I could easily go back through all of Aciman’s published work and underline passages and write in the margins of the pages, same for me, this is me, this was me, he states perfectly what I’ve always felt about these things, he writes about this as I would have written about such things, such perfect synch between what he says or describes and what I’ve long experienced and felt. But is this not what we do with so many writers? We find ways to believe they write for us, express what we want to have expressed. We identify, after all, with the tales they tell, the characters they describe, the ways they express thought, storylines, the narrative voices they use. This is the whole of literary art and how readers have always enjoyed it. But, no, with Aciman there is a distinct difference for me. He describes feeling, longing, anxiety, ambivalence, being in the middle of situations, places, people, moods, thoughts, in all the ways familiar to my own inner life. Much more so than any other writer I’ve ever read. I have been waiting for over fifty years to find a writer like Aciman. I had given up hope of every finding one like him. The closest most recently has been Pessoa. When I read The Book of Disquiet only a few years ago, I said oh if only I had had this book forty years or so ago. Why had I never read this book before now?
Pessoa as companion and guide would have helped me so much at so many moments in life. With Aciman, this same sort of recognition and relief but even closer to the bone. Uncanny it felt. Instant sense of deep inner accord. No matter how much he talks about the externals of his story, and they are as dramatic and noteworthy for a major writer as possible---Alexandria, Jewish, Ladino, France, Rome, New York, memoir, novels, essays, awards, fellowships, the whole success of the writer in our time--no matter all of this. The essential wonder is how much, how perfectly, my
own experiences in their felt rhythems and patterns align with all that he feels about his outer life.
Long passage below from his essay called “Intimacy.” to which I say Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes, that’s how it was for me too. Me too Alypius, Augustine’s friend in The Confessions. I have always often times been that person, but this is different. Aciman is just uncanny in saying my notions about all of these things.
“It never occurred to me then that insight and intuition, which are the essence, the genius of all criticism, are born from this intimate fusion of self with something or someone else. To everything—books, places, people—I brought a desire to steal into and intuit something undisclosed, perhaps because I mistrusted all appearances, or because I was so withdrawn that I needed to believe others were as dissembled and withdrawn as I feared I was. Perhaps I loved prying. Perhaps insight was like touching—but without asking, without risk. Perhaps spying was my way of reaching out to the Roman life that was all around me. In the words of Emanuele Tesauro: “We enjoy seeing our own thoughts blossom in someone’s mind, while that someone is equally pleased to spy what our own mind furtively conceals.” I was a cipher. But, like me, everyone was a cipher as well. Ultimately, I wanted to peer into books, places, and people because wherever I looked I was always looking for myself, or for traces of myself, or better yet, for a world out there filled with people and characters who could be made to be like me, because being like me and being me and liking the things I liked was nothing more than their roundabout way of being as close to, as open to, and as bound to me as I wished to be to them. The world in my image. All I cared for were streets that bore my name and the trace of my passage there; and all I cared for were novels in which everyone’s soul was laid bare and anatomized, because nothing interested me more than the nether, undisclosed aspects of people and things that were identical to mine. Exposed, everyone would turn out to be just like me. They understood me, I understood them, we were no longer strangers. I dissembled, they dissembled. The more they were like me, the more I’d learn to accept and perhaps grow to like who I was. My hunches, my insights were nothing more than furtive ways of bridging the insuperable distance between me and the world.
"In the end, my solitude, my disaffection, my shame on Via Clelia, and my wish to withdraw into an imaginary 19th-century bubble were not incidental to the books I was reading. My disaffection was part of what I saw in these books and was essential to my reading of them, just as what I read in Ovid was not unrelated to my tremulous yearnings for the swarthy knees of the gypsy girl. But they were essential in an altogether strange and undisclosed manner. I wasn’t identifying with Dostoyevsky’s characters because I too was poor or withdrawn, anymore than I was identifying with the lust of Byblis and Salmacis because I would have given anything to undress the gypsy girl in my bedroom. What my favorite authors were asking of me was that I read them intimately—not an invitation to read my own pulse on someone else’s work, but to read an author’s pulse as though it were my own, the height of presumption, because it presupposed that by trusting my deepest, most intimate thoughts about a book, I was in fact tapping on, or rather divining, the author’s own.”
Saturday, April 08, 2017
Aciman's Irrealis--notes
great passage from Spurious by Josipivici---makes me like him much more, have to give him a read, and continue on with Proust
[Reading In Search of Lost Time] gave me the powerful sense that it didn't matter if one could not see one's way forward, it didn't matter if one was silly and slow and confused, it didn't matter if one had got hold of the wrong end of the stick - what mattered was to keep going. I began to see that the doubts I had were in a sense the temptations of the Devil, the attempt to make me give up at the very start by presenting things in absolute terms (I can do it/ no, I can't do it); and that what Proust (like Dante before him, I later discovered) was offering was a way of fighting that by saying: All right, I am confused, then let me start with my confusion, let me incorporate my confusion into the book or story I am writing, and see if that helps. If I can't start, then let me write about not being able to start. Perhaps, after all, confusion and failure are not things one has to overcome before one can start, but deep human experiences which deserve themselves to be explored in art. Perhaps, indeed, the stick has no right end and therefore no wrong end.
Gabriel Josipovici, The Teller and the Tale
Letter from Dave today to Dear Angel Investor requesting funds to carry family of four across the atlantic this summer.
