Sebald on Handke in Silent Catastrophes

Sebald's essay on Handke, Beneath the Surface, is so good trying to slice out a key quote feels like an unforgivable violation.  What the essay demands is being re-read and re-read, its brilliance sends you back to re-read the novel.  The last sentence will have to do:  "The pathography of the protagonist and the biography of the narrator thus converge in what, from the point of view of societal normality, appears as illegitimate nature of both illness and art, which, each in their different way, recall the destruction that is wrought in the lives of children."  151  Can imagine how beautiful the sentence must be in the German.  

The beginning of that final paragraph:  "The suggestion implicit in the above, that in depicting a pathological world view Handke was ultimately also concerned with a scrupulous examination of his own artistic 'guilty' conscience, and his own distance from 'normal' life, is confirmed by his story in another regard also."   "Bloch's story converges with that of the missing schoolboy" 

"the development of goalkeeper Bloch's pathological state goes back to pre-existing handicaps of a social nature, and that his own art only goes beyond the pathological inasmuch as it opens up, for both author and readers, [. . . . .readers . . . .] an understanding of the wretched and utter hopelessness of such circumstances."  150-151 

now if only Sebald had written such an essay on each of Handke's novels after this one !  

next essay on Light and Dark deals with Stifter and Handke  and later a big essay on Repetition  

much to look forward to    probably will not read the final tale in the Stifter volume  

heavy gray skies now    rain tonight, Saturday   

"he had chosen this apartment in particular

 because it appealed to his poetic powers--which expressed themselves less in creation than in reception."

108 Motley  "there was nothing he loved more in the world . . . to stand at his window on a rainy day and watch as . . . the moisture crept down the old walls."  

I like that notion that poetic powers could best express themselves in reception---there, my whole life understood, described.  When I consider the remainder of the passage and the context in which it is placed I wonder if I am using it, affirming it, adopting it as my motto, somewhat too hastily.  It may not be a sentiment one should take as an ideal, after all.  How can I know?  

Saturday   What if I place that comment about reading with Mia Cuoto's?  

"Books are never written. When we read them, we write them."   Mia Couto

his poetic powers expressed themselves less in creation than in reading--reception  

Sebald's essay on Stifter may help me out here.  Since he wrote and painted might he not be placing reception on the lower rung of estimation.  Could also wait to see how this vaguely creepy story turns out.  The narrator warned us it would be dark---Tourmaline  

today and tomorrow I am trying to do a 24 hour only thing eating only Ora So Lean & So Clean powder protein.  Why?  Who knows.  Some strange "cleansing" impulse, or "fasting" or experimentation to see what happens to the cycle of headaches?  

"It is a dietary supplement designed to boost protein intake, not a complete meal replacement. Each serving provides only around 120 calories and minimal fats and carbohydrates, meaning it lacks the total daily energy, essential fatty acids, and broad spectrum of vitamins and minerals required to sustain human life."  

so indeed this is a fairly stupid notion and where does it spring from?  

Anton Reiser, the German novel, written in 1785-1790    Christian Garlitz shows up in Garrett County, Maryland  1790-1873 Avilton, MD 

In the end we are unable to reconcile the facts, because they, to this date, simply have not been discovered. Therefore we can only reconcile the stories. Thus, for the present, the history presented on this website lists the first Garlitz in the area, the one who came from Prussia, as John Hendrey Garlitz. The Garlitz to whom all the family histories are traced is Hendrey Christian Garlitz or Christian I. The great hunter of folklore is Christian II. And the convert to the Catholic faith and the settler of Avilton, MD, is Christian III.

