The Recruit

One of my back-burner projects for the past couple of years is a memoir or a series of linked autobiographical essays about my years of quiet desperation trying to be a writer while living in New Orleans in the mid-90s. Green Mountains Review has just published some excerpts in their online edition.

Read them here.

Fragment

What a pen can make: lines. The sea sees nothing. The computer heats up, rendering. What was given to Henry James: names. Makes a world. 

They were neither of them saints. Him especially, but also especially, her. But what makes a saint? To have stood for something, and to have suffered for it. Isn't that enough? Isn't that, at least, something?

The artist chooses his constraints: that is his freedom. But the philosopher? Is she not obligated, simply, to the truth? And thus is the least free of all? The philosopher does not invent, even when she does invent: a voice, a character, a concept. The philosopher constructs a discourse, an elaborate machine for unearthing what she discovers in the day or night. She lives in the brilliant aftermath of intuition. 

Moths

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.[1]

Begin again. In a new spirit of pragmatism, asking not why I am interested in vital materialism, in modernist poetics, in the dialectic of innocence and experience, in the phenomenological and ecological implications of taking language and the imagination as things that obtain, that exist. Accepting that I am interested in these things, that they are a matter of my temperament, its line or lines of flight. Asking, instead, what this assemblage of interests can do.

The idea has come to me that I want to do now is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes.[2]

In my own poetry this assemblage empowers a new practice, a practical poetics to be lived with and explored. Such a poetics undermines the impulse toward the made and returns one’s attention to making. To be always beginning again, with the reader, asking what it is in the moment that poems do.

Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea.[3]

Poetry is a practice of magic, of incantation, “a matter of disturbance, entrance and passion, rather than abracadabra.”[4] A speech in which the speaker is fully embedded, fully committed. A voice committed to the moment, to creating and being created by the otherness of what the poem includes.

Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.[5]

It is false, unreal, merely conventional: this business of the realist: how some poetry and much scholarship encases and thwarts experience. In their insistent proprieties they obscure our vision of the actual, what William James called “pure experience.”[6] The actual may be a poem; it may be the western black rhino, declared extinct last week; it may be my daughter; it may be a feeling or a lure for feeling. We lose the actual when we lose the adventure of imagination.

The world of wonders is limited at last to the parent’s will (for will prospers where imagination is thwarted); intellectual appetites become no more than ambitions; curious minds become consciences; love, hatred, affection, and cruelty cease to be responses and become convictions. And the adventure of life becomes a self-improvement course.[7]

We can, in other words, know nothing in advance. The poem lies before us. We are implicated if we write it, if we read it. We are willing subjects in the wrong.

There is a stone chair on a dais. Seeing it is the King’s chair or, even, in some dreamings of this dream, finding myself a lonely king in that chair, there is no one rightly there. A wave of fear seizes me. All things have gone wrong and I am in the wrong. Great doors break from their bars and hinges, and, under pressure, a wall of water floods the cavern.[8]

I am interested in noir. In a noir narrative the protagonist, who is usually some sort of detective, plunges confidently into the heart of an expanding darkness, only to discover that the darkness is inside himself—that he may even be its origin. This is the story of Oedipus and the story of Chinatown. Noir reverses the dialectic of innocence and experience. The experienced detective is undone by his adventure, confronted with his own complicity in evil. He detects himself. A terrible innocence is born. This terrible moment, the moment at the very end of the noir narrative, is ours.

I discover myself on the verge of the usual mistake.[9]

But we can bear in, imagining the darkness rather than willing it.

Medicine can cure the body. But soul, poetry, is capable of living in, longing for, choosing illness. Only the most fanatic researcher upon cancer could share with the poet the concept that cancer is a flower, an adventure, an intrigue with life.[10]

“Ecological politics has a noir form,” Timothy Morton writes. “We start by thinking we can ‘save’ something called ‘the world’ ‘over there,’ but end up realizing that we ourselves are implicated. This is the solution to beautiful soul syndrome: reframing our field of activity as one for which we ourselves are formally responsible, even guilty.”[11] We are or ought to be fanatic cancer researchers, and the cancer is in us. Is us. We are caught up in the Anthropocene. We are caught up in an intrigue with life.

