Rarement les hommes aiment la beauté

From Jacques Prévert's dialogue in Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis ...

“Vous êtes beaucoup trop belle pour qu’on vous aime vraiment. La beauté est une exception, une insulte au monde qui est laid. Rarement les hommes aiment la beauté, ils la pourchassent simplement pour ne plus en entendre parler, pour l’effacer, pour l’oublier.”

"You're much too beautiful to be truly loved. Beauty is an exception, an affront to an ugly world. Men rarely love beauty. They pursue it to hear no more about it, to blot it out, to forget it."

The roads to the new moon blocked

From an early poem by Pablo Neruda

¡El Liceo, el Liceo! Toda mi pobre vida
en una jaula triste, ¡mi juventud perdida!
Pero no importa, ¡vamos! pues mañana o pasado
seré burgués lo mismo que cualquier abogado,
que cualquier doctorcito que usa lentes
y lleva cerrados los caminos hacia la luna nueva…
!Qué diablos, y en la vida, como en una revista,
un poeta se tiene que graduar de dentista!


The Lyceum, the Lyceum! All my poor life
In a sad cage, my lost youth!
But it doesn't matter, come on! for tomorrow or the next day
I'll be as bourgeois as any attorney,
or any little bespectacled doctor
and has blocked off the roads to the new moon ...
What the hell, and in life, as in a magazine,
a poet must graduate as a dentist!

Icarus and the fatal man

Golding's Ovid gives us the classical lesson of Icarus:

Wee also lerne by Icarus how good it is to bee
In meane estate and not to clymb too hygh

Thomas Wyatt's 'Stand, whoso list, upon the slipper wheel of high estate' comes to mind: "let me here rejoice, and use my life in quietness".

But there's Lermontov's Demon - his effort to get to the clouds "Стремясь достать до облаков" ... a Romantic "fatal man" cursed by his immortality ... Печальный Демон, дух изгнанья ... A sorrowful demon, spirit of exile ... he sees Tamara at her wedding dance, destroys his rival. When he kisses her there is a direct echo of Icarus in the imagery, the days hot sun melting white wax ...

Она противиться не смела,
Слабела, таяла, горела
От неизвестного огня,
Как белый воск от взоров дня.

She dared not resist,
She weakened, melted, burned
In the unknown fire
Like white wax in the gaze of day.

He destroys her. This links to the romantic fatality of Oscar Wilde:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Cervantes' Siri

The recently launched iPhone 4S is getting plenty of publicity for its voice-recognizing assistant Siri feature that "understands what you say and knows what you mean". It reminds me somewhat of Don Antonio's enchanted brazen head in Don Quixote, although the talking head is actually a trick.

Various friends of Don Antonio ask the head questions, sometimes receiving surprisingly accurate answers, sometimes getting the obvious or tautological. Sancho, for example asks if he will ever escape the hard life of a squire and get back to see his wife and children, to which the less-helpful-than-hoped-for response comes that if he returns to his house he will see his family, and that on ceasing to serve he will cease to be a squire.

On the other hand, Don Antonio's wife asks if she will have many years of enjoyment of her good husband, to which the nice reply is "Thou shalt, for his vigour and his temperate habits promise many years of life, which by their intemperance others so often cut short." - "Sí gozarás, porque su salud y su templanza en el vivir prometen muchos años de vida, la cual muchos suelen acortar por su destemplanza." Ah, that destemplanza! - da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo.

Bitter cold world

Lines by Josef Weinheber - the man honoured by Auden and despite having been a member of the Nazi party famously replied to Goebbels' query about what the Germans could do to enrich Viennese culture replied "in Ruah lossen" (leave us alone) - these are from his short poem 'Forest Paths':

Ach, wie ist die Welt so bitterkalt !
Immer weht derselbe böse Wind

Oh, how the world is so bitter-cold!
Ever blows the same evil wind

Could it have been from her girls' library?

In an earlier post I quoted Flaubert's sentence which provides the key to Emma Bovary's narrative - "Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres" - and mentioned how, like Dante before him with the "quando leggemmo" of Paolo and Francesca, the blame for all the trouble is attributed to books.

Dostoevsky plays the same theme. In Part I, Section IV of The Idiot, we learn of how Totsky set up Nastasya Filippovna, in the village of Отрадное ("pleasing" or "comforting", Pevear and Volokhonsky translate it as "Delight") ... В доме нашлись музыкальные инструменты, изящная девичья библиотека, картины, эстампы, карандаши, кисти, краски, удивительная левретка, ... "There were musical instruments in the house, an elegant library for girls, paintings, prints, pencils, brushes, paints, a wonderful greyhound ... " (Pevear and Volokhonsky use "astonishing greyhound" ... "amazing greyhound" would also be good).

