Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Blake's (and Parry's) Jerusalem

Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry
The performance of Blake's 'Jerusalem' at the memorial service for Gough Whitlam gave me a momentary pause, it being so strongly identified with England, and Whitlam being such a staunch 'Australianist.' After all, the Barmy Army of visiting cricket supporters sing it before the day's play during Ashes series. But then of course it was the campaign song for Clement Attlee's Labour Party in the famous 1945 landslide ousting Winston Churchill from No.10.  And, having had a not dissimilar educational upbringing from Gough - posh Protestant school - I too find the music invariably stirring; in fact, at the 30 year reunion a short service was held where this was the hymn sung heartily by a bunch of 'old boys' nearing 50.

But then I pondered the lyrics again ... lines such as

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem ...

Parry, who composed the marvellous music, was asked to set the poem to provide a song for the ultra-patriotic Fight for Right movement. Parry had misgivings but did not want to disappoint those who had asked him, and he was pleased - musically - with his resulting work. Yet his misgivings about the political agenda of the Fight for Right grew, and he publicly withdrew all support for the movement.

In this time when seemingly incomprehensible brutality and violence is once again erupting in parts of the world and in our news feeds, it is perhaps worthwhile to ask ourselves what it is that is so moving or inspiring in this hymn, this Call to Arms. Is not the line "Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand" terrifyingly brutal in the way it gives agency to the inanimate weapon. And how would we hear the lines quoted above if instead of the word 'Jerusalem' we substitute 'the Caliphate'?

Saturday, September 27, 2014

One's own rhythm

Cesare Pavese
"Il genio non è scoprire un motivo esterno e trattarlo bene, ma giungere finalmente a possedere la propria esperienza, il proprio corpo, i propri ricordi, il proprio ritmo – ed esprimere, esprimere questo ritmo, fuori dalla limitatezza degli argomenti, della materia, nella perenne fecondità di un pensiero che per definizione non ha fondo." Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: 1938, 6 dicembre.

"Genius is not a matter of discovering some external theme and treating it skillfully, but of finally achieving complete possession of one's own experience, own body, own memories - one's own rhythm, and expressing this rhythm, above and beyond the limitations of plot or subject matter." - Cesare Pavese 6 December 1938

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Before the strangeness of things ... the taste of dreams

'Emerald Blue' is one of my favourite Gerald Murnane stories, and the whole collection of which it is the title story, is my favourite Murnane book. In 'Emerald Blue' the narrator describes receiving a collection of foreigh postage stamps at the age of seven. "One stamp was from Helvetia. ... He, the owner of the stamp, wanted to know where Helvetia was, but no one he asked had heard of any country of that name. ... More than forty years afterwards, he still remembered that he had seen in his mind from time to time for several years images of a place he supposed to be Helvetia. ... As soon as he was able to use an atlas, he searched for Helvetia. When he could find no part of the world with the same name as the country in his mind, he felt for a few moments as awed and delighted as he would ever afterwards feel before the strangeness of things."

This seems to me a masterfully precise description of the inner life and the workings of the imagination. Of course, Helvetia is itself a wonderfully literal metaphor for imaginary landscapes. Murnane is one of those writers whose paragraphs lead you off into your own speculative world; I often find myself often reading a paragraph or two then drifting off into my own thoughts. The great figure in this vein of writing is of course Marcel Proust. Early in Du côté de chez Swann he writes how on waking from a dream of a woman he has known he would set about finding her, "comme ceux qui partent en voyage pour voir de leurs yeux une cité désirée et s'imaginent qu'on peut goûter dans une réalité le charme du songe" ... which Lydia Davis translates as "like those who go off on a journey to see a longed-for city with their own eyes and imagine that one can enjoy in reality the charms of a dream" (this somewhat sacrifices the strong overtones of goûter which has "to taste" and there's that subtlety of "une réalité")

Back to Murnane: "Later, he had come to understand that the landscape of Helvetia was not the only such landscape he had seen. Whenever he was invited to a house that he had not previously visited, he would see in his mind at once the house as it looked from the front gate, the interior of the main room, the view of the back garden from the kitchen window. Then he would visit the house, and the other house would have followed Helvetia into oblivion."

