Horner's Corner

 

 

 

 

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open, and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,

I cried to dream again.

The Tempest 3.2.148-156

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In Disobedient Rooms: On J.G. Ballard By China Miéville

The publication of any book by J.G. Ballard at this moment–let alone so colossal and career-spanning a volume as The Complete Stories, running to nearly 1,200 pages–is an occurrence that can only be about more than itself. All writers are writers of their time, of course, but Ballard, who after a fight with cancer died in April 2009, feels somehow uniquely, precisely so. This book marks the fact that we are all post-Ballard now: it’s not that we’ve gotten beyond him but rather that we remain ineluctably defined by him. Completists have pointed out that, its title notwithstanding, this volume is not a truly comprehensive collection of all Ballard’s published short fiction. Those few omissions are a disappointment. Nevertheless, they are few, and despite them the book is indispensable.

more via In Disobedient Rooms: On J.G. Ballard.

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“His body on the cross was therefore fully and entirely subject to the laws of nature.  In the picture the face is terribly smashed with blows, swollen, covered with terrible, swollen, and bloodstained bruises, the eyes open and squinting; the large, open whites of the eyes have a sort of dead and glassy glint. . . .

Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, though it may seem strange, as some huge engine of the latest design, which has senselessly seized, cut to pieces, and swallowed up–impassively and unfeelingly–a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of nature and all its laws, worth the entire earth, which was perhaps created solely for the coming of that Being!  The picture seems to give expression to the idea of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subordinated, and this idea is suggested to you unconsciously.  The people surrounding the dead man, none of whom is shown in the picture, must have been overwhelmed by a feeling of terrible anguish and dismay on that evening which had shattered all their hopes and almost all their beliefs at one fell blow.  They must have parted in a state of the most dreadful terror, though each of them carried away within him a mighty thought which could never be wrested from him.  And if, on the eve of the crucifixion, the Master could have seen what He would look like when taken from the cross, would he have mounted the cross and died as he did?”

Feodor Dostoevsky: Spoken by Ippolit in The Idiot (Penguin 1955, tran. by David Magarshak, 446-7)

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Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length;
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o’er the disentangled doom.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

PB Shelley

Full text: here

Keep the flame alive: never abandon hope that we can make a better world

BEAT THE WHITES WITH THE RED WEDGE (El Lissitsky, 1920)

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Marcel Proust

Alexander García Düttmann

The name of a place can promise happiness, Adorno says in this section (“Meditations on Metaphysics”, Negative Dialectics) after appealing to Proust. For the promise to be kept, for happiness to come into existence, all that would seem to be required is a visit to the actual place. And yet when, attracted by the force inherent in the promise of happiness, one arrives at the place in question, one finds that happiness withdraws as if it were a rainbow. What has allowed then for an experience here is precisely the difference between the name and the named. Adorno does not wish to denounce the anticipation of the imagination as an illusion, just as he does not wish to reduce the experience to the discovery of an empirical truth. This is why he insists on the fact that the withdrawal of happiness at the point where one would expect to be happy does not amount to a disappointment. Rather, one realizes that, having arrived at the place itself by following the trail laid out by the name, one has been brought too close to the promised happiness for it to be experienced as such. Happiness, then, lies neither in the image emanating from the name nor in the reality of the place named, but in the space and in the time stretched out between the image and reality. It springs from seeing something from the inside. However, insofar as the inside is just the other side of the outside, it only appears truly when removed from the thing. What Adorno gives here is the exact definition of the idea, even if he does not employ the philosophical term. In his “Short Commentaries,” he characterizes Proust as a “Platonist” who dismissed opinion. Could one summarize Adorno’s argument by asserting that happiness is linked to the disclosure of the idea? That happiness is to be found residing in neither the name nor the named may only be understood once one has undergone the experience of searching for it in the place or the reality towards which the name points. Happiness, in other words, would depend entirely on whether one reaches a limit at which a second life could begin; one that is not the imaginary life of the promise and yet does not merge with real life in the conventional sense. It is as if the fulfillment of the promise of happiness consisted in the preservation of its form instead of the actualization of its content, or as if keeping the promise meant returning to it so as to render the form a part of the content. Adorno speaks here of a “metaphysical experience,” and not of experience in general, because he wants to highlight the distance that separates happiness from both a matter of fact and a state of mind. Metaphysics interpreted in this manner has something to do with one’s own comportment towards life, with a pursuit of happiness and the yielding of an insight that manifests itself in the form of a lack of disappointment. It thereby acquires a moral or ethical dimension. By protecting each other from dumbness and madness—from the necessity of the literal and the vacuity of the figurative, from the ontological “there is” and the psychological “as if”—the name and the named bestow happiness with the reality of a second life. What Adorno ultimately suggests is that the named is too real to be real in any morally relevant fashion while the name, on the contrary, is never real enough. Does Proust not write, in the last volume of the Recherche, that it is always the attachment to an object owned that provokes the death of the owner? In the wake of Adorno’s reading of Proust, one could claim that happiness is not an object to be owned, that it does not have the form of a real thing, and that in becoming attached to it one runs the danger of turning it into something that could be appropriated. …(more)

