by Peter H Frank | Aug 24, 2014 | Literature |
For any of you who have ever stopped and marveled at the purity and simplicity with which children speak their many first words – and especially for those of you who also have wondered at the silence that words break – one long and one short contrasting passages from Max Picard’s beautiful 1948 book, The World of Silence.
“The child is like a little hill of silence. On this little hill of silence suddenly the word appears. The little hill becomes quite small when the first word of the child is spoken. It sinks beneath the pressure of the word as if by magic, and the word tries to make itself look important.
“It is as though with the sound that comes from its mouth the child were knocking on the door of silence and silence were replying: Here I am, Silence, with a word for you.
“The word has difficulty in coming up from the silence of the child. Just as the child is led by its mother, so, it seems, the word is led by silence to the edge of the child’s mouth, and is held so firmly there by silence that it is as though each syllable had to detach itself separately from the silence. More silence than sound comes out through the words of children, more silence than real language.
“The words a child speaks do not flow in a straight line, but in a curve, as if they wanted to fall back again into the silence. They make their slow journey from the child to other people, and when they arrive they hesitate a moment, to decide whether they should return to the silence or stay where they are. The child gazes after its word as it might watch its ball in the air, watching to see if it will come back again or not.
“The child cannot replace by another word the word it has brought with difficulty out of the silence; it cannot put a pronoun in place of an noun. For each word is there as it were for the first time, and what is there for the first time, what is quite new, naturally has no wish to be replaced by something else.
“A child never speaks of itself as ‘I’, but it always says its name: ‘Andrew wants…’ The child would think it were disappearing if it were to replace its own name by a pronoun — its own name that has just come up out of the silence with the word and is there as it were for the first time ever.
“The child’s language is poetic, for it is the languge of the beginning of things, and therefore original and first-hand as the language of poets is original and first-hand. ‘The moon has got broken’, says the child of the new moon. ‘We must take it to mother to mend it.’
“This child’s language is melodious. The words hide and protect themselves in the melody — the words that have come shyly out of the silence. They almost disapper again in the silence. There is more melody than content in the words of the child.
“It is as though silence were accumulating within the child as a reserve for the adult, for the noisy world of the child’s later years as an adult. The adult who has preserved within himself not only something of the language of childhood but also something of its silence, too, has the power to make others happy.
“The language of the child is silence transformed into sound. The language of the adult is sound that seeks for silence.”
and yet we come to this:
“Silence no longer exists as a world, but only in fragments, as the remains of a world. And as man is always frightened by remains, so he is frightened by the remains of silence.
“Sometimes in a city a man suddenly collapses and dies in the midst of the noise of the highway. It is then as if all at once the shreds of silence, still lying around, amongst the tree tops by the roadside, suddenly descend on the dead man. It is as if these remains of silence had crept down to the silence of the dead man in the roadway, and there is a momentary stillness in the city. The remains of silence are with the fallen man in order to disappear with him into death, to disappear through the fissure of death. The dead man takes the last remains of silence with him.”
by Peter H Frank | Mar 6, 2014 | Journalism, Literature, Media |
From Salmagundi, a series of satirical pamphlets written by Washington Irving, his brothers and friends in New York City from January 1807 to January 1808.
The following excerpt is from the editors to readers in the first issue, dated Saturday, January 24, 1807.
***
“Our intention is simply to instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age; this is an arduous task, and therefore we undertake it with confidence.
“We intend for this purpose to present a striking picture of the town; and as everybody is anxious to see his own phiz [face] on canvas, however stupid or ugly it may be, we have no doubt but the whole town will flock to our exhibition. Our picture will necessarily include a vast variety of figures; and should any gentleman or lady be displeased with the inveterate truth of their likenesses, they may ease their spleen by laughing at those of their neighbors – this being what we understand by poetical justice.
“Like all true and able editors, we consider ourselves infallible; and therefore, with the customary diffidence of our brethren of the quill, we shall take the liberty of interfering in all matters either of a public or a private nature. We are critics, amateurs, dilettanti, and cognoscenti; and as we know “by the pricking of our thumbs,” that every opinion which we may advance in either those characters will be correct, we are determined though it may be questioned, contradicted, or even controverted, yet it shall never be revoked.”
[In case you look it up, the full name of the publication was Salmagundi; or The Whim-whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others.]
by Peter H Frank | Aug 21, 2013 | Literature |
Rather than remain silent while I finish a few projects and prepare for some travel, I thought I would be kind and share with you a wonderful, thoughtful passage from one of Michel de Montaigne’s essays, On Books.
A New York Times story a year or two ago, referred to him as perhaps the world’s first blogger, though in the late 1500s (at least in France where he lived), there was no internet so these were not posted until more recently.
Speaking of time, this will take you a little time to read. So sit back and read this the way you should read all his essays (and you should read all his essays): just let him talk to you. (Wouldn’t it be great if all bloggers had this much self-awareness and saw this much value in thoughtful reflection?)