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Too much going on at once

Frédéric Chopin
In a recent post about alliterative effects in poetry I mentioned a sort of effect which "gets under your skin, or beneath your analytic defences; it sneaks into the brain directly like perfume, or music with too many things going on at once." This type of too-much-going-on-at-once is beautifully described by Douglas Hofstadter in a piece he wrote about Chopin:

"In that same year, Chopin wrote what some admirers consider to be his greatest work: the fourth Ballade in F minor. This piece is filled with noteworthy passages, but one in particular had a profound effect on me. One day, long after I knew the piece intimately from recordings, a friend told me that he had been practising it and wanted to show me "a bit of tricky polyrhythm" that was particularly interesting. I was actually not that interested in hearing about polyrhythm at the moment, and so didn't pay much attention when he sat down at the keyboard. Then he started to play. He played just two measures, but by the time they were over, I felt that someone had reached into the very center of my skull and caused something to explode deep down inside. This "bit of tricky polyrhythm" had undone me completely."

He goes on to describe that at one scale there is a rhythmic pattern of 2-against-3, but that by accenting every fourth triplet this creates a simultaneous pattern of 3-against-8 at a larger scale. This seems to me to be an excellent example of a general principle about the role of technique in the arts. And the principle is this: the conscious mind under normal circumstances intermediates reality, constructing what is perceived and including its own interpolations and interpretations as part and parcel of our experience of the world.  Thus the role of the conscious analytical computing mind serves to slightly distance us from what we experience: experience is not direct in normal circumstances. When experience is direct we are swept off our feet by the force of it; in this category of experience we might well find certain religious experiences, love at first sight, various psychotic episodes, moments of inspiration or insight, sudden epiphanies, and so forth. Technique is art can so overwhelm the analytical, keeping-track, I-know-what-I-am-experiencing brain that the consructing/interpolating/interpreting processes become overloaded and simply give up and the perceptual experience bypasses all the filters and hits us directly. This is what Hofstadter describes when he says "I felt that someone had reached into the very center of my skull and caused something to explode deep down inside."

Friday, May 23, 2014

The double message

Frank Auerbach Self Portrait
sold for £423,700 in 2008
In a letter to The Times in 1971 Frank Auerbach wrote: "Your correspondents tend to write of paintings as objects of financial value or passive beauty. For painters they are source material; they teach and they set standards." And this is much the same thing as T. S. Eliot meant when he wrote - in the September 1919 issue of The Egoist - that the poet "must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past"

Jacob Bronowski, as always, gives the wide-angle view: "The characteristic feature of all human cultures is that they make artifacts and this is really what we mean when we sat that the human mind is creative. The artifacts begin as simple stone tools, some of which are at the least several hundred thousand years old. What characterizes these and later artifacts is the double message that we read in them all., from the first chipped piece of stone: that tells us what they are for and also, at the same time, how they were made. So the artifact is an invention which carries its own blueprint with it - as we look at it, we see forward into its use and backward into its manufacture, and it extends our culture in both senses." - The Visionary Eye, p.65

