an intellectual on the road

In Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed (variously Demons), you will find the character Stepan Trofimovitch Verkhovensky. He's an older fellow, an intellectual. He lives mostly inside his head, where the ideal, the abstractive, and the theoretical quiver in consciousness. He lives, therefore, just beyond the actual, in a more liquid or gaseous state than the solid. 

In that respect, I see his intellectualism as a kind of artistry. On the impetus of allusive and expansive thinking, he floats toward possible spheres of interpretation. The life of mind has, over time, opened up a tangential space for this critic at large, for this spirit known as Stepan Trofimovitch. A peripheral "geography" is where the artistic abides. But let's not get carried away. He's an intellectual, not an artist per se, even if his musings and one famous work change time into different substance.  

We find Stepan Trofimovitch in the novel during his later years, when he's a chronic free boarder with the aristocratic Vavara Petrovna. In her manor and with dramatic flair, he soliloquizes perceived slights and gesticulates intrinsic egoism. But he's more eccentrically charming than insufferable. Just a fading candle flame from an older era. 

In Part Three of this novel, there is a Chapter 7: "Stepan Trofimovitch's Last Wandering." After a falling out with Vavara Petrovna, he sets out on the road. Dazed, feverish, and crestfallen, he yet proceeds with a misty hopefulness -- a Don Quixote on a not quite firm mission. Here's an excerpt:

The cart reached him; it was a fairly solid peasant cart. The woman was sitting on a tightly stuffed sack and the man on the front of the cart with his legs hanging over towards Stepan Trofimovitch. A red cow was, in fact, shambling behind, tied by the horns to the cart. The man and the woman gazed open-eyed at Stepan Trofimovitch, and Stepan Trofimovitch gazed back at them with equal wonder, but after he had let them pass twenty paces, he got up hurriedly all of a sudden and walked after them. In the proximity of the cart it was natural that he should feel safer, but when he had overtaken it he became oblivious of everything again and sank back into his disconnected thoughts and fancies. He stepped along with no suspicion, of course, that for the two peasants he was at that instant the most mysterious and interesting object that one could meet on the high road.

“What sort may you be, pray, if it's not uncivil to ask?” the woman could not resist asking at last when Stepan Trofimovitch glanced absent-mindedly at her. She was a woman of about seven and twenty, sturdily built, with black eyebrows, rosy cheeks, and a friendly smile on her red lips, between which gleamed white even teeth.

“You . . . you are addressing me?” muttered Stepan Trofimovitch with mournful wonder.

“A merchant, for sure,” the peasant observed confidently. He was a well-grown man of forty with a broad and intelligent face, framed in a reddish beard.

“No, I am not exactly a merchant, I ... I ... moi c'est autre chose.” Stepan Trofimovitch parried the question somehow, and to be on the safe side he dropped back a little from the cart, so that he was walking on a level with the cow.

“Must be a gentleman,” the man decided, hearing words not Russian, and he gave a tug at the horse.

“That's what set us wondering. You are out for a walk seemingly?” the woman asked inquisitively again.

“You . . . you ask me?”

“Foreigners come from other parts sometimes by the train; your boots don't seem to be from hereabouts. . . .”

“They are army boots,” the man put in complacently and significantly.

“No, I am not precisely in the army, I ...”

“What an inquisitive woman!” Stepan Trofimovitch mused with vexation. “And how they stare at me . . . mais enfin. In fact, it's strange that I feel, as it were, conscience-stricken before them, and yet I've done them no harm.”

The woman was whispering to the man.

“If it's no offence, we'd give you a lift if so be it's agreeable.”

Stepan Trofimovitch suddenly roused himself.

“Yes, yes, my friends, I accept it with pleasure, for I'm very tired; but how am I to get in?”

“How wonderful it is,” he thought to himself, “that I've been walking so long beside that cow and it never entered my head to ask them for a lift. This 'real life' has something very original about it.

So much other stuff goes on in this whole novel that someone might ask, "Why are you focusing on this little scene with the two peasants?" It's because I find myself on occasion wondering about the further and farther lives of minor characters.

The two cart peasants are confronted with the riddling presence of an...intellectual! They are also being unconsciously influenced by the intellectual narrator. And behind him, the artistic intellectual author, who has placed those two peasants in an unusual circumstance. They must be feeling ghosts! 

Will they later laugh or whisper about that preposterous stranger on the road? The appearance of Stepan Trofimovitch will surely alter, in the weeks ahead (especially for the woman),  an opinion that things are firmly quotidian. 

