February
1, 2010 Taylor on
Bernhard
Wonderful essay on visiting the house of Thomas Bernard by
Jonathan D Taylor
I'm going to paste in huge chunks from it right now.
Everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death, he said upon receiving Austria’s Förderungspreis für
Literature in 1968
Take good care, Gambetti, not to visit the places associated
with writers, poets and philosophers, because if you do you won’t understand
them at all.
—Thomas Bernhard, Extinction
Real intellect does not know admiration.… People enter every
church and every museum as though with a rucksack full of admiration, and for
that reason they always have that revolting stooping way of walking which they
all have in churches and museums, he said. I have never yet seen a person enter
a church or a museum entirely normally, and the most distasteful thing is to
watch those people in Knossos or in Agrigento, when they have arrived at the
destination of their admiration journey, because the journeys these people take
are nothing but admiration journeys.
—TB Old Masters
I write only of interior landscapes, and the majority of people
don’t see those: they see almost nothing that is “inside.” Because they always
think that if something is internal, it’s obscure, and therefore they don’t see
anything. I think I’ve never described a landscape in a book. I treat only
concepts, by which I mean talking always of mountains or a
city or roads, but how these appear—no, I have
never described a landscape.
—Interview, 1981
Whatever is communicated can only be falsehood and
falsification; hence it is only falsehoods and falsifications that are
communicated. The aspiration for truth, like every other aspiration, is the
quickest way to arrive at falsehoods and falsifications with regard to any
state of affairs. And to write about a period of one’s life, no matter how
remote or how recent, no matter how long or how short, means accumulating
hundreds and thousands and millions of falsehoods and falsifications, all of
which are familiar to the writer describing the period as truths and nothing
but truths.
—The Cellar: An Escape
Right from the beginning I isolated myself far too much in
Nathal and not only did nothing to counter this isolation but actually promoted
it, consciously or unconsciously, to the point of utter despair.… On the other
hand, after a few days in Vienna I have to flee to Nathal to avoid suffocating
in the loathsome Viennese air.… Every other week I flee from Nathal to Vienna and
then from Vienna to Nathal, with the result that I have become a restless
character who is driven back and forth between Vienna and Nathal in order to
survive.
—Wittgenstein’s Nephew
Bernhard himself was not a drinker, his brother explained, but
placed the best brands of sherry and vermouth in every room. He hated hunting
and hunters. Yet an armoire at the top of a landing is stocked on one side with
sherries and vermouths, and on the other with a hunter’s wardrobe, numerous
identical dark green sweaters, jackets, and trousers. In case of a World War
III, Dr. Fabjan said. Not to mention Bernhard’s prodigious supply of shoes.
Thomas’s shoe tic, his brother said. Bernhard hung a rifle from the curtain rod
of his bedroom. Of course this was—nur Schmuck, just decoration, his brother
made clear. He was afraid of this instrument!
Every sitting or living or sleeping room has a record player.
The 1981 CBS Masterworks recording of the Goldberg Variations played by Glenn
Gould sits predictably, but thrillingly, on top of a couple of other LPs in a
sitting room. It is virtually a staging of the end of The Loser, in which
Bernhard endowed a fictional version of the misanthropic pianist with his own
autobiographical traits: I asked Franz to leave me alone in Wertheimer’s room
for a while and put on Glenn’s Goldberg Variations, which I had seen lying on
Wertheimer’s record player, which was still open.
----Taylor
Bernhard, who mocked the visiting of places associated
with writers as well as admiration journeys to museums and churches, had done
nothing less than design a museum for admirers like us to visit, in the same
way that he devoted his life singlemindedly to writing even though the writings
we possess are only nonsense because they can only be nonsense. Bernhard’s
house is part and parcel of his literary legacy: a seriously satirical stance
that eludes the initial urge to peg him as a misanthrope, a pessimist, or a
nihilist.
-----Taylor
The truth is that I have always hated the Viennese
coffeehouses because in them I am always confronted with people like myself,
and naturally I do not wish to be everlastingly confronted with people like
myself, and certainly not in a coffeehouse, where I go to escape from myself.