"same" German cultural mind-sets?  And the point is?  

putting an end to the Ora only thing, having some milk, yogurt and granola 

back to Tourmaline   a tale of the mother who fled, who disappeared, from the girl with the large head who lived in the basement of the abandoned house.  Sense of tales from Poe, slightly.  

so that's it!  the great actor, the professor, the man who fell to his death, the woman who birthed the young girl, the ancient house, everyone "disappears" and none of their lives are told with any meaning.  Very proto-modernist indeed.  Nothing coheres.  The tale is dark in the sense that it is a mystery with no revealing patterns.  Stones hold themselves together, we can carry them in our hands, but in themselves they yield nothing to us that we may want to hear from them.  We live in the landscape of mountains, nature, stones, but we are not of them.  At all.  

our son's dissolving marriage weighs on us in the silence of the house now and we wonder how it will all play out over seas in that other country that we understand and do not understand.  Could his wife not be a character in many types of stories, including one by Stifter?  One by Henry James, for sure.  I talked with him about Henry James in the only short conversation we had about the situation.  I wonder how to help him, what to do, what to say.  We are clarifying bequests in the portfolio that had erroneously been neglected and I am going to re-do the trust and will to clarify David as sole beneficiary.  Ten years ago we had named the grandchildren as well, trying to be caring, but now under these new circumstances it seems better to not try to engage legal structures we cannot comprehend.  So many tv dramas under our belts!  As much as we do not cotton to "Ted Lasso" as entertainment, it had some resonances that we could not help but notice, in this new situation, about the American abroad trying to navigate a different national and cultural reality.  

rules of thumb

years ago I learned from that beautiful magazine for doctors that Mamacita subscribed to that it takes three weeks before a doctor actually begins to feel the relaxing effects of a vacation.  Old rule of thumb.  Bet it would bring some scoffs these days.  However, the query today is: how many weeks does it take to relax after visitors have been staying with you for three weeks?  

hmmm

empty house, chill air this morning, picking up, laundering, rearranging; we did establish that the new toy aisle chair works perfectly to get Bela into the downstairs bathroom.  

letter from Dr Fagan says nothing in the mri would relate to persistent headaches.  Should I see anyone else, maybe neurology?  

hard time sleeping last night.  suspect mountain mermaid shake had some green tea or other such in it

Karl Philipp Moritz's Anton Reiser

Adalbert Stifter's Motley Stones

will I finish these ?  

picked up euros at the bank.  Very tall young teller.  Nolan Cross, graduated from Exeter high school six years ago; advanced placement English there with Ryan Hale.  

will talk with Fagan next week for short visit about mri and headaches---nothing to figure out, really 

MRI today August 19

 

Interesting experience; wanted DFW to write an essay about it.  After, in the parking lot short chat with John Sheineman.  He stopped himself short explaining why he took his buy out from the college a year short of turning 65 saying "because I was tired of fucking. . . ."   I was glad to hear that.  He described instead what a great trip he had with his family driving around the great lakes and taking in three or four of the world cup games.  

On the message from Mid-State it doesn't seem possible to copy and paste.  So here is the key line

so far as I can tell:  "IMPRESSION: Mild frontoparietal atrophy.  Pontine and supratentorial white matter disease, likely the sequelae of microangiopathy.  No acute hemmorhage, infarct, mass effect, or midline shift."  

Now, do I wait for Mid-State to contact me and offer explanation and what to do?  Or do I ask google to explain the lingo and advise procedures?  

Stopped into Westcott Law to find out if we are in the computer.  Email said no.  Should I contact Dorcas can't recall her last name, now!  Dorcas Murphy?  She is no longer with Westcott.  

Rick Evans called while we were watching General Hospital.  All is well but he is sending documents to update beneficiaries for two of our accounts.  Wrote him back and said maybe we should update all the accounts to be safe.  

So the word disease has shown up.  What to do about it?  How significant is it?  Normal part of aging?  Angiopathy?  Diet? medicine?  Cut back, kick up, smooth out?  

AI says it might be about blood pressure and to stay active.  Walk more?  What about nsaids on daily basis?  or live with whatever and try movement rather than any pills?  

Stylistic Rhapsody

 title from search on G on iphone, which did not show up on same search here on airbook

Stylistic Rhapsody:  Critics characterize the book as dream-like and plot-nebulous, functioning less as a traditional novel and more as a turbulent, erudite prose poem oscillating between despair and rapture.  

so, I got it.  Long essay in NYRB "His Mystic Way" July 14, 1994 issue  is it worth $10. to read it and 9 other issues?   also a long essay (AI?) on something called Grokipedia, what is that?

