His explanation was very elusive.

His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, "Twenty yards of linen are worth about two pounds." People say that about everything that has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing is worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things - one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money - as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? What is it that determines the price of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people who were involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all of those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "It's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, "I like the pictures in this magazine."

A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history - the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all those people - the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer - who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.

For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. The on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn't see it anymore.

"The Fever", Wallace Shawn, 1991

She had come from the coast

She had come from the coast, where she had taken part in that latter-day annual ritual, the resurrection of the dead. I went to look at it once. From all over Europe they come, the white bodies, as if the Last Trumpet had sounded. Nudist beaches are permitted here these days, but just as nakedness used to be taboo in the past, so it is now forbidden to be white. All those bodies torment themselves during the day in order to stand before the mirror in the evening and, for these two weeks in the year, look invulnerable and therefore immortal. Everyone has his own resurrection. I do not say this out of prudishness, but I don't believe in it - it is a false faith, and during these rites they display their uninteresting genitalia to each other while at the same time pretending not to see them. Fatter or older people ought not to take part, but they do. They are not welcome; they disturb the illusion of paradise - the fat ones because they evoke thoughts of intemperance and therefore of the resulting Dantesque punishments of sickness, death and damnation; the old ones because they shamelessly display precisely that which everyone tries to deny, namely the future. They are like a silent but hysterical sect, all those nameless bodies that lie there burning like Saint Laurence on his roasting grid, as if they wished to be irradiated against the cancer of death  or to anticipate their own cremation, whereby the body, as a punishment because it has betrayed them, is pulverized at high speed in a macro-oven, until not a trace of their nameless lives is left. 

 

"In the Dutch Mountains", Cees Nooteboom, 1984, translation Adrienne Dixon

Evil is never intended as evil.

Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion. It is evil to act as though the past is bringing us to a specifiable end. It is evil to assume that the past will make sense only if we bring it to an issue we have clearly in view. It is evil for a nation to believe it is "the last, best hope on earth." It is evil to think history is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society, or with the Islamicization of all living infidels.

Your history does not belong to me. We live with each other in a common history.

Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They therefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore a contradiction. They only attempt paradoxically to recognize in themselves the evil that takes the form of attempting to eliminate evil elsewhere.

Evil is not the inclusion of finite games in an infinite game, but the restriction of all play to one or another finite game.

"Finite and Infinite Games", James P. Carse, 1986

People don't read the morning newspaper

People don't read the morning newspaper, Marshall McLuhan once said, they slip into it like a warm bath. Too true, Marshall! Imagine being in New York City on the morning of Sunday, April 28, 1974, like I was, slipping into that great public bath, that vat, that spa, that regional physiotherapy tank, that White Sulphur Springs, that Marienbad, that Ganges, that River Jordan for a million souls which is the Sunday New York Times. Soon I was submerged, weightless, suspended in the teprid depths of the thing, in Arts & Leisure, Section 2, page 19, in a state of perfect sensory deprivation, when all at once an extraordinary thing happened:

I noticed something!

Yet another clam-broth-colored current had begun to roll over me, as warm and predictable as the Gulf Stream...a review, it was, by the Times's dean of the arts, Hilton Kramer, of an exhibition at Yale University of "Seven Realists," seven realistic painters...when I was jerked alert by the following:

"Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial - the means by which our experiences of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify."

Now, you may say, My God, man! You woke up over that? You forsook your blissful coma over a mere swell in the sea of words?

But I knew what I was looking at. I realized that without making the slightest effort I had come upon one of those utterances in search of which psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow and Belgrade press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely, the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta, the words in passing, that give the game away.

What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, "to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial." I read it again. It didn't say "something helpful" or "enriching" or even "extremely valuable." No, the word was crucial.

In short: frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed to me for the first time. The fogs lifted! The clouds passed! The motes, scales, conjunctival bloodshots, and Murine agonies fell away!

The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe, 1975

I'm currently caught up in re-reading several books that i pulled out merely to hunt for extracts for this blog, hence postings have dried up recently. hope to resume soon...

