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words. music. pictures. scheherazade.
Seeing Words: Does Verisimilitude Matter?
Peter Mendelsund, a pretty sick polymath who also happens to be the associate art director at Knopf, has a lengthy, thought-provoking post on how our visual imagination works when we read, whether we can visualize characters or things in a work of fiction with reliable specificity, but more crucially: whether it really matters at all that we do so.
I’m at work right now, quote-unquote slogging through regulatory material which needs to be reviewed, so can’t summarize Peter’s post in finer detail. But in quick essence (Peter, don’t hate me for rushing through this!), Peter goes through a series of examples from Anna Karenina, The Sound and the Fury, Moby Dick, Madame Bovary, To the Lighthouse, etc., and notes various instances in which he cannot picture at all what a character or a place looks like.
Via contemplations on Wittgenstein and Barthes, among other things, Peter determines the following -
Good books incite us towards imagining - towards filling in an author’s suggestions.
But there is an important distinction: that this imagination on the part of the reader is not at all a striving to recreate an author’s ideals or original intentions, but instead a striving toward an opposite aim, if you will - not toward a recreation but toward a reduction -
Writers reduce when they write, and readers reduce when they read. The brain itself is built to reduce. Verisimilitude is not only a false idol, but also an unattainable goal…
Picturing stories is making reductions.
My quick thoughts before hopping back to my spreadsheet: it’s interesting that Peter applies a passage from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Grammar to his thoughts -
We do sometimes see memory pictures in our minds: but commonly they are only scattered through the memory like illustrations in a story book.
I also thought about Wittgenstein while reading Peter’s post, especially about the foreword from Philosophical Investigations, which in essence says that one can only make sense of the “scattered memory pictures” mentioned in the quote above, not through looking for a determined identity or essence, but through -
a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing… as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre.
It’s an intentional point of fact that Wittgenstein describes his Philosophical Investigations in pictorial terms when he calls it “an album” which should not cohere into “any single direction.”
Funny how Peter thinks about Wittgenstein while providing a litany of literary examples in which he cannot pictorially imagine what the character looks like: this is how Sebald’s narrator in Austerlitz describes what Austerlitz looks like -
Whenever I see a photograph of Wittgenstein somewhere or other, I feel more and more as if Austerlitz were gazing at me out of it, and when I look at Austerlitz it is as if I see in him the disconsolate philosopher…
Notice that Sebald’s description of Austerlitz is not really a description of a verisimilitude? But of Schwindelgefühle. (Okay, my conviction in that last statement aside, that was a pun obviously for the Sebald nerds: the German title for Sebald’s Vertigo is indeed Schwindel. Gefühle.)
I have to run now, but a few of you may recall my post about the photographer William Gedney I wrote a couple of years ago, about Gedney trying to paint - totally from his memory - a posterior view of a woman in a Vuillard painting he saw at an exhibition. Obviously, there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence in likeness between Vuillard’s woman and Gedney’s representation of her. But it’s funny how I discover Peter’s conclusion in his post - that verisimilitude in representation/imagination doesn’t matter - in my Gedney post, as well -
it wouldn’t make much of a difference to know which exact Vuillard he saw: we know that Gedney’s girl, painted from memory, can only be an approximation, at best, of the girl in the actual Vuillard painting he saw. However, if we did have the opportunity to compare Gedney’s girl next to Vuillard’s girl, we would no doubt recognize that Gedney’s girl is indeed the girl from the Vuillard, not as much from the verisimilitude of physical details, but from the same infinite care and compassion with which both men looked at the small, lovely busy-ness of the woman turned away: their sights on the same point on the same axis, as if they share a common nexus of memory.
Uncanny, right? But again, Wittgenstein says it better and more succinctly than either of us in Philosophical Investigations -
What makes my image of him into an image of him?
Not its looking like him.
(The first image is stolen from Peter’s post, the second is by Mikka Rantanen, the third is by Nicolas de Crecy, the fourth is taken from Austerlitz, and the last is from William Gedney’s sketchbook)
The Slippery “I”
The slippery “I”: Walter Benjamin has this to say about the way with which Proust and Kafka use “I” (tr. Esther Leslie) -
When Proust, in his Recherche du temps perdu, and Kafka, in his diaries, use I, for both of them it is equally transparent, glassy. Its chambers have no local coloring; every reader can occupy it today and move out tomorrow… In these authors the subject adopts the protective coloring of the planet, which will turn grey in the coming catastrophes.