And then when Nastasya Filippovna takes it upon herself to go to St Petersburg and cause trouble for Totsky we read:

Эта новая женщина, оказалось, во-первых, необыкновенно много знала и понимала, -- так много, что надо было глубоко удивляться, откуда могла она приобрести такие сведения, выработать в себе такие точные понятия. (Неужели из своей девичьей библиотеки?).

This new woman, it turned out, first of all knew and understood an extraordinary amount - so much that it was a cause of profound wonder where she could have acquired such information, could have developed such precise notions in herself. (Could it have been from her girls' library?)

But it is not only Nastasya Filippovna that has learned too much from books.

When the Epanchin girls are introduced, we read "С ужасом говорилось о том, сколько книг они прочитали" ... "with horror it was told how many books they had read".

A little later, in section VII, Mrs Epanchin, the "generalsha", lashes out at her "learned" (ученых) daughters: with their "умом и многословием" .. "brains and verbosity" ...

Во-первых, от ученых дочек -- отрезала генеральша -- а так как этого и одного довольно, то об остальном нечего и распространяться. Довольно многословия было. Посмотрим, как-то вы обе (я Аглаю не считаю) с вашим умом и многословием вывернетесь, и будете ли вы, многоуважаемая Александра Ивановна, счастливы с вашим почтенным господином?

"First of all, about my learned daughters," Mrs Epanchin snapped, "and since that is enough in itself, there's no point in expatiating on the rest. There's been enough verbosity. We'll see how the two of you (I don't count Aglaya) with your brains and verbosity are going to find your way, and whether you, my much esteemed Alexandra Ivanovna, will be happy with your honourable gentleman."

Typo brides and unacceptable downtown

Peter Porter's poem 'Brides come to the poet's window' presents the serendipitous typo; the first lines are:

Birds it should have been, but pleasure quickens
As the white and peregrine performers land -

Glancing at a recent paper called 'FISMA Compliance and Cloud Computing' I came across the following sentence ...

If the cloud goes down then organizations will have unacceptable downtown that their IT departments can not control causing a stop to the critical services that the organization uses to conduct its daily operations.

'Downtown' instead of 'downtime' suggests the malign influence of spellcheck. Nevertheless there is something poetic, in a sort of robotic or aleatoric way, in this language with its talk of clouds going down and downtowns that IT departments are unable to control.

Time's pupils

One of Berlioz's most famous quotes comes from a letter: "Le temps est un grand maître, dit-on; le malheur est qu'il soit un maître inhumain qui tue ses élèves." - Time is a great teacher, they say, the misfortune is that it is an inhuman teacher who kills his pupils.

I remember seeing a note from Berlioz in the Chopin museum, Warsaw, which began with the playful and punning "Chopinetto, mio".

Chopinetto mio, si fa una villégiatura da noi, à Montmartre rue St. Denis No 10; spero che Hiller, Liszt e Devigny seront accompagnés de Chopin. Enorme Bêtise Tant pis. H.B.

"Choupinette" is a term of endearment, like "sweetie", I guess it's a form of "choupette" which is also used as a pet-name for loved ones, and refers - I think - to a ribbon tied in a girl's hair to make a tuft of hair? - but it is also reminiscent of the pet-name "chou" - which literlally is not one presumes the cabbage, but rather the delicious knobbly sweet bun that is cut in half and stuffed with cream - the chou à la crème; with food like that no wonder there are terms of endearment such as "mon petit chou" and "mon gros"! Perhaps "honeybun" is a good translation of "choupinette".

It seems that the Chopin Museum has been relaunched as an up-to-date museum - which will no doubt attract many more visitors - but I remember fondly the very old-world style of the place - very cheap entry, a few rooms of exhibits under glass cases, watched over by elderly attendants. Although I see that some things in Poland don't change so quickly ... the "regulamin" or "rules" of the museum are posted on its new website, in that splendid Polish-for-contracts with the standard notariusz-approved translation into weird English. Hopefully Warsaw's Muzeum Marii Skłodowskiej-Curie still retains its dull old-world charm.

Happy in a different way

At the end of Chapter 5 of the first part of The Idiot, the Prince says in response to being quizzed as to whether he had in Switzerland been in love: "я... был счастлив иначе" ... "I ... was happy in a different way".