Why admit anything to literature that is not poetry—by which I mean saturated? Is that not my grudge against novelists? that they select nothing?[12]

I have written a novel called Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy. It is a sentimental title for a narrative that struggles to emerge on the other side of sentimentality, as the protagonist, in her struggle with the past that composes her, tries to survive her own innocence of that past. The phrase “beautiful soul” is Hegelian (schöne Seele): “The beautiful soul maintains a split between self and world, an irresolvable chasm created by the call of conscience.... [it] cannot see that the evil it condemns is intrinsic to its existence—indeed, its very form as pure subjectivity is this evil.”[13]

The poets succeeding by simplifying: practically everything is left out.[14]

Poems are not mimetic; they do not represent; they show nothing of states of affairs or states of mind. Poetry is the by-product of what Karen Barad calls “intra-action,” “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies… the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action.”[15] The poet is one agent entangled with innumerable other agents: black rhinos, Congressional Republicans, tornadoes, John Keats, hay fever, words. The particular moment of entanglement is the poet’s experience. The record of that experience is the poem; liable, as Ezra Pound said of The Cantos, to carry “the defects inherent in a record of struggle.”[16]

The poet’s role is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it: what if Shakespeare had opposed Iago, or Dostoyevsky opposed Raskolnikov—the vital thing is that they created Iago and Raskolnikov.[17]

The poem itself is not mimetic but the struggle to produce it is microcosmic; as Whitehead says, “Each task of creation is a social effort, employing the whole universe.” The defects of the poem mark its suffering of incompatible facts. “Insistence on birth at the wrong season is the trick of evil.” Whitehead follows this claim with a gimcrack theodicy, assuring us that “in the advance of the world, particular evil facts are finally transcended.”[18] One can accept this only in the spirit of Kafka’s mordant remark that there is plenty of hope for God, but not for us. Yet what Keats calls “the poetical Character” must participate this hope if is not to be overwhelmed, or to retreat to the guilty noncommitment of the beautiful soul.

...it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys life and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.[19]

Poetic practice is a pragmatism of impure subjectivity. The poem’s I is embedded in, produces, and is produced by what it sees. “Environment” does not exist. There is a vibration and an overlapping and a revision. The poem ends, but the adventure does not. If the adventurer encounters evil, he tarries with it and becomes it for a while. “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine.”[20] That is his obedience to the struggle.

A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures.[21]

Keats is wrong about the unchangeable attributes of things, since all things are themselves entangled and intra-acting agents. He is right that a poet is willing to enter consciously and of his own free will into the contract of intra-action that binds the rest of us all unwilling, since we are blind to it. That blindness is what makes us poetical creatures of impulse. The poet’s vision makes blindness palpable. What Duncan called, “a little endarkenment.”[22]

I want to put practically everything in: yet to saturate. That is what I want to do in “The Moths.” It must include nonsense fact, sordidity: but made transparent.[23]

Moths are nocturnal insects, except when they are not. There is nothing so strange nor seemingly nonsensical as the luna moth, which molts five times in caterpillar form, eating the leaves of black walnut trees, until finally cocooning and emerging with a wingspan of four and a half inches. The luna moth has no mouth; its career as a gourmand is done. It lives for about a week, flying only by night (unlike the diurnal sphinx moth, the infant moth, the Panamanian tiger moth), the females releasing a chemical that attracts the males to mate with them. Then they lay several hundred eggs, and then they die. Moths are very common, except when they are not. Luna moths are endangered in many areas due to pollution from herbicides and insectisides, as well as habitat loss. Is this saturated? Is this transparent? Is the luna moth, selected for the purposes of this essay very nearly at random, something with which I am entangled in 2013, on the November night after a day of unseasonable warmth and torrential rain, during which at least seventy-seven tornadoes caused five reported deaths and untold property damage in the state of Illinois where I live? The lives of moths are fantastically brief. Does this writing bear the defects of a record of my struggle to imagine an order that is not an illusion or bad faith but the order of intra-action, of noir, of innocence?