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From a Notebook that Never Was

The ridiculous, work, and dedication.

by Fernando Pessoa

Asterisks separate the short, autonomous prose pieces that follow. None was written in a notebook (see the longer note at the end for information on the author’s real notebooks). Some of the original manuscripts contain alternate words or phrases between the lines or in the margins; I have used the word or phrase I find most appealing for the translation. Lacunae and unfinished sentences—frequent inPessoa’s posthumously revealed work—are indicated by six dots: “. . . . . .”.—RZ

 
I always acted on the inside . . . I never touched life . . . Whenever I began to trace an action, I finished it in my dreams, heroically . . . A sword weighs more than the idea of a sword . . . I commanded large armies, won great battles, savored huge defeats—all inside me . . . I enjoyed strolling alone through green parks and down wide corridors, issuing commands to the trees and challenges to the hanging portraits . . . In the wide and dusky corridor that’s at the back of the palace I often strolled with my fiancée . . . I never had a real fiancée . . . I never knew how to love . . . I only knew how to dream of loving . . . If I liked to wear ladies’ rings on my fingers, it’s because I sometimes supposed that my hands belonged to a princess and that I, at least in the motions of my hands, was the woman I loved . . . One day I was found dressed up as a queen . . . I was dreaming I was my royal wife . . . I liked to see my face reflected, for I could dream it was someone else’s face—namely that of my beloved, since the reflection I saw denoted feminine features . . . How often my lips touched my lips in a mirror! . . . How often I clasped one of my hands with the other, or fondled my hair with my hand I’d become strange to, as if it were her hand touching me. It isn’t me who’s telling you this . . . Who’s speaking is what’s left of me.

More here:

From a Notebook that Never Was by Fernando Pessoa : Poetry Magazine [article/magazine].

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Samuel Butler -Self Portrait

Always eat grapes downwards–that is, always eat the best grape first; in this way there will be none better left on the bunch, and each grape will seem good down to the last. If you eat the other way, you will not have a good grape in the lot. Besides, you will be tempting Providence to kill you before you come to the best.

This is why autumn seems better than spring: in the autumn we are eating our days downwards, in the spring each day still seems ‘very bad.’ People should live on this principle more than they do, but they do live on it a good deal; from the age of, say, fifty we eat our days downwards.

Samuel Butler (1832-1902)

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Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19th 1863

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I just published a novel about music. Early in the process of writing it, I was warned by a similarly music-obsessive friend that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Since that first somewhat menacing reminder, I’ve heard the line frequently.

At first blush, the claim is a smugly dismissive one: verbal descriptions of music are doomed to be pointlessly, perhaps even ridiculously, inferior to actual music. As a reader, I resisted this idea; it just felt false, though I couldn’t quite say why. But as a writer, this assertion paralyzed me: I didn’t want to waste two or three years trying to produce something that could not be produced. I tried to put aside the line’s foundational snobbery (“My music is too ineffable for your inky art”), and then, reassuringly, it seemed like nothing more than a truism: words are words and music is music. And perfume is perfume; paintings are paintings; facial features are facial features. Yet writers are never counseled against attempting to evoke paintings or smells or faces or feelings or buildings or the nonmelodic sounds of jackhammers, thunder, or snoring. What was so elusive about music that it couldn’t be captured by words?