* * *
“I make no doubt but that I often happen to speak of things that are much better and more truly handled by those who are masters of the trade. You have here purely an essay of my natural parts, and not of those acquired: and whoever shall catch me tripping in ignorance, will not in any sort get the better of me; for I should be very unwilling to become responsible to another for my writings, who am not so to myself, nor satisfied with them. Whoever goes in quest of knowledge, let him fish for it where it is to be found; there is nothing I so little profess. These are fancies of my own, by which I do not pretend to discover things but to lay open myself; they may, peradventure, one day be known to me, or have formerly been, according as fortune has been able to bring me in place where they have been explained; but I have utterly forgotten it; and if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention.
“So that I can promise no certainty, more than to make known to what point the knowledge I now have has risen. Therefore, let none lay stress upon the matter I write, but upon my method in writing it. Let them observe, in what I borrow, if I have known how to choose what is proper to raise or help the invention, which is always my own. For I make others say for me, not before but after me, what, either for want of language or want of sense, I cannot myself so well express. I do not number my borrowings, I weigh them; and had I designed to raise their value by number, I had made them twice as many; they are all, or within a very few, so famed and ancient authors, that they seem, methinks, themselves sufficiently to tell who they are, without giving me the trouble. In reasons, comparisons, and arguments, if I transplant any into my own soil, and confound them amongst my own, I purposely conceal the author, to awe the temerity of those precipitate censors who fall upon all sorts of writings, particularly the late ones, of men yet living; and in the vulgar tongue which puts every one into a capacity of criticising and which seem to convict the conception and design as vulgar also. I will have them give Plutarch a fillip on my nose, and rail against Seneca when they think they rail at me. I must shelter my own weakness under these great reputations. I shall love any one that can unplume me, that is, by clearness of understanding and judgment, and by the sole distinction of the force and beauty of the discourse. For I who, for want of memory, am at every turn at a loss to, pick them out of their national livery, am yet wise enough to know, by the measure of my own abilities, that my soil is incapable of producing any of those rich flowers that I there find growing; and that all the fruits of my own growth are not worth any one of them.
“For this, indeed, I hold myself responsible; if I get in my own way; if there be any vanity and defect in my writings which I do not of myself perceive nor can discern, when pointed out to me by another; for many faults escape our eye, but the infirmity of judgment consists in not being able to discern them, when by another laid open to us. Knowledge and truth may be in us without judgment, and judgment also without them; but the confession of ignorance is one of the finest and surest testimonies of judgment that I know.
“I have no other officer to put my writings in rank and file, but only fortune. As things come into my head, I heap them one upon another; sometimes they advance in whole bodies, sometimes in single file. I would that every one should see my natural and ordinary pace, irregular as it is; I suffer myself to jog on at my own rate. Neither are these subjects which a man is not permitted to be ignorant in, or casually and at a venture, to discourse of. I could wish to have a more perfect knowledge of things, but I will not buy it so dear as it costs. My design is to pass over easily, and not laboriously, the remainder of my life; there is nothing that I will cudgel my brains about; no, not even knowledge, of what value soever.
“I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself by an honest diversion; or, if I study, ’tis for no other science than what treats of the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die and how to live well. ...”
by Peter H Frank | Jun 12, 2013 | Culture |
In a wonderfully unexpected recent concurrence of conversations and thoughts (separated by a few weeks but coincident in memory), I was reminded to share with you a bit of writing from someone very much worth reading.
It’s from Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality by Max Blecher, published in 1936 and thankfully translated into English and published a few years ago by the University of Plymouth Press in conjunction with the “old” Romanian Cultural Institute.
If you don’t know Max Blecher, you should – especially if you’re Romanian as he’s part of your national heritage.
(I can only wish I could read the original, though it appears to me that Alistair Ian Blyth has done a terrifically intelligent translation in the version I read.)
Blecher was born in Botosani in 1909 and died at 28 after suffering for a decade with tuberculosis of the spine. He is often compared with the Surrealists, and while I enjoy the visual dislocation of their art, I find their verbal dislocation to be a bit too abstract. That, I suppose, is why I find Blecher’s more-structured “surrealism” in many ways more accessible and engaging. The dislocation is there, it’s just more coherent somehow.
I was reminded of all this when in a conversation the other day I went searching in my memory, without success, for the precise words of perhaps the most beautiful early example of this creative dislocation – a quote that’s often associated with the Dadaist movement. It’s from Comte de Lautréamont in his book Le Chants de Maldoror, written in the late 1860s, when he describes a young boy as “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.”
Yep, that was good. Extraordinarily good. And seems easy to imitate, too – to put the powerful and unexpected where it does not belong. Because when the powerful appears where it should not be expected, its impact and its lessons are simply there to be cherished.