Furbank, turns out, wrote the big, key, biography of his friend E. M. Forster, also Alan Turing and "a book on political thought."  it's that political thought that helps me dismiss his terrible treatment of Milosz.  

here is his final harshness "Thus, as the Duke’s bravura tirades begin to modulate into Milosz’s serious mystical theories, the reader, battered and bemused by so much exorbitant phrase-making, can no longer quite silence the whisper at the back of his mind, that what the book suffers from is silliness." 

That seemed so clear the night I scanned it and copied out passages.  overnight and the next day I withdrew my agreement with Furbank.  His severe Judgment against Milosz is typical rational judgmental authoritarian dismissal of the poetic, the rhapsode.  As twisted and irritating as the novel, or "novel," is, it does still have many elements and passages that make it entirely worthwhile, as least as a representative work of the period and time as well as the great inner traditions,  both esoteric and exoteric. 

Sunday 16 August

big day  Emma at earring workshop with Cordelia friend and Suzan at Artistic Roots

Dave and Eliot off to sunspot for arcade games

Dinner at Farmhouse slated for 4:30

we all slept late, bela until 10!  

nice breakfast table talk about their night visiting Pete and Erin O'Donnell in Lyme; they have clean gray rats as pets now in the house, beautiful new kitchen, hundreds of beautiful plants and flowers throughout

leftovers from Polly's 

apple photo reminded me eleven years ago today I was with Scott Merrill in Boston getting him, helping him get, his doctorate at BU  

really fun forty minute talk with Eric yesterday at Mountain Mermaid; he dropped off a few mushroom pieces this morning; will I try them?  hmmm possible not but we'll see   His visit with Dawson in BCN was his first time in Europe.  He noticed everything correctly and perfectly.  That was the core of the fun talk.  I had imagined the visit would go along scenario X but of course from the instant of recognized presence of the other person the visit goes along scenario of  P, S and onward.  Am I vaguely quoting Virginia Woolf here?  He got about a hundred pages into Schattenfroh and then put it down.  I apologized for having sent it.  His wife seems to be younger, more than five years younger, works in real estate, just got arrested for dui!  His daughters sweet and shy still at 16 and 14 or 12?  

back to finish up Milosz  why is it so difficult to read?  circular, spiral, clunky translation? dense; over wrought?  under realized, unfamiliar mode?  

now we have a buccaneer and the hanged man!  maybe there is a genre of erotica-exotica known as "tarot fiction"  

Cécile wants to talk to me, get me on her side, have me get Dave to see, etc etc  I walk away from her, twice now.  I must stay out completely and protect my own tranquility in all of this.  It is their drama, not ours.  

tarot fiction   Of course, Charles Williams---I read this years ago and probably got nothing much out of it---The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams: Written in 1932 by a member of the Inklings, this fantasy book features the Major Arcana as active, moving, 3D mystical forces central to a battle of magic

and Gemini also lists a book by Italo Calvino, Crossed Destinies  

134  Beauty and Adoration  . . .  Sorrow and Pity  

paroxysms  136  that is the governing mode of this tale  "I felt in my secret flesh and soul a kind of dark and strange pleasure . . . titillating anguish and gnawing delight  . .  . comparing it to the mysterious and appalling emissions of the hanged."  whoa  that is an image and a comparison 

then a perfect description of the psychology of a stalker 

page 137  extraordinary   applies to our moments here and how  have to copy out some later  great

clarity about love and betrayal---keys to the whole book 

Monday Aug 17  

Finished Milosz's very strange book.  Hallucinatory dream? trippy?  hmm maybe if I look through the volume called The Noble Traveller I will find context and discussion that will help.   Inner Traditions and Lindisfarne devoted lots of work to it some forty years ago.  1985 edited by Christopher Bamford, links no doubt somehow to the worlds of Temenos conferences.  good guess, math shows, 41 years ago!!