From the 50s to the 70s Auerbach kept up a weekly habit of visiting The National Gallery and making drawings from paintings. This simple discipline of work, work, work reminds me of Rilke's comments about Rodin; in a letter (10 August 1903) he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé:
"wird es mir offenbar, daß ich ihm, Rodin, folgen muß: nicht in einem bildhauerischen Umgestalten meines Schaffens, aber in der inneren Anordnung des künstlerischen Prozesses; nicht bilden muß ich lernen von ihm, aber tiefes Gesammelstein um des Bildens willen. Arbeiten muß ich lernen, arbeiten, Lou, das fehlt mir so! Il faut toujours travailler - toujours - sagte er mir einmal, als ich ihm von den bangen Abgründen sprach, die zwischen meinen guten Tagen aufgetan sind; er konnte es kaum mehr verstehen, er, der ganz Arbeit geworden ist (so sehr, daß alle seine Gebärden schlichte Bewegungen sind, aus dem Handwerk, genommen!)."
"It is becoming apparent that I must follow him, Rodin: not in a sculptural reshaping of my creative work, but in the inner disposition of the artistic process; I must learn from him not how to fashion but deep composure for the sake of fashioning. I must learn to work, to work, Lou, I am so lacking in that! Il faut toujours travailler - toujours - he said to me once, when I spoke to him of the frightening abysses that open up between my good days, he could hardly understand it any longer he, who has become all work (so much so that his gestures are homely movements taken from manual work!)"


Tuesday, May 13, 2014

An immediate sense of the general

Ever since I watched The Ascent of Man as a child, and read several of his books while I was (briefly) at university, Jacob Bronowski has been a significant —and, as is often the way, a sometimes unconscious — influence.

In a recent interview I did for Tincture Journal, I responded to a question about the relation between my work with designing computer systems and my poetry-writing by trying to talk about the similarities: "Seeing that two distinct things are in some respect the same is the vital insight of abstraction, which allows you to make metaphors, write reusable software components, devise mathematical theorems, and make scientific breakthroughs. “My love is like a red, red rose” is the same sort of equation as Newton’s realisation that the force that pulls a falling apple is the same force that guides the orbiting moon (that is, the discovery of gravity united the hitherto separate domains of terrestrial and celestial mechanics). Seeing that two distinct things are in some important way the same is the key ability of the human brain, and—in very basic terms—must be what allows us to learn from experience. As no two moments are alike in all details—as Heraclitus said, “No person ever steps in the same river twice”—we need that crucial power of abstraction to be able to see that the current situation is in some way the same as previous remembered experience. We need a fast, reliable memory, and dreams to train the pattern-matching neural networks, to support this essential metaphor-making ability. Mathematics and poetry are the highest expressions of that same basic evolutionarily-determined skill."

Browsing through old books, I realised that Bronowski had put the matter more succinctly, clearly, and deeply in 'The Nature of Art' from his book The Visionary Eye: "There is a common pattern to all knowledge: what we meet is always particular, yet what we learn is always general. In science we reason from particular instances to the general laws that we suppose to lie behind them, and though we do not know how we guess at these laws, we know very well how to test them. But in a poem the specific story and the detailed imagery that carries it create in us an immediate sense of the general. The experience is made large and significant precisely by the small and insignificant touches. Here the particular seems to become general of itself: the detail is its own universal."

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Taking a mechanical turn


Bernard Stiegler in a 2010 article ('The Age of De-proletarianisation') refers to Bartók's 1937 lecture on mechanical music: "At the beginning of the 20th century, perception took a mechanical turn – making it possible, for example, to repeatedly listen to music without knowing how to make music. Bartók drew attention to this in relation to the radio, when he recommended only listening to music while following along visually with the musical score."

Stephen Hough has released a wonderful iPad app where you can do just that: the score is presented as well as three different camera angles filming the performance, and all of these play in sync and of course you can move freely around in the piece with the swipe if a finger. There is also an intriguing piano roll view which shows the notes of the left hand and right hand as little scrolling streaks in different colours.

Bartók was concerned with the body's role in the production of music, and to some extent echoed an aritcle in a special issue of Musikblätter des Anbruch on Music and Machines (October/November 1926) contributed by Hans Heinsheimer, who worked as a music publisher for Universal Edition (where he supported Kurt Weill, Leoš Janáček, and Alban Berg).