Prince Myshkin embodies certain spiritual values, and the divide that Dostoevsky explored with his juxtaposition of the Prince with the hectic and dysfunctional world of St Petersburg society is a divide with which we still are confronted. Friedrich Torberg, talking of the decline suffered by European culture through the course of two world wars, states at the outset of the first Tante Jolesch book: "Ich denke vielmehr an ein Untergangssymptom, welches sich darin äußert, daß in unsrer technokratischen Welt, in unsrer materialistischen Kommerz- und Konsumgesellschaft die Käuze und Originale aussterben müssen." ... Kauz is a wonderful word, it refers to a certain awkward and reclusive species of owl - it is this bird that is an omen of death, whereas the more elegant Eule is an emblem of wisdom; here Käuze means eccentrics or oddballs: "I concentrate rather on one symptom of decline, namely that in our technocratic world, in our materialistic consumer society, eccentrics and originals are bound for extinction."

In The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks describes two twins who had been diagnosed as autistic and retarted but communicated with each other sharing very large prime numbers which they appeared to savour for their beauty and delight, primes in fact so large that at the time Dr Sacks was unable to verify that the longest of them were indeed primes. Sacks goes on to describe how the twins were separated "for their own good" but questions the outcome: "Deprived of their numberical 'communion' with each other, and of time and opportunity for any 'contemplation' or 'communion' at all - they are always being hurried and jostled from one job to another - they seem to have lost their strange numerical power, and with this the chief joy and sense of their lives."

Sacks goes on to mention an autistic girl with a phenomenal gift for drawing, who was "subjected to a therapeutic regime 'to find ways in which her potentialities in other directions could be maximized'. The net effect was that she started talking - and stopped drawing." Sacks quotes Nigel Dennis: "We are left with a genius who has had her genius removed, leaving nothing behind but a general defectiveness. What are we supposed to think about such a curious cure?".

I underline books

Joseph Campbell in the 'Dialogues' section at the end of the lecture material collected in Pathways to Bliss, says "Alan Watts once asked me what spiritual practice I followed, I told him, 'I underline books.'"

Tante Jolesch

"Die Tante Jolesch ober Der Untergang des Abendlandes in Anekdoten" ... what a superb title! ... "Tante Jolesch or The Decline of the West in Anecdotes" Tante Jolesch, Torberg assures us, did in fact exist, but "war, um mit Christian Morgenstern zu sprechen, keine 'Person im konventionellen Eigen-Sinn'" - "was not, to quote Christian Morgenstern, 'a person per se, in the conventional sense'".

Envying all the world

Charles Bovary's father had no grasp of the financial realities that constrain success: "[il] buvait son cidre en bouteilles au lieu de le vendre en barriques" ... "he drunk his cider by the bottle instead of selling it by the barrel".

And then sequestered himself from the world ... "chagrin, rongé de regrets, accusant le ciel, jaloux contre tout le monde, il s’enferma dès l’âge de quarante-cinq ans, dégoûté des hommes, disait-il, et décidé à vivre en paix." (variously translated "morose, gnawed by regrets, railing at heaven, envying all the world, he shut himself away at the age of forty-five, disgusted with men, he said, and determined to live in peace." (Davis) & "chagrined, remorseful, cursing his fate, jealous of everybody, he shut himself away at the age of forty-five, disgusted with the world, he said, and determined to live in peace" (Wall)

168 hours

Ron Graham - a U.S. mathematician who put himself through college working as a circus acrobat and is famous for a very big number - past president of the International Jugglers' Association, an accomplished trampolinist and tenpin bowler, speaks Chinese and plays the piano, is quoted in Paul Hoffman's book on Erdős: "It's easy ... there are 168 hours in every week".

Self deception

A nice observation by Robert Trivers from the latest New Scientist: "If you ask high school students are they in the top half of their class for leadership ability, 80 per cent will say yes; 70 per cent say they're in the top half for good looks. It ain't possible! And you cannot beat academics for self-deception. If you ask professors whether they're in the top half of their profession, 94 per cent say they are."

Just try going to the ballet

Rogozhin, when he is informed that he would be able to see Nastasya Filippovna at the ballet, conveys clearly the despotic environment of his home life with his father: "У нас, у родителя, попробуй-ка в балет сходить, - одна расправа, убьет!" ... "With our parent, just try going to the ballet - it'll end only one way - he'll kill you!"

Everything was before him

Dostoevsky describes General Epanchin's position in life with these shining words: "Но все было впереди, время терпело, время все терпело, и все должно было придти современем и своим чередом." ... "But everything was before him, there was time enough for everything, and everything would come in time and in due course." What a wonderful place to be! No wonder he continues: "Да и летами генерал Епанчин был еще, как говорится, в самом соку, то-есть пятидесяти шести лет и никак не более, что во всяком случае составляет возраст цветущий, возраст, с которого, по-настоящему, начинается истинная жизнь." ... "As for his years, General Epanchin was still, as they say, in the prime of life, that is, fifty-six and not a whit more, which in any case is a flourishing age, the age when true life really begins." (translation, as often, from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky).