For she stood upon the threshold of an art where she was to take her place with Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams in the adventure of the higher imagination, in the full risk of the poem in which divine, human, and animal orders must be revealed.[24]

The lives of moths are fantastically brief.

Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body.[25]

Innocence survives experience, through experience. The innocence of the moth in its mouthless struggle for life. Of the poem.

Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead.[26]

---

[1] Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, pg. 244.

[2] Virginia Woolf, diary entry of 28 September 1928.

[3] Woolf, op. cit.

[4] Robin Blaser quoted in Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus, pg. 165.

[5] Woolf, op. cit.

[6] William James, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” in Essays in Radical Empiricism, pg. 4.

[7] Robert Duncan, “Pages from a Notebook,” A Selected Prose, pg. 16.

[8] Duncan, The H.D. Book, pg. 151.

[9] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855).

[10] Duncan, “Pages from a Notebook,” A Selected Prose, pg. 15.

[11] Morton, Ecology without Nature, pg. 187.

[12] Woolf, op. cit.

[13] Morton, pg. 118.

[14] Woolf, op. cit.

[15] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, pg. 33.

[16] Pound, Guide to Kulchur, pg. 135.

[17] Duncan, The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, pg. 669.

[18] Whitehead, Process and Reality, pg. 223.

[19] John Keats, Selected Letters, pgs. 147-148

[20] Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5.1.

[21] Keats, pg. 148.

[22] C.f. Stephen Collis and Graham Lyons, eds., Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation, pg. 64.

[23] Woolf, op. cit.

[24] Duncan, The H.D. Book, pg. 210.

[25] Woolf, “The Death of the Moth,” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, pg. 4.

[26] Ibid, pg. 6.

From an old notebook

The camera preserves looking--the life of the poem.

Can't expel the image without an image

terror face

Streaked the face and the face's frame 

Soot on the lens, incurved eye

Lips parted the teeth rendered

White and black open to be torn

The me of it the late-night regarder

Alone in the house with vintage paranoia

Letter by letter I seek the image

Unconveyed by the phrase "lidless eye"

Unable to flinch

In the face of that

Unable to flinch

Blow to the face

Blunt instrument the eye cannot choose but accept

*

Great fucking title for a book:

SEASON ONE

*

My daughter materializes time for me in a new way: she grows so rapidly that I too must, it seems, be growing as rapidly, or anyway changing, aging: as she discovers language I discover language; as she staggers on suddenly overlong legs so do I stagger. Except I'm used to it, I scarcely notice my own becoming, I think I'm standing still. But time has me in its savage grip for sure. It flourishes us both for now, but a tipping point will come and no doubt sooner than I expect. Or sooner than I'll realize. 

*

Guy at cafe talking about Cleveland as a place that "if you live there, you have a reason for living there"; mentions DFW's novel about it (Broom of the System?) and says that Joyce would have written about Cleveland both as Midwestern oasis and also as a backward and venal place. 

*

A.R. Ammons: "you sit there discussing the theory / of poetry as if you were saved: / meanwhile, a big-mouthed cock / is creeping up on your ass" like "Lawrence's snake"

Ammons: 

carefully fail

at every

task except

the highest

only the essential is material

only the material is essential 

*

Adjustment to the film based on the anticipated desires of the "world audience."

From the distant square oompah music, fat froggy tones of horns, kettle drums, accordions taking the air. 

We haven't lost, I said. We've won. Roche is finished. DeGaulle is finished. The unions are getting everything they've asked for.

The why does it feel like losing?

The victory rally. The thousands of shining faces, floating in a sea of banners, slogans, lights. The man of the hour, the bearer of our hopes, raising his hands to receive our silence. The silence before he speaks goes on and on. Stretched out on the ecstatic rack of time, we, breathless, hearing only each other's stillness, are listening, leaning, hand in spontaneous hand. His lips are parted. A shout that will not be. 

Let me live here ever. 