Benjamin scribbled his thoughts above on the drug prescription pad discarded by his doctor friend, Fritz Fränkel. Wonderful, the lugubrious notion expressed in the final sentence of his thoughts. I’d also add the “I” in Cavafy’s 4th Century Alexandria poems to the company of Proust and Kafka’s, as well as Sebald’s “I,” within whom other storytelling voices are nested…
Let me tell you a story. When I was a little kid in Korea, I used to play with this girl, who essentially bossed me around to do everything she wanted me to do. We only played house, doctor, etc., or rather, she forced me to play them - role playing games. Even as a kid, I knew that she was very pretty and grasped that I’d better inhabit the roles she’d ordered me to play with gusto if I wanted to please her.
I mention this girl because I was talking to my mom last week, and she reminded me of one day in my childhood past, when I went missing. She panicked and enlisted all the neighbors to look for me, even got the police involved. When my mom found me, I was at the girl’s house. At the very moment of discovery, my mom saw that the girl was helping me go pee on a tree in the yard, pretending that she was my mother in the darkness of dusk.
My mom had the occasion to bring her up in conversation with me, because she had recently talked on the phone with an old friend in Korea, and the friend mentioned by way of casual update that my girl friend died at an early age due to cancer a few years back, leaving behind a husband and a toddler daughter.
Benjamin highlights the ludic qualities in the I’s of Proust and Kafka, that every reader can occupy their I’s on a whim and move out equally capriciously. Perhaps that’s what we are doing fundamentally when we slip into Proust or Kafka’s I’s (and by extension, Cavafy’s and Sebald’s, et cetera): not so much reading by or through them, but slipping in and out, playing.
When my mom found me at the yard of the girl’s house those many years ago, would we not likely have been cloaked in the protective coloring of the planet, learning to inhabit other I’s and experiences, just playing games, before we sadly and eventually came to mind any pending catastrophes of this world? And so I learned to read I’s with her, I’d like to believe. In another fragment retrieved from Adorno’s archive, Benjamin wrote the lines below in his tiny script as opening lines of a poem, and I’m going to pretend that these Ariadnic lines were meant for my old friend all along (which also means they’re likewise meant for me) -
When I begin a song
It sticks
And if I become aware of you
It is an illusion
(First image - a snapshot of a page from a copy of Walter Benjamin’s Archive which I keep at my office next to the Volcker Rule reports; latter two images are from Qiu’s wonderful flickr)
readingmarksonreading tumblr is getting too good -
Pgs. 194 & 195 of David Markson’s copy of Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett:
…
Further on down the page: “Heidegger calls this field of Being Dasein. Dasein (which, in German, means literally Being-there) is his name for man.”
Then on the following page: “That Heidegger can say everything he wants to say about human existence without using either ‘man’ or ‘consciousness’ means that the gulf between subject and object, or between mind and body, that has been dug by modern philosophy need not exist if we do not make it.”
… then readingmarksonreading moves to Markson’s novels in which he sees traces of Heidegger, and this observation below on Markson’s Vanishing Point -
Just after tossing in the word “Dasein” in Vanishing Point, on pg. 160, Markson writes:
“Einsatzgruppen.”
(Which were SS paramilitary death squads.)
… and so on, just a delightful running catalogue of David Markson’s notes in the margins of his books which readingmarksonreading has bought secondhand from The Strand, his thoughts criss-crossing from Markson’s marginalia to his novels, so forth.
As a form of writing: marginalia, small notes, lists and catalogues, diary entries, etc. Fragments, shards, ephemeralia: small in ambition, happiness in a corner, das Glück im Winkel. Walser’s Microscripts comes to mind, deftly translated by Susan Bernofsky (I’ve two copies already but will be buying the paperback edition due out later this year, illustrated by Maira Kalman).
Who else? Walter Benjamin, who was also fond of pencil micrography, like Walser. In his letter to Jula Radt-Cohn on June 9, 1926 (tr. Esther Leslie) -
You will see that - starting about a week ago, I have once more entered a period of small writing, in which, even after long intervals, I always find some kind of home again, and into which I should like to entice you. If you perceive this little box as homely, then nothing should prevent you from becoming its Princess. (You do know the “New Melusine,” don’t you?)