Yet it is here that I find myself confronted with myself and my kind. I find
myself insupportable, and even more insupportable is a whole horde of writers
and brooders like myself. I avoid literature whenever possible, because
whenever possible I avoid myself, and so when I am in Vienna I have to forbid
myself to visit the coffeehouses, or at least I have to be careful not to visit
a so-called literary coffeehouse under any circumstances whatever.
However, suffering as I do from the coffeehouse disease, I feel an unremitting
compulsion to visit some literary coffeehouse or another, even though
everything within me rebels against the idea.—Wittgenstein’s Nephew
Of Bernhard’s commandingly assertive diatribes against
existence, the only real content is their existence as liberating acts of
self-cancellation and exaggeration. Bernhard’s own project was to rehearse not
only every possible Bernhard thought but also every possible Bernhard
counterthought, acknowledging that we are mistaken if we believe we are in
possession of the truth, just as we are mistaken if we believe we are in error.
Bernhard’s preoccupation with death and suicide and the absolute
meaninglessness of existence—it is the energy generated by his fervent
determination to overcome them that makes Bernhard’s literature the most
life-affirming literature of all.
*
We must take care to turn this world, which was a given
world but not made for us or ready for us, a world which is all set in any
case, because it was made by our predecessors, to attack us and ruin us and
finally destroy us, nothing else, we must turn it into a world to suit our own
ideas, acting first behind the scenes, inconspicuously, but then with all our
might and quite openly, so that we can say after a while that we’re living in
our own world, not in some previous world…
—Correction
And so for my work—everyone has his needs—it is supremely
important to be in a country whose language I do not understand, because I
always have the sensation that people are saying only pleasant things and
speaking only of important, philosophical things. Whereas when you’re at home
and understand the language, you feel that people are saying only absolute
nonsense, no? Thus the nonsense, in Spanish, becomes philosophical for me.
—Interview, 1981
Everything
is ridiculous when one thinks of death, he said upon receiving Austria’s
Förderungspreis für Literature in 1968
February
1, 2010 Conducive to
Thinking About
quote
I doesn't have to be a hospital, he said, a prison will do just
as well, perhaps even a monastery. Prisons and monasteries are not really
any different from hospitals. . . . Now that I was over the worst,
I too had an opportunity to see my spell in the hospital as a time spent in an
atmosphere conducive to thinking. . . . The sick, he said, are the
ones who have real clarity of vision; no one else sees the world so clearly.
unquote
---Thomas
Bernhard, Breath: A Decision (in Gathering Evidence: 237)
February
2, 2010 Spring
Sorrow
“Especially on fair days, when the air has a particular
transparency and nature is lovely for its tranquility alone, one sorrows for
the dead with redoubled force.
The essential elements of a person, my father said, come to
light only when we must regard him as lost to us, when everything he has done
seems to have been a taking leave of us. Suddenly the true nature of
everything about himthat was merely preparation for his ultimate death becomes
truly visible.”
--Thomas
Bernhard, Gargoyles 16-17
Books
As Battle
The isn’t just a battle for dollars. This is a losing war for
the hearts and minds of our customers, for the folks that we know by sight, and
that Amazon knows better by algorithm. Most booksellers aren’t out to make a
killing or a dime. We’re trying to make a living, sure—but by putting the best
of what we know in your hands. The best of our friends and customers ask often
how business is, and the majority of us can only shrug. There is a time when
the bookseller needs to stop his and her panicked breeziness about the state of
affairs and tell our customers, point blank, the truth. Business isn’t good,
and let me tell you: spending money is a political act, a ballot cast for the
kind of world you want to live in. There is no right or wrong answer, but if
you don’t shop locally, in the real world, there won’t be one left when you
step outside.
-
Jeff Waxman Manager of an Indie bookstore in Chicago---this from the
website Three Percent
Email
prose poem (found) from Jeffrey Herrick
As for Tanizaki, I suggest you try The Makioka Sisters.
He could be quite heavy-handed, but the artistry of this novel is
comparable to that of Mann's Buddenbrooks or Lawrence's The Rainbow.
The original title, "sasameyuki, " indicates the subtlety of
his hand here. It can be translated as "powder snow," but you
need to know that that is a real rarity here, where snow is usually slushy.
You also need to know that "sasame" refers to a whispered
conversation, most likely between a man and a woman, and most likely sad.