Aciman in form again too---on the wishfilms we throw over everything, every place, in our craving for romance. Longing for intimacy and love, the remanence of our presence. 154-155 in Alibis, the essay on luminous New York. The next essay, on “Self Storage,” also right on the money. Those few moments, seconds, hours, when he/I find some solitude and recoup, recharge, find who I am again, for a while, find some core, imagined or real or illusory, some longed-for center, and from there “for a few imagined seconds . . . was finally able to run away from those I couldn’t be more grateful to love.”
Why am I feeling so fragile today? What has spooked me? Upset? 10 days of Caribbean sun and warmth destabilized? Re-entry? new carpet, day at pheasant lane in mid-week? Trying to hear French? Turn of seasons into spring, out of the burrows of winter? April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead earth. Flooding the basements built on granite ledge. Now we wait two or three days, turn our faces to the wall and ignore the waters. Wait for the earth to dry and open and carry away the excess efluvia.
For a little over fifteen years I tried to get away from books. I took up painting to use up lots of time I otherwise would have spent reading books. I had read enough. Too many. They had piled up. Shelves crammed. Too many trips to used bookstores to sell some, even more trips to other bookstores to buy more. I rented a studio space in a small office building on Main Street. Lawyers at one end of the hall. A masseur in the corner at the other end. A mail-order business in worms for pets in one office and about the two others I was never quite sure. Maybe the woman I would see off and on, rarely, entering and leaving the unmarked door to the left of my space was a therapist. Maybe not. And in the office to my right, I never saw anyone leave or enter. Was it even an office? From outside, the windows added up properly and said, yes, that room must have been a duplicate of the one I used three or four afternoons a week. I would teach my classes in the mornings, as I had been doing for more than twenty-five years. After scrupulously being available for students to seek help in my office I would walk down the hill to my painting studio as I began to call it and I would paint. Or sit. I allowed myself one chair on which to look back a the works I was painting. No books. It was hard at first not to carry a book with me, but pretty soon I got the hang of it. I didn’t think of it at the time as a flight from books. In fact it was probably not really that at all. That is just a way of looking back at it now. It was more like a way of filling out the act of reading by expanding it to the whole of seeing. The page became the canvas, words merged into paint, consciousness wanted to embrace thought and image, all attempts to express and contain, pour forth and hold onto, colors, forms, lines, shaped letters, words, in voice, cadence in movement held in paint and ink.
Aciman “You don’t know whether what you feel is what you you feel or what you say you feel, just as you don’t know whether saying you feel something is actually a way of saying anything at all aboout it.” Alibis 199 You wing it. You hope others believe you. If they believe you, then you might as well copy them and believe the person they believe.”
Perfect license for practicing Pierre Menardism.
“I’ve built my home not even with words and what they mean but with cadence, just cadence, because cadence is like feeling, and cadence is like breathing, and cadence is heartbeat and desire, and if cadence doesn’t reinvent everything we would like our life to have been or to become, then just the act of searching and probing in that particularly cadenced way becomes a way of feeling and of being in the world.”
Aciman uses irrealis at the end of the final essay on Parallax--page 189
“Parallax is not just a disturbance in vision. It’s a derealizing and paralyzing disturbance in the soul—cognitive, metaphysical, intellectual, and ultimately aesthetic. It is not just about displacement, or of feeling adrift both in time and space, it is a fundamental misalignment between who we are, might have been, could still be, can’t accept we’ve become, or may never be. You assume you are not quite like others and that to understand others, to be with others, to love others, and to be loved by them, you need to think other thoughts than the ones that come naturally. To be with others you must be the opposite of who you are; to read others, you must read the opposite of what you see; to be somewhere, you must suspect you are or could be elsewhere. This is the irrealis-mood. You feel, you imagine, you think, and ultimately write counterfactually, because writing speaks this disturbance, investigates it, because writing also perpetuates and consolidates it and hopes to make sense of it by giving it a form.”
Most recently in the essay on Sebald in American Scholar this past December. Part of the forthcoming collection of essays on the idea, which will be entitled Homo Irrealis.
[Reading In Search of Lost Time] gave me the powerful sense that it didn't matter if one could not see one's way forward, it didn't matter if one was silly and slow and confused, it didn't matter if one had got hold of the wrong end of the stick - what mattered was to keep going. I began to see that the doubts I had were in a sense the temptations of the Devil, the attempt to make me give up at the very start by presenting things in absolute terms (I can do it/ no, I can't do it); and that what Proust (like Dante before him, I later discovered) was offering was a way of fighting that by saying: All right, I am confused, then let me start with my confusion, let me incorporate my confusion into the book or story I am writing, and see if that helps. If I can't start, then let me write about not being able to start. Perhaps, after all, confusion and failure are not things one has to overcome before one can start, but deep human experiences which deserve themselves to be explored in art. Perhaps, indeed, the stick has no right end and therefore no wrong end.
Gabriel Josipovici, The Teller and the Tale
Letter from Dave today to Dear Angel Investor requesting funds to carry family of four across the atlantic this summer.
Aciman in form again too---on the wishfilms we throw over everything, every place, in our craving for romance. Longing for intimacy and love, the remanence of our presence. 154-155 in Alibis, the essay on luminous New York. The next essay, on “Self Storage,” also right on the money. Those few moments, seconds, hours, when he/I find some solitude and recoup, recharge, find who I am again, for a while, find some core, imagined or real or illusory, some longed-for center, and from there “for a few imagined seconds . . . was finally able to run away from those I couldn’t be more grateful to love.”
