April 2022

 1 April 2022

Quest for Quest Diagnostics early this morning.  Up on Golf drive, Lovelace hilltop.  Beautiful morning.  Clouds covering the crest.  

Another attempt to get into the permitting process.  Going to Jemez Springs tomorrow with Ed.  

Remember the opening chapters of Solid Mandela.  I think I made it about seventy pages in before.  Did I read the whole book?  Don't think so.  

Remember the Forgotten Sister opening of vol 2 of MwQ as well.  I read about half of the version put out by Joel Agee. 

Sunday 3 April  

Great music at Chatter this morning.  Emanuele Arciuli pianist and Peter Gilbert, composer, American premier of his sonata "New Scenes from an Old World."  Duckworth and Debussy framed the event.  

Good talk with Jim.  He sounded perfectly fine.  Snow storm blowing around outside his window.  Gave me the mission to look up Marty Helldorfer and give him a big bear hug.  Marty opened the door at Ammendale when Jim first went there for an interview with Erminus Joseph.  Reminded him of our sixtieth anniversary this year.  Asked him about the boy who had skin of fur and could sing beautifully.  He said he had a great time writing that book.  Feels quite attached from years ago to Wind in the Willows.  

Took a short walk,  hips aching.  Too much sitting yesterday, day's trip with Ed to Jemez Springs.  Delightful time but exhausting to talk for three hours.

Ed is 83!!!! never realized that.  

Jim told me he has his brothers' habit packed away in a trunk somewhere.  Am amazed at that.  Wonder if I will meet Marty Helldorfer.  He opened the door at Ammendale when Jim first went there for an interview with Erminus Joseph.  Sent Marty an email via his website but that might be old and something he doesn't use.  

Got a reply!!  But next morning this—-

Bob,

Thank you.  I’ve a little problem, temporary as far as I can see.  These days and likely for the next few weeks, I’m dealing with the symptoms of Parkinson Disease compounded by treatment for Prostrate problems.  Therefore I’ve had to cut back on many actives…not so easy for me to do.  So keep me involved and inform about your project with the memory of Brother E Joseph. While disappointed, let’s put off meeting for lunch until a later date.  

Best wishes,

Marty

——-

Jemez Springs yesterday.  Beautiful day trip.  Specimen drop at Quest/Lovelace on the way.  Today super windy.  Wind yesterday too.  Might

go over to the Green Side Cafe today, just because Lou mentioned it.  I guess.  My business shows up as Registered with the City but can't tell if I do have a License and how to secure the STR permit.  This time last year we were buying the house.  We should have an annual Closing Day celebration each year.  

Winds all day and now into night.  

8 April  From White's Mandela:  "Most of what he did he did secretly, as though making a secret of his acts gave them a special importance.  It was only too bad that more people were not in the secret, for in the circumstances he could only appear important to himself."  81 

"And so it must have been from outside that they received the double possibility of a giving and a receiving vision, as a dual aspect of nature, and somehow all this is far older than the difference of gender, on which the sexes later drew to fill out their psychological wardrobe . . . ."  748 MwQ

in today's world this line is shocking: "At that moment Waldo Brown realized Mrs Feinstein's nose reminded him of the uncircumcised penis of an Anglican bishop he had noticed in a public lavatory.  The connection was too obvious, too obscene to resist, and he was forced to bring out his handkerchief to sneeze."  136 Mandela  

to compete with that! we have this passage from Musil:  "Perhaps it also resembled some harmless form of vampire passion, which sucks the desired being into itself, except that this infant male did not want to draw that infant female into himself but wanted to take her place entirely, and this happened with that dazzling tenderness present only in the first intimations of sexuality."   

If only White could have borrowed this for his novel about twins—-wouldn't that be a doubling of the doubling?  

White: 158  "This giant incubator hoped she was her own infallible investment.  But she would not suck him in.  Imagining to hatch him out." 

"His life was his book, until at some point in age and detachment it wrote itself logically into the words with which his mind and notebooks were encrusted."  162

"To submit himself to the ephemeral, the superficial relationships might damage the crystal core holding itself in reserve for some imminent moment of higher idealism.  Just as he had avoided fleshly love—-while understanding its algebra, of course—-the better to convey eventually its essence."  183

209  "But Arthur was determined Waldo should receive."  

How White and Musil would have understood each other.  Collaborationists, even.  

After finishing Waldo's section in Mandala I realized I had indeed read it some years ago, and felt disappointed at exactly the same place.  I will finish it, about fifty more pages.  This time I read more carefully.  Enjoyed it, but still not able to make White my favorite writer of all or recent times.