I guess that the translator or publisher decided there was no way to get
all that across; the title itself would have to become a haiku, perhaps.
I wonder if this finds you surrounded by powder snow. If
so, I hope it' s not whispering sadly.
Best regards,
Jeffrey
February 3,
2010
Internet
Addiction not so new, nor brainless health care professionals
Hotel Vöterl, Salzburg, where Thomas Bernhard was sent to
recover from an illness; it was then a hospital for lung disease patients and
so it was there he contracted lung disease, which he died of years later, at
age 58.
"Hence the question I repeatedly asked myself was whether
or not the doctors who had sent me there were really as brainless, base, and
irresponsible as I had often been forced to conclude. As was subsequently
shown, they were every bit as brainless, base, and irresponsible as that, in
that they had sent a young person who was fighting to regain his health not to
a place where he would be cured but virtually to his death."
“I
also rediscovered an urge to read the newspapers, and though I at once found
myself repelled by them, this did not prevent me from reding them daily:
even at that time I had developed an addiction (a life-long addiction, as it
turned out) to the mechanical routine of getting hold of newspapers and reading
them--only to be unfailingly repelled by them. Like my grandfather, who
had a life-long loathing for newspapers just as intense as mine, I fell prey to
this incurable newspaper disease.” 268 Gathering Evidence
February 6, 2010 Writing and shamelessness
“The writer is always devoid of shame. Only a person who
has no shame is qualified to take hold of sentences and bring them out and
throw them down. Only the most shameless writer is authentic. But
that too is a delusion, like everything else.”
Bernhard,
Evidence 303
February
8, 2010
Bernhard's Song
Bernhard's five-part memoir--Gathering
Evidence---is one of the most intense books I have ever read. Having
read four or five of his novels now and a few good books about him and his
work, done my homework, I finally have "gotten" how to get into him
and how to hear his voice. This memoir is not literally a memoir but it
is more so that than his plays (not available in English) or his novels.
He tells about his life growing up and most of it, apparently, is true,
with some embellishments and contradictions, slightly differing versions of
some people and events. And he warns us directly about all of this
throughout, emphasizing every so often how impossible the truth is to tell, how
misleading even dishonest all talking is, all writing. How everything fails,
everything oppresses, nothing matters.
I found myself remembering the
great speech Edmund makes in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night.
Edmund says at one point that we must be drunken with wine, women and
song, but always drunken. An old motif for sure, but Bernhard does
it, turning his dark bitterness into a harrowing music, beautiful, terrible,
sad, and as disturbing and memorable as any music can be.
He did survive by the time he
turned twenty the great sufferings of war, death, illness, medical
mistreatment, isolation, every sort of loss. The timing of certain
events added to the horrors of their sheer occurrence. His grandfather,
whom he was closest to, died while Bernhard was learning that he had himself
contracted tuberculosis, and then his mother tells him she has cancer and dies
shortly thereafter at the age of forty-six. He never knew his father and
longed to find out more about him. The one woman who could tell him these
things was killed in a freak auto accident just days before they were to meet.
These kinds of things---all through the book. It makes you feel
terrible, horrified, appalled, at what happens, at what people do, at how
impossible it is to comprehend things. The experience of reading Bernhard
is like no other and impossible to convey.
And
yet the voice which Bernhard created with which to tell these things
never sounds like the voice of the victim that came to the fore in so many
other books about terrible lives in the second half of the twentieth century.
No wisp of victimology, of maudlin emotion. Bernhard despairs,
condemns, rages, excoriates, describes, tells and he repeats and re-states, he
finds ways to darken the music of the telling so that sentimentality gets wrung
out and dry wit, cold humor, bare radiance and the rhythms of pure song hold us
in its grip.
February
12, 2010 The disgrace
of humorless clichés
Martin
Amis in an interview in Prospect magazine which I must have found online
somewhere disses Bernhard I think for having no paragraph breaks but admits he
has not read him so I thereby know that Amis doesn't know how funny Bernhard
really is. But he attacks Coetzee
for being humorless and I wholly approve of him for doing that.
Yet there are whole reputations
built on not being funny. Who’s that German writer doesn’t even have paragraph
breaks?
