| Author |
Message |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 - 3:18 pm: | |
Not an especially important topic this. But still interesting enough. This is, if you see a child draw a picture it emerges as a completeness just beyond the edge of its control and in a way only partially understood or spontaneously invented in what the images might depict or refer to as objects in the world. This is something that interests me somewhat; say in the way that water might interest the thirsty. I crave the cessation of narrative expectation. If you draw something with your opposite hand it often produces an image more authentic - somehow - than one drawn dextrously. Dexterity often proves a kind of curse. I think this is why I often find my unconconscious doodles stimulating. The dextrous linear brain was disengaged! |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, December 19, 2008 - 12:10 pm: | |
Reading or for that matter writing a story essentially works as a device for finding out what one doesn't know: what happens next, for example. It can't really count as a discovery of knowledge but only of ignorance, this weird activity. (As if reading fiction could ever teach one anything actual!) |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, December 23, 2008 - 1:52 pm: | |
Can one say this, that a story involves a cessation of narrative expectation? (Paradoxically.) It is in the nature of the story itself: one reads it but doesn't know what to expect. But still one expects something all the same. The story constantly extends itself just beyond all expectation.
So that the story stops the narrative of the moment from happening, in this sense. (The 'and then ...' of the everyday world.) |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 24, 2008 - 8:46 am: | |
Most good short stories drop you into a section of a narrative, and pull you out before the end Ð you are aware that there was a before (and you might have hints about what happened there) and there will be an after, which you might not be able to guess anything about. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, January 02, 2009 - 2:16 pm: | |
Alex, what you say is true in the context of a story's semantic coherence. A story would lose all purchase on reality if its words no longer had context or a significance that in some way showed the world we recognise, and of course whatever aspects of time are involved in this kind of thing, they naturally imply a before and after to any related sequence of events. Here one might compare a newspaper story. One reads about a bombing somewhere in the cause of some political end - which one has never heard of before - so the story stands as an isolated fragment that one can't do much with other than see the consequences. A destroyed school or mosque. Nothing but fragments. And yet one assumes a before and after. A history that is in some way the sense of this bomb. In short, in these terms nothing stands by itself wholly self-originated. The bomb is not its own cause.
But a newspaper report is not entirely like a fiction. In the sense of its factual before and after. (What the next day then ensues.) Fiction adds an incalculable element to this process of common understanding and expectation because it makes reality answerable to us personally. In some way it makes it our responsibility; we are responsible for it because it has to be imagined - or brought to life. This creates the moment of discontinuity. Of narrative disruption: the disruption of 'actuality'. An example that comes to mind here is Twelfth Night. It begins with a storm and a beach. Viola, alone, is washed up from a shipwreck bemoaning the loss of her twin, Sebastian ... Other Shakespeare plays start with shipwrecks too. The Tempest; Two Gentlemen of Verona ... What better way to symbolise (or to enact) a birth? A something from nothing? Viola is 'born' onto a beach - crosses the shadow line into adulthood in the experience of this catastrophe, or this discontinuity. Here is where she begins or starts ... anew. Illyria her new country of birth. Twelfth Night operates as an intricate logical puzzle comprised of symbolic roles delicately worked out, with (as is often the case with Shakespeare's plays?) the main interplay discovering itself in the actions of a self-important buffoon (Malvolio, the ill-wishing, the smiling idiot) and a knowing fool, Feste. Music. Everything occurs in this interval between wishing and music. The play starts with music, discovers strangeness and ends with music and discovers recognition. "When I was a little tiny boy - with a hey and a ho and the wind and the rain. And the rain it raineth every day." (Or however.) We are contained in the play's tiny world. It completes itself; pictures its own beginning and end. Stands separate from us.
My thinking is this. That imaginatively, in so far as we are moved by this play, engrossed by it, laugh at it, see ourselves in it, react to the characters, to their actions, to Sir Toby's songs and dances, or whatever, in so far as this happens, then this is *where we are made to come from* - we come from within the play itself - a form of total discontinuity with the mundane world thus; this is the discovery. And of course, such is the essence of music too. It could be said that listening to the music, we become the music. But it can also be said that listening to the music we *come from* the music: that this is where we find ourselves originated. Or: reading Hills Like White Elephants I discover (momentarily) that this is where I come from.
It is like a lightning strike. Just for a flash, in the space it takes to create an after-image where there was nothing but darkness before, through the play, the music, we are able to originate ourselves. We are no longer the creatures of clay that our mundane lives otherwise make us into. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, January 02, 2009 - 2:19 pm: | |
... Comically enough I now notice that I misread your point Alex. But it was a useful enough misreading ... |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 06, 2009 - 3:48 pm: | |
Modernism is the fragmentary and discontinuous. So Hemingway discovered the blank spaces of narrative. The use of connectives that connect nothing. A word that describes but in the way that a stencil describes a letter: blankly, without colour. For instance one can start a story with "And ..." And then it was summer. What happened before? Winter and Spring, obviously enough. But not the winter and spring of our world but the winter and spring of *their* world. (I notice Per Petterson uses the Hemingwayesque ...and ... in novels like In the Wake. And .. and .... And so dots that end in a blank.) |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 06, 2009 - 6:30 pm: | |
Another aspect of this is (this is my pet, this one): quarantine. "You begin Proust and he (Proust) brings you into a world and by doing that, takes you out of this one." ... From Sodom and Gomorrah, the beginning page: " ... reduced by the distance to tiny figures in a painting, making their slow ascent of the abrupt rise, feather duster in hand, between the large sheets of transparent mica that stood out so pleasingly against the red foothills ..."