The world is odder than it appears. How thoughtful of Dostoevsky to bestow on non-intellectuals an extraordinary encounter with someone from the life of reading and thought. The shock will surely vibrate into their own later years.

And how will brute nature -- rain, snow, wind, stone, stream, wheat -- extruded into the human shapes of two cart peasants affect Stepan Trofimovitch? Will his last dream as he soon lies dying spiral around the weirdness of a contrary mode? Will he sigh out his last toward the enigma of peasants, those who eyed him with suspicion?

"Dreams" -- Jaida Dreyer

This song could be a soundtrack for the inside of my head at night when I'm asleep, when unusual things are going on. Murky things, elongated problems, topographical mis-locations. Streets of muted doom, buildings of symbolic confusion. Time as compulsive, fruitless momentum.

And how upon waking, those events linger, spreading a psychological hex into hours of ostensible reality.

on sonority

Besides the usual aspects of music -- melody, harmony, rhythm, counterpoint, development, resolution -- could there something deeper, more essential at work in a composition? A quality to which the listening soul is helpless against impressions that subtly register in and integrate with the unconscious?  That's a question each person will have to answer for himself or herself.

Here, I propose, is sonority as a fantastical commingling of timbres into an organ-like resonance:





This effect is distinct from strictly religious connotations that the word "organ" usually conjures. It's more like a primal synthesis of the human and the unaskable question -- time become the sound of itself. Does sonority only happen during performance, or is it also something mediated through the composer's intuition and imagining?

The blending of timbres into an organ-like plangency is, I suggest, a clue to art as such.

Perhaps through a poet. In some poems (Adam Zagajewski's?), sonority is a thing happening apart from the aural. Not the usual "music" of a poem's language but a something implicit and symbolical. An unheard effect, a cumulative vibration within written gesture -- a poignancy of being in confrontation with Being. Mood as a sonorous choiring of memory, presence, and the necessity of a meaning that is impossible.  

composer Tigran Mansurian on sound and silence

For example, I’ve happened to overhear two people having a tense conversation in the silence of the night under my window. I was unable to understand a word from their dialogue; the subject of their argument was unintelligible. But the sounds they produced (whispered, at times) lent themselves wonderfully to the silence, sometimes breaking out of that silence in short bursts. I listened with delight to their unintelligible conversation, imbued with eccentricities, paradox and absurdity—a conversation that had more depth and content than if I were able to follow its verbal content. The sounds lacked semantic detail and, through the power of their abstraction, were disposed to becoming signs—signs of midnight conversation and fury.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

László Krasznahorkai on W.G. Sebald

His novels could be rather not like fiction, and more like a strange diary. Descriptive in some cases: descriptions of stories, states of being. I’ll be in a city, suddenly, in an unknown city, not feeling any sensational effects but some very strange, small effects, and it feels like a book by Sebald: I am unsure, I am uncertain, this uncertainty moves in my soul, it remains there forever. And this is wonderful. It’s not only scary. It’s wonderful too, because the unknown was perhaps the most important element of Max’s [Sebald's] life. The unknown in things. 

László Krasznahorkai

earliest post of the latest year

Artaud's Error

Antonin Artaud's “theater of cruelty” was more theory than theater, more influence than event. It involves the dismal notion that life and being operate according to principles of terror and agony. Behind the curtains of normality (forms of experience metabolized into culture) brood implacable energies that propel stuff through tortures of time, pathologies of space. Hence the new theater – spectacle as stimulation of and participation in brute awareness. Life and art in a frenzied marriage of anti-ecstasy. God not only dead but a dangerous psychopath.

Speaking of influence, Artaud wouldn't have had very much to get himself worked up about if not for Schopenhauer. I find it striking that Kant still reverberates into so-called philosophy – Continental directly, Analytical indirectly – while Schopenhauer's thought echoes through actual philosophy (music, literature, film, poetry – possible venues of extant wonder). So it seems fitting that Artaud would recast Schopenhauer into a form of art – theater. The problem is that both Schopenhauer and Artaud are wrong about aesthetics.

For Schopenhauer, the experience of art is for transient moments of equanimity – a calm distraction from the chronically blistering absurd of undifferentiated noumenal force (whether creator or auditor, a prophylactic zen trance). For Artaud, the experience of art is for mirroring the horror of the situation.

Neither approach to art is artistic. The former is about therapeutic coping, the latter agonistic mimesis.