Stiegler asserts that "the socialisation of digital technologies, as with every new technology, is initially perceived as a kind of poison (as Plato said about writing, even though it was the basis of law and rational thought)." Perhaps we are too far steeped in the consumerist disenfranchisement from our lives to feel the poison at work: as Stiegler writes elsewhere in the same article ..."a good consumer is both utterly passive and irresponsible" He concludes with an injunction to grasp the digital nettle: "Like writing, and according to Plato’s word, the digital is a pharmakon, that is, at once a poison, a remedy and a scapegoat. Only the digital itself, insofar as it can be a remedy, enables an effective struggle against the poison which it also is"

Sunday, April 13, 2014

The real ogres know how to live


Claude Chabrol is the French Hitchcock. Of course, that's an Anglo-centric way of putting it. He may be better than Hitchcock. At the end of his film Masques the soundtrack even plays Gounod's 'Marche funèbre d'une marionnette' ... the piece used as the theme music for the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

In this film the sinister character at one point explains: "The love for children, you know, it's terrible ... it eats you alive! They're the real ogres."

Raymond Carver, in an essay on "Influence" in his book Fires wrote: "The biggest single influence on my writing, directly and indirectly, has been my two children. They were born before I was twenty and from beginning to end – some nineteen years in all – there wasn’t any area of my life where their heavy and often baleful influence didn’t reach."

I remember the first time I read this —back before I had any children of my own — this shocked me, maybe because — for like Tonio Kröger I am no doubt ein verirrter Burger — it was not the sort of thing one should say, it was not (in the young Tolstoy's terms) comme il faut, but I think also because — despite the admiration I felt for both the man and his writing — I sensed that here there was something wrong, something that revealed more of some ancient wound of the speaker than it did some universal experience.

Children are — almost by definition — a positive. They know how to live! In a scene at the very end of Mikio Naruse's Late Chrysanthemums one friend advises another whose adult son has just left on a train for a new job in a different city, "Don't worry, young people know how to live".

There are theories about creole languages — new langauges with sophisticated grammars arising out of the many-rooted pidgin languages in communities of immigrant workers of diverse origins — which explain that their creation is due to the children of the community playing together and inventing the new language. But surely the standard languages are similarly invented, or reinvented, children inventing a language based on the inherited dialect, but full of mistakes and radical reuse ... small wonder that reading Chaucer in the original is not so easy.

Friday, April 11, 2014

Problems of the will

"The real problems are the problems of the will" - the quote is from Giuseppe Mazzotta, in his book Reading Dante, but if like me you've watched his Yale lecture course on 'Dante in Translation' more than once, then you'll remember the idea. The full context of the quotation is this: "The body stands for one’s own reality, the passions. It stands for one’s own will. This is the difference between what the Greeks understand as the great intellectual adventure, which is one of knowledge, and Dante’s idea that the real problems are problems of the will. We may not know where we are, and we may understand that we are not happy with the situation in which we find ourselves, but we cannot quite solve these problems with knowledge alone because the problems here are problems of willing."

Dante himself was well aware of the centrality of the question of will in his Comedy. In his Epistle to Cangrande he writes: "Si vero accipiatur opus allegorice, subiectum est homo prout merendo et demerendo per arbitorii liberatem iustitie premiandi et puniendi obnoxius est" (If the work is taken allegorically, the subject is man according as by his merits or demerits in the exercise of his free will  he is deserving of reward or punishment by justice."[bold face mine])

And of all the great writers, who better to understand this than the "problem-gambler" Dostoevsky? But of course it may well not have been until his second marriage that Dostoevsky would actually have felt any 'remorse' at succumbing to the 'weakness' of being addicted to gambling. If the character Alexei in The Gambler is anything to go by, then the young Dostoevsky possibly had his own theories about success and the positive power of human will, although Alexei - like Raskolnikov with his similarly cerebral theories about crime - seems quite incapable of actually attaining the rational control he extols.