The mundane has a clear line drawn around it, even if that is a dotted one. Instantly, one is in a - the? - non-mundane world.
I once got so immersed in Proust I felt pity for anyone who wasn't reading it: what a dull pointless undimensioned life! |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 07, 2009 - 8:40 am: | |
Yes, maybe this is the year that I Proust.
Sorry, that just made me imagine some godawful operating system advertising where various people look smug or jetski or get zany and make statements like: "I Proust... and I have *fun* saving lives..."
I really shd get back into the habit of not wearing my specs while on public transport. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 07, 2009 - 10:08 am: | |
Advertising! Good example!
Proust. It's that Edwardian state of pointillist perfection, that impressionist beach and promenade. Sunshine paint. All before the First World War!
I have read the beginning and end of Proust. First and Last page. It's the bit inbetween is the challenge.
The newest penguin translations look good - much better than the Enright versions. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 07, 2009 - 10:30 am: | |
Pissaro's painting of Lordship Lane train station: in that tiny space do you see the romance of trains? In that rectangle the virus checked, contained? The small square of God looking back in the total absence of rain, strangely. In that spatter of green colour on an iron track that isn't there but is. Which is neither true nor false but yet not neither either but the pig in its pen, the pet in its basket, and the horse in the field of an infinite plain. |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 07, 2009 - 11:36 am: | |
In that painting, the world stops at the end of the hills, where they meet that stage backdrop of a sky. I don't think the train will ever leave the painting, either. It's Sapphire and Steel. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, January 12, 2009 - 1:45 pm: | |
A naive painting:
it looks like a list of things.
1) a fake coat pocket
2) the dashboard of a Ford Cortina
3) a conically-shaped lamp shade
4) the torn label from an Amazon posted package
5) the star in the Starbucks logo
6) the green of baize
7) the ruck of a blanket
... AND SO ON.
Interesting, eh? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, January 12, 2009 - 2:32 pm: | |
One could turn the thing upside down. The 'hunger' I feel, that seems partly satisfied by reading fiction, in another way is a feeling of being out of life, not actually dead but dead-seeming, homeless: in a place that does not appear fully real to me but not strange either: merely socially defined - . To read a story is to embark on the journey home. And sometimes for a fraction of a second, to feel that I have arrived there. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - 9:38 am: | |
On the other hand, maybe it would be an idea to face up to the experience of being homeless. Virtue isn't just one thing in this context. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, January 15, 2009 - 9:53 am: | |
Possibly teenagers feel it more acutely.
I used to know someone who covered his room with 'romantic' drawings of his motorbike. Such bikes were indeed a romance to him. Fast powerful steel: shields, masks. (cf Transformers, the movie, another Great American Masterpiece). The bike as a mask, a face, a totem of the inward and truly real, personally. This can be seen as a kind of devolved species of the romance of trains and their adoption as a main subject matter by Impressionists. One has to wonder why it is impossible now to do the same, paint trains and train stations with girls standing in front of them, or just as landscapes. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 - 10:58 am: | |
In a machine age, an age of objectivity, the Romantic period investigated "the legitimacy of the individual imagination as a critical authority" (Wiki) - which also means the individual imagination as creative authority. An object by means of which that is expressed, such as in a Springsteen song, a Chevrolet car, the same model car one finds in Transformers in the role of friend to the boy protagonist. Something like "it was a 59 chevy with a hurst on the floor ...". There is a moment of self-invention .... Similarly in Pissaro, romancing the railway station by Forest Hill: a romance authority. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, January 19, 2009 - 4:15 pm: | |
.... therefore (final word this) in general the romance impulse is a kind of lyric search for silence.
"....I crave the cessation of narrative expectation."
Does that neatly bring us to Mark Rothko and one of his black on black compositions?
Imagine yourself. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, January 23, 2009 - 1:59 pm: | |
(Quick random thoughts)
Authorising the imagination.
The room with the Seagram paintings (Rothko at the Tate) this comprises a series of huge canvases of great simplicity: design changes place with iconography in a way that is almost totemic: these are near totems for the modern world, figurative and abstract at the same time. They seem to imply a religious or sacred sense. Implying the physical horizon and the verticals coming from it such as there will be in a city.
A definition of a totem might be: "A natural object or an animate being, as an animal or bird, assumed as the emblem of a clan, family, or group" (Dictionary.com)
The world is en-souled (?) by the totem: made living in such a way as to indicate one's place in it.
In such terms one can see that a mask can work as a way of authorising the imagination (within the mask's defining terms of reality). So for example Batman or Spiderman (or a Transformer; or Lego-figure; or even a band name and so on) - the imagination is authorised: and thereby becomes reality's 'authority': it takes control of reality. Superman masks himself and thereby he becomes what he is. One might look at this as fiction's perhaps most basic principle. (Cf women's 'masks'. I watched a young girl putting her mask on on the train this morning.) |