*

shiver   overcharged

by narrative

bootblacks.   mistress quicklys

overwrought    by night

streaming video from subcontinents

overreaching.   overt hands

fingertips flying up to brush

metal seams of a hull

dark down there

& breathless.    mutineers

parts of the whole

satelite whirligigs   sedan chairs carried

into the muck of speech

*

The goat's colored footsteps

*

Outbound 1/26/10

Flatiron sky flies in wedges

"my iron lung"

Front to back two ladies

Speaking Spanish por que

A flag hovers to my left

Over Evanston's hotel de ville

And where does the gravel on top of shelter roofs come from

Fighting about nothing you

Sleep well all night

Gym bag between my feet

Like an offering

Health care's dead

It's alive!

Little dogs walk

Their feet can't keep up with 'em

Benadette Mayer writes her couplets

At midnight

As I staple together

Ends of the working

Day

*

Rust-red pigeon

What's in it for you

Hey everybody!

Let's go ahead and pathologize

The last several months

Count weeks

And have a few beers

*

The black relic hung

Something to savor

The black relic hung

Crossroads of the years

The black relic hung

Forgotten LP

The black relic hung

The black relic hung

*

shoes make broken glass OK

Beautiful Soul: An Image Playlist

ARK and angels

Just back from reading with Norman Finkelstein at the Green Lantern Gallery / Corpse Space in Wicker Park, in which I tested out a manuscript-in-progress with the working title Hannah and the Master. It's extremely loosely based on the Martin Heidegger-Hannah Arendt romance and I can't tell at this stage whether it's poetry, fiction, a very strange essay, or perhaps a play. It went over well, but that's not what I wanted to remark on--I wanted to remark on this:

Yep--a hot-off-the-presses copy of the new edition of Ronald Johnson's ARK, straight from the hands of editor Peter O'Leary. It has page numbers! And an utterly gorgeous monochrome design. And it has been sensibly given the low low price of $17.95, so that there's simply no excuse not to buy a copy, and copies for all your friends, and to assign it to your students.

Also worth remarking is this:

That's a copy of Joel Felix's new book Limbs of the Apple Tree Never Die, the first release from Peter's new small press Verge Books. It looks exquisite and of a piece with Peter's numinous sensibility. Here's a poem from the book:

Least Wind

1

in least wind
yarrow stalks
dippin sticks
for ages a rain
O drum frog


2

era is ova
drew the tea clear
air then air
two scale trees and wet hair
lick your face



In other news, I am reading all the Alfred North Whitehead I can get my hands on. And am sifting the interwebs for cover ideas for my novel. And teaching Milton and Woolf. Woof.

This Is Jim Rockford

I've made my debut as a TV critic with an essay on how The Rockford Files got me through my fortieth birthday over at Press Play, a new Indiewire blog devoted to TV and film criticism. Check it out.

And if you're interested, here are some older posts on cinema and the cinematic:

• A reading of Tsai Ming-Lian's film What Time Is It There?
• On Michael Haneke's Caché
• On Man on Wire
• On Terence Malick's Days of Heaven
• "Cinematic Prose and Its Posthuman Other"

Paris Notebook (June 2012)

June 3. Much dirtier and less glamorous than I remember: my heart is not opened. Part of the problem is simple jet lag--plus the fact that I was just "here"--in Europe. German phrases leap to my lips as often as French ones--I am even taken for a German at a kebab shop and offered a "Danke schon" upon departing. Plus my allergies. But Paris--Paris is somehow not yet Paris to me, and I find myself, astoundingly, comparing it unfavorably to Chicago! Could it be that was first impressed me ten years ago was the sheer urbanity of the place--and now that I'm a city-dweller the novelty is gone? A sense of all I'm experiencing being already in the past. The next big project will not begin here. So I am a tourist, looking for what I expected to find. Also, it's unbelievably expensive.

Lunch at a tourist trap across from the Pont des Arts--too hungry to search for something more "authentic," which would be even more expensive. Even a bad French restaurant is good. I do like how the couple on my left has brought their little scruffy dog inside with them and no one objects. The middle-aged American guy says, "Can I get a steak and a glass of red wine?" I'm no different.

