driving me toward my home, from when I was a little boy. I asked them to pull over and let me walk alone the rest of the way. The old hill, the other side of which lay my childhood house, grew steeper as I approached. I began struggling to find handholds in what had now become a boulder-strewn mountainside. The brush and forlorn roots hanging here and there morphed into frozen water sprays. The heat of my climbing caused the ice-sprays to begin melting. This somehow triggered the bursting through of a terrible river above. Torrents of floodwater poured over and onto me, washing me back down the mountain(hill)side. The old road I had taken was now a hopeless ravine. I was swept away into death and eternal oblivion.

I woke up.


So...isn't it astonishing how consciousness can speak to itself allegorically, through the ambiguous form of an oneiric tale?

Kapralova's Piano Concerto

In her concerto -- Brahmsian flourishes and inflections; Rachmaninoff moments of melancholy; Beethovian mystery to open the Largo, which later takes on some Shostakovitch vibes. 

But pervading through the whole piece -- "a certain slant of light" that I can only imagine to be Bohemian.

Ms. Kapralova was a remarkable composer, writing with natural, fierce, and imaginative flair.

I woke up this morning...

...thinking about this movie. A freak-ass movie about numerological psychosis. I've seen it several times. Must see it again.

Some facts...

...are incapable of being dramatized, poeticized, or even imagined. The most that can be done by way of expression toward certain facts is an utterance brushing the edge of silence.

Martin Heidegger...

...was either an anti-Semite or a cynical opportunist. He was certainly a coward.

"Hitler's Superman"


As in the case of Wagner, Heidegger presents a troublesome phenomenon: the greatness of works in contrast to the repulsiveness of character.