Musil's attack on Mann on page 377 of the Diaries is amazing:  "wrong" in some ways and yet superbly astute and accurate and so "right" in the essential ways.  "And what does his problem child, Castorp, do in all that time on the Magic Mountain?  Obviously he masturbated!  But M. removes the private parts from his characters as if they were plaster-of-Paris statues."    He sees "self-abuse" as emblem of the "knowledge of immorality" unfortunately and of a mode that went with the times.  The immorality seems to be that the boy who knew immorality went on to become the head of a family.  Is there a commentator who unpacks this passage?  I could question the scholar who is on twitter.  Maybe she does.  Genese Grill?  have to get her name accurately.  Mann's removal of sexuality was done to keep his closet door firmly closed.  Was Musil saying this in code or did he really not know?  Suspected but didn't discuss openly?   A simple google search will not yield this info.  Musil's great line shows up—-"Art peels kitsch off of life."

Short visit with the kids yesterday for Easter.  They were at Plessis and had found hidden eggs.  After dinner they were watching uncle Flo play beach volleyball down in Spain on the computer.  Beautiful day there.  We had a great Schutzer octet at chatter and then lunch at M'Tucci's with a pricey Piedmontese wine, Amarone del something—their email about these fine wines snagged me.  

Met with Juanita J about the taxes on Saturday.  Bit surprised in lots of ways.  Have I mismanaged things?  We'll see how it all plays out.  Over the next ten years.  Juanita had nothing Juanitaesque about her!! Can see why Eloy has moved his business to a larger firm, however.  He wants to go to twenty properties.  Will that be too many for him to handle well?  

April 18  Already feels like we need to start packing for going back East.  Not liking that feeling.  Donald's visit to look forward to later this week.

Warmer temperatures and sun.  Ozark spooking me/us about money things.  Moving it around what life is all about.  Make looking at Zillow

values every week part of same ritual as checking TIAC.  

Basile has problems with his cataract surgery.  They won't make it to Charlotte in early June.  Guess we will go ahead with that plan.  

All that caffeinated worrying last night for nought.  Day went off smoothly.  University VW even called and we went over and got our car back.  Donald says exactly what I thought he would about the spirits needed for his visit—-he will be bringing a wee flask or some such with him.  The experienced traveler.  

Here is Genese Grill in LARB interview—-Sitter and Jones would not approve, one suspects, given their current discussion about population sustainability on the globe—-

Burton Pike influenced my thinking here, as well, by clarifying the Modernist project, not as a wholesale rejection of meaning, but a much subtler attempt to find formal strategies (metaphor, fragmentation, syntactical experiments) to approach the new consciousnesses of relativity, subconscious processes, psychology, and perspectivism. Meaning(s) and truth(s), while much more complex than had formerly been conceived, were still worth scrambling for. One was called upon to approximate, approach, and attempt, as aesthetic-ethical imperative. In my own essayistic work, this developed into a study of the ways in which the material world is and is not created or changed by the spiritual processes of thought, imagination, or constructs. I maintain that our most life-affirming approach to existence is one which honors the reality of the material world — beauty, gravity, death, change — and empowers what Nietzsche called “creative subjects” — i.e., all human beings — to be agents of necessary reality-renewal.

—-

Everything !   "As to Emerson and Thoreau, yes, they are important influences in my essay writing. Musil, of course, esteemed Emerson, and seems to have read some Thoreau. I also include Walter Pater and Yeats as my inspirations, writers who complexified and digressed in their own sumptuously ornate, nonlinear ways. While I delight in the light touch of Walser, I am afraid I have a hard time keeping my mind trained on small discrete subjects or momentary haiku-like glimpses. I am always making connections and also divisions, and I am always tempted to include everything in every piece. Form and content, as for Musil, are one here. The fact that the world is made up of so many interconnected, yet invariably divaricating and distinct singularities, that no one thing can be understood without seeing it in relation to all other things — moving and changing even as we observers move and change our perspectives — is itself at the heart of the delightful and frightful matter. "

here hear!!!

"This essay, part of a collection exploring the tension between Spirit and Matter, was written in response to the deleterious contemporary moralistic trend toward devaluing the material — in this case, physical beauty and sexual pleasure. The material world is denigrated today in favor of the so-called spiritual, which may be exemplified by the virtual, on the one hand, or by a pious emphasis on allegedly more important internal beauty, on the other. In all cases, there is a denial of the meaningful connection between externalities and internalities. Like all of the essays, this one was searching out correspondences between surface and depth, beauty and truth, nature and culture, aesthetics and ethics.