 Read more by Arthur Phillips at: The Believer – Dancing About Architecture.

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‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

George Eliot (from Middlemarch)

photo: Mike Sinclair

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This is the Senate House of  University College, London. Architect was Charles Holden (1937 ).This Art Deco building is supposed to be the inspiriation for Orwell’s “Ministry of Love” in 1984.

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By T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

Published: June 5, 2009

Twenty years ago, John Updike published a memoir, “Self-­Consciousness,” which opens with an extended reminiscence of his hometown. The author has been stranded for the evening while his mother and daughter are at the movies, and he walks the streets of Shillington, Pa., in a light rain, reliving the past in the incantatory detail with which he informed and illuminated his fiction, summoning up the names of departed local merchants, of his teachers and elementary school classmates, recalling the material texture of his childhood right on down to the candies, magazines and coloring books offered for sale at the variety store, recording the essence of his time amongst us. “The street,” he writes, “the house where I had lived, seemed blunt, modest in scale, simple; this deceptive simplicity composed their precious, mystical secret, the conviction of whose existence I had parlayed into a career, a message to sustain a writer book after book.” That message, that testimony of an individual and recollective consciousness as it relives and reviews the matter of a lifetime and grapples with the effects of aging, disease, decline and death, is the focus of Updike’s final collection of new fiction.

Of these 18 stories, all but one (an odd travelogue called “Morocco,” dating from 1979) were published in the last decade, and their themes and situations hark back to the author’s earliest autobiographical fiction, especially the stories set in Olinger, Updike’s fictionalized version of Shillington. The difference here is that the protagonists in this collection are, for the most part, at the end of their lives, and so the news of familial drama and divorce and the cocktail parties, barbecues and casual wooings of quotidian life in suburbia is given retrospectively, wistfully, presented in the larger context as memories of lost moments and lost opportunities. Updike once described himself as “a literary spy within average, public-school, supermarket America.” So he was. And these are his last smuggled dispatches, made all the more poignant for their finality.

Read more via Book Review – ‘My Father’s Tears – And Other Stories,’ by John Updike – Review – NYTimes.com.

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The rich brown-umber hue the oaks unfold

When spring’s young sunshine bathes their trunks in gold,

So rich, so beautiful, so past the power

Of words to paint–my heart aches for the dower

The pencil gives to soften and infuse

This brown luxuriance of unfolding hues,

This living luscious tinting woodlands give

Into a landscape that might breathe and live,

And this old gate that claps against the tree

The entrance of spring’s paradise should be–

Yet paint itself with living nature fails:

The sunshine threading through these broken rails

In mellow shades no pencil e’er conveys,

And mind alone feels fancies and portrays.

I like the way the art/nature theme takes on a political, yet still entirely ‘natural’ turn towards the end: Clare is thinking of the enclosures that had driven so many like him from the land – their land. Worth remembering next time you are walking in the countryside and see a ‘private property’ sign blocking off a copse or woodland path.

(Paintings of trees by John Sell Cotman, apart from ‘The Cornfield’ which is by Constable (1826) -immediately below; photograph by  CH)

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I recently went to see Twelfth Night. Big deal: Shakespeare’s on in London somewhere every week. I had a ticket as a birthday present, but after a long day at work I just wasn’t much in the mood. Let it wash over you and pretend to be into it I said to myself. Fact was, it wasn’t possible to do that. By Act 1 Scene 2 I was up and paying attention; by the interval my head was spinning

The Bard of Avon.

with the images, themes and the language. When it was over I was too awake to sleep when I got back.  I helped that the production was great (Derek Jacobi as Malvolio was particularly memorable). But here’s the good thought: when we see/hear/visit a ‘classic’ it can feel like paying one’s respects to a monument. When the classic comes and twists your melon despite a deep desire for sleep midweek after a long day at work you know the Bard of Avon is as good as they say, if you had any doubt.  I’ve been Shakespeare crazy, all over again, ever since..

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