A few pages earlier, in describing Totsky, the man who lives with Nastasya Filippovna, Dostoevsky refers to the mid 50s: "потому совсем, то-есть, лет достиг настоящих, пятидесяти пяти, и жениться на первейшей раскрасавице во всем Петербурге хочет." ... interestingly (and perhaps strangely), Pevear and Volokhonsky add in the phrase "prime of life" here as well ... "because he's reached the prime of life, he's fifty-five, and wants to marry the foremost beauty in all Petersburg." Totsky is fifty-five, he's getting on a bit, now is the time he should be thinking of marrying a beauty, but of course it is plausible that he marry a great beauty, so in this sense perhaps we can take it as the "prime of life", but I am not sure the addition of the phrase in the translation is justified.

[Painting by Фёдор Александрович Васильев]

Money for nothing in return

Dostoevsky again, getting us on-side with some entertaining complaints about the medical profession:

особенно засмеялся он, когда на вопрос: "что же, вылечили?" - белокурый отвечал, что "нет, не вылечили".
- Хе! Денег что, должно быть, даром переплатили, а мы-то им здесь верим

He laughed particularly when to his question 'Did they cure you?' the blond man answered 'No, they didn't.'
- Heh, Got all that money for nothing, and we go on believing them.

Of course, the same holds now in spades for the consultants big companies hire to cure themselves.

Russian difference

The theme of Russian difference is touched lightly upon in the first pages of The Idiot: "Но что годилось и вполне удовлетворяло в Италии, то оказалось не совсем пригодным в России." - "But what was proper and quite satisfactory in Italy, turned out to be not entirely suitable to Russia". The comic lightness of touch in the phrasing "не совсем пригодным" is delightful: the polite understatement also carries within it some of the mockery that animates Rogozhin.

Narrative gambits

After a quick paragraph of scene-setting, Dostoevsky gets the narrative of The Idiot running with the second sentence of the second paragraph: "Если б они оба знали один про другого, чем они особенно в эту минуту замечательны, то, конечно, подивились бы, что случай так странно посадил их друг против друга в третьеклассном вагоне петербургско-варшавского поезда." ... "If they had known what was so remarkable about each other at that moment, they would certainly have marvelled at the chance that had strangely seated them facing each other in the third-class carriage of the Warsaw-St Petersburg train."

What is it, we want to know, that is so "замечательны", so "remarkable" or "wonderful" about these figures. Surely we too shall shortly "marvel." We read on.

Imbibing the Reality of Metaphors Made Manifest

I will be Paris and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked.
- Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

Faustus declaims an impassioned identification, invoking a magical fusing of past and present, the fire of his emotion being hot enough to make the metaphor real.

On 7 February 1601, the evening before the abortive Essex Rising, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex and his supporters requested the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to perform a play on the matter of Henry IV, and the "deposing and killing" of Richard II.

We seek out art that "expresses" or makes manifest the swirl of inarticulate emotions within us. This is Aristotle's κάθαρσις - catharsis - the purgation of excessive feelings. But we see with Essex and with Faustus that the imitation is commutative: art represents life, and life would reinforce its patterns by imitating the art it selects. Instead of Richard, Elizabeth; instead of Troy, Wittenberg.

Plato had identified this danger of poetry, see Republic 3.395d ... (here starting back in the middle of 395c): ἐὰν δὲ μιμῶνται, μιμεῖσθαι τὰ τούτοις προσήκοντα εὐθὺς ἐκ παίδων, ἀνδρείους, σώφρονας, ὁσίους, ἐλευθέρους, καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα πάντα, τὰ δὲ ἀνελεύθερα μήτε ποιεῖν μήτε δεινοὺς εἶναι μιμήσασθαι, μηδὲ ἄλλο μηδὲν τῶν αἰσχρῶν, ἵνα μὴ ἐκ τῆς μιμήσεως τοῦ εἶναι ἀπολαύσωσιν. ἢ οὐκ ᾔσθησαι ὅτι αἱ μιμήσεις, ἐὰν ἐκ νέων πόρρω διατελέσωσιν, εἰς ἔθη τε καὶ φύσιν καθίστανται καὶ κατὰ σῶμα καὶ φωνὰς καὶ κατὰ τὴν διάνοιαν;

"But if they imitate they should from childhood up imitate what is appropriate to them — men, that is, who are brave, sober, pious, free and all things of that kind; but things unbecoming the free man they should neither do nor be clever at imitating, nor yet any other shameful thing, lest from the imitation they imbibe the reality. Or have you not observed that imitations, if continued from youth far into life, settle down into habits and (second) nature in the body, the speech, and the thought?"