TC: I don’t know him, I don’t tend to read that kind of German
writer.
MA: Coetzee, for instance—his whole style is predicated on
transmitting absolutely no pleasure.
TC: Do you admire his books at all?
MA: No. I read one and I thought, he’s got no talent. The denial
of the pleasure principle has a lot of followers. But I am completely committed
to it, to pleasure.
--------
Greek Wealth Today
On the radio and tv all this week, news from Europe about how unwilling
Germany and France might or might not be to bail out almost bankrupt Greece,
and maybe some other Euro nations too big to fail and too small to count well
enough to balance their books.
In Borders this afternoon this magazine caught my eye Greek
Rich List.
It was in a plastic wrapper, like so many magazines these days,
and had a big price under the published in UK line. So I wrote down the
name to remember it. Here is how they describe themselves online---
The Official Publication Profiling the World’s Wealthiest
Greeks.
Greek Rich List Magazine is the official publication profiling
the World’s wealthiest Greeks and Greek Cypriots with accounts of their rise to
success. It is an annual luxury lifestyle magazine with 116 pages, hundreds of
profiles, photographs, special features, interviews and articles from renowned
authors and journalists.
The concept of our publications is to celebrate and document
entrepreneurial stories; to inspire young entrepreneurs and to promote Greek
heritage and culture.
So intriguing. There is some story behind the headlines
here, some story behind the story, behind the magazine. Who are these
people? What Business School did they graduate from? The London
School? Wharton?
Do other wealthy people tend to ignore the Greeks? Are
they not included in inner talks at Davos? Is this a coffee table
magazine designed precisely for distribution at something like Davos?
Long
range concern---should I still consider a trip to Greece in a few years?
February
14
Old
News
Quote
Politics is a stone tied around literature's neck, and in less
than six month's, it sinks under the weight. Politics set among the
imagination's concerns is like a pistol shot fired at a concert. The
noise mangles without energizing. . . . "If your characters don't talk
politics," responded the publisher, "they'll cease to be the
Frenchmen of 1830, and your book will no longer the the mirror, as you claim it
is . . . ."
Unquote
Stendahl, The Red and the Black
361
And
a few pages later: "All I can see is candidates paying court
to dirt-covered majorities."
February
14
I like the Olympics ok but find it pretty fun
that 3Quarksdaily sent us to this hit of skepticism from the Roman
physician, Galen, who died around 200 AD.
quote
All natural blessings are either mental or physical, and there
is no other category of blessing. Now it is abundantly clear to everyone that
athletes have never even dreamed of mental blessings. To begin with, they are
so deficient in reasoning powers that they do not even know whether they have a
brain. Always gorging themselves on flesh and blood, they keep their brains
soaked in so much filth that they are unable to think accurately and are as
mindless as dumb animals.
Perhaps it will be claimed that athletes achieve some of the physical
blessings. Will they claim the most important blessing of all: health? You will
find no one in a more treacherous physical condition... Their sleep is also
immoderate. When normal people have ended their work and are hungry, athletes
are just getting up from their naps. In fact, their lives are like those of
pigs, except that pigs do not overexert or force feed themselves...
I think that it has become abundantly clear that the practice of
athletics has no utility in the real business of life. You would further learn
that there is nothing worth mention in such practice if I tell you the myth
some talented man put into words. It goes like this: if Zeus decided that all
the animals should live in harmony and partnership, and the herald invited to
Olympia not only men but also animals to compete in the stadium, I think that
no man would be crowned. In the dolichos the horse will be the
best, the stadion will belong to the hare, and the gazelle will be
first in the diaulos. Wretched men, nimble experts, none of you
would be counted in the footraces. Nor would any of you descendants of Herakles
be stronger than the elephant or the lion. I think that the bull would be
crowned in the pyx and the donkey would, if he decided to enter, win the
kicking crown...
This myth shows quite nicely that athletic strength does not
reside in human training. And yet, if athletes cannot be better than animals in
strength, what other blessing do they share in?
Perhaps someone will say that they have a blessing in the
pleasure of their bodies. But how can they derive any pleasure from their
bodies if during their athletic years they are in constant pain and suffering,
not only because of their exercises but also because of their forced feedings?
And when they reach the age of retirement, their bodies are essentially if not
completely crippled.
