Talmud

L’ecrit vain.

A choice between two things that already exist is no choice at all. – Disdain for the (otherwise harmless) passivity of ‘record review’ etc. The listener saying: ‘Do it right!’ – in other words: ‘Do me right! Give me that thrill I crave!’ – And yet (there’s often an and yet), the work of comparison is itself highly intellectual, as much as sensuous – a true ars erotica mentis.

‘Carburettor’. For words are like clothes pegs.

Love of the asperity of the Talmud. – Its irreverence. – The voices from nowhere. – Of course, this is the view of an outsider. Tant mieux.

Barthes, Derrida… this weird intimacy. A lure? (Un leurre?) As if, in spite of their theories, it was a relation between subject and subject that was being developed: as if one were being encouraged (or forced) to be a subject. – Too late; no doubt. 

‘And this call is in regards to your computer.’

The echoes – muffled, as if in a dream – of Wagner in Debussy’s Pelléas. ‘Je dormirai comme un enfant’ sings Golaud: ah, if only! For that is the dream.

Sanctus Januarius Sweet Sixteen

‘I am too weak to help’ – The leitmotiv of The Magic Flute. Voices on all sides, in the dark.

Truth as reminiscence – of childhood, before ‘it’ happened.

There is a book who runs may read. – My jogging puns.

Equations: the score of the universe.

Wolfgang Rihm writes: ‘I have been reading John Updike’s Seek My Face (Penguin Books 2003, page 14): “Interviewers and critics are the enemies of mystery, the indeterminacy that gives art life”. And now I am asked to write a text on my new composition…’

The distinction between ‘objective culture’ in the more literary arts (the poem, the play, the film, the review, the novel) and the rest (not exactly subjective: it can be non-objective, unfinished, scrappy, inchoate – tweeted and snapchatted) is surely ruined? Can you live amongst these ruins? – The old distinction is of course threatening – so why not undermine it even further? Why this nostalgia for something (a recognizable form; the form of a recognition) that hurts? Think of so many philosophers who are admired for not writing treatises. Leibniz and his letters and opuscules, Nietzsche and his fragments and dithyrambs and aphorisms, Wittgenstein and his bullet points… and even Hegel (who exists to some extent as students’ transcriptions) and Heidegger and Lacan (ditto) and perhaps Derrida, for all the archness of his writing, introduce an element of – what? Improvisation? Winging it? Off-the-cuff remarks? – Remarks may not be literature: they can, however, be poetry. (They can even found a religion.) 

Writing as victimless vengeance.

Before sunrise: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. ‘What’s the point of scarpering? The best thing to do is to be cunning and stay where you are. You see, I’ve gonna let them think they’ve got me ’ouse-trained, but they never will, the bastards.’ – The sense of a lost world – almost unimaginably monochrome – coexists with the politician on television saying that Britain now faces the challenge of prosperity… that what brings the country together is an event like the Coronation or a royal birth… (The same politician seems to be talking about existentialism and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and not in a friendly way.) - As Colin Smith runs, he relives his life; or, he lives. – ‘Chariots of Fire’: what is it about this music and running? – The film (technically verging on Carry On at times with the embarrassing speeded-up sequences, no doubt meant to ironize any revolutionary pedagogy) ends, however, with a still. Before this, there are odd moments where the film falls silent (in the sense that something initially seems wrong with the sound: odd flashback to silent movies?). Amusing: the Borstal boys are taken aback at what they hear about the public school: ‘You pay to go to this school?!’

Pathos of knowledge: essentially what is transmitted from one generation to the next. Or, in less abstract terms: love of gorillas because your children watch a TV documentary about them.

A work by Finzi could entitle this post

There is some burden I am carrying that I do not need to carry.

How to deal with your own opinions? Turn them into ‘art’? Attribute them to a fictitious character (such as yourself)? Express them incognito? Write them down but ironically, as if within permanent quotation marks? – Is there much difference between these options? – It is as if you were so wary of your opinions that the last thing you could envisage doing with then is just saying them, in a conversation with other human beings, and hearing the opinions of those other human beings in turn, and having a discussion on that basis.