Basically, I do not believe that spirit exists without matter or matter without spirit, but I wanted to tease out the “spiritual” dimensions of matter, the difference between some materiality — art, nature, bodies — and other, shallower, materialism. I began the collection with an investigation of the history of books as objects and of current theories of virtuality, contending that when we remove the materiality from a book, we are severing its essential magical role as conduit between ideas and the world, between imagination and reality, thought and action. I further tested this conjecture by creating, over the course of five years, a gigantic room-sized accordion book (each of its 10 panels is four feet by eight feet), which I illuminated and inscribed, letter by letter, with the essay, thus experiencing firsthand the tribulations that matter is heir to — peeling paint, cumbersome panels, painstaking inscription work, gravity, breakage — as well as its pleasures and ritual potency.

The world, even in 2020, is rife with richly spiritual materiality, but this rare aesthetic and ethical aspect of human life is increasingly drowned out by the pervasive roar of hollow, vulgar consumerism, on the one hand, and, on the other, by those voices that deny the inherent value of physical reality, beauty, art, and nature. Such a nihilistic perspective leaves an aching abyss in our lives, all-too-easily filled by the peddlers of dissipating, violating virtuality. My work is fueled, thus, in good part by opposition to these latter dangers; but, also, it is fueled by what I love. In the wake of a rising tide of anti-intellectual, anti-aesthetic, moralistic de-materialization, I am impelled — compelled? repelled? — by the hate that I feel for that which threatens what I love. Yet the work is, I hope, more of a yay- than a nay-saying."

—-

exchange with Genese Grill   21 April

p 137 in Musil's Diaries

A critic like Kenneth Burke could find a way to argue that Musil in his prescience was using "masturbation" as code for "homosexuality (closeted)" to give us an incredibly perfect reading of Mann's whole work/life.  A kind of prophesying before the fact. 

Hello Again, Robert.

I had forgotten this hilarious passage. I am not sure, however, what your question is.  My thoughts about it are, again, that Musil is comparing Mann to himself. While Musil dealt with sexuality, including homosexuality, bestiality, sadism, masochism, and adultery in his many works, Mann avoided direct confrontation with it (except in Death in Venice, even though even there it is handled poetically, not explicitly).

Thanks for sharing!

Genese

29 April 

two days ago from Nicholas

Dear Bob,

I was still hoping to visit as of last week - but this week has completely upended my schedule so very sadly I won’t be able to. The return of travel has been like letting cows out of a barn in Switzerland in Spring, so much pent up work demand for meetings, this first half of year has become a little crazy (as well hosting a flow of exiled Russians through my house around the edges)!

So, sorry to miss you and Va. I am coming to the US in first weeks of September, will you be in NH or NM?

Sorry about this again - I wonder whether we will ever get back to some kind of normality! Whatever that is. 

Love, Nicholas

——

Donald departed today around 1.  Drove him to the airport at 11 and then we walked briefly at Walmart before having lunch and a nap and then our soaps.  

He told Virginia at one point that he is left-brained and I am right-brained. 

Our two visitors, then, a balanced set of opposites:  Dennis, right-brained artist, Donald, left-brained super-church member.  Knight of Malta and defender of the Church.  He complains about prices and money but pays 1700$ for daily Times in paper format, plus subscriptions to the New Yorker and The Economist.  He is still a character.  As is Dennis.  

As aren't we all.  

Near the end of White's Solid Mandala he brings in his revelatory fragments about mandalas and the twins.  He has been developing them all along, Arthur the right-brained wandering visionary artist, Waldo, the left-brained sensible fellow, not understanding much about his twin at all.  Then a text Arthur finds in an old book in the library, vaguely Jungian? about the hermaphroditic Adam who appears in the form of a male but always carries within him his wife Eve, hidden in his body.  To which Arthur agrees and adds why not two or three wives.  281 i.e. all the women in the book.  "Love , he had found, is more acceptable to some when twisted out of its true shape."  280  Earlier Arthur had danced a mandala, 265, for Mrs Poulter.  He carries his glass marbles, gives the knotted one to Waldo, who does not value it.  He tries to read Brothers Karamazov but prefers Alice.  "While in the present the dogs sat licking their pads or, jacked on their sterns, lavished respectful tongues on the blue perfection of their balls.  Arthur laughed, for all roundnesses.  He took out the marble and looked at it."  288

google search—-

soon as I glanced I recalled some of the comments from before, especially Tomlinson's which I am happy to second.  Relieved to see it again.  Will not, this time, plow on through to the end.  Disconcerted that I read  the whole book over again.  Almost all.  Dang.  Not worth it, except maybe for the final passage quoted.  

There is much grace and beauty here and plenty of laughs, but in places I felt overwhelmed by the sadness that effuses the story, the sense of loss and regret and the inability to escape the past and to truly grasp life by the horns. And the near-perfect ending, I have to say, came as somewhat of a shock, so much so it’s taken me a month to write this review, because I wanted to think about this book before I put pen to paper.