Why am I feeling so fragile today? What has spooked me? Upset? 10 days of Caribbean sun and warmth destabilized? Re-entry? new carpet, day at pheasant lane in mid-week? Trying to hear French? Turn of seasons into spring, out of the burrows of winter? April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead earth. Flooding the basements built on granite ledge. Now we wait two or three days, turn our faces to the wall and ignore the waters. Wait for the earth to dry and open and carry away the excess efluvia.
For a little over fifteen years I tried to get away from books. I took up painting to use up lots of time I otherwise would have spent reading books. I had read enough. Too many. They had piled up. Shelves crammed. Too many trips to used bookstores to sell some, even more trips to other bookstores to buy more. I rented a studio space in a small office building on Main Street. Lawyers at one end of the hall. A masseur in the corner at the other end. A mail-order business in worms for pets in one office and about the two others I was never quite sure. Maybe the woman I would see off and on, rarely, entering and leaving the unmarked door to the left of my space was a therapist. Maybe not. And in the office to my right, I never saw anyone leave or enter. Was it even an office? From outside, the windows added up properly and said, yes, that room must have been a duplicate of the one I used three or four afternoons a week. I would teach my classes in the mornings, as I had been doing for more than twenty-five years. After scrupulously being available for students to seek help in my office I would walk down the hill to my painting studio as I began to call it and I would paint. Or sit. I allowed myself one chair on which to look back a the works I was painting. No books. It was hard at first not to carry a book with me, but pretty soon I got the hang of it. I didn’t think of it at the time as a flight from books. In fact it was probably not really that at all. That is just a way of looking back at it now. It was more like a way of filling out the act of reading by expanding it to the whole of seeing. The page became the canvas, words merged into paint, consciousness wanted to embrace thought and image, all attempts to express and contain, pour forth and hold onto, colors, forms, lines, shaped letters, words, in voice, cadence in movement held in paint and ink.
Aciman “You don’t know whether what you feel is what you you feel or what you say you feel, just as you don’t know whether saying you feel something is actually a way of saying anything at all aboout it.” Alibis 199 You wing it. You hope others believe you. If they believe you, then you might as well copy them and believe the person they believe.”
Perfect license for practicing Pierre Menardism.
“I’ve built my home not even with words and what they mean but with cadence, just cadence, because cadence is like feeling, and cadence is like breathing, and cadence is heartbeat and desire, and if cadence doesn’t reinvent everything we would like our life to have been or to become, then just the act of searching and probing in that particularly cadenced way becomes a way of feeling and of being in the world.”
Aciman uses irrealis at the end of the final essay on Parallax--page 189
“Parallax is not just a disturbance in vision. It’s a derealizing and paralyzing disturbance in the soul—cognitive, metaphysical, intellectual, and ultimately aesthetic. It is not just about displacement, or of feeling adrift both in time and space, it is a fundamental misalignment between who we are, might have been, could still be, can’t accept we’ve become, or may never be. You assume you are not quite like others and that to understand others, to be with others, to love others, and to be loved by them, you need to think other thoughts than the ones that come naturally. To be with others you must be the opposite of who you are; to read others, you must read the opposite of what you see; to be somewhere, you must suspect you are or could be elsewhere. This is the irrealis-mood. You feel, you imagine, you think, and ultimately write counterfactually, because writing speaks this disturbance, investigates it, because writing also perpetuates and consolidates it and hopes to make sense of it by giving it a form.”
Most recently in the essay on Sebald in American Scholar this past December. Part of the forthcoming collection of essays on the idea, which will be entitled Homo Irrealis.
Monday, February 20, 2017
Aciman Replies
Feb 12
Dear Robert Garlitz,
I am in Berlin for a few days because they are screening Call Me by Your Name. It showed at Sundance, but I was too...lazy to go to Utah. Berlin I love. But I am taking some time out because I wanted to write back.
Yes for the house in either Nantucket or the Vineyard. But before I sign anything, let me just say this. I have been in print for 20 years now and received some adulation, but never--i.e. NEVER--have I felt that a reader understood me to the bone or so thoroughly as you did in your blog. You went straight to the soul of things--to use mystical language--because you got what I have elsewhere called the "soufflé" effect, the folding back and forth without necessarily arriving at any answer, a form of treading water, of floating but not swimming. I can go on but it is the subject of what I hope will be a forthcoming collection of essays on various artists entitled Homo Irrealis, based on the irrealis mood, something that linguists call the indefinite mood in grammar. Wikipedia has, I think, a damn good
definition.
In any event, you have inspired me to get Pessoa and see what he writes. Thank you so much for ... well, thinking of me, thinking
about me.
André
Dear Robert Garlitz,
I am in Berlin for a few days because they are screening Call Me by Your Name. It showed at Sundance, but I was too...lazy to go to Utah. Berlin I love. But I am taking some time out because I wanted to write back.
Yes for the house in either Nantucket or the Vineyard. But before I sign anything, let me just say this. I have been in print for 20 years now and received some adulation, but never--i.e. NEVER--have I felt that a reader understood me to the bone or so thoroughly as you did in your blog. You went straight to the soul of things--to use mystical language--because you got what I have elsewhere called the "soufflé" effect, the folding back and forth without necessarily arriving at any answer, a form of treading water, of floating but not swimming. I can go on but it is the subject of what I hope will be a forthcoming collection of essays on various artists entitled Homo Irrealis, based on the irrealis mood, something that linguists call the indefinite mood in grammar. Wikipedia has, I think, a damn good
definition.