Are athletes perhaps to be worshipped like kings because they
have large incomes? Yet they are all in debt, not only during the time they are
competing but also after retirement.
--Galen, Exhortation
for Medicine 9-14; A 215
February
15 2010
Spiraling
Onward and Ever Upward
I love it when I hear tales of the power of literary study.
A student just read The Happiness Hypothesis, so I looked up the
book. Jonathan Haidt. Here is the Biography he has posted on
Amazon.
"A strange path led me to write the Happiness Hypothesis.
It all started with an existential crisis in high school -- after reading
"Waiting for Godot" I became convinced there was no meaning to life.
So I majored in philosophy in college, which was of little help. Then I went to
graduate school in psychology, where I began to study morality and culture.
Then I did post-doctoral research in anthropology (including 3 months in
India), then a year of research in health psychology. It felt like meandering
at the time, but every period of these travels contributed many ideas to The
Happiness Hypothesis, which ends with an answer to the question: What is
the meaning of life?"
"I'm now an associate professor of psychology at the
University of Virginia -- an idyllic university founded by Thomas Jefferson. My
next projects will involve taking the insights about balance and virtue that I
came to while writing the Happiness Hypothesis, and applying them to the
American culture wars. I am conducting research that may help liberals and
conservatives to understand each other -- and why both sides are necessary for
the health of our democracy."
(Aside to high school teachers: I wish you would not
teach Beckett in high school, even in AP, but then I also wish you would stop
teaching Tuesdays With Morrie, too.)
On the Wiki site for his work I see the following:
"Haidt found that Americans who identified as liberals tended to value care and fairness higher than loyalty,
respect, and purity. Self-identified conservative Americans valued care and fairness less, and the
remaining three values more. Both groups gave care the highest over-all weighting,
but conservatives valued fairness the lowest, whereas liberals valued purity
the lowest."
Sounds like the Myers-Briggs TI all over again, doesn't it?
Or: how do you rebuild your life after having read Beckett? Since
these days I am deep into being drunk on a Beckett-like author, Bernhard, I do
take note that once I finish Bernhard and my life falls apart once more, I will
turn, as indeed I have so often done in the past, to Haidt and similar writers
to re-find the counterbalancing traditions.
In fact I am tempted to take Haidt's either/or and turn it into
a Möbius Loop and claim that there is the supreme aesthetic theory that
explains and embraces all other lesser aesthetic theories. The great
artists and writers figure out ways, old ways, new ways, ways that seem new
when we need new, ways that seem old when he hunker for the old, to give us all
points on the Möbius Loop of judgments so that for the brief time that we are
experiencing their works---we can be liberalconservative and conservativeliberal
all at once.
It is a hopeless cause, however, because Jung and Myers showed
us that most people, most as in 97%, cannot live for long in such oxygen
deprivation systems. They require the certainty of clear judgment, where
do I stand, which, indeed, my students have been complaining about for all
thirty some years of my teaching career. I am a slow learner, the
slowest, it seems. I should have been a moutain climber. Maybe I
would have been even happier than I am now, which is pretty happy, all things considered.
Darn, I wish that phrase had not been co-opted by radio.
It
passes the time, though, as Didi and Gogo have said.
“The
more shocked he was by the prince’s absurdities, the more he despised himself
for not admiring them, and the more miserable he
judged himself for not sharing them. Self-loathing can go no further.”
Stendahl,
The Red and the Black, Burton Raffel trans. 377
February
16
Fiction
and News
We often note how gruesome the news on the tv channel out of
northern Vermont can be. Drugs, thefts, domestic violence, murders,
farmers’ suicides, generally desperate stuff belying the idyllic image of
back-country Vermont life. Northern New England can be pretty desperate,
economically depressed in lots of the pockets in between the ski resorts, zen
retreats and arts compounds. Last week a retired middle school teacher
who had been highly regarded apparently was arrested and convicted of having a
collection of child pornography that the judge announced to the press was the
worst he had ever seen.