 The feel of the narrative is almost claustrophobic, certainly psychological. What we learn of both brothers is complemented by their different narratives; their dependency on each other is suffocatingly established. The numbers two (for the principal characters) and four (for the number of chapters) become clear in the telling. Hatred seems to be the glue that binds the first part of this structural system.

from rob-tomlinson.com 

… lowering his head he read out loud, pushing the words well forward with his lips, because he almost doubted he would be able to form them, he was so excited: “The mandala is a symbol of totality. It is believed to be the ‘dwelling of the god’. Its protective circle is a pattern of order super-imposed on — psychic — chaos. Sometimes its geometric form is seen as a vision (either waking or in a dream) or -“ His voice had fallen to the most elaborate hush. “Or danced,” Arthur read.
(The Solid Mandala, p. 237-8)

From this point onwards, Arthur’s marbles become his ‘solid mandalas’, talismanic objects of peculiar value to him. White’s adoption of the term ‘mandala’ for Arthur’s marbles stemmed from his interest in the work of the psychologist Carl Jung who encouraged his patients to draw and paint circle drawings that represented “the Self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well is harmonious”. That White has Arthur as the keeper of the mandalas, when Waldo’s personality is — in contrast — fragmented and chaotic, is key to the novel’s form and meaning.

Arthur accumulates instances of mandalic associations. He considers “the world is another mandala” (p. 245). By revolving a marble in his pocket, he is able to make “Dulcie’s lake with the crystal-studded castle to re-appear” (p. 247), invoking the postcard she had sent him years earlier. Of all the rugs that Leonard Saporta shows Arthur, he likes the Turkish one that “has the mandala in the centre” (p. 251). He also sees the Star of David as being yet another mandala (p. 251).

This association — even, obsession — takes a personal form when Arthur identifies that each of the four marbles he carries must be gifted to specific individuals. To Dulcie Feinstein, Arthur gives the solid blue taw mandala. “He had always known the blue mandala would be the one for Dulcie. Her beauty would not evaporate again” (p. 255). Despite the childish origin of the marble, “the blue taw which Norm Croucher had traded for liquorice straps”, the gift binds them to each other at a spiritual level. To Mrs Poulter, Arthur gives the gold mandala, “the gold one, in which the sparks glinted, and from which the rays shot upwards whenever the perfect sphere was struck by its counterpart” (p. 276). Her genuine acceptance of the gift, not as a loan, but as a gift for keeps, contains no hint of ridicule. Arthur wanted to give the colourless, knotted mandala to his twin Waldo because he “was born with his innards twisted” (p. 32). Offering it, “while half sensing that Waldo would never untie the knot” (p. 273), his gesture is rebuffed: “so my reply, Arthur, is not shit, but shit!” Brutal though this rejection is, it comes as no surprise. Arthur solves the riddle by keeping the marble until after Waldo’s death when he symbolically loses it. The fourth mandala, the double spiral, he keeps for himself. It was the one “in which the double spiral knit and unknit so reasonably” (p. 281). With the rejected marble Arthur had thought Waldo might accept, both mandalas would occupy the same pocket for the rest of the novel.

David Marr, to whom one turns for reliably authoritative views of the writer, is clear that White was always searching for “wholeness”. “He always saw himself as a shattered personality — not one man but a cast of characters and Jung offered him fresh hope of making sense of this jumble” (Marr, p. 452). Memorably, he wrote:

The Browns of Sarsaparilla seemed two halves of his own nature: it was as if he had taken a scalpel to himself and excised the innocent Arthur, leaving the monster Waldo behind. Memory and imagination gave him all he needed to make the twins real and separate characters, but at heart they are Patrick White: an expression of the best hopes and worst fears he held for himself. (Patrick White, a life by David Marr, p. 448)

One is left with the impression that White felt compelled to write The Solid Mandala, that its birth was a kind of … if not expiation, then therapy — for him. As reader, one is left feeling as if the process was voyeuristic, that we have been looking in on something that we were never meant to see. I can’t say that I enjoyed very much about Mandala, though I did learn more about the complexity of White’s personality. Where the journey (with a mileage expressed here in page numbers) from Tree (499) to Voss (428) to Riders (552) and on to The Vivisector (617), The Eye of the Storm (589) and A Fringe of Leaves (365) is a sustained literary pilgrimage of distinctive power, The Solid Mandala is, for me, an oddity left by the wayside, worth stopping for but not re-visiting. That it is the shortest of the seven of White’s novels mentioned here, at 318 pages, makes the stop either easy or high in value, depending on one’s viewpoint.