The translation here is Paul Shorey's. I think "lest from the imitation they imbibe the reality" is an instance of the translator introducing a new metaphor that isn't in the original ἵνα μὴ ἐκ τῆς μιμήσεως τοῦ εἶναι ἀπολαύσωσιν. As much as I like the florid grandeur of "imbibe the reality", perhaps Benjamin Jowett's older translation is closer to the mark "lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate."

Jowett's version of this section runs: "if they imitate at all, they should imitate from youth upward only those characters which are suitable to their profession - the courageous, temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they should not depict or be skilful at imitating any kind of illiberality or baseness, lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate. Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind?"

Mimesis and Memory

"Kinder spielen Soldaten. Das ist sinnvoll. Warum aber spielen Soldaten Kinder?" - Karl Kraus

Children play soldiers. That is sensible. But why do soldiers play children?

But there is no real puzzle here, when we consider the dual engines of mimesis and memory. Aristotle observed how humans are naturally mimetic and take delight in the recognition of what is represented. Our characters become defined through the way we imitate ourselves and repeat certain actions - so memory (its nostalgia for the self, and repugnance as well perhaps) plays a vital part in the way character moves forward and the person develops. So it is entirely natural for children to imitate soldiers, and for soldiers to replay one way or another the days of their childhood.

Félicité, Passion, Ivresse

Returning to that final sentence of Chapter 5 of Part 1 of Madame Bovary

"Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres."

In Geoffrey Wall's translation for Penguin Classics it is: "And Emma sought to find out exactly what was meant in real life by the words fidelity, passion, and rapture, which had seemed so fine on the pages of books." "Fidelity" here seems like a mistake.

Lydia Davis' recent translation offers: "And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words "bliss," "passion," and "intoxication," which had seemed so beautiful to her in books."

Frank McConnell explains the range of meanings of these three words in his essay 'Félicité, Passion, Ivresse: The Lexicography of Madame Bovary': "To understand fully the range and importance of the verbal motto félicité, passion, ivresse, it is necessary to examine their potential grammar. All three may be understood as both intransitive and relational terms, depending upon the sense in which we decide to take them. Fklicitk-"bliss, "luck," "joy," or a kind of benign capacity for grace, is either a serenely full good humor or a dynamic equilibrium of circumstance and spirit. Passion is both le grand passion, the English "passion," and also a "passive" suffering, a state of being painfully objective to another person or to the world. And Ivresse is both "ecstasy" and, simply, "drunkenness" or "intoxication": taken most generally, the use of an object-or the objectification of a subject-for the artificial transcendence of one's subjective consciousness." (Novel, Winter 1970, p.158)

In a footnote he also quotes a remark by Wittgenstein: "That is to say, whether a word of the language of our tribe is rightly translated into a word of the English language depends upon the role this word plays in the whole life of the tribe; the occasions on which it is used, the expressions of emotion by which it is generally accompanied, the ideas which it generally awakens or which prompt its saying, etc., etc.," Wittgenstein, The Brown Book (New York, lssue), p. 103.

Man is what he hides

« Pour l'essentiel, l'homme est ce qu'il cache ... Un miserable petit tas de secrets. » - André Malraux, Les Noyers de l'Altenburg.

"Fundamentally, man is what he hides ... A wretched little pile of secrets."

So it is up to the historian, the psychiatrist or the detective biographer to piece together the story.

Maths - the branch of physics where the experiments are cheap

With news of NASA cancelling LISA only a few months after FermiLab announced it will be turning off the Tevatron, one is tempted to feel a new Dark Ages may be approaching. But perhaps a renaissance of mathematics will be dawning. The mathematician Vladimir Arnold once said "Математика — часть физика — экспериментальчая, естественная наука, частьестествознания. Математика — это та часть физики, в которой эксперименты дешевы."

Translated, this reads "Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap."

Too much food ?

«'On cite souvent, pour en rire, Schopenhauer qui faisait l'éloge du sui- cide devant une table bien garnie.» - Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942)

"Schopenhauer is often cited as a fit subject for laughter, because he praised suicide while seated at a well-set table."

«В сущности же, эта моя любовь была произведением, с одной стороны, деятельности мамаши и портних, с другой - избытка поглощавшейся мной пищи при праздной жизни» - Lev Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata.