They draw on the figure of the Mighty Oz to show how religion appears: a phantasm dreamt up by elderly men hiding behind curtains in order to scare the masses. But what if all thinking were the product of Oz-like mechanisms? And if so, where is The Toto who will smell out the illusion and pull the curtain aside? (The Wizard of Oz is always a film. – Does it even make sense to try to get behind the screen?)

H., in her phone call, told me there had been snow over X. This awakened many memories and many dreams.

An artist who is too far ahead of her time is no longer really in time at all. It does not make sense to imagine that we are somehow trying to catch up with the work of the avant-garde – still grappling with the insights of Finnegans Wake, or the Nouveau roman, or OULIPO. Artists are no more the antennae of the race than they are its wagging tail (or its organs of excretion). The time of art is in itself (in-itself; in art). This is not an idealist statement. It does not presuppose the autonomy of the aesthetic, or the existence of ‘art’ or ‘time’.

The generalist scratches the surface. The specialist scratches the depths.

Make a list of the people you, in spite of it all, knew. A rich gallery even if you just concentrate on, for example, those at the École – or even your colleagues and pupils in Saint-H. (Your heart gives a little leap when you think of this – perhaps this is why people write down their memories? And why should you deny yourself the pleasure of memorializing it? You are no different from other people: you are just as narcissistic as they are. You are not going to cease being narcissistic simply by pretending not to glimpse into the lake of memory from time to time. Echo can look after herself.)

Eagleton in the LRB: ‘Mauss and Durkheim were of that classical school of intellectuals in which one was expected to know everything, and the extraordinary versatility of Mauss’s work harks back to Goethe rather than forward to Giddens. His knowledge stretched from classical antiquity to psychology and political economy, the sacred texts of India to Celtic law and Scandinavian mythology. As a professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and later at the Collège de France, he published on Germanic migration and the habits of the human body, death and the expression of feelings, violence, totemism, Bolshevism, the nation, magic, seasonal variations of Eskimo societies, modern politics, art and mythology and a good deal more. As a student at the Ecole Pratique, he delved into Sanskrit, Hebrew and Indo-European comparative linguistics. What has survived most Imemorably of him, however, are two anthropological masterpieces: his “Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice”, co-authored with Henri Hubert, and “The Gift”.’

- This reminds me of the allure – I want it back, I WANT IT BACK – of reading the programme of the Collège de France posted up in a corridor of the Sorbonne as I saw it in the autumn of 1979.

I could become an interviewer.

The surrealist shorts I saw in the rue Saint-Jacques.

‘Who now still reads Karl Jaspers?’ Martin Jay begins his review of Suzanne Kirkbright’s biography of the philosopher (LRB, 8 June). Well, we psychiatrists do, or at least we older ones did. His philosophy may have been expressed in ‘turgid idiom’, but his psychiatric masterpiece, General Psychopathology (1913), was not. Most Anglophone readers think it worth buying for the fifty-page introductory chapter alone. If Jaspers’s philosophy was preoccupied with those ‘aspects of the human condition that defied rational understanding’, then it is unsurprising that he was so well suited to the exploration of mental illness. His work is outstanding for its vivid and penetrating descriptions of the seemingly alien experiences his patients struggled to communicate. Jay emphasises the value Jaspers accorded relationships and this is most evident in his insistence on psychiatry as an interaction between two individuals, rather than simply as the exercise of trained observation. His comments may be even more important now, as psychiatry risks drifting into an impoverished and mechanistic scientism. - Tom Burns, Warneford Hospital, Oxford. - Or, quite simply, the link between philosophy and the hospital. Or, even more simply, the psychiatric ward. (The odd yearning at the sight of G., seen from the road on returning from the glorious beech woods today.)