“The New Melusine” is a story in Goethe’s William Meister’s Journeyman Years, in which a small, magical box contains a miniaturized world which is constantly under a threat of disappearance. A world constantly under a threat of disappearance… if you think of it: is any earthly world in its natural course ever not under such a threat? Doesn’t seem far-fetched by any means, if we follow this logic, to record our disappearing world with small writings. Benjamin again -
Memory does this: lets the things appear small, compresses them. Land of the sailor.
(Last image of Syrian refugees crossing into Turkey for sanctuary, by Moises Saman)
Death in Alexandria, 340 A.D.: Cavafy
Last Friday night at home, working off the buzz I’d inherited from the four beers I’d guzzled during my company’s happy hour (literally a one hour-long affair, spread on the credenza near the hallway), I logged into my twitter to tweet about a dream I had the night before in which I wrote a tidy tome analyzing Paul Celan’s poems using sabermetrics (the results of my book proved that - post VOPR, UZR and adjusted OPS via dream logic - Celan was more than a little overrated, which made me a pariah with both the literati and baseball statisticians). Just before logging out, however, I saw @arachnomaria’s link to Cavafy’s stunning poem, “Myres: Alexandria in 340 A.D.,” translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. The poem, I guess, can ostensibly be taken as an elegy, except there’s nothing much elegiac about it on the surface.
In the poem, a youth named Myres has died. He was a Christian in Alexandria during a period when the city, after Constantine’s rule, was undergoing a tidal religious transformation - in the beginning of the fourth century, Alexandria was predominantly pagan; there were laws and injunctions which persecuted Christians for their faith unto death. Then, during and after Constantine, Alexandria increasingly and en masse converted to Christianity, until it was the pagans who became marginalized, culminating in the destruction of the Serapeum led by Theophilus. (I have to note and strongly recommend: Daniel Mendelsohn’s annotations to his Cavafy translation, by the way, serve as excellent guide to Cavafy’s series of poems set in Alexandria of this era.)
In Cavafy’s poem, the “I” is a pagan friend or lover (?) of Myres, and the final stanza is a stunning testament of mourning which summons the personally emotional, metaphysical and religio-political sense of loss, all at once with chilling realism. By the closing lines of the poem, “I” is observing the diligent rituals of Christian funeral rites, listening to the priests talk of Myres’ soul -
And all of a sudden I was seized by a queer
impression. Vaguely, I had the feeling that
Myres was going far away from me;
had a feeling that he, a Christian, was being united
with his own, and that I was becoming
a stranger to him, very much a stranger; I sensed besides
a certain doubt coming over me: perhaps I had been fooled
by my passion, had always been a stranger to him.—
I flew out of their horrible house,
and quickly left before their Christianity
could get hold of, could alter, the memory of Myres.
This poem is bar none the best non-Christian Christian poem ever. The perspective is profoundly pagan, but that stark realization of “I,” that it may be the Christian faith which will ultimately estrange “I” from the memory of Myres… There’s a deliberate and brilliant blurring of boundaries between the pagan and the Christian - the perspective of the poem repudiates Christianity, but the ultimate confession does not deny Christianity’s darkly real hold on the “I” of the poem, over the memory of Myres, and finally ends up fundamentally coloring his entire relationship with Myres, threatening his lasting remembrance of him.
The sense of mourning, as expressed by Cavafy, is multivalent. In historical context, this voice seems all the more sad and desperate, backed up against the wall. This diary entry from Roland Barthes’ The Mourning Diary flashes across my mind for some reason now (tr. Richard Howard) -
December 9
Mourning: indisposition, a situation with no possible blackmail.
It’s just a hopeless fight to preserve the memory of the lost, which, in the end, has to do with our stupid desire to bring back those whom we’ve lost with futile rites and gestures: a syncretic and universalist foolishness, equally Christian and pagan at once. Cavafy expresses this very foolishness of our rituals and desires in another poem called “Cleitus’s Illness” set in Alexandria of the same era. In this poem, an old housemaid tries to bring Cleitus, a privileged Christian youth, back from the verge of death and to health by chanting litanies to a pagan idol she once worshiped as a girl, in a Christian home of her master, no less. Here’s how the poem ends -
She secretly takes some cakes, and wine, and honey.