In any event, you have inspired me to get Pessoa and see what he writes. Thank you so much for ... well, thinking of me, thinking
about me.
André
tweets
“I miss the future when I’ll be able to look back and miss all of this, however absurdly.” Pessoa Disquiet 180
"The orator,dizzy from speaking the unspeakable. The monster, drunk on the thought of the monstrosities he heralds Binet on The Blond Beast in his novel about Heydrich.
"The orator,dizzy from speaking the unspeakable. The monster, drunk on the thought of the monstrosities he heralds Binet on The Blond Beast in his novel about Heydrich.
Friday, February 10, 2017
Mid-February weather report
Ready to Survive Mud Season
On the desk, bookmarks in each, at least ten pages in.
HHhH
Sudden Death
Missing Person
False Papers
Mystical Languages of Unsaying
Alibis
Tantra Illuminated
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Eight White Nights
The Man of Light in Iranian Suifism
The Proust Project
Villa Triste
The Voyager and the Messenger
The Garden of Truth
The Black Notebook
Damaged Lives
On the desk, bookmarks in each, at least ten pages in.
HHhH
Sudden Death
Missing Person
False Papers
Mystical Languages of Unsaying
Alibis
Tantra Illuminated
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Eight White Nights
The Man of Light in Iranian Suifism
The Proust Project
Villa Triste
The Voyager and the Messenger
The Garden of Truth
The Black Notebook
Damaged Lives
Tuesday, February 07, 2017
André Aciman and Apophatic Theology
Aciman, Our Apophatic Mystic
Over the past few weeks I’ve been catching up on the work of André Aciman. The great memoir and three of the novels. Started a fourth, Eight White Nights, earlier this week.
Felt like I should take a break, though, and cast about for what to read. Could go back to Patrick Modiano, but even though I like his work as much, the most recent book I had stopped after one-third, Missing Person, has themes a bit too similar to those of Aciman. A blurb from the back cover says the book “portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory.” Not too unlike Aciman’s searches for himself after his exile from Alexandria.
I googled Aciman some more, hoping to find he had written an essay on Pessoa. Nothing promising but did read a few interviews that are online.
After sleeping on it for a day or so and trying not to ponder too hard, I thought I would take a look at something on apophatic theology. Real change of pace. I found the new copy of Michael Sells book, Mystical Languages of Unsaying. I had read some of the authors under discussion. I had not realized that “The 150-year period from the mid-twelfth to the beginning of the fourteenth century constitutes the flowering of apophatic mysticism. Almost simultaneously, the apophatic masterpieces of the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions appeared . . . .” Such a short, intense cross cultural or intercultural period. It made me wonder about apophatic forms of expression in our time. I googled “apophatic novel” and up came, of course, the books by Charles Williams. The Greater Trumps, Shadows of Ecstasy, War in Heaven, The Descent of the Dove. I had read those years ago but had forgotten them. I have long privately thought of Beckett’s works as explorations in negative theology. I suppose there are many dissertations on the topic by now. I would read Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet this way.
Day or so later I picked up a book of Aciman’s prose pieces. A different voice in these than in the novels and it is the voice in the fictions that I love best. But in the first few essays in False Papers I began to see how clearly Aciman is an apophatic writer. “Exile” and “Memory” are in the subtitle and these words Aciman repeats endlessly in marvelously woven intricacies. But it is desire, longing, that everything he talks about serves. And look at these passages:
“It was my way of preempting tomorrow’s worries by making tomorrow seem yesterday, of warding off adversity by warding off happiness as well. In the end, I learned not to enjoy going to Paris, or even to enjoy being there--because I enjoyed it too much.”
“The Paris I cultivated was a Paris one need not stay too long in. It was a Paris made to be yearned for and remembered, a Paris of the mind, a Paris which stood for the true life, the life done over, the better life, the one flooded in limelight, with tinsel, soundtrack, and costume.”
“I had long ago learned to prefer the imagined encounter, or the memory of the imagined encounter, to the thing itself.”
This is the basic pattern of all of Aciman’s writing---a saying and then an unsaying. In Sell’s words “apophsis cannot help but posit . . . a ‘thing’ or ‘being,’ a being it must then unsay, while positing yet more entities that must be unsaid in turn.” Aciman’s characters love and then lose and learn to unlove, whether a place like Alexandria or Paris, or a person, like Oliver who his love, Elio, asks to call him by his name. Eight White Nights would be a great title for a mystical work, like The Cloud of Unknowing. “what I was feeling was not just admiration . . . . The word worship---as in ‘I could worship people like her’--hadn’t crossed my mind yet, though later that evening which I stood with her watching a glowing moonlight barge moored across the white Hudson I did turn to worship. Because placid winterscapes lift up the soul and bring down our guard. Because part of me was already venturing into an amorphous terrain in which a word here, a word there--any word, really---is all we have to hold on to before surrendering to a will far mightier than our own.” (my emphasis)
I suppose there are already many dissertations in a university libraries on the apophatic tradition in Modernist and Post-Modernist literature. Aciman is certainly our principal practitioner at this moment. Yearning oscillates between the poles of every bridge, every love, every utterance, every saying and unsaying. Memory, exile, love and loss sustain this longing, as with every mystic.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been catching up on the work of André Aciman. The great memoir and three of the novels. Started a fourth, Eight White Nights, earlier this week.
Felt like I should take a break, though, and cast about for what to read. Could go back to Patrick Modiano, but even though I like his work as much, the most recent book I had stopped after one-third, Missing Person, has themes a bit too similar to those of Aciman. A blurb from the back cover says the book “portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory.” Not too unlike Aciman’s searches for himself after his exile from Alexandria.