Culture: the stars by which we navigate. Needed only by night.

‘Fare lonely like rhinoceros’ (an old translation of an Old Buddhist adage). It does not need to be like that, though a tough skin is always useful for society.

Drop the burden, whatever it is. 

Varia 31 August 2013

Little red berries on the tree.

‘Just in my life’ – is the just (‘de justesse’).

Relief on reading Beckett! Creatures of my own kind!

Great cycle rides of my life (even if at the time I was feeling deeply unhappy, bored, tired). Mainly in France. With D.D., and the petite bande. With N.-K., in Normandy. Solus, in Burgundy.

A reference by B.D. to the Plaza de la Virgen in Valencia. The Blessed Virgin. Sudden longing. Why not? 

Torcello. Holiday romance: but holy day.

‘This is just like in a film!’ – A frequent feeling. – Why represent it? How represent it? (In a FILM?)

‘Another surviving Elizabethan tree is displayed in the library. The family tree or pedigree of Queen Elizabeth I dates from 1559. It is richly illuminated and gilded, decorated with coats of arms and heraldic devices. It is a remarkable parchment roll, 22 yards long, tracing Elizabeth’s ancestry back to Adam and Eve. Some of the Queen’s ancestors who appear here are King Arthur, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Romulus and Remus, Hector and Noah.’ (Hatfield House.)

He has the doodle bug.

Imagine Heideggerean as a popular dialect. (A kind of German Rabelaisian?)

Casanova’s translation of the Iliad into Venetian.

The superstition of (that is) the other.

Life is too short for long faces.

Comparaison n’est pas raison. – BUT compare translations and you open worlds.  

The Tingueley machine is at its most splendid as it self-destructs.

My illness was deaf. It tied me to the mast and rowed me past the collected works of Maurice Blanchot. I cried out to be landed on the island, but my illness could not hear.

The Dark – in James Herbert. (Note that he attended a Catholic School in Bethnal Green.) The Dark is all the negativity in me and without. Critique. But: ‘The living people who gave themselves up to the Dark could be controlled, killed, but the killing itself allowed their energy to become stronger.’

Creation too was always a matter of scissors and paste.

Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt. – I ‘heart’ world? I ‘like’ world? I ‘friend’ world? But even Jesus had his special friends. (I am uneasy about MacC. on friendship with God.)

The gîte in Alsace: poems of Ronsard, thoughs of the empty room in Mallarmé. Something melancholy, sequestered, as so often in the French provinces.

Draw on the past – yours, theirs – for energy, not depletion. Gently dismiss the ‘bad’ images.

Books I read before QM. ‘The room started to go round and round and burst into flames.’ There was a wonderful dudelsack of a monster in it.

Beautiful pieces played by Gilels: ‘Lyric Pieces’ by Grieg.

Mirrors: get an assembly of them, make a mobile.

Poems – they are all good – why put them into order? Why prefer? Or rather: on your preferences to base nothing (that would be an overgeneralization). I am the anti-Leavis: or rather, I find life where he does not.

Evil must self-destruct? (The Nazis, the Daleks… turn against themselves. Satan in Dante? The Dark in The Dark.)

A sudden flicker of remembrance of THOR and the other Marvel comics. I cannot get it back and would not want to: here it is: the hero stands on the edge of the gigantic space ship, against a backdrop of stars and planets: he speaks of ‘THE HALCYON DAYS OF YORE’. Also something Egyptian, mythological: the essay I wrote aet. 11 (and read out to M. while she was cleaning the windows in the Front Room), a mythological fantasia on the coming of night – the constellations all alive, the Crab reaching out with its claws. Something Ovidian, no?