Novels are like symphonies: they unfold in a linear sequence, but their parts stand in architectural relation to each other; main themes are announced and explored through their developments.  Crime and Punishment, for example, after a brief introduction which introduces us to Raskolnikov's fevered stream of consciousness, announces a grand theme of the failure of the will as presented in the recounted history of Marmeladov, who has drunk up everything, lost all opportunity, and sinks further and further into wretched hopelessness. He has been reduced to living off the earnings of his daughter who has been driven to prostitution.  We, in a sense, overhear this as he recounts his pathetic story to Raskolnikov, much as Raskolnikov overhears a student and a young officer theorizing over the merits of murdering the old pawnbroker. Of course, it is not many pages after Marmeladov's story that we learn that Raskolnikov himself has been the financial beneficiary of his elderly mother who subsists on a meagre pension, and his sister who had had to take up a very unpleasant serving position; all this bears a striking resemblance to Marmeladov's own circumstances. So we are now left having to revise our suppositions about how Raskolnikov felt about Marmeladov's story; a new light is cast backward over the narrative.  This uncertainty can start to infest the text; when, for instance, Raskolnikov sleeps suddenly in the bushes, and then on the way home, before falling into a deep slumber from which he cannot be woken, he chances to overhear a conversation in the Haymarket with Lizaveta, the unfortunate sister of the pawn-broker, revealing the exact hour at which she will be absent from the apartment, could this perhaps be a delusion? It is paired with the story of Raskolnikov chancing to overhear the student and the young officer, who just happen to be talking of the pawn-broker whom Raskolnikov himself has just visited, and furthermore, they are discussing the very thoughts of murder that he was already apparently thinking himself. How reliable really is this narrator? It starts to feel like the delusional otherness of Fight Club.

Failure of the will is Raskolnikov's own analysis of why most crimes are so readily solved: he believes that almost any criminal, at the moment of the crime, "подвергается какому-то упадку воли и рассудка" - undergoes some failure of the will and reason.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Trifling details und ein neues Niveau

Nikolai Alexandrovich Yaroshenko's
painting 'The Student' (1881)
In Crime and Punishment (1866), Raskolnikov, after receiving some jeering comment in the street about his German hat (someone shouts at him "немецкий шляпник!") and realising how conspicuous it makes him, exclaims: Мелочи, мелочи главное!.. Вот эти-то мелочи и губят всегда и всё… (Trivial details, trivial details above all … It's these trivial details that ruin everything always).

Adorno posing with a musical score
Adorno also saw the power of trifling details: in Minima Moralia he writes "Keine Verbesserung ist zu klein oder geringfügig, als daß man sie nicht durchführen sollte. Von hundert Änderungen mag jede einzelne läppisch und pedantisch erscheinen; zusammen können sie ein neues Niveau des Textes ausmachen." (“No improvement is too small or insignificant to be carried out. Out of a hundred changes, a single one may appear trifling and pedantic; together they can raise the text to a new level.”).

Adorno, of course, understood music, and music is all details; as Emperor Joseph is reported to have said: Gewaltig viel Noten lieber Mozart!

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Most anxious to appear clever

Усадьба Богимово, the setting of 'The House with the Mezzanine'
Chekhov in his story "The house with the Mezzanine" paints, in a single sentence, an instantly recognizable and convincing portrait of a young man who has retained the social awkwardness of his student days:
Chekhov, 1879
Зато мой  Петр  Петрович,  у  которого  еще  со студенчества осталась манера всякий  разговор  сводить  на  спор,  говорил скучно, вяло и  длинно,  с  явным  желанием  казаться  умным  и  передовым человеком.
On the other hand my friend Pyotr Petrovich, who still retained the student habit of turning everything into an argument, spoke boringly, listlessly and longwindedly - he was obviously most anxious to appear advanced and clever.
Tolstoy in Youth (Юность) presents himself as a young student with a similar social affliction in a memorably cringeworthy scene:
- Вам,  я  думаю,  скучно,  monsieur Nicolas,  слушать из  середины,  - сказала мне  Софья  Ивановна с  своим  добродушным вздохом,  переворачивая куски платья, которое она шила.
Чтение в  это время прекратилось,  потому что Дмитрий куда-то  вышел из комнаты.
- Или, может быть, вы уже читали "Роброя"?
В то время я считал своею обязанностию, вследствие уже одного того, что носил студенческий мундир,  с  людьми мало  мне  знакомыми на  каждый даже самый простой вопрос отвечать непременно очень умно и оригинально и считал величайшим стыдом короткие и ясные ответы,  как: да, нет, скучно, весело и тому  подобное.  Взглянув  на  свои  новые  модные  панталоны и  блестящие пуговицы сюртука,  я отвечал, что не читал "Роброя", но что мне было очень интересно слушать,  потому что я больше люблю читать книги из средины, чем с начала.
- Вдвое интересней:  догадываешься о  том,  что  было и  что  будет,  -
The young & unpleasant Tolstoy