I've had better soupe a l'oignon in Chicago. In Evanston, even.

They break a lot of glassware in this place.

Ineffable faint disappointment yet I'm hardly displeased to be her. It's only that Paris no longer nourishes my sense of the ideal--it's just a city whose best days are behind it. Something I didn't feel in Berlin.

The American with the steak is actually Australian.

L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts: entrance on Quai Malaquais. Two fish-backed gray marble columns. Stairs to a great hall in front with dirty glass arcade-style roof.  Obscure panels of classical figures overlook le grand salle where a student exhibition is taking place. A barefoot young woman in a black top and long black skirt conducts an ecstatic dance to the dissonant scrapes of an upright bass.

The cellist, a young man in a dark jacket, bearded and bespectacled, wears a hungry stare. How intimate--the dancer is just a few feet from me. And I must follow her body in motion, or look away. She gets high, then way down low, never quite collapsing. Her long, dirty feet! "At Henry's bier let some thing fall out well..."

A placard: "Programme de recherche La Seine."

In the back courtyard a man in a Spider-Man costume saunters by. Cops, les flics, barricades. An enormous party is apparently being prepared. A wedding?

After work I would follow the steep narrow channel of Rue Bonaparte to the B. Saint-Germain, and from there the tide of young humanity bore me irresistibly to the Sorbonne. Seeming sneer under the bust of Poussin that guarded the entrance to the courtyard. My bulk sailing as if before my I down the strip of sidewalk encouraging those ahead of me to step into the street to avoid a collision. My native diffidence was impossible to sustain. Gigantic and alone, a head taller than the matchstick-sized Parisians, I could only be covered by a tide as deep as the Events themselves. Ever since and after my eye has ceased to matter.

And have Ruth recall "filthy Paris." Alluring cesspool of generation. Horror of copulation: the Old Coutnry with the New.

I met her on the bridge from the Ile de la Cité walking fast. Are you coming from the Cathedral?
- No.
- Charles is out. I thought perhaps we could get dinner.
- Memorials aren't about remembering!
- No?
- They build the memorial so that they can forget. It's only grass and stone.

- If you're not hungry..
- Of course I'm fucking hungry.
She reached up to me with both arms extended like a child asking to be picked up, and almost involuntarily I stooped to her, bent my face toward hers. She kissed me once, fast and dry: I felt the webbed texture of her lips.
- Let's go, she said.

Filthy Paris, with its best days behind it, the days of the world.

June 4. Another fortuitious performance at the Centre Pompidou, a woman plays cello for a group of schoolchildren sitting before an enormous canvas of Cy Twombly's on which I read the words, "Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus."

In the room and corridors of the Sorbonne, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the Opera, in houses and flats, the students sat or squatted in great teeming hordes, clusters, groupuscules, adhered to one another by media of sweat and smoke and endless talk. The tiger paced his cage. Black strips cover the eyes of the police, the legislators, the fearful mothers. We walked everywhere, with linked arms, foregoing trains, the Metro, the pastoral of the automobile. We sang. We all but sang.

Every artwork without exception refers first and foremost to our anatomy.

Two Scythes by I.H. Finlay. One bears the legend: "French Revolution, n.: A pastoral with scythes." The other: "Revolution, n.: A continuation of pastoral by other means." Written on green card: "For the best of the Jacobins the Revolution was intended as a pastoral whose Virgil was Rousseau." Also: "Three Parties in the Convention: The Mountain, the Plain, the Ravine."

Incommensurable gap between those artists who believe in "depth" and those who don't. The abyss (or shapelessness) peered into by Pollock in one of last paintings, "In the Deep" (or some such title).

Always moved by hints of process--the fragment, the sketch. The pencil lines visible through the painted volumes of a woman's head.

The windows: intrinsic mystery that plays with our desire to see.

Line and color: so often these were enough for Matisse.

The young American guy on the Metro explaining the plot of Inception to two middle-aged women, at exhaustive length.

