a strange thing happened to me...

...while reading this article:

"After the Revolution" 


This article is a review of the book What Ever Happened To Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici.


I was reading along because I like Modernist stuff. I was not prepared for the effect this article had on me -- a kind of spiritual dissociation occurred in my head. I began to wonder about what was so cosmically at stake for Josipovici. What might be percolating beneath his strident manifestoing? Why is he so obsessive? I began to suspect an existential myopia behind his fealty to one form of artistic/literary consciousness and his annoyance at another.

Yes, Modernist stuff is totally swell stuff. But even a return to Modernist sensibility in our literature and the other fine arts is not going to soften our mortality nor uncover essential meaning in an absurd universe. Since there are no answers in Modernism or anything else, why get your underwear in such conniptious wrinklage?

It. Don't. Mean. That. Much.

Billions of human beings currently breathing on Earth could not care less about the virtues of experimental, expressive literature in contrast to old-timey (and now new-timey) realist, narrative literature. If a lot of authors now are writing books you don't like, so what? I'll punch your Chagrined Sophisticate card so you can move on with your life.

Now, I'm okay with casual discussions about art and literature -- the various qualities and whatnot. Give me a bottle of red wine, and I'll be verbose, maybe even enthusiastic. But while reading this review, I began to wonder if Josipovici had gone off the deep end, and maybe needed to retire to a cabin in the woods somewhere to calm himself down.

Bursting into heretofore unseen or unwritten planes of expression is, when you look at it calmly, not going to alter our basic situation. For a while, it can make us feel stimulated and profound, yes. But it's not going to usher in a new world or persuade a god to appear. So why get stressed out over it?

And for what it's worth: having read War and Peace three times for the sheer historical, psychological, metaphysical, and (yes) narrative sweep of the thing, I would not displace it in the aesthetic canon with a necessarily Modernist book. Both things -- tradition and revolution -- can exist as poised equals. And neither thing is going to crack the riddle of Being.

a Wallace Stevens poem

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour


Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough. 

Wallace Stevens

Schopenhauer's Troupe of Souls: The Poems of William Crawford

Will Crawford has two books of poems out now: Fire in the Marrow (NeoPoiesis Press, 2010) and Actual Tigers (Edgar & Lenore's Publishing House, 2012). 

Crawford's poems contain a coiled energy, which is released as they are read. This energy vivifies the souls moving through his poems. These people are moments or cross-sections of the (especially) modern human paradox – cartilage and emotion, viscera and expression, substance and duration. Tragedy and persistence. 

The people appearing in Crawford's poems ride a carousel of deep-gathered momentum. Implicit is the numinous (unknowable) force that through the skeletal fuse drives these forms of human spirit, propelling them into event and circumstance. These characters are instances of philosophy without their even realizing it. The ghost of Schopenhauer leans in to observe. And is bemused at how these expressions of life, torment, beauty, and melancholy – these human beings -- are immune from any compulsion for metaphysical context. They are what they are (intense fusions of unconscious will and stubborn being), and they are where they are (moving on action stages that could be secretly choreographed and directed by Werner Herzog).  

I've read and reread these Crawford poems. There are many possibilities of encounter and appreciation when reading poetry. I keep coming back to my thought about Schopenhauer and the numinous. I don't know if the poet intends what comes to me in this thought. Maybe it's just the way my mind skews. But I'm struck by what is "there" without being overtly suggested by the poet. What is implicit, yet powerfully so: the dark hidden region – the metaphysical penumbra – that arcs above dramas of bodies and souls. In other words, there is poetic power on the page and another, unwritten power hovering beyond the page.

amazon.com

amazon.com

the most beautiful love letter...

...I've ever heard.

a profound book review

"Faustian Bargain"


About the Holocaust.

Danilo Kiš -- "Serbia's Holocaust Memorist"

It is with a kind of muted awe that I begin to have thoughts about this writer and his work. I have yet to read his work. But the article linked below is sufficient to persuade me that Kiš was someone of cultural and literary depth.

article about Danilo Kiš

I am going to be provocative

I don't wish to ruffle sophisticated feathers, but a certain thing must be stated (so it gets registered in time and space):


Van Cliburn's Chopin makes a peculiar and lasting impression, has a unique intensity, is aesthetically remarkable.