rilke baby

I've been waiting (fruitlessly) for this new translation of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus to make it over from eng-land but nothing, it's been almost two years now, and I have given up. Checked it out at the PCL, since I cannot afford the cost, sorry I mean carbon footprint naturally, of shipping it across ocean.

The poet/translator is Don Paterson and it is so lovely (so far), like clear water, no irritating grit but gorgeously shifting shallows and depths. The third one has been on my mind lately and he does it beautifully (beginning from second stanza):

A song is not desire; so you taught.
Nor is it courtship; nor is it courtship's prize.
Song is being. Easy for a god.
But when are we? When will the Earth and stars

be squandered on us, on our living? Youth--
don't fool yourself that love unlocks this art;
for though love's voice might force your lips apart

you must forget those sudden songs. They'll end.
True singing is another kind of breath.
A breath of nothing. A sigh in a god. A wind.

performative words

In a college French class my professor happened to mention "performative verbs" -- verbs that do not merely describe but perform an action as they are spoken. "I solemnly swear," "I promise," etc.

So this has stuck with me ever since, and lately has connected with my thinking about maps, although I don't think I've sorted that our very well yet. (Are there performative maps? is maybe the question). In some traditions, including at least one Christian Gospel, the world was created by a word, the Logos.

And that made me think about sounds that are eggs or seeds. In Sanskrit there are syllables called seed sounds which I know little about but I think they are meant to affect you energetically rather than convey meaning. Are there other egg or seed sounds out there?

You know I can go on and on about this and use words like performative but what's cool is that it's magic spells; magic words.

radio play scene 1

Scene 1.

Phone ringing [maybe some specific tune]. Quite a few rings

XX
Sorry, isn’t that your phone?

B
That is my phone.

XX
Are you—-you’re not going to answer?

B
That’s one very strong possibility.

XX
And you’re not going to – most cell phones have silent modes, I mean in case you didn’t know, where you can—

B
And I’m not going to silence it. I’m almost certainly not going to answer it, and more certainly, I’m not going to silence it.

XX
Do you mind if I ask why? Because it’s really pretty irritating to—

B
Because I might answer it. I might answer it. That possibility also remains open. And it can’t remain open if I can’t hear it. I can no longer hang balanced in perfect anguish between those two possibilities. If I turn the ringer off.

(pause. phone continue to ring)

XX
Why isn’t your voicemail picking up?

B
I cancelled the voicemail.

XX
So it could just ring forever.

B
It could.

(pause)

XX
Whoever it is, they really seem to want to reach you.

B
I agree.

XX
What if it’s something important. What if it’s, it could be something like, it could be your mother, she’s sick, she might have fallen, she could barely reach the phone in the first place, and now she’s holding it to her ear, her last hope –

B
My mother died a year ago.

XX
Oh. Well. Sorry.

B
It’s okay. (beat) It’s been a long year.

(Phone ringing)

figure and ground

I was thinking about this idea a lot a year or two ago because I had just read Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and was excited. I want to think about it more so I am sticking it here, in the world's most random blog. In the book, Lawrence Weschler quotes the painter Robert Irwin, who writes about how you separate the line of a painting from the rod on the wall it's hanging from:

Well, of course you do it on a scale of values. In other words, the line in the center has some kind of compounded meaning which gives it the emphasis to be focused on. Whereas the rod on the wall, of course, is very meaningless. So therefore, you can, in a sense just not see it . . . So what we're really talkingabout in this whole process is not anything to do with the painting itself, but rather something to do with this thing of value . . .

And figure and ground is a whole system of that kind of focus. You've got a way of looking at the world . . . In this case, you simply eliminate those rods by a deductive process of meaning. They're meaningless, so therefore they simply fall out of view.

But now, when you have a construct like that, that's how you go through the world. In other words, you don't just do it when you're looking at painting. We're talking about a mental construct to which the whole civilization has deeply committed itself.

There's more and it's excellent but I have been typing all day. But he talks about how cubism flattened figure and ground--"the marriage of figure and ground." And he talks about how he (Irwin) is doing work that marries painting to the environment: "Suddenly it had to deal with the environment around it as being equal to the figure and having as much meaning."