When I married Edgar Strasser-Mendana

When I married Edgar Strasser-Mendana I received from an aunt in Denver who had been taken as a bride to a United Fruit station in Cuba, twenty-four Haviland dessert plates in the 'Windsor Rose' pattern and a letter of instructions for living in the tropics. I was to allow no nightsoil on my kitchen garden, boil water for douches as well as for drinking, preserve my husband's books with a thin creosote solution, schedule regular hours for sketching or writing, and regard the playing of bridge as an avoidance of reality to be indulged only at biweekly intervals and never with depressive acquaintances. In this regime I could perhaps escape what the letter called the fever and disquiet of the latitudes. That I had been living in those same latitudes unmarried for some years made no difference to my aunt: she appeared to locate the marriage bed as the true tropic of fever and disquiet.

So in many ways did Charlotte.

As it happens I understand this position, having observed it for many years in societies quite distant from San Francisco and Denver, but some women do not. Some women lie easily in whatever beds they make. They marry or do not marry with equanimity. They divorce or do not. They can leave a bed and forget it. They sleep dreamlessly, get up and scramble eggs.

Not Charlotte.
Never Charlotte.

I think I have never known anyone who regarded the sexual connection as quite so unamusing a contract. So dark and febrile and outside the range of the normal did all aspects of this contract seem to Charlotte that she was for example incapable of walking normally across a room in the presence of two men with whom she had slept. Her legs seemed to lock unnaturally into her pelvic bones. Her body went stiff, as if convulsed by the question of who had access to it and who did not. Whenever I saw her with both Victor and Gerardo it struck me that her every movement was freighted with this question. Who had prior claim. Whose call on her was most insistent. To whom did she owe what. If Gerardo's hand brushed hers in front of Victor her face would flush, her eyes drop. If she needed a bottle of wine opened on those dismal valiant occasions when she put on her gray chiffon dress and tried to 'entertain' she could never just hand the corkscrew to Gerardo. Nor could she hand the corkscrew to Victor. Instead she would evade the question by opening the wine herself, usually breaking the cork. I recall once telling Charlotte about a village on the Orinoco where female children were ritually cut on the inner thigh by their first sexual partners, the point being to scar the female with the male's totem. Charlotte saw nothing extraordinary in this. 'I mean that's pretty much what happens everywhere, isn't it,' she said. 'Somebody cuts you? Where it doesn't show?'

"A Book of Common Prayer", Joan Didion, 1977

Let The Power Fall

I
1 One can work within any structure.
2 Once one can work within any structure, some structures are more efficient
than others.
3 There is no structure which is universally appropriate.
4 Commitment to an aim within inappropriate structure will give rise to
the creation of an appropriate structure.
5 Apathy, ie passive commitment, within an appropriate structure will
effect its collapse.
6 Dogmatic attachment to the supposed merits of a particular structure
hinders the search for an appropriate structure.
7 There will be difficulty defining the appropriate structure because it
will be always mobile, ie in process.

II
8 There should be no difficulty in defining aim.
9 The appropriate structure will recognise structures outside itself.
10 The appropriate structure can work within any large structure
11 Once the appropriate structure can work within any large structure,
some larger structure are more efficient than others.
12 There is no larger structure which is universally appropriate.
13 Commitment to an aim by an appropriate structure within a larger,
inappropriate structure will give rise to a large, appropriate structure.
14 The quantitive structure is affected by qualitative action

III
15 Qualitive action is not bound by number
16 Any small unit committed to qualitative action can affect radical
change on a scale outside its quantitative measure.
17 Quantative action works by violence and breeds reaction.
18 Qualitative action works works by example and invites reciprocation.
19 Reciprocation between independent structures is a framework of
interacting units which is itself a structure.
20 Any appropriate structure of interacting units can work within any
other structure of interacting units.
21 Once this is so, some structures of interacting units are more efficient
than others.

Robert Fripp, 1981

Flay began to untie his boots.