"In actual fact, this love of mine was the product of on the one hand, the efforts of the girl's mother and dress-makers, and on the other, of the excessive quantities of food I had consumed during a life of idleness"

The Lord's Tokens

I notice that in the section of the Java Language Specification devoted to tokens the following line's from Love's Labour's Lost are quoted.

These lords are visited; you are not free,
For the Lord's tokens on you do I see.

The quotation seems a bit weird and obscure in isolation, particularly if one doesn't realize that the "Lord's tokens" referred to the black coin-shaped patches on the skin that signalled infection with the plague.

Yet I have a trick
Of the old rage: bear with me, I am sick;
I'll leave it by degrees. Soft, let us see:
Write, 'Lord have mercy on us' on those three;
They are infected; in their hearts it lies;
They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes;
These lords are visited; you are not free,
For the Lord's tokens on you do I see.

The word "token" derives from the Old English tæcean, to show, from which we more directly get the word "teach".

In a recent London Review of Books article, James Shapiro points out "It’s hard to decide what’s more disturbing about the exchange: the casual joking about spotting ‘the Lord’s tokens’ on her skin – as close to a death warrant as you could get – or the joke about inscribing the warning ‘Lord have mercy on me’ on the infected."

Starting with the shape

I've started reading Hilary Menos's début collection Berg and the first line of the first poem struck me.

I want to write you a small square poem

I think this captures something fundamental about artistic creation ... the initial impetus for a new poem or a new piece of music might be simply some vague notion of the form or shape you want to create ... a sonnet, an unrhymed epigram, a piano sonata, a waltz, or an étude.

Cheated out of our understandings

Ward Farnsworth gives as one of his examples of conduplicatio this extract from Webster's Senate speech against President Andrew Jackson's removal of the deposits from the Bank of the United States: "Sir, I pronounce the author of such sentiments to be guilty of attempting a detestable fraud on the community; a double fraud; a fraud which is to cheat men out of their property, and out of the earnings of their labor, by first cheating them out of their understandings."

The corporate world seems often to operate on the basis of this species of fraud, and the principal tool employed to cheat managers and governance committees of their understandings is the Powerpoint presentation, and the major culprit is the mode of thought engendered by bullet points. Richard Feynman noticed this when he participated in the investigation of the Challenger space shuttle accident.

"Then we learned about “bullets” – little black circles in front of phrases that were supposed to summarize things. There was one after another of these little goddamn bullets in our briefing books and on the slides."

Webster went on express his faith that his fellow citizens would never sink to being deluded by abominable frauds and so far cease to be men ... "Sir, it shall not be till the last moment of my existence - it shall be only when I am drawn to the verge of oblivion - hen I shall cease to have respect or affection for any thing on earth - that I will believe the people of the United States capable of being effectually deluded, cajoled, and driven about in herds, by such abominable frauds as this. If they shall sink to that point - if they so far cease to be men - thinking men, intelligent men - as to yield to such pretences and such clamour, they will be slaves already; slaves to their own passions - slaves to the fraud and knavery of pretended friends. They will deserve to be blotted out of all the records of freedom; they ought not to dishonour the cause of republican liberty, if they are capable of being the victims of artifices so shallow - of tricks so stale, so threadbare, so often practised, so much worn out, on serfs and slaves."

And yet the shallow artifices seem to flourish and thrive, and what is more: generate substantial revenue.

Moreau exhibition

I've just been to the Moreau exhibition at NGV. Parallels with Cavafy struck me: a somewhat reclusive person who had a deep fascination with sexuality, and who found a way to express the personal relevance of classical stories through distinctive reworkings. The Symbolist common ground with Vrubel was immediately apparent. The blurred violence of one picture of a decpaitated John the Baptist looked like something from Francis Bacon.

Recognition's curse

"One comes back to the thought that every recognition (with very rare exceptions) should make one mistrustful of one's own work. Basically, if it is good, one can't live to see it recognized: otherwise it's just half good and not heedless enough ... " Rilke, letter 16 October 1907

Bunting in a crossed out notebook entry wrote "The scholar ought to be like the poet, an Ishmael, scouted and feared" ... Wild Ishmael, scornful Ishmael (Milton)

Life over Art

"You know how much more remarkable I always find the people walking about in front of paintings than the paintings themselves" - Rilke, 7 October 1907

The calm of passions habitually appeased

"Dans leurs regards indifférents flottait la quiétude de passions journellement assouvies" - "In their coolly glancing eyes lingered the calm of passions habitually appeased." (p.48)

This is a succinct depiction of that possibly indefinable air of success - whether it be in terms of wealth or love or a happy lofe -that some people carry, as opposed to the pent-up frustrations and disappointments of so much of the population.