I googled Aciman some more, hoping to find he had written an essay on Pessoa. Nothing promising but did read a few interviews that are online.
After sleeping on it for a day or so and trying not to ponder too hard, I thought I would take a look at something on apophatic theology. Real change of pace. I found the new copy of Michael Sells book, Mystical Languages of Unsaying. I had read some of the authors under discussion. I had not realized that “The 150-year period from the mid-twelfth to the beginning of the fourteenth century constitutes the flowering of apophatic mysticism. Almost simultaneously, the apophatic masterpieces of the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions appeared . . . .” Such a short, intense cross cultural or intercultural period. It made me wonder about apophatic forms of expression in our time. I googled “apophatic novel” and up came, of course, the books by Charles Williams. The Greater Trumps, Shadows of Ecstasy, War in Heaven, The Descent of the Dove. I had read those years ago but had forgotten them. I have long privately thought of Beckett’s works as explorations in negative theology. I suppose there are many dissertations on the topic by now. I would read Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet this way.
Day or so later I picked up a book of Aciman’s prose pieces. A different voice in these than in the novels and it is the voice in the fictions that I love best. But in the first few essays in False Papers I began to see how clearly Aciman is an apophatic writer. “Exile” and “Memory” are in the subtitle and these words Aciman repeats endlessly in marvelously woven intricacies. But it is desire, longing, that everything he talks about serves. And look at these passages:
“It was my way of preempting tomorrow’s worries by making tomorrow seem yesterday, of warding off adversity by warding off happiness as well. In the end, I learned not to enjoy going to Paris, or even to enjoy being there--because I enjoyed it too much.”
“The Paris I cultivated was a Paris one need not stay too long in. It was a Paris made to be yearned for and remembered, a Paris of the mind, a Paris which stood for the true life, the life done over, the better life, the one flooded in limelight, with tinsel, soundtrack, and costume.”
“I had long ago learned to prefer the imagined encounter, or the memory of the imagined encounter, to the thing itself.”
This is the basic pattern of all of Aciman’s writing---a saying and then an unsaying. In Sell’s words “apophsis cannot help but posit . . . a ‘thing’ or ‘being,’ a being it must then unsay, while positing yet more entities that must be unsaid in turn.” Aciman’s characters love and then lose and learn to unlove, whether a place like Alexandria or Paris, or a person, like Oliver who his love, Elio, asks to call him by his name. Eight White Nights would be a great title for a mystical work, like The Cloud of Unknowing. “what I was feeling was not just admiration . . . . The word worship---as in ‘I could worship people like her’--hadn’t crossed my mind yet, though later that evening which I stood with her watching a glowing moonlight barge moored across the white Hudson I did turn to worship. Because placid winterscapes lift up the soul and bring down our guard. Because part of me was already venturing into an amorphous terrain in which a word here, a word there--any word, really---is all we have to hold on to before surrendering to a will far mightier than our own.” (my emphasis)
I suppose there are already many dissertations in a university libraries on the apophatic tradition in Modernist and Post-Modernist literature. Aciman is certainly our principal practitioner at this moment. Yearning oscillates between the poles of every bridge, every love, every utterance, every saying and unsaying. Memory, exile, love and loss sustain this longing, as with every mystic.
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Modiano, Knausgaard, Aciman and Marías
Aciman, Knausgaard, Modiano---at the turn of the 20th Century these writers mark the turn of the novel as a work of fiction into a blended work of remembered consciousness, autobiography seguing into fiction and fiction back into remembered past. Much as the author of Historical Consciousness, John Lukacs, described and predicted. Proust perhaps first at the start of the century. What about Javier Marías? His novels do not have quite the same attitude or voice as these other three writers. If he draws on his own life stories, he plays these cards much closer to his chest than the three others. Marias needs to use a fictive design as an armature. See his most recent work, Thus Bad Begins. Hamlet figures all through the work even though Marías describes clearly Madrid in the ‘80s as he remembers it and other features of the experience of living through the long, slow end of the Franco era. A major tale of abusive behavior also provides a main element of the novel, a doctor who raped patients and wives of patients and who succeeded in keeping this behavior safe behind a public image of charity and honor. And yet for all of that, the novel does not have that personal feel of intimate, remembered consciousness that the works of Knausgaard, Modiano and Aciman have. They must tell their stories---there is a sense of their personal need to find who they were and are by exploring what happened to them, what all they happened to do over the years they look back upon. Marías in contrast is a consummate borrower and cobbler of bits and pieces of stories he has heard, he knows or believes to be true in one way or another. He loves to weave them into intricate tapestries of layered consciousness, imitated consciousness, for his pleasure and the pleasure of the reader. A silversmith in Toledo, inlaying threads of gold and silver into the metal of the sword. Damascene work. But for Modiano and Aciman and Knausgaard the appeal of damascene intricacy is hardly present at all. They may scramble timeline and thematic links but they cannot help it, this is the way the moments came back to them, the ways they grabbed them as much as they could, from possible escape. A slight tinge of the desperation of getting into the right words the imagined and remembered way things need to be caught if they are to be caught at all.