Flay began to untie his boots. Behind him his swept cave yawned, a million prawn-coloured motes swaying against the darkness at the entrance. He noticed, as he worked his heel free of the leather, that the crag was biting its way into the sun and had all but reached it's centre. He leant his bony head backwards against the stone, and his face became lit and the stubble of his first beard shone, its every hair a thread of copper wire, as he followed the course of the crag's crest in its seemingly upward and arrow-headed journey, its black barbs eating outwards as it climbed.

Inexorable as was its course, there was, that summer evening, more destiny in the progress of another moving form, so infinitesmal in the capacious mountain dusk, than in the vast sun's ample spellbound cycle.

Through her, in microcosm, the wide earth sobbed. The starglobe sank in her; the colours faded. The death-dew rose and the wild birds in her breast climbed to her throat and gathered songless, hovering, all tumult, wing to wing, so ardent for those climes where all things end.

To Flay, it was as though the silence of his solitude had been broken, the senses invading each other's provinces, for on seeing the movement of something the size of the letter 'i', that moved in silhouette agains the gigantic yellow plate, he had the sensation of waking from a dream which took hold of him. Distant as it was, he could tell it for a human form. That it was Keda it was not in his power to realize. He knew himself for witness. He could not stop himself. he knelt forward on his knees, while the moments melted, one into the next. He grew more rigid. The tiny, infinitely remote figure was moving across the sun towards the crag's black edge. Impotently, he watched, his jaw thrust forwards and a cold sweat broke across his bony brow, for he knew himself to be in the presence of Sorrow - and an interloper upon something more personal and secret than he had the right to watch. And yet impersonal. For in the figurette was the personification of all pain, taking, through sliding time, its final paces.

She moved slowly, for the climb had tired her and it had not been long since she had borne the child of clay, like alabaster, the earthless daughter who had startled all. It was as though Keda was detached from the world, exalted and magnificently alone in the rose-red haze of the upper air. At the edge of the naked drop to the shades below she came to a standstill, and, after a little while, turned her head to Gormenghast and the Dwellings, afloat in the warm haze. The were unreal. They were so far, so remote. No longer of her, they were over. Yet she turned her head for the child's sake.

Her head, turning was dimensionless. A thong about her neck supported the proud carvings of her lovers. They hung across her breasts. At the edge of age, there was a perilous beauty in her face as of the crag's edge that she stood upon. The last of footholds; such a little space. The colour fading on the the seven-foot strip. It lay behind her like a carpet of dark roses. The roses were stones. There was one fern growing. It was beside her feet. How tall?...A thousand feet? The she must have her head among far stars. How far all was! Too far for Flay to see her head had turned - a speck of life against that falling sun.

Upon his knees he knew that he was witness.

About her and below lay the world. All things were ebbing. A moon that climbed suddenly above the eastern skyline, chilling the rose, waned through her as it waxed, and she was ready.

She moved her hair from her eyes and cheekbones. It hung deep and still as the shadow in a well, it hung down her straight back like midnight. Her brown hands pressed the carvings inwards to her breast, and as a smile began to grow, the eyebrows raised a little, she stepped outwards into the dim atmosphere, and falling was most fabulously lit by the moon and the sun.

"Titus Groan", Mervyn Peake, 1946

I shan't risk trying to predict.

I shan't risk trying to predict. All these factors are part of his identity. He was born into a family that was traditionally Muslim; the language he speaks links him to the Southern Slavs, who were once joined together in a single state, but are so no longer; he lives on land which belonged sometimes to the Ottoman and sometimes to the Austrian Empire, and which played a part in the major dramas of European history. In every era one or other of his affiliations swelled up, so to speak, in such a way as to eclipse all the others and to appear to represent his whole identity. In the course of his life he'll have heard all kinds of fables. He'll have been told that he was a proletarian pure and simple. Or a Yugoslavian through and through. Or, more recently, a Muslim. For a few difficult months he'll even have been made to think that he had more in common with the inhabitants of Kabul than with those of Trieste!