Chabrol, Gégauff and retracing old steps

In Chabrol's Une partie de plaisir (1975), the main character is played by the writer Paul Gégauff. Gégauff plays a troubled and domineering husband, his (de facto) wife is played by his real-life first wife Danièle Gégauff. In the movie he kills her by kicking her head in a graveyard; in real life they were already divorced by this time ... their real daughter also plays their daughter in the movie. In real life Gégauff was stabbed to death by his second wife on Christmas Eve 1983, at the age of 61. Chabrol and Gégauff worked together on fourteen films.

In the film at one point Gégauff's character drives in the night and stands outside the house he and his de facto wife and daughter lived in and rented, the house his grandmother had lived in and the house he was born in ... after disturbing the calm balance of his family life in that house, they packed and left and the family fell apart. After marrying another woman he drives at night to stand outside the house, recalling a line in Flaubert: "comme quelqu’un de ruiné qui regarde, à travers les carreaux, des gens attablés dans son ancienne maison." ... "like a ruined man gazing in, through the window, at the people dining in his old house." (Penguin Classics, p.40)

Gégauff takes his new wife back to the opening "idyllic" scene of the movie, re-enacting the scene with putting a small crab on a fishing hook, the girl catching a fish, a foghorn blowing eerily. This attempt to recreate an old vivid memory is repeated in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), but the Chabrol scene is more profound, more moving and more disturbing.

The cracking veneer of manners

Flaubert captures well the gap between feeling and politeness ... "et les mots de ma fille et de ma mère s’échangeaient tout le long du jour, accompagnés d’un petit frémissement des lèvres, chacune lançant des paroles douces d’une voix tremblante de colère."

"and the words mother and daughter went back and forth all day long, accompanied by a little quiver of the lip, each woman uttering sweet words in a voice trembling with anger" (Penguin Classics, p.40)

Incongruities and Absurdities

Mark Twain on how to tell a story: "To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they
are absurdities, is the basis of the American art." (From How to Tell a Story and other essays 1897).

This remark seems a century before its time. We are now well accustomed to the sort of short story scattered with quirky and off-beat observations that is the sort of "Mac Story" (to paraphrase Donald Hall) mass produced by MFA-style courses in creative writing.

Two camps

«Это ведь только в плохих книжках живущие разделены на два лагеря и не соприкасаются.» - Lara in Dr Zhivago: "It is, you see, only in bad books that people are divided into two camps and do not come into contact." Only in bad books and we might add post-Nazi-occupation western Europe.

Everyman a Faust

«Каждый родится Фаустом, чтобы все обнять, все испытать, все выразить.» - this from Zhivago's notebook. "Each is born a Faust, to embrace everything, experience everything, express everything."

The calamity of mediocre taste

«они не знали, что бедствие среднего вкуса хуже бедствия безвкусицы.» - Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago (Part 5, Chapter 7) , an interesting aphoristic phrase ... "they didn't know that the calamity of mediocre taste is worse than the calamity of tastelessness". Средне - coming from middle and average - means "middling" or "mediocre" ... so what is this calamity of "middling" taste, "so so" taste?.

"Sie sind ein Burger auf Irrwegen, Tonio Kroger — ein verirrter Burger."

Genius Loci - happiness, une plante particulière

"Il lui semblait que certains lieux sur la terre devaient produire du bonheur, comme une plante particulière au sol et qui pousse mal tout autre part." - Flaubert.

"to her [Emma] it seemed that certain places on earth must produce happiness, like the plants that thrive in a certain soil and are stunted everywhere else." (p.38, Penguin classic)

This idea, which Flaubert places in the mind of the foolish young Emma - only two pages he has mentioned her passion for Lamartine, a poet he did not respect - but perhaps it is not such a silly idea. Flaubert presents Emma's dissatisfaction with the calm and peace of her existence as a misunderstanding of happiness: "it seemed quite inconceivable [to her] that this calm life of hers could really be the happiness of which she used to dream". It is Emma's dangerous restlessness which propels her forward into trouble.

Lawrence Durrell championed the idea of spirit of place, and it is everywhere in his writing from Justine to Caesar's Vast Ghost.

Inclined towards the tumultuous??

The character sketch of the young Emma in Chapter 6 of Part 1 of Madame Bovary captures some key elements of the restlessness which leads her towards trouble.