добавил я, самодовольно улыбаясь.
'I expect you find it dull, Monsieur Nicolas, to hear the middle of the story without knowing the beginning,'  said Sophia Ivanovna to me with her good-natured sigh, turning over the pieces of a garment she was making.
The reading had stopped just then because Dmitri had gone out of the room.
'Or perhaps you have read Rob Roy before?'
At that time I thought it incumbent on me, if only on account of my student's uniform, always to give clever and original answers to even the simplest question put to me by people I did not know very well, and I should have been deeply ashamed to offer brief plain replies like 'Yes,' 'No,' 'I don't care for it,' 'I like it,' and so on. With a glance at my fashionable new trousers and the shining buttons on my coat I said that I had not read Rob Roy but that it was very interesting to me to listen to it because I preferred to read books from the middle rather than from the beginning.
'It is doubly interesting,' I added with a self-satisfied smile. 'One tries to guess what has gone before and what will happen further on.'
Youth p. 242 sect 23

Then in his story 'Muzhiki' (sometimes translated as 'Peasants'), Chekhov describes a character whose only achievement is the acquisition of a few unusual words.
В городе он не живал и книг никогда не читал, но откуда-то набрался разных умных слов и любил употреблять их в разговоре, и за это его уважали, хотя и не всегда понимали.
Although he had never lived in a town or read any books, somehow he had managed to accumulate a store of various clever-sounding words and he loved using them in conversation, which made him respected, if not always understood.
How many writers still it these shoes? The awkward youth eager to impress? The ill-educated spicing every paragraph with clever-sounding words? People like me peppering obscure blog posts with quotes in multiple languages.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Golo and Geneviève de Brabant

 from Le Petit Sheriff #87 9 Jan 1954
In Los pasos perdidos (1953) (The Lost Steps), Alejo Carpentier chooses as a book to represent the unsophisticated tastes of the simple peasant people his protagonist encounters on his journey through the Andes, an account of the story of Geneviève de Brabant and Golo. Carpentier contrasts the simplistic naive tale in the gaudily covered paperback with bad paper with the "modern" novel he had abandoned in disgust which is now being read by his urbanized and spiritually lost mistress, Mouche, whom he is soon to also abandon in disgust, while pursuing the grounded and beautiful Rosario:
Mouche sacó un libro de su maleta. Rosario, por imitarle, buscó un tomo en su hato. Era un volumen impreso en papel malo, lleno de escorias, cuya portada en tricromía mostraba una mujer cubierta de pieles de oso o algo parecido, que era abrazada por un magnífico caballero en la entrada de una gruta, bajo la mirada complacida de una cierva de largo cuello: Historia de Genoveva de Brabante. En mi mente se hizo al punto un chusco contraste entre tal lectura y cierta famosa novela moderna que estaba en las manos de Mouche, y que yo había dejado en el tercer capítulo, agobiado por una especie de vergüenza triste ante su caudal de obscenidad.