Sunday, January 29, 2017
Aciman on Voice
Voice
“Voice is not just telling a story, it is the attitude in the story that has to exist in every single sentence, because it is the attitude that keeps the reader going.” 2012 interview on daysofyore
“Voice is not just telling a story, it is the attitude in the story that has to exist in every single sentence, because it is the attitude that keeps the reader going.” 2012 interview on daysofyore
Monday, January 23, 2017
André Aciman
Main event otherwise is Aciman has arrived. Reading his book Enigma Variations. Had I vaguely heard of his Harvard Square or some other title? How did I decide to look into his book? He’s been famous for about ten years. Has the 5ooo limit friends on facebook. etc. but I’m glad I am reading this book and will read all the others. I think. Love his writing and the way he focuses on interior flow of consciousness, thought and feeling.
email from the kindle iphone to myself---
Hi - I'm reading "Enigma Variations: A Novel" by André Aciman and wanted to share this quote with you.
"You and I don’t love the way others do—we run on empty.” She touched my face, my forehead. “I could tell you to be happy that you have him, but it won’t help. I could tell you to be happy we’ve got two days, but that won’t help either. You’re alone, as I’m alone, and the cruelest thing is that finding each other and saying let us be alone together won’t solve a thing.”” no page number though Loc 3201 so weird
8:40pm Finished Enigma Variations. Final section, Abingdon Square, felt like a let-down. Felt forced and unnecessary.
quotes “I’d grown to love serving two masters.” “and the unspoken tinge of indecency in every avowal--that thrilled and stirred me . . . .” “I was like an ellipse, with two competing foci but no center.” "We were neither friends, nor strangers, nor lovers, just wavering, as I wavered, as I wished to think she wavered, each grateful for the other’s silence as we watched the evening drift into night on this tiny park that was neither on Hudson, nor on Bleecker, nor on Eighth Avenue, but a tangent to all three, as we ourselves were, perhaps, nothing more than tangents in each other’s life. In a blizzard, we’d be the first to go, we’d have nowhere to go. Ours, I began to fear, was a script without parts.”
-------
still I will keep reading in the other books. do feel some duty to finish the others I’d started last fall.
Thurs morning 20th Aciman has me again after all. Call Me By Your Name. The narrator talks of envy and similitude and the hunger for acceptance, recognition. The eternal teenager in us, Aciman seems to have a talent for recapturing that over and over. Tempted to troll through Goodreads to see what others say about the books. Later perhaps. Enough still to have found them. Being Jewish is a topic and for me it satisfies enough for curiosity and I can easily replace it for being Catholic, strangely enough.
Aciman’s writing reminds me of reading Brideshead Revisited, listening to Leonard Cohen, or, even, reading Pessoa? No, Pessoa feels different even if akin.
Hadn’t realized until looking at Goodreads that Enigma Variations is listed as being published this year, 2017. Call Me ten years earlier, 2007.
“They had always said I got too easily attached to people.” 60
“Here was someone who lacked for nothing. I couldn’t understand this feeling. I envied him.” 26
“How could anyone intuit the manner of someone’s thinking unless he himself was already familiar with this same mode of thinking?” 22
Being and having “in the twisted skein of desire” are one and the same thing. 68
A minute of grace. Between always and never. Celan. 70
Finishing Aciman more slowly to make it last. Plans to declare him on twitter the greatest INFP writer ever, Enneagram 4, and bisexuality realist.
Monday 23 Jan
Aciman’s novel incredibly beautiful. And perfect. Having the father give his knowing blessing to the relationship part of that rather amazing perfection. Having it be situated perfectly on the Mediterranean also. Is it in fact too perfect? Could that be so? No, it is a wonder. Like a Keats ode. Now it is a movie at Sundance, review posted just 8 hours ago. !
Peter Debruge’s review for Variety is exceptionally well done and has this paragraph about the father: “No matter how intellectually progressive the Perlman family is, no father has ever said something so open-minded and eloquent to his son, and yet, the film offers this conversation as a gift to audiences who might have desperately needed to hear it in their own lives. Such liberties are permissible given the story’s 1983 setting, which suggests that this isn’t a literal rendering of Elio’s experience, but a bittersweet embellishment of his memory. These were the days that shaped him, marked by the intense tastes, textures, and odors which Guadagnino so effectively amplifies for our benefit.”
Sounds like the movie is successful.
The reviewer of the book for the Times, D’Erasmo, quotes this passage from Aciman on nostalgia: “In his essay “Pensione Eolo,” Aciman writes, “Ultimately, the real site of nostalgia is not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that loss.” In other words, Elio and Oliver might give each other up, but the book that conjures them doesn’t give up either one. In fact, it brings them back together, reunites them, for a glorious endless summer. In the book, the river can be revisited. The closing words echo the title: a phrase simultaneously of elegy and of invitation.”
I like the line from the Post---In The Washington Post, Charles Kaiser said, "If you have ever been the willing victim of obsessive love--a force greater than yourself that pulls you inextricably toward the object of your desire--you will recognize every nuance of André Aciman's superb new novel, 'Call Me by Your Name.’” Obsessive is a better frame than “gay” and the wikipedia article where I found this uses “bisexual” somewhere in it. At least it shows up on search under that term but of course the main press hails the movie and book as a gay story. Aciman makes clear that it is not so easily boxed.
Message from student gave me line from Beckett---“It is suicide to be abroad”, grumbles Mrs Rooney in Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall, “but what is it to be at home . . . what is it to be at home? A lingering dissolution.”
passages from “Call Me” to bring up the subtexts I focused on.
Marzia says this so am in doubt as to whether to post it: “People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.” 115
Could be just an inside joke between writer and reader. One of the oldest complaints about reading.