"Habituée aux aspects calmes, elle se tournait, au contraire, vers les accidentés. Elle n’aimait la mer qu’à cause de ses tempêtes, et la verdure seulement lorsqu’elle était clairsemée parmi les ruines. Il fallait qu’elle pût retirer des choses une sorte de profit personnel; et elle rejetait comme inutile tout ce qui ne contribuait pas à la consommation immédiate de son coeur, -- étant de tempérament plus sentimentale qu’artiste, cherchant des émotions et non des paysages."

The Penguin Classics translation seems to strike a somewhat different tone ... the first sentence, for example, transposes Flaubert's fairly direct imagery into a different register, almost Miltonic in its abstract grandeur.

"Familiar with the tranquil, she inclined, instead, towards the tumultuous. She loved the sea only for the sake of tempests, the meadow only as a background to some ruined pile. From everything she had to extract some kind of personal profit, and she discarded as useless anything that did not lend itself to her heart's immediate satisfaction - endowed with a temperament more sentimental than artistic, preferring emotions rather than landscapes."

The phrase "ruined pile" hits a strange note - somehow too Gilbert & Sullivan for this context, and the last phrase "cherchant des émotions et non des paysages" loses some of its simplicity.

Lydia Davis' recent translation discards "inclined towards" in favour of the simpler "turned toward" but keeps "tumultuous", and it is good to see no mention of a "ruined pile". Davis sticks closer to the French with "greenery", and her concluding phrase better mirrors the rhetorical balance of the original.

Here is Davis' translation: "Accustomed to the calm aspects of things, she turned, instead, toward the more tumultuous. She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. She needed to derive from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not continue to the immediate gratification of her heart, - being by temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions and not landscapes."

Beware of books

The last sentence of chapter five of Madame Bovary is a succinct expression of the engine that propels the story. It deserves to be as famous as the first sentence of Anna Karenina - Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему - or Tale of Two Cities - "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, ..." and so forth. Flaubert writes:

"Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres."

In Geoffrey Wall's translation for Penguin Classics it is: "And Emma sought to find out exactly what was meant in real life by the words fidelity, passion, and rapture, which had seemed so fine on the pages of books." "Fidelity" here seems like a mistake.

Lydia Davis' recent translation offers: "And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words "bliss," "passion," and "intoxication," which had seemed so beautiful to her in books."

Books can be perilous - we know this from Paolo and Francesco in Canto V of Dante's Inferno. It was their reading of the story of Lancelot which was their dangerous path, and when they reached the part where Lancelot kissed the smiling lips of the Queen, they kissed and their fate was sealed. At the end of the canto, Dante faints from pity at this story.

Quando leggemmo il disïato riso
esser basciato da cotanto amante,
questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,
la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.

Everything is beautiful at the ballet, as Edward Kleban's lyrics in the A Chorus Line song go, and fidelity, passion and rapture are generally "si beaux dans les livers".

Emma and Francesca are each driven by the desire to know and to experience things of which they have read. There is almost something of wanting to apply the scientific method to the world of the emotions which leads us into the world of Freud.  But more simply there is simply the desire to fully live, to experience what there is to be experienced and not let life pass by shut off from the big experiences.

Flaubert's close ups

Flaubert writes cinematically. The following paragraph reminds me of scenes like the opening of Bergman's Cries and Whispers, and of that febrile distortion of focus I remember from lying in bed sick as a child, where the clock on the far wall with a dog's face seemed so close.

"Il arriva un jour vers trois heures; tout le monde était aux champs; il entra dans la cuisine, mais n’aperçut point d’abord Emma; les auvents étaient fermés. Par les fentes du bois, le soleil allongeait sur les pavés de grandes raies minces, qui se brisaient à l’angle des meubles et tremblaient au plafond. Des mouches, sur la table, montaient le long des verres qui avaient servi, et bourdonnaient en se noyant au fond, dans le cidre resté. Le jour qui descendait par la cheminée, veloutant la suie de la plaque, bleuissait un peu les cendres froides. Entre la fenêtre et le foyer, Emma cousait; elle n’avait point de fichu, on voyait sur ses épaules nues de petites gouttes de sueur."

Bovary's hightened sensitivity is clear ... the fine detail, the flies drowning in the cider in the bottom of the glasses, and all this culminating in noticing the small beads of sweat on Emma's shoulders.

Bewailing thir excess

Christopher Ricks (Milton's Grand Style, p.74) makes the link between Adam and Eve 'bewailing thir excess' and lines from The Pardoner's Tale

O, wiste a man how manye maladyes
Folwen of excesse and of glotonyes

Think also here of the sins of incontinence that occupy the early circles of Dante's Inferno.