And that precisely is the problem. The appeal of these powerful juxtapositions is too attractive to people who don’t know how to use them. It’s too easy to copy. Too easy to fake. Because simply combining random images or contradicting ideas is not the same as creating a new thought – not a thought worth thinking anyway.
It’s why I tire so quickly of too many current artistic attempts that conflate disgust with true impact, or shock with ideas. They seek provocation, almost comic-like in depth, through scatological manipulations, bloody swords, writhing snakes, perverted Madonnas, twisted Christ-like figures, or any assorted and sordid computer-generated metamorphosis. Provocative simply to be provocative is not difficult. In fact, it’s too easy even to be considered creative. It (as well as that current popular style of writing that I can only describe as a hectic sleaze of consciousness), seems tired and unimaginative when compared with these originators.
Now I suspect most of these current writers and artists would not regard themselves as Dadaists or Surrealists. Their mission is different. Their sensibilities are different. Their rage, such as it is, is very, very different. But in terms of combining ideas that don’t appear to belong, I see only small differences and even less ingenuity.
Indeed, I have recently seen several examples of this here in Bucharest, in writing, in photography, and in video. Yes, what I saw was mostly provocative. Some were even clever. But mostly, they appeared created to impress a circle of like-minded acquaintances, a circle that may indeed bestow some notoriety and success on the creator but will finally remain only momentary in its impact. To me, it seemed mostly sophomoric and boring. To provoke – and not only, but also to evoke – something revealing in the reader or the viewer, effectively and challengingly, by breaking apart our imagination’s expectations – that is what’s needed to bring something new.
And Blecher does that. While his writing is more structured, what happens while you read him feels much the same as when you study the paintings of de Chirico or Magritte. It’s not the dislocation of objects so much, but the dislocation of concepts, images, and emotions that he uses to describe his life and his experiences.
I finished his book some weeks ago. But then, as these coincidences occur, confronted by bad memory, I went to the internet to check the spelling of Lautréamont, and there thanks to Wikipedia (yes, I confess) I came across this quote:
“The critic Alex De Jonge writes, ‘Lautréamont forces his readers to stop taking their world for granted. He shatters the complacent acceptance of the reality proposed by their cultural traditions and makes them see that reality for what it is: an unreal nightmare all the more hair-raising because the sleeper believes he is awake.’”
And that, my friends, is the connection that led me back to Blecher (you’ll see why in the second excerpt). As for the first, it’s interesting how Sartre’s Nausea was published just two years later. (Apparently, there was no chestnut tree in the town of Roman.) I hope you enjoy:
“I picked up one object after another and their variety dizzied me. In vain did I grip a file, slowly run my fingers over it, place it to my cheek, swivel it, let if fall spinning to the floor…In vain…in vain…nothing had any meaning.
“Everywhere, hard, inert matter surrounded me – here in the form of wooden balls and carvings – in the street in the form of trees, houses, and stones; immense and futile, matter enveloped me from head to foot. In whichever direction my thoughts turned, matter surrounded me, from my clothes to the springs in the forest, passing through walls, trees, stones, glass…
“Into every cranny the lava of matter had spilled from the earth, petrifying in the empty air, in the form of houses with windows; trees with branches that ever rose to pierce the emptiness; flowers, soft and colourful, which filled the small curved volumes of space; churches whose cupolas soared ever higher, as far as the slender cross at their pinnacle, where matter halted its trickling into the heights, powerless to ascend further.
“Everywhere, matter had infested the air, irrupting into it, filling it with the encysted abscesses of stones, with the wounded hollows of trees…
“I went maddened by the things I saw, things I was destined not to be able to escape.”
And:
“Sometimes, at night, I awake from a terrible nightmare…
“In the end, my final scream, the loudest, wakes me. All of a sudden I find myself in my real room, which is identical to the room in the dream, and in the same position in which I dreamt myself, at the same hour when I must have been floundering in the nightmare.
“What I now see around me differs very little from what I saw only a second before, but somehow it has an air of authenticity, which floats in things, in me, like a sudden cooling of the winter air, which all of a sudden magnifies all sonorities…
“In what does my sense of reality consist?
“Around me the life I will live until the next dream has returned. Memories and present pains weigh heavily in me and I want to resist them, not to fall into their sleep, whence I shall perhaps never return…
“Now I am struggling in reality, I scream, I beg to be woken, to be woken to a different life, to my real life. It is certain that it is broad daylight, that I know where I am and that I am alive, but in all these things something is missing, the same as in my terrifying nightmare.
“I struggle, scream, writhe. Who will wake me?
“Around me, a precise reality is pulling me ever lower, trying to submerge me.
“Who will wake me?
“It has always been like this, always, always.”
For those of you with some curiosity, you should also see the following two links about the role of some important Romanians in the early Dadaist movement:
First link, here
Second link, here