At E. Coll. – yet again – I haven’t been going in for my Wednesday teaching session – not for weeks. Should I pretend that I’ve been ill? Also, I need to mug up for ‘A’-level. And German prose. So I go to the UL. The mediaevalist K. H., now distant from me, is there – I have to ask her if she will look after F.L. (S.’s friend) for me. I’d e-mailed her about this: but she has a conference to go to. The computers are very distant – I can barely see. The ‘joke of the day’ is on show. But I am frustrated by the low visibility – and frankly shocked when I see some young girls smoking – and here, in the Library! Then I notice that many other people are smoking, too, in the vast hall – where several scientific experiments seem to be in progress.

Recently, a vast geography: Latin-American/Italian/Mediterranean. Vast sunshine, wings of planes.

The Dutch Mountains. The forests around this town. In those days… Forests, steppes and swamps. East: why not? Smoke rising from clearings.

Philosophy is not the present age captured in thought: philosophy is yesterday’s philosophy captured in thought.

Proust: but jealousy is a failure of the imagination too.

I am a mere page boy.

Mosaic – Seurat – Klee. Byzantium linked to impressionism and high modernism.

‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ = ‘Why?’

Dull as dishwater. Have you ever really looked at dishwater? – Think of Pnin doing the washing up. (This morning, 14 December 2013, I drew a sketch of the washing up as it lay in the bowl: a cubist assemblage.)

Men: gonads without windows.

Herbst im Herzens Sommeruntergang. 

FW – found etymology (as they say: found object).

I’m just not up to Being.

Strangeness: be in places where you cannot judge.

If I were to try and express my sense of the mystical (‘hearing my daughter sing in San Marco’, for example) it would sound utterly banal. But that is the mystical! You want it to sound like Hegel?!

The mystical is for me alone – but it also means that there is no longer any me. (‘Vor dem Gesetz.’)

I cannot know what I believe in – in two senses. (If I believe in X, I cannot know X, and I cannot know what my belief of X really involves.)

So many books, plays, films that you barely remember: and so many of them are about the fragility of memory! (This thought gives you a sudden sense of relief.)

I like writing on a soft background (in a notebook, with a good 2B pencil. Or on the rubber cloth on the kitchen table.) Too much pounding on the keyboard has damaged my hands. – Handwriting is then like sketching.

Get away from the knowingness of PM.

PM, yes, the afternoon nap of thought.

Relics: GB’s merde as madeleine.

I am luxorius.

Mad Men versus Burroughs. No contest.

Language opens up to the world, of language. Not.#

Nature is tamed, will.

For the only objective thing is freedom. Subject: Scylla AND Charybdis.

Locate the conservative moments in JD and LW. (Are they perhaps the same?)

Citalopram was my drug of choice.

Imagination: the Zoroastrian mage in Tokyo.

Stanford, Symphony no. 5 ‘Symphonic Fantasia’ a lot of the music is much fresher than I had imagined. The finale doesn’t work.

Relive and rewrite – e.g. the loneliness of Saturday mornings in the École.

Yes, my problem with film: you can’t (in the cinema) stop it, freeze the frame, rewind, say ‘sorry, could you say that again?’

Pugin, Ruskin, Newman – the form that ‘revolution’ assumed among the English.

Translation as critique and demystification of original.

My Atlas – Cadaster – Domesday.

IT goes back to when I was very young. – Coming back home to P. St, discovering the gate was locked. I think I had got the date/time wrong for a service at St. Matthew’s. – M. was very cross. She’d had to rush all the way up the hill, all the way back… be there for K… she was probably working at the time, too. – I slumped against the locked gate, in tears. ('Vor dem Gesetz'.)

Refer every minute to the eternal thing.

The Walkers Along H. Road.

Bagatelles.

I was doing more teaching – supervisions – at K. Coll. – in K. Lane. The college had given me a room there: tall, lighted, Londonesque. In K. Lane I discuss the question of ‘fat nails’ – what is the medical term for this? – I try ‘pinguis’ but an intelligent male student says ‘pinguis’ means ‘fat’, ‘oily’. I’m impressed and say I need to look this up. There are attractive women students too, and I end up living in a student community. I can banter with them, in a human way. [Maybe humanity would be fully deployed, realized, after death? – Kafka.] Slight warm eros for the women. They have put my chest of drawers behind a bed, where I need to gain access to it.