She brings them before the idol. She chants as many
litanies as she recalls: the bits from either end, the middles. The foolish
woman
doesn’t realize that it matters little to the black demon
whether a Christian is or isn’t cured.
Yet, it is because of this foolish endeavor that the maidservant has our sympathies, that she moves us. All the more moving because no matter the futility of her vigilance, there is still a sense of life in her petition. Cavafy. Just one day before the entry on mourning which I quoted above, Barthes made another entry on mourning -
(Images, top to bottom: by Alexey Titarenko, Roland Barthes’ handwriting from a “Mourning Diary” entry, a detail from Ghirlandaio’s Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuonni)
JACKET MECHANICAL: On Late Style
My friend gould, who has an uncanny ability to pick out the best material from the interwebs, pointed me to an excellent blog kept by Peter Mendelsund, a book designer who works at Knopf. In the post linked above, Peter contemplates the notion of late style in music and literature, before turning to the possibility of late style in design. This is fascinating to me, because it’s never crossed my mind to look at the discipline of design through the Adornian (and to some less degree, Said-ian) lens of late style, and what he has to say about the subject is inspired. Peter -
If Design is not predicated on youth; perhaps it demands timeliness.Familiarity with the zeitgeist is integral to Design.Conversely, Repudiation of the zeitgeist is integral to “late style.”
This is good stuff. It makes sense to me but for a practicing designer whose trade is predicated upon being in step with the demands and fashion of the marketplace, such a realization offers no consolation. And it doesn’t for Peter -
I fear that Design is for the young.
In On Late Style, Edward Said has this to say about Glenn Gould’s eccentric pianism (bold mine) -
The tension in Gould’s virtuosity remains unresolved: that is, by virtue of their eccentricity his performances make no attempt to ingratiate themselves with his listeners or reduce the distance between their lonely ecstatic brilliance and the confusions of the everyday world….
… [Late style] has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them.
I can think of a few exceptions to the rule, but Said’s “definition” of late style rings true to me, by and large. For example: Beethoven’s Opus 110 Sonata. Its Arioso dolente contains perhaps the most openly despairing passage of music among his late sonatas (Beethoven’s accompanying injunction is Ermattet, klagend – Exhausted, lamenting). Yet it leads, eventually and inexplicably, by the way of fugue, into a finale which is transcendentally ecstatic, life-affirming. The twin flames of disenchantment and pleasure. Looking back at Peter’s post on late style in design, it seems that he’s also aware of this dialectic -
“Late style” is made up of strange, almost warring bedfellows:Wisdom and rebellion; Nostalgic longing and philosophical detachment; Existential sobriety and religious reckoning; Stubborn, hard-won intransigence and nothing-to-lose flexibility…“Late style” generally includes liberation from the strictures of established form.
Going by this enchanted logic, maybe Peter and other veteran designers don’t have to be so pessimistic. I think one of Jean Genet’s metaphors in Prisoner of Love illustrates this concept of late style, albeit inadvertently, better than anything I can say about it -
If you put two matches together and light them, they twine so close you can’t separate their single ember. Two immortalities in one. And so with the bard and the power that he sings, as long as no one goes and touches what’s left of the confused but splendid conflagration.
Are designers capable of this conflagration? I believe so.
(Images: by I-Shien Lai from flickr, by Masahisa Fukase)
Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularityis here. It’ll start shipping next week and should be stacked in a bookstore near you by the Ides of April. Clear your calendars, folks: there be reading ahead.
Thought: Levi Stahl should have a TV show in which he holds up books and talks about them.
… in which he also dispenses ironic sartorial advice. And I swear I see the face of Wilfred Benitez in 3-D out of the patterns of the cover.
(Source: ivebeenreadinglatelyannex-blog, via thedizzies-blog)
What is realism? That is the central question running throughout the first section of J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, aptly titled - wait for it - “Realism.” I don’t know any other writer who is more intelligently mischievous than Coetzee, and he plays it very sly in this section. The premise is simple: Elizabeth Costello, a famous literary writer, arrives in a Pennsylvania college town to accept an award with her son. The narrative pivots around the apparently useless function of realism in contemporary literature -
“Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things.”
And in fiction, according to this narrator, characters embody contending ideas but in doing so, prohibits the ideas from floating free. Coetzee also does his tongue-in-cheek best to expose the artifice of his fictional construct; he pushes along the action with dispassionate directives that seem more like cookie-cutter screenplay directions than anything, i.e.: “We skip the rest of the hotel scene, move to the foyer.” Mapquest directions can seem less bland than this.