Bach's Mass in B Minor at Salle Pleyel. The music of the Mass expresses a fervent hope--becomes in the glory of voices what it scales after. Credo: in music itself, the only resurrection.

Pairing voices with instruments: a tenor with a flute, a bass with an English (French?) horn, each following the theme of the other. To heighten the expression of the words? Or to gesture at a higher form of speaking? Zukofsky's integral.

June 5. As I emerge from my building a middle-aged black man with a receding hairline, wearing a blue checked jacket, carrying a canvas in his hand--it appears to be a rather indifferent painting of a seascape. He holds it up to someone sitting in the passenger seat of a small white man and begins to explain or sell the painting.

Je parle francais, mais je ne comprends pas francais.

People still smoke here, but not as many as I remember.

Charles Fourier's tomb at the Cimeterie de Montmartre, whose walls I can see from my apartment.
The cemeteries here are more integrated than I expected: a fair number of Jewish graves, some of which allude specifically to the Holocaust and anti-semitism. One sees also the occasional historical placard while walking around:

I note that the students were deported for being born Jews. To emphasize their innocence? Or their Frenchness?

To the east of the cemetery past Rue de Caulaincourt toward Sacre Coeur things get more fahsionable in a hurry. Rue des Abbesses a very cute little high street. Coq au vin just inside the door of a cafe with doors flung wide to the streaming sunny late morning.

Maturity comes with the discovery of limitation. That is the real morning Olson (a late bloomer) speaks of: the work of methodology, how to use oneself and on what. Since the end is imaginable--since one's powers are not, after all, unlimited.

My Paris can't be that younger man's Paris. It's a city. Like anywhere for me, it points inward. I'm perhaps not putting enough into it.

Lumiere. Licht.

June 6. Middle-aged bourgeois in a gray suit and blue tie, a briefcase in one hand an a ukulele case in the other.

Jeu de Paume, Rosa Barba exhibition. Mute, staring. "Wrapped in plastic." Where a spine should e, a cut. The actual sublime, refers us to a text. Floyd, Jermaine. Too many voices. Too many choices. Under the rose with an extra R. The film flickers, cut.

Laurent Grasso's Uraniborg: "spaces of uncertainty or doubt aroused by any conjecture."

Being is more terrible than non-being. As Prometheus shows.

The sea is not the desert. The sea is bountiful. Even when it is a desert to the eye, even while it parches the shipwrecked mariner, the idea of the sea--its secret world of multitudinous life--consoles by what it conceals. Cyclops hammering at the surface of the sea, trying to break through. No-man's mocking laughter.

The most desolate of spaces yet ineluctably refer to the hand of man. To the vulnerable throat, channel of his life.

Les Oiseaux--immense flocks of starlings collecting and decoalescing in shapes and patterns over the Vatican, as though demonstrating some immutable law. They look like the smoke monster from Lost.

The Hungarian-Jewish photographer Ava Besnyö, 21 years old, herself photographed seated on a bed hugging her knees alone at the center of

The composition of an immense space.

Another provocative photo of the young woman shot from below, her expression defiant, hands clasped behind her head so that her elbows are thrust out, revelaing double lustrous patches of hair beneath her armpits. The image of M.

June 7. Conference and conferees. On the left foot. Again that sense of speaking the language without really grasping it.

What I miss in these critiques is Duncan's consciousness of the enemy within. Innovative writing gets fossilized in advance, foreclosed.

But is "reality" so purely a social category? This question of "magnetism" that Christina Milletti talks about.

Easy to throw around words like "fascism." But we are our own fascists--we have fully internalized fascism.

Markets, however, area always about competing narratives--supply vs. demand.

Metafiction: the pathos of conscious investment or cathexis in a narrative--the drama of self-fashioning (Hedwig and the Angry Inch as an example).

If we are Americans or Europeans we participate this reality. We all write it.

The  moment one suspends disbelief: chooses to believe, to go along for the ride--an exquisite unnarrativized moment that can only be re-lived.