In every age there have been people who considered that an individual had one overriding affiliation so much more important in every circumstance to all others that it might legitimately be called his "identity". For some it was the nation, for others religion or class. But one has only to look at the various conflicts being fought out all over the world today to realise that no one allegiance has absolute supremacy. Where people feel their faith is threatened, it is their religious affiliation that seems to reflect their whole identity. But if their mother tongue or their ethnic group is in danger, then they fight ferociously against their own co-religionists. Both the Turks and the Kurds are Muslims though they speak different languages; but does that make the war between them any less bloody? Hutus and Tutsis alike are Catholics, and they speak the same language, but has that stopped them from slaughtering one another? Czechs and Slovaks are all Catholics too, but does that help them live together?

I cite all these examples to underline the fact that while there is always a certain hierarchy among the elements that go to make up individual identities, that hierarchy is not immutable; it changes with time, and in so doing brings about fundamental changes in behaviour.

Moreover, the ties that count in people's lives are not always the allegedly major allegiances arising out of language, complexion, class or religion. Take the case of an Italian homosexual in the days of fascism. I imagine that for the man himself that particular aspect of his personality had up till then been important, but not more so than his professional activity, his political choices or his religious beliefs. But suddenly state repression sweeps down on him and he feels threatened with humiliation, deportation or death. It's the recollection of certain books I've read and films I've seen that leads me to choose this example. This man, who a few years earlier was a patriot, perhaps even a nationalist, was no longer able to exult at the sight of the Italian army marching by; he may even have come to wish for its defeat. Because of the persecution to which he was subjected, his sexual preferences came to outweigh his other affiliations, among them even the nationalism that was at its height. Only after the war, in a more tolerant Italy, would our man have felt entirely Italian once more.

"On Identity", Amin Maalouf, 1996, translation Barbara Bray

At two in the afternoon I set off with the firm intention of seeing Fidèle and cross-examining her.

At two in the afternoon I set off with the firm intention of seeing Fidèle and cross-examining her. I can't stand the smell of cabbage; the shops along the Meshchanskaya just reek of it. What with this, and the infernal stench coming from under the front doors of all the houses, I held my nose and ran for all I was worth.

If that's not bad enough, those beastly tradesmen let so much soot and smoke pour out of their workshops that it's quite impossible for any respectable gentleman to take a stroll these days.

When I reached the sixth floor and rang the bell, a quite pretty-looking girl with tiny freckles came to the door. I recognized her as the same girl I'd seen walking with the old lady. She blushed slightly and straight away I realized that the little dear needed a boyfriend. 'What do you want?' she said. 'I must have a talk with your dog,' I replied. The girl was quite stupid - I could see that at once. While I was standing there the dog came out barking at me. I tried to catch hold of her but the nasty little bitch nearly sank her teeth into my nose. However, I spotted her basket in the corner. That what I was after! I went over to it, rummaged around under the straw and to my great delight pulled out a small bundle of papers. Seeing this, the filthy dog first bit me on the thigh and then, when she's sniffed around and discovered I'd taken the papers, started whining, and pawing me, but I said to her: 'No, my dear, good-bye!' and took to my heels. The girl must have thought I was mad, as she seemed scared out of her wits.

When I arrived home, I intended starting work right away sorting the papers out, because I can't see all that well by candlelight. But Mavra decided the floor needed washing. Those stupid Finns always take it into their heads to have a good clean up at the most inconvenient times. So I decided to go for a walk and have a good think about what had happened earlier. Now at last I would find out every little detail of what had been going on, what was in their minds, who were the main actors in the drama, in fact, nothing would be hidden from me: those letters would tell me everything. 'Dogs are a clever species,' I told myself. 'They're very well versed in diplomacy, and therefore everything will be written down, including a description of the Director and his private life. And there'll be something about her, but never mind that now...Silence!' I returned home towards the evening and spent most of the time lying on my bed.

"Diary of a Madman", Nikolai Gogol, 1834, translation Ronald Wilks