Man Ray's photograph
of a marionette of
Geneviève de Brabant.
Atelier Mascotte, 1926.
This choice of book — deliberately or unconsciously or coincidentally — has itself sophisticated literary echoes as an emblem of the simple primitive child-like view of the world and its magic. It recalls a passage from Proust where he describes the uneasy and disturbing distraction of a magic lantern projecting images of that same story of Golo and his "hideous designs" and Geneviève de Brabant, intended to provide solace to a bored an unhappy child in the long hours before bedtime.
A Combray, tous les jours dès la fin de l'après-midi, longtemps avant le moment où il faudrait me mettre au lit et rester, sans dormir, loin de ma mère et de ma grand'mère, ma chambre à coucher redevenait le point fixe et douloureux de mes préoccupations. On avait bien inventé, pour me distraire les soirs où on me trouvait l'air trop malheureux, de me donner une lanterne magique, dont, en attendant l'heure du dîner, on coiffait ma lampe; et, à l'instar des premiers architectes et maîtres verriers de l'âge gothique, elle substituait à l'opacité des murs d'impalpables irisations, de surnaturelles apparitions multicolores, où des légendes étaient dépeintes comme dans un vitrail vacillant et momentané. Mais ma tristesse n'en était qu'accrue, parce que rien que le changement d'éclairage détruisait l'habitude que j'avais de ma chambre et grâce à quoi, sauf le supplice du coucher, elle m'était devenue supportable. Maintenant je ne la reconnaissais plus et j'y étais inquiet, comme dans une chambre d'hôtel ou de «chalet», où je fusse arrivé pour la première fois en descendant de chemin de fer.
Au pas saccadé de son cheval, Golo, plein d'un affreux dessein, sortait de la petite forêt triangulaire qui veloutait d'un vert sombre la pente d'une colline, et s'avançait en tressautant vers le château de la pauvre Geneviève de Brabant. Ce château était coupé selon une ligne courbe qui n'était autre que la limite d'un des ovales de verre ménagés dans le châssis qu'on glissait entre les coulisses de la lanterne. Ce n'était qu'un pan de château et il avait devant lui une lande où rêvait Geneviève qui portait une ceinture bleue. Le château et la lande étaient jaunes et je n'avais pas attendu de les voir pour connaître leur couleur car, avant les verres du châssis, la sonorité mordorée du nom de Brabant me l'avait montrée avec évidence. Golo s'arrêtait un instant pour écouter avec tristesse le boniment lu à haute voix par ma grand'tante et qu'il avait l'air de comprendre parfaitement, conformant son attitude avec une docilité qui n'excluait pas une certaine majesté, aux indications du texte; puis il s'éloignait du même pas saccadé. Et rien ne pouvait arrêter sa lente chevauchée. Si on bougeait la lanterne, je distinguais le cheval de Golo qui continuait à s'avancer sur les rideaux de la fenêtre, se bombant de leurs plis, descendant dans leurs fentes. Le corps de Golo lui-même, d'une essence aussi surnaturelle que celui de sa monture, s'arrangeait de tout obstacle matériel, de tout objet gênant qu'il rencontrait en le prenant comme ossature et en se le rendant intérieur, fût-ce le bouton de la porte sur lequel s'adaptait aussitôt et surnageait invinciblement sa robe rouge ou sa figure pâle toujours aussi noble et aussi mélancolique, mais qui ne laissait paraître aucun trouble de cette transvertébration.
Certes je leur trouvais du charme à ces brillantes projections qui semblaient émaner d'un passé mérovingien et promenaient autour de moi des reflets d'histoire si anciens. Mais je ne peux dire quel malaise me causait pourtant cette intrusion du mystère et de la beauté dans une chambre que j'avais fini par remplir de mon moi au point de ne pas faire plus attention à elle qu'à lui-même.
Marcel Proust, Du Côté de Chez Swann

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Censor vandals

This image is from the film Searching for Sugar Man and shows the method by which the former South African regime censored "unsuitable" tracks from LPs, in this case the track 'Sugar Man' from Rodriguez's album Cold Fact. Nothing new here; witness Erasmus's books, several examples of which can be seen in this condition in his house museum in the suburbs of Brussels ...