“I envied him.” the author of If Love. 113
I like how often envy is mentioned. More than any other book in recent memory.
“the inflections of desire . . . could only be conveyed in play.” 186
“I want you as intermezzo . . . as both, or as in between.” 196
Here is Aciman’s genius, and few reviewers see it clearly enough. The obsessiveness of the experience serves this desire for the transit into the middle of the bridge. The hovering in the middle, that is the experience beyond every other.
“I had never envied him the past, nor felt threatened by it. . . . I didn’t envy life before me, nor did I ache to travel back to the time when he had been my age.” 201
“Rehearse the pain to dull the pain. Homeopathically.” 210
Because he was himself, he was myself. Montaigne “he’s more myself than I am.” Bronte 223
“No reader of Montaigne can forget that stunning moment when, after probing why he loved his deceased friend Etienne de La Boétie so much, the author of the essays, this master-stylist of baroque prose, breaks down and scrawls out one of the most beautiful sentences penned in French: “You ask me why I loved him,” Montaigne says. “I don’t know. All I can say is parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi.” Because it was he, because it was I. Proust too knows how to “ PEN America 2007
Father says to Elio “You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you.” . . . . “But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything--what a waste!” 224
“‘The truth is I’m not sure I can feel nothing. And if I am to meet your family, I would prefer not to feel anything.” 235
“God, the way they envied us from across the dinner table that first night in Rome,” 239
“And we’ll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.” 239
“it would finally dawn on us both that he was more me that I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself.” 243
Jeff P Jones on The Millions gets everything right about Enigma Variations. Especially the dominance of feeling.
“But this section also reveals something at the heart of Paul’s character: he’s happiest in the throes of yearning after new love because he knows that acquisition never leads to contentment. Obsessing over his feelings for Manfred, Paul thinks, “The circuit is always the same: from attraction to tenderness to obsessive longing, and then to surrender, desuetude, apathy, fatigue, and finally scorn.” Familiarity is the come-down; Paul’s drug is feeling itself, the more intense the better.”
Except feeling is not the “drug.” It is the way of being, the primary process of living itself.
Jones adds “Love, infatuation, desire — these most powerful of feelings, this novel says — reduce and enlarge us in ways that are wonderfully juvenescent, at once simplifying and magnifying the world.”
Jones also gets exactly the “P” nature of the way Aciman describes desire. “P” as in INFP. “Paul’s focus isn’t on the repercussions from leaving an old lover as much as it is on savoring the possibilities of new love.
“Intriguingly, as we witness Paul repeatedly rearrange his life around a new magnetic north, it becomes clear that his bisexuality abets his serial monogamy. “I’d grown to love serving two masters,” he thinks, “perhaps so as never truly to answer to either one.” Yet Paul’s state isn’t a dilemma in search of an answer. We go with him the way we go with Anton Chekhov’s characters, enmeshed in the humanness of the drama. When Chloe, an on-again, off-again lover since college, confronts Paul, asking about his new lover, “Did you tell her you’ll always want something else and something more?”, we see it for the tender inquiry it is.”
email from the kindle iphone to myself---
Hi - I'm reading "Enigma Variations: A Novel" by André Aciman and wanted to share this quote with you.
"You and I don’t love the way others do—we run on empty.” She touched my face, my forehead. “I could tell you to be happy that you have him, but it won’t help. I could tell you to be happy we’ve got two days, but that won’t help either. You’re alone, as I’m alone, and the cruelest thing is that finding each other and saying let us be alone together won’t solve a thing.”” no page number though Loc 3201 so weird
8:40pm Finished Enigma Variations. Final section, Abingdon Square, felt like a let-down. Felt forced and unnecessary.
quotes “I’d grown to love serving two masters.” “and the unspoken tinge of indecency in every avowal--that thrilled and stirred me . . . .” “I was like an ellipse, with two competing foci but no center.” "We were neither friends, nor strangers, nor lovers, just wavering, as I wavered, as I wished to think she wavered, each grateful for the other’s silence as we watched the evening drift into night on this tiny park that was neither on Hudson, nor on Bleecker, nor on Eighth Avenue, but a tangent to all three, as we ourselves were, perhaps, nothing more than tangents in each other’s life. In a blizzard, we’d be the first to go, we’d have nowhere to go. Ours, I began to fear, was a script without parts.”
-------
still I will keep reading in the other books. do feel some duty to finish the others I’d started last fall.
Thurs morning 20th Aciman has me again after all. Call Me By Your Name. The narrator talks of envy and similitude and the hunger for acceptance, recognition. The eternal teenager in us, Aciman seems to have a talent for recapturing that over and over. Tempted to troll through Goodreads to see what others say about the books. Later perhaps. Enough still to have found them. Being Jewish is a topic and for me it satisfies enough for curiosity and I can easily replace it for being Catholic, strangely enough.
Aciman’s writing reminds me of reading Brideshead Revisited, listening to Leonard Cohen, or, even, reading Pessoa? No, Pessoa feels different even if akin.
Hadn’t realized until looking at Goodreads that Enigma Variations is listed as being published this year, 2017. Call Me ten years earlier, 2007.
“They had always said I got too easily attached to people.” 60
“Here was someone who lacked for nothing. I couldn’t understand this feeling. I envied him.” 26
“How could anyone intuit the manner of someone’s thinking unless he himself was already familiar with this same mode of thinking?” 22
Being and having “in the twisted skein of desire” are one and the same thing. 68
A minute of grace. Between always and never. Celan. 70
Finishing Aciman more slowly to make it last. Plans to declare him on twitter the greatest INFP writer ever, Enneagram 4, and bisexuality realist.