super quiet day.   C upstairs all day.  Willow and I had lunch, have read all day.  Kids down at the amusement park.  I went out to Walmart to get milk and cash and walk around; then to Hannaford to buy milk and walk around.  

strange book for strange days  listened to the theta podcast Eric gave me  meditation 

the curious phenomenon of feeling

the extremes of states we see in the narrator, as tempetuous as any opera, any soap opera, any user of tick-tock, bantr, twitter or grindr or threads as possible.  Love as storm of impossible emotions swirling violently, like weather gifs on the nightly news.  The noble young Dane on the one hand, who woos the beloved lady, and on the other hand the sweet young lover named Edward who also woos her.  A trinity of lovers wracked with passions, wracking everyone around them.  

there must be a whole cluster of literary elements at work here under the heading of "libertinism."  'lack of restraint"   as well is the desire to pull together into a unified vision of love all that can be attributed to or derived from all loves, all loves sacred, all loves profane, desires of every sort

Bela not happy with the novel about the dula of regrets.  Just found a Spanish writer named Luz Gábas.  

87 "baroque shadow of this great beanpole in a nightshirt" 

90 "There is a great mystery at the bottom of every affection, an impenetrable secret in the heart of every passion 

we have trouble enduring life and our love is intoxicated with eternity 

David off to prepare tonight's gig at the Covered Bridge.  All excited for the coming performance. !

Milosz's book an unrelenting rhapsody of love, love loving love,  

---

thursday  "Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."  Pessoa 

back to a few pages of each book alternatingly   went to Speare to draw Bela's blood, realized we missed the echocardiagram yesterday 

surely Amorous Initiation was "erotica" in 1910 and a variant on erotica that lifted it from lowly erotica to sublime spiritual meditations---in today's lingo porn embraced as worship of everything, worship of flesh, of beauty, of cosmos, of self, of all  

111 for the thing called Beauty when it is outside of us is called Love when it is within us.  

99 Emotion offers us the deep mirror of dreams, and how surprised we are to recognize ourselves in the features of universal love!  

112 Drunk with pride and power, he found the first no when everything was yes, when everything around him was affirmation.   

back to Milosz

 day off.  weather has lifted and brightened, beautiful now, breezy, kids on Squam for boat party with Jeff and Mya  

I went back to Amorous Initiation---why?  A few pages so far and then just now this line ---  "When will it come, the promised day, the day of all days when the solitary being will feel himself moved to his very depths before a crowd of men as he is at the sight of the sea or of a forest?"  48  he has walked into San Marco square in Venice, our decadent narrator 

Bela had a fine swim; I dined at Casa Amigas in Tilton, policemen, one detective training a new guy, and three town businessmen;  Tilton historic district has just enough grunge to satisfy the wanderer's curiosities.  

"Why is it that oceans of trees and of waves unite in a revealing song of love, while a hundred human beings brought together are enough to create the most absurd, the most hateful of monsters? O peaceful herds!  Slow-moving white rivers at the foot of hills!"   

I did drive to the entrance of Livermore Falls State Park to see what it now looks like.  

Darlene just brough in two of George's cinnamon rolls.  Fresh and yummy.  They both now volunteer for hospice helping.  

"For love, poor chevalier, love resides in the heart of stones, and it is with a poor pebble, infused with tenderness and picked up on a solitary shore, that the teeth of Falsehood and of Arrogance will be smashed on the day of days." 53

"There is  no such thing as barren passion, for the love that does not increase is a love that revives." 62

"Once past thirty years of age, the majority of human beings live only to avenge themselves." 

"we never love better than when we ill understand, because the impossibility of acquiring a thing with the coin of reason reminds us of the marvelous treasure of feelings that we carry in our hearts."  

the affinity between mystery and love       all the charm of its sadness   

Sunday 9 August

breezy out now almost 6 pm  beautiful sunlight  fam at Wiley's party and beach

new blacktop at grocery store, feeling like a million now

ordered Noa aisle transport chair to use here to get into bathroom past the bookshelf 

back from Hanover, visit with Dr George Culler.  He's been on Royal C cruises with his parents and his wife and their twin girls.  

that was yesterday Monday 10 August