Klemperer’s Bruckner’s 6^th is abominable – slow and flaccid. Marcus Bosch is better! 

Varia 27 August 2013

What has been ‘extreme’ in my life (so far)? – Why do I have a minor obsession with the ‘cutting edge’? Extremity and solitude. My experiments with razor blades, 1999. ‘Self-harming.’

A young Asian woman has just shot by on a strange V-shaped scooter (the platform on which she stands consists of two boards which join at the prow). She is intent and looks a little worried. She is wearing a sun hat and shades, and carries a small light green hand-bag. It is 8:40.

Grey skies, 13e arrondissement, language school Inlingua.

This summer, Straits: Hormuz, Taiwan.

Trying to read Le Chiendent in Milan station, late at night. – Lille. – F.Q., the young woman I had met teaching.  – Her freshness. Her cool, clear handwriting. The postcards of Paris she sent to console me for my ‘exil’. 

Eduard van Beinum, Haffner Symphony – blisteringly intense! His Debussy Nocturnes too.

Varia 26 August 2013

Dream: I was in, for example, D., occupied by, for instance, the Nazis, and we were being taken out daily to be executed. My turn was to be the following day. I had been resigned to my mortality: but now, somewhere near the M. Z. shopping centre, I started to feel rebellious. I would do my best to escape, rather than submit. I would head north. I would hide in bogs and sewers. Even an extra day of life was worth fighting for.

Can science ever be too pedantic? Or, say, finance? Or furniture building?

What I do is exactly what I need to do (and can do).

Top of the Lake. The pleasure of just seeing – New Zealand, for example. I am being given an edited version? Someone else’s? But when would this not be the case? I know, I know, there are differences, there is nothing but differences.

Glazunov Symphony 4 cond. Mravinsky. More by the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra. 

E.g. Vadim Salmanov, Symphony 2 – a sudden new world. In a recording: conditions of composition and of performance (e.g. the audience – the people you don’t hear, apart from coughs and applause – you hear their silence). (Later: the people are silent.)

The time we went to Erasmus’s church. – Back to illud tempus. – Visions of vast brick churches in the lowlands of Europe. – 1666. - What did 1666 gather? In terms of dread and knowledge and vague but intense longing.

Music – metaphor: Debussy’s ‘Waves’ could be a dance of the fairies, or a walk in a windy day, or young love, or (the woodwind is sometimes oriental) a scene from Japanese feudal history. Ainigma. – Seeing as, and hearing as. (Kandinsky.) The wind versus waves: some skirmish in the fields of Lombardy. (Verdi.)

Blue – girl with blue skirt has just gone by – very blue, like the robe of the Madonna in some Paolo della Francesca – so Italian art is essentially a way of keeping cool in a hot climate. (Not an echo: a complement.)

In heaven, would they have memories of heaven? (‘Do you remember that… day?... when we… did what, exactly?) ‘Of course not! There is no time!’

Toscanini’s Debussy is outstanding. - His Haffner symphony is boring (as it is under most conductors) until the silverfire of the finale.

Cortot’s Debussy – not good, too stolid. Debussy plays Debussy (piano rolls?) – outstanding.

Varia 24 August 2013

Lives of film directors are always boring. Partial exceptions: Welles, maybe Kubrick – those who were somehow more than directors. The gung-ho razzmatazz types are the most boring: all guns, jungles, and dollars.

Extraordinary excitement of finale of Tchaikovksy’s ‘Winter Dreams’ esp. recording in the Mercury Living Presence ***** series (Dorati, LSO).

Faust is damned from the start. (On listening to Berlioz’s version: that melancholia cannot be ‘solved’.) – Seiji Ozawa’s recording is good, Stuart Burrows ‘Je souffre, je souffre’ – fugal section. Munch too – David Poleri, such pathos.