Yet, this is a deliberate game. The reader realizes that Coetzee’s narration is anything but dispassionate, as it’s a remarkable act of psychological ventriloquism, a free indirect speech which closely tracks the interiority of Elizabeth’s son. All the while Coetzee points out the artifice of realist fiction, pointing out that realism tethers ideas and imaginations down to things, the evidences that Coetzee underhandedly presents through his writing prove the exact opposite - that the things that we are bound by, even and especially our bodies, actually open up our imagination, our emotional lives. For example, Elizabeth’s son sleeps with a woman who interviewed his mother earlier in the day. Coetzee chooses to narrate the son’s experience retrospectively. “We skip ahead in the text rather than in the performance,” he says -
“When he thinks back over those hours, one moment returns with a sudden force, the moment when her knee slips under his arm and folds into the armpit. Curious that the memory of an entire scene should be dominated by one moment, not obviously significant, yet so vivid that he can still almost feel the ghostly thigh against his skin. Does the mind by nature prefer sensations to ideas, the tangible to the abstract? Or is the folding of the woman’s knee just a mnemonic, from which will unfold the rest of the night?”
What a passage. That haunting last question posed with a Proustian inflection: Or is the folding of the woman’s knee just a mnemonic, from which will unfold the rest of the night? From the smallest containment - a glimpse of a fold from a woman’s knee - a dream space opens up, a narcotic space divinely expansive with metaphysical proportions.
Which brings us to the attached music file, sorry about the circuitous route. Sam Beam, in a brief introduction to the live account of this song in NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, says that it took him more than 10 years to write this brief song. It begins this way -
Mary Anne, do you remember
the tree by the river
when we were seventeen?
Dark canyon wall, the call and the answer
and the mare in the pasture
pitch black and baring its teeth.
Not difficult to imagine how a single mnemonic, be it a folding of her knee or a tree by the river, can resurrect an entire world you’d believed had long perished with time, heartbreak and all, and every swift glance at each small thing suddenly reveals a hidden code, all specifying the same secret, that I haven’t forgotten, I have not forgotten, could never have forgotten.
(All images are by the amazing Bill Henson; a grateful hat tip to my friend gould for forwarding yet another great find for me)
(Source: phonofranca-blog)
Well, I started this tumblr one night while I was reading Anne Carson’s Nox and listening to the first side of Wayne Shorter’s Night Dreamer in 45 RPM (hence the name of this site). And I’ve spewed on about Carson or name-dropped her and her amazing books here, there, while heating up brown rice in the office microwave, while running and thinking about doing ecstasy, while fasting…
So it’s not hard for y'alls to imagine my small cardiac arrest at having seen these images below from her forthcoming translation of Sophocles, Antigonick? This book’s approach makes a lot of sense if you’ve read and loved what she wrote about in Decreation… more later on that. ND, you need to please send me a review copy, I’ll do your laundry…
newdirectionspublishing has the deets, and also, more pics from the New Directions Blog:
"I remember this old guy once telling me, “To thine own self be true.” And I was like: “Yeah, well, I’ve got some advice for you, pal: use real words that are actual words in our time right here, for starters.” And then he, red-faced, said: “O.K., well, so… be true to your own self.” The worst advice I’ve ever received was—well, it was that same advice. I tried being true to my own self for a few months but it was such a hassle. Honesty, self-disclosure, closely considering my own motivations? Ugh. I got absolutely nothing done. And once I started faking it again, everything got easy."
~ Hehe, the great George Saunders on why he’s not all for keepin’ it real, over at The New Yorker Online.
I read Proust with Prof. Macksey in this very room years ago (there’s a typo below, btw, it’s Richard Macksey, not Robert); it was a grad student seminar but I snuck in there somehow as an undergrad, although my interest in “serious” literature was casual at best. He smoked a fragrant pipe throughout every evening, while talking about Proust and the music of Cimarosa or something, and by the degree of discoloration of his teeth, one could tell that he enjoyed the pipe as much as he enjoyed his books. Intimidatingly erudite and multilingual, he not only taught in the humanities at Johns Hopkins but was also a professor at the Johns Hopkins Medical School.