This week I’m reading Thomas Bernhard some more and come upon
this passage:
Then he began talking about the school teacher, the first person
he had visited that morning, who had died under his hands. The fate of
the country schoolteachers was bitter, he said. So often they came from a
town, no matter how small a one, where they felt easy, into a grim mountain
community where everyone was hostile to them. Such transfers were usually
made as a punishment. The teachers would lead a more and more wretched,
depressed life, all the more hamstrung by the hateful regulations issued by the
Ministry of Education. Most of them lapsed fairly soon into an apathy
that might at any moment turn to madness. In any case they were people
all too prone to regard life as a penance. But now, constantly in
surroundings where they were not taken seriously, looked down on by everyone,
their initially weak intellects were torn to shreds and they stumbled into
sexual aberrations.
---Bernhard,
Gargoyles 53 (1967; 1970)
February
16 In which the author may be
permitted to glimpse the future greatness of his work
Julien has been copying love letters written by someone else and
trying to use them to his purpose.
"It was the contrast between the surface frivolity of his
conversation, and the letters' profound, almost apocalyptic sublimity, that
made him stand out.
The length of his sentences, above all, pleased the marshall's
widow: this was not the hopping and jumping style made fashionable by
Voltaire, that terribly immoral man!
Although our hero did everything he could, striving to eliminate
any good sense from his conversation, it still struck notes of antimonarchism
and impiety, nor did that escape Madame de Fervaques's notice.
Surrounded as she was by eminently moral people who often passed
an entire evening without having a single idea, the lady was deeply impressed by
something that seemed novel, though at the same time she considered it her duty
to herself to be offended.
She termed these radical notions a lack of judgment, bearing
the stamp of the era's frivolity."
After this delightful paragraph, (I have broken it into parts
for emphasis) Stendahl gives us fair warning about just where we are.
Almost a Modernist touch, even a post-modernist foreshadowing---just to strain
the idea too far.
"But frequenting drawing rooms like hers is only useful
when there's something you want to ask for. The boredom of that
meaningless life, as Julien was living it, is surely shared by the
reader. These are the barren moors and heaths of our journey."
--The Red and the Black: 397.
Yes,
of course I may be boring you, dear reader, Stendhal seems to be saying, but
deal with it. Almost with supreme confidence, isn't it. As
though he is also thinking to himself---you will deal with it and bear
with me, dear reader, for after all, you have made it this far,
page 397 and the end, page 524, is in sight, to you, reader, if not, yet, to
me, and yet we both know that this is a great book, will become a great book,
and we are both of us now in thrall to it and we must both push on.
February
17 Discipline Rewarded
"He was afraid of seeing Mathilde's vanity awakened.
Drunk with love and sensual ecstasy, he forced himself to say nothing.
As far as I'm concerned, reader, this is one of the finest
traits of his character. Anyone capable of compelling himself to make
such an effort can go far--si fata sinat, if the fates grant it."
Stendhal,
R&B 407
February
17 Wal-Mart and Fez
We go to Wal-Mart, a Super Wal-Mart, at least five times a week.
In the winter it is the nearest largest enclosed space in which to walk
for exercise. Virginia likes to stimulate her damaged left arm and hand
by holding them onto the handle of the shopping cart and walking with the cart.
Not
every time but very often when I am wandering around Wal-Mart while Virginia is
racking up steps on her pedometer for the day, I think of our visit to the
great Medina of Fez, Morocco in 1998. We were there only two nights and
we visited the Medina only one afternoon under the protection of our guide who
walked us all around explaining everything. Then I thought of Wal-Mart
and back home, even more than ten years later, when in Wal-Mart I recall the
wholly medieval market of Fez.
February
20, 2010
A
quiet Saturday in February
and photographing the washcloth seems just the thing to do.
We went to a gallery opening last night. That might
explain it. Wondering when the need to paint will finally overwhelm all
other actions and intentions and plans for the day and cause the setting up of
the studio in the empty space here in the room to the right of this MacBook
station under the skylight.
Not yet. Photographing the towel racks earlier today
seemed to do the trick.
For
now.
February
28
Here's
the root base of the big tree that blew down across Rogers Street Thursday
night. Violent rain and wind. No power when we woke. We spent
the next two nights at a motel just outside of town. Sunday, today, I
took these photos of the NH Electric Co-op crews working. They had to
replace some destroyed poles at the base of the hill, on Langdon Street.
No comments:
Post a Comment