Yes, life and being tend toward the sucking, stinking maws of pain and death. But human beings happen to be very strange creatures. We are potential transformers of the hopeless macabre into the unsettling beautiful. There is something mystic afoot that contradicts the rotting regions of despair and darkness. Where would we find the deepest impressions of this mystical afootedness? Let's go to Poland!

Frederick Chopin and Karol Szymanowski in music. Bruno Schulz in literature. Wojciech Has in film. Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski in poetry. Why is Poland an incubator of aesthetic transformation? I really don't know. I live in Arkansas.

Chopin's music is pure sublimation. He inhaled the deathly, diseased hours after midnight and turned them into quietly ecstatic melodies, beatified the darkness into pensive waiting:

Szymanowski's own Song of the Night (Symphony No. 3) expresses mysterious fantasy rather than harrowing nausea from the netherfolds of consciousness: 

Schulz's story "Tailor's Dummies" from The Street of Crocodiles is an alchemical working of language and yesterday into an infinite mythology. Via hilarious melancholy and metaphysical stupefaction, the reader is made skeptical of a claim that the world is merely quotidian principles, merely cruel manifestations.



Has's film The Saragossa Manuscript -- a large tale of nested tales -- is also imbued with visionary humor. Life as curvaceous adventure:

Miłosz's poems question the environment of memory to the extent that loss itself is crowned with a halo of spiritual beauty:


Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Szymborska's poems explore the uncanniness of mere presence and the privilege of mere experience:

Miracle Fair

Commonplace miracle:

that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:

in the dead of night

the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:

a small, airy cloud

yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:

an alder tree reflected in the water,

and that it's backwards left to right

and that it grows there, crown down

and never reaches the bottom,

even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:

winds weak to moderate

turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:

cows are cows.

Second to none:

just this orchard

from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:

scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:

today the sun rose at three-fourteen

and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:

even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,

it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:

the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:

the unthinkable

is thinkable.

Zagajewski's poems are like no other poems being written these days. They are jaw dropping in their subtle spiritization and aesthetization of time and being. This from his book Unseen Hand: Poems:

Improvisation 

You must take up the world’s whole weight 

and make it easier to bear.

Toss it like a knapsack

on your shoulders and set out.

The best time is evening, in spring, when

trees breathe calmly and the night promises

to be fine, elm twigs crackle in the garden.

The whole weight? Blood and ugliness? Can’t be done.

A trace of bitterness will linger on your lips,

and the contagious despair of the old woman

you spotted in the tram.

Why lie? After all rapture

exists only in imagination and leaves quickly.

Improvisation – always just improvisation,

great or small, that’s all we know,

in music, as a jazz trumpet weeps happily

or when you stare at the blank page

or try to outwit 

sorrow by opening a favorite book of poems;

just then the phone usually rings, 

someone asking, would you like to try

the latest model? No thank you.

I prefer the proven brands.

Grayness and monotony remain; grief

the finest elegy can’t heal.

But perhaps there are things hidden from us,

in which sorrow and enthusiasm mix

non-stop, on a daily basis, like the dawn’s birth

above the seashore, no, wait,

like the laughter of those little altar boys

in white vestments, on the corner of St. John and Mark,

remember?

What's disheartening is that today you find music, literature, film, and poetry still under the conscious or unwitting influence of Artaud. Consciousness is considered a curse, life a toxic extract, abjectness the persistent cool. Today, you find music as aggression, literature as smirkingness, film as violence, poetry as abyssal complaint. What's so silly about all this “profound” artistic misery is that it preens with such egoistic gusto. Apparently, you can become famous if your avant-gardism is rebellious, doomy, and pretentious enough. There's something out of kilter about that.

If the world is a cruel and reckless berserking, then it's best not to dwell on that stuff. Better to sublimate and reconfigure. Better to transform our dystopian tears into aesthetic substance. Real art lives and breathes in the quizzical region, in moments that modify the actual into a symbolic otherness – space and time become perplexed rhapsody. Frowning while holding up a theatrical mirror to the vicissitudes of chemical and organic immanence is anti-art; actual art is a gesture toward paradox and transcendence.

Artaud presumed to impose his view of a nihilistic reality on the audience via scene and sound. To shake people awake. That's megolomania and guruism rather than art. Real art suggests and is uncertain. Real art is a transmutation of dark materials into evocative shadows, into substrates of possible light.  

1896 - 1948