This is one of those ideas that is both beautifully obvious but also won't stop unfolding. I will even set aside what it means to the way we watch political conventions, or walk around the world for hell's sake. Just confining it to art for a moment it is still slightly thrilling (and much more manageable).

What constitutes figure and ground in theater, and how can they be married? (Married=flattened is funny.)

"Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame Catcher Carlton Fisk bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back"

". . . the Love Poem Project, in which we take love poems and swap out any mention of the word love."

For example, "Love = Wearing Your Pants Backward."

The fair varieties of earth,
The heavens serene and blue above,
The rippling smile of mighty seas—
What is the charm of all, but wearing your pants backward?

Or "Love = MTV."

If I speak in the languages of humans and angels but have no MTV, I have become a reverberating gong or a clashing cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can understand all secrets and every form of knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains but have no MTV, I am nothing. Even if I give away everything that I have and sacrifice myself, but have no MTV, I gain nothing.

In a stupid week this blog makes me want to go on.

"the curious eat themselves"

There are only a few bony concepts, but think of the metaphors!

For him, God was always there, like an ugly wife.

I am reading Straw for the Fire, excerpts from Roethke's notebooks. Here's a paragraph where he was on crazy roll:

Get down where your obsessions are. For Christ's sake, shake it loose. Make like a dream, but not a dreamy poem. The past is asking. You can't go dibble-dabble in your tears. The fungi will come running; the mould will begin all over the noble lineaments of the soul.

(it goes on too)

mystique of the archive

I am writing a piece about an exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center called "The Mystique of the Archive." I was thinking, am I the biggest nerd in the world that I actually do think archives have a thrilling mystique and I have just read and enjoyed 83 pages of exhibition label text in prep for a 700-word piece? But the labels reminded me that people have written whole novels and plays (Eco, Byatt, Stoppard, Barnes) about archive mystique. I am a piker.

I wish I understood better how we make objects magical. It does go back to saints' relics and far before that. It's some combination of what someone invests in the object and what we invest in that someone. The journal of someone you love or wildly admire radiates this kind of magic, whatever kind of magic it is, and the magic is deeper if they are gone.

error is

"Error is drawing a straight line between anticipation of what should happen and what actually happens." Says John Cage (talk about old cranks). And that reminds me of this dream I had where a piece of onionskin floated up to occupy my whole field of vision, with typewritten letters that said

DIVORCE EXPECTATIONS FROM REALITY.

kafka in a bar

Met Kafka in a bar. He is not a big drinker, more of a slow sipper. Will make a shot last all night. Stares down into the bar, never at the mirror behind it. I was trying to explain the Milky Way. “God’s seed spilled across the night sky,” he said. Which was confusing.

I said No, it’s something about galaxies. His eyes burned, which with him means he's perking up. “Means milk,” he said. “Galaxy means milk. ‘The Milky Way is something to do with milk.’ That’s a fine definition, compact and pleasing. I congratulate you.”

I said no, a galaxy wasn’t milk (“it used to be,” he whispered), or well if it used to be it wasn’t anymore. Now it was something about a lot of stars together. Stars and gravity. Stars held together by gravity. For a joke he said “I am held together by gravity, too.”

I said the Milky Way was our galaxy, we were part of the Milky Way. “Is the Milky Way a mirror then?” he asked. I said no, it was a galaxy, our galaxy. “Then why does it seem to be so far away, something we peer into, rather than out of? I peer out of my face. I peer into a mirror.”

I said I didn’t know.

Kafka ordered a glass of milk. “Top it off with stars,” he said. When it came, he tossed the milk in the mirror, and watched it drip down his face.

dream play

I'd like to make a play where the narrative moved forward the way dreams do--circling back to repeat the same events over and over, but in a more complex, information-rich, and emotionally charged way every time. This is what actors do; also ghosts maybe. This might be good for my Ghost Radio play, which definitely needs SOME kind of narrative.