Helvetia, in Figuren leben, et la cité désirée

“Wir leben wahrhaft in Figuren” wrote Rilke – pictured here on a Swiss stamp – “We truly live in figures”, that is amongst symbols, abstractions, figments, the imagined. This is from the Sonnets to Orpheus which he wrote while living in the Château de Muzot, which is about halfway between Geneva and Locarno. Our reality is in fact something fabricated by our brains, the real world as we experience it is essentially a hallucination which is more or less faithful to our sense perceptions, but filled in with interpolation, cached memories, predictions and such. 

In his most recent book Homo Irrealis, André Aciman explores the theme-and-variations way the mind and world inter-relate and the role art plays in our inner lives. 

“Art allows us to think the unthinkable, to posit one paradox after another in the hope of firming up wisps of our lives and feelings by transfiguring them, by giving them a shape, a design, a coherence, even if they are and will remain forever incoherent. Incoherence exists, which is why composition—art—exists. Grammarians called this unthinkable, imponderable, impalpable, fluid, transitory, incoherent zone the irrealis mood, a verbal mood to express what might never, couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t possibly occur but that might just happen all the same. The subjunctive and the conditional are irrealis moods, as are the imperative and the optative. ... Most of our time is spent not in the present tense, as we so often claim, but in the irrealis mood—the mood of our fantasy life, the mood where we can shamelessly envision what might be, should be, could have been, who we ourselves wished we really were if only we knew the open sesame to what might otherwise have been our true lives. Irrealis moods are about the great sixth sense that lets us guess and, through art sometimes, helps us intuit what our senses aren’t always aware of.”

“Comme ceux qui partent en voyage pour voir de leurs yeux une cité désirée et s'imaginet qu'on peut goûter dans une réalité le charme du songe.” Proust, Du côté de chez Swann.

“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 charm of a dream” transl Lydia Davis, Proust The Way by Swann's p.9

But reality has a way of superceding and overwriting our fragile and fleeting imagined worlds.

“He, the owner of the stamp, wanted to know where Helvetia was, but no one he asked had heard of any country by 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” Gerald Murnane, Emerald Blue p.86

“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 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.” ibid. p.87

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."

Precious knowledge

"There was much that he wanted to learn, but he could not believe that he would learn it as other people learned what they learned. He believed in something called precious knowledge. As a child, he had hoped to find some of that knowledge in some discarded or forgotten book. Later, he came to understand that such knowledge as he was looking for was not readily passed from one person to another." Gerald Murnane, Emerald Blue, p.84

The image above is a still from Tarkovsky's The Mirror - you can tell that it is the boy leafing through the book (the boy in the 'contemporary' time frame of the film) because of the clumsy way in which the pages are turned and the tissue paper over the plates is creased. Later in the film we are led to suspect that this is the book was stolen by his father when he was a boy. The dialogue below is the sister threatening to tell ... "I'll tell them you stole the book."

It's a subtle film, at times difficult with the different time periods and the same actors playing people in different generations, but it is marvellous ... and the ending of the film with that most sublime chorus "Herr, unser Herrscher, dessen Ruhm in allen Landen herrlich ist" from the opening of Bach's great Johannes Passion BWV 245 makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. After just having watched a scene where the central character (the boy from early days who becomes the father in the contemporary time) presumably dies, we see the young mother seemingly watching herself now aged leading her two small children (the boy and his sister) through a field. The different time periods coincide, the decades collapse, which is after all what happens in the mind, and presumably also what happens in the frame of reference of a photon, and maybe even at the moment of death. All time is one.