He actually owns something like a quarter or a half (or more?) of the collection from Henry James’s personal library, and even back then, he was fielding calls from libraries and institutions everywhere, which were all, essentially and rudely, when-might-you-be-dying queries about his estate planning. He let us look at and browse any book in his library, which contained some of the rarest first editions I’ve seen in person. But more intriguing was the game of reading the marginalia in those beautiful books and trying to guess whether it was in the hand of James, or Emerson, or Spencer, or Gide…
“This is the personal library of Robert A. Macksey, a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He is the owner of one of the largest personal libraries in the state of Maryland, with over 70,000 books and manuscripts along with art work, worth over $4 million US D. He is known to hold graduate level courses in his famous library.” (Click photo for more)
Courtesy Aloke Kumar on Facebook, where he also writes about World Sparrow Day, which was March 20th.
(Source: melanyouth)
The Argo: Hisaji Hara & Balthus.
I haven’t been able to check my tumblr with any great frequency recently, but whenever I do, I make a note to visit my friend gould’s fabulous japonisme tumblr, Empire des signes. And that’s where I stumbled upon Hisaji Hara’s beautiful studies of some of Balthus’ signal works.
Wonderful, no? The drawn quality of the lines’ figurative contours and shadowplay, the hentai-inflected mannerism in Hara’s composed scenes which nevertheless stops shy - always - just before puncturing the formal poise of each scene. Seen through Hara’s Well-Tempered Camera, each scene seems weightless and weighted at the same time. Perfectly erotic, in other words, both uninhibited and repressed.
In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Barthes compares his work space in Paris with another in the country, and declares them identical even though they do not share any common object -
Why? Because the arrangement of the tools is the same: it is the structure of the space which constitutes its identity.
This must be the reason why, at least to me, the photographer William Gedney’s sketch of a woman in a Vuillard painting corresponds so perfectly to the original referent he saw in a museum, years prior? Wittgenstein said it plainer in Philosophical Investigations -
What makes my image of him into an image of him?
Not its looking like him.
In fact, I had this perfect moment of recognition while walking to work this morning. I was walking under a scaffolding of a building near the subway exit. The noise from the construction was deafening but strangely not unpleasant. The morning sunlight filtered in through the gaps in the scaffolding. A kid screamed for his toy in the distance. And briefly, standing at the intersection waiting for the traffic light to change, I recognized that I had been in that space once before. I was with [ ], looking at an apartment building called The Beethoven near her art school to see if we should sign the lease. We were under a scaffolding, and the light slanting in through the interstices of that makeshift space was so perfectly etiolated, that it had seemed to us then that all kinds of things in our future were destined to be blessed, haloed by that light. It was a spring day in Baltimore and there were children shouting to be heard above the din of construction. The Argo was docked nearby, awake and ashore at the Inner Harbor.
On the cello transcription of Schumann’s F-A-E, Roland Barthes, tree alphabets and Heine at phonofranca:
Attached file is the cello transcription of the F-A-E Intermezzo from Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 3; I’d previously posted my thoughts on the original version for the violin. Steven Isserlis, who is as spirited a defender of late Schumann as anyone out there, transcribed it himself and plays it. Dénes Várjon, who accompanied Carolin Widmann’s violin in my previous post, accompanies Isserlis here, as well. A nice touch. Now I can’t imagine those supple, inaugural triplets played by anyone else.
I still prefer the original violin version, but through Isserlis’ Stradivarius, the musical line gains a lonelier lexicon. Schumann in his deepest melancholy makes me think of Roland Barthes, and tonight is no exception. As the notes sound their mourning alphabets through Isserlis’ cello, F-A-E, my thoughts turn to Barthes’ brief reflection on palm trees, alphabets and Heine: Frei aber einsam. From Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (tr. Richard Howard) -
According to the Greeks, trees are alphabets. Of all the tree letters, the palm is the loveliest. And of writing, profuse and distinct as the burst of its fronds, it possesses the major effect: falling back.
A hemlock tree stands lonely.
Far north on a barren height.
He drowses; ice and snowflakes
wrap him in sheets of white
He dreams about a palm tree
That far in an eastern land
Languishes lonely and silent
Upon the parching sand.
Heine(Image by Qiu)
(Source: phonofranca-blog)
About Me
books. baseball. LPs. 45s. 78s. City. alcohol. ghosts.
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