Monday 23 Jan
Aciman’s novel incredibly beautiful. And perfect. Having the father give his knowing blessing to the relationship part of that rather amazing perfection. Having it be situated perfectly on the Mediterranean also. Is it in fact too perfect? Could that be so? No, it is a wonder. Like a Keats ode. Now it is a movie at Sundance, review posted just 8 hours ago. !
Peter Debruge’s review for Variety is exceptionally well done and has this paragraph about the father: “No matter how intellectually progressive the Perlman family is, no father has ever said something so open-minded and eloquent to his son, and yet, the film offers this conversation as a gift to audiences who might have desperately needed to hear it in their own lives. Such liberties are permissible given the story’s 1983 setting, which suggests that this isn’t a literal rendering of Elio’s experience, but a bittersweet embellishment of his memory. These were the days that shaped him, marked by the intense tastes, textures, and odors which Guadagnino so effectively amplifies for our benefit.”
Sounds like the movie is successful.
The reviewer of the book for the Times, D’Erasmo, quotes this passage from Aciman on nostalgia: “In his essay “Pensione Eolo,” Aciman writes, “Ultimately, the real site of nostalgia is not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that loss.” In other words, Elio and Oliver might give each other up, but the book that conjures them doesn’t give up either one. In fact, it brings them back together, reunites them, for a glorious endless summer. In the book, the river can be revisited. The closing words echo the title: a phrase simultaneously of elegy and of invitation.”
I like the line from the Post---In The Washington Post, Charles Kaiser said, "If you have ever been the willing victim of obsessive love--a force greater than yourself that pulls you inextricably toward the object of your desire--you will recognize every nuance of André Aciman's superb new novel, 'Call Me by Your Name.’” Obsessive is a better frame than “gay” and the wikipedia article where I found this uses “bisexual” somewhere in it. At least it shows up on search under that term but of course the main press hails the movie and book as a gay story. Aciman makes clear that it is not so easily boxed.
Message from student gave me line from Beckett---“It is suicide to be abroad”, grumbles Mrs Rooney in Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall, “but what is it to be at home . . . what is it to be at home? A lingering dissolution.”
passages from “Call Me” to bring up the subtexts I focused on.
Marzia says this so am in doubt as to whether to post it: “People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are.” 115
Could be just an inside joke between writer and reader. One of the oldest complaints about reading.
“I envied him.” the author of If Love. 113
I like how often envy is mentioned. More than any other book in recent memory.
“the inflections of desire . . . could only be conveyed in play.” 186
“I want you as intermezzo . . . as both, or as in between.” 196
Here is Aciman’s genius, and few reviewers see it clearly enough. The obsessiveness of the experience serves this desire for the transit into the middle of the bridge. The hovering in the middle, that is the experience beyond every other.
“I had never envied him the past, nor felt threatened by it. . . . I didn’t envy life before me, nor did I ache to travel back to the time when he had been my age.” 201
“Rehearse the pain to dull the pain. Homeopathically.” 210
Because he was himself, he was myself. Montaigne “he’s more myself than I am.” Bronte 223
“No reader of Montaigne can forget that stunning moment when, after probing why he loved his deceased friend Etienne de La Boétie so much, the author of the essays, this master-stylist of baroque prose, breaks down and scrawls out one of the most beautiful sentences penned in French: “You ask me why I loved him,” Montaigne says. “I don’t know. All I can say is parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi.” Because it was he, because it was I. Proust too knows how to “ PEN America 2007
Father says to Elio “You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you.” . . . . “But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything--what a waste!” 224
“‘The truth is I’m not sure I can feel nothing. And if I am to meet your family, I would prefer not to feel anything.” 235
“God, the way they envied us from across the dinner table that first night in Rome,” 239
“And we’ll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.” 239
“it would finally dawn on us both that he was more me that I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself.” 243
Jeff P Jones on The Millions gets everything right about Enigma Variations. Especially the dominance of feeling.
“But this section also reveals something at the heart of Paul’s character: he’s happiest in the throes of yearning after new love because he knows that acquisition never leads to contentment. Obsessing over his feelings for Manfred, Paul thinks, “The circuit is always the same: from attraction to tenderness to obsessive longing, and then to surrender, desuetude, apathy, fatigue, and finally scorn.” Familiarity is the come-down; Paul’s drug is feeling itself, the more intense the better.”
Except feeling is not the “drug.” It is the way of being, the primary process of living itself.
Jones adds “Love, infatuation, desire — these most powerful of feelings, this novel says — reduce and enlarge us in ways that are wonderfully juvenescent, at once simplifying and magnifying the world.”
Jones also gets exactly the “P” nature of the way Aciman describes desire. “P” as in INFP. “Paul’s focus isn’t on the repercussions from leaving an old lover as much as it is on savoring the possibilities of new love.
“Intriguingly, as we witness Paul repeatedly rearrange his life around a new magnetic north, it becomes clear that his bisexuality abets his serial monogamy. “I’d grown to love serving two masters,” he thinks, “perhaps so as never truly to answer to either one.” Yet Paul’s state isn’t a dilemma in search of an answer. We go with him the way we go with Anton Chekhov’s characters, enmeshed in the humanness of the drama. When Chloe, an on-again, off-again lover since college, confronts Paul, asking about his new lover, “Did you tell her you’ll always want something else and something more?”, we see it for the tender inquiry it is.”
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