Narrative as a simple machine incapable of dealing with the sheer volume of available information. Versus the manifold capacities of rhetoric.

Breakdown now of even secularized theology: the expectation of the integrity of the deal.

Truth-seeking through a manifestly alternative, minority system (Duncan's theosophy, etc.) perhaps opens up the most maximal fields--including fields of the self--to critique and transparency.

Rhetoric versus mimesis. Persuasion by other means?

Rob Halpern: Perec's early essay, "For a Realist Literature." [C.f. "The *Nouveau Roman* and the Refusal of the Real."]

June 8. Panel, "Architectures of Absence."Absenting oneself to permit other entities to enter. Amaranth Ravva: "We can imagine what we've covered up with our life." Leah Souffrant: "The effort of attention is more important than its object."

"IF you are a spam filter, you're just like, 'I don't get poetry.'"

June 9. Musée Carnavalet. A little astonished to discover that the Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety had its own stationery.

Lance Olsen: All literature is now too complex for the market. Is an excess of lyricism, of attention to the sentence, enough to be "experimental"? Is it excess itself--of signification or its absence?

Exterior. Exterior.

June 10. Harry Mathews. "The Dialect of the Tribe," a story dedicated to Perec.

Homage to Perec's Bartlebooth. A story about translation and the (I presume) fictional language of a New Guinea tribe that is untranslatable because it's a process, not a vehicle for content. The phatic, the mere presence of the communicative. Quotes Gaddis: "Having an unfinished novel in your house is like having a sick man."

"But how do you construct a novel?" The need for more mathematically advanced Oulipian techniques.

Problem of Oulipo-produced work: the method overdetermines the critical response. (The potentielle more significant than the littérature.) There's also "Canada Dry": a work that pretends to have a procedure but doesn't. (Roubaud.)

Mathews: "I'm a serious romantic writer."

You saw her alive, less alive, still less alive. You saw it: the degree zero of her living. Then you stepped out of it, went for a walk, went to the library. Between the doorway and the card catalog you got the call. Then she was not alive. You went home to see: a corpse. What you missed: the unalive, the last moment, the final breath. Clinamen of her body abandoned in the bed. She's gone, but you did not see her leave, and so it persists, all the remaining minutes of your life: a doubt.

Coover and Mathews in dialogue. Coover: what holds it together beyond the constraint--voice? Mathews: No, voice comes after, in rewriting.

Two beautiful French words: passé composé.

Gerard Richter at the Pompidou: intensive dialectic of his painting. A 1968 canvas, Bunt auf Grau, has a creamy smooth undulant gray background and reddish impasto pink spattered on top. Two layers of technique married in space.

Curious boundary of illusion or spatial point of disbelief--suspension: when you locate on a illusionistic canvas (a seascape) the mark of the paint. The line of the horizon is a line.

Remarkable echo of Titian's Annunciation. Quotes the painting without mocking it, falls short of the original but is not itself degraded or degrading.

Abstract jungle of greens, yellows, oranges, with a pale red arrow gesturing upward on the right and a thick horizontal slash of darker red on the left as a kind of sibling.

There is a kind of reference to natural forms in the big abstracts, but no gestures toward naturalism.

Force: volume: color: line. 1987's large Abstract Painting: a durably joyful sense of release.

Ghostly horizon, sky and sea in a deep blue abstract. Title: Forest (3), 1990.

Abstracts always present surface forms, but very rarely the illusion of perspective or depth, or even of planes.

It must take enormous confidence to move toward the aleatory abstract from a figurative or lyrical abstract mode.

Destruction is not erasure.

Abstraction --> reality
Landscape --> nostalgia

"The landscapes are a type of yearning... The abstract works are my presence, my reality, my problems... The abstraction is more real, the other more like a dream." Gerard Richter in 1986.

Six monumental fucking canvases inspired by John Cage for the 2007 Venie Biennale. Did I see them there?

A series of mother-and-child paintings on the wall opposite portraits of his uncle Horst, a Nazi, and his aunt Marianne, euthanized for her mental disability.

"The Forest."