Architecture

How to Howl

I went to see this movie, Howl, about Allen Ginsberg’s trial after the release of his book Howl. Well, it actually wasn’t his trial, but the editor’s, who had been willing to publish his slightly controversial poem. Anyway, the problem of letting the Allen Ginsberg character read the whole thing through out the movie was solved by flowing images and background music. The images made me feel nauseous, although I can’t say for certain that this wasn’t emphasized by me sitting on the second row. Neck problems and dizziness must be quite common after sitting like that for two hours, all this time being bombarded with strong colours and fast moving objects. This movie wasn’t that long, nor was it filled to the brim with action, but in general these days it seems more important to make a film really long, than making it interesting. 

There were two things in particular that the Allen figure said during the reproduction of old interviews. He talked about poetry and how to make it; where it comes from. He described it as starting with a feeling in your stomach that moves upwards, through your throat, and then emerges from your mouth like a sound. This can be a groan, a sigh or whatever sound you connect with that certain feeling. To write poetry, you take a good look at what you have around you. What is happening, what you can see etc. Combine the words that come up with the feeling you have in your stomach and poetry drops down on the paper. So it’s as easy as that. 

Another thing he said, and also what I think is the most relevant for what I’m trying to say with this blog, was that if you want to write anything good, you have to give it the whole day and you can’t expect anything satisfying to come out of it before you’ve tried for several hours. (He didn’t mention how agonizing this can be to some of us.) To use words of Ginsberg when he had managed to write something that he felt completely satisfied with, this is true. And it reflects what I wrote earlier about permutations and finding the true name of God. Whatever you want to do, you have to go really deep into it to come out with something good. We want you to howl, to roar when you find something true. What we don’t want is for you to yap continuously, without anything real to say.

Being Pretentious

I just finished this book by Julie Buxbaum called The Opposite of Love. It’s been sitting in my bookshelf for I don’t know how long and I only started reading it because I couldn’t think clearly enough to understand any of the books in the pile by my bed.

The author is a woman in her late twenties or maybe she just had her 30^th birthday. She is a lawyer, born in New York. The book is about a woman in her late twenties, working in a law firm, in New York. The story revolves around her finding herself and thereby winning back a love that she threw away from fear of her own feelings. It’s about life and death, explained through what happens with the people this woman has close; her dad, her grandfather, her girl friends etc. This book first became my bath tub book and then, surprisingly, took over the place as my “thinking about something else than my life before I go to sleep” book. And this is troubling me. I find it most disturbing. Can you guess why?

Yes, I believe it is because I am pretentious, an aspiring writer, who also has a way of complicating things. “Write about what you know.” You hear it in movies, in classes, from encouraging friends. It’s a good idea; it seems like a good place to start. I appreciate reading about other people’s lives; I can assure you my curiosity is immeasurable when it comes to human beings and how they use the time they have on their hands. Thus, I find pleasure in reading Bodil Malmsten for instance. The way she is describing her life as a child, the environment in which she was brought up, it’s all giving me new information. She is writing about what she knows, in a pretty simple language, but still makes it interesting for someone who does not know her personally.

In The Opposite of Love, however, the author is using external factors that she knows well, like what it is like to work at a law firm, but she is also attempting to say something about life within us. The story isn’t bland enough to make me throw the book away, but is, none the less, not very interesting. The insights doesn’t offer any novelties, but the story is still engaging enough for me to relax for a minute, lost in the world of an author I do not respect, because I am pretentious. Is this what they call a Feel Good Novel, I wonder?

In any case, I’ve saved the last couple of pages for some days now, because I don’t want to be left without the security of knowing I can pick that book up at night and forget myself for a couple of minutes. Just for once.

Permutations

In the book mentioned below, the Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, they talk a lot about words and their permutations. How, for instance, the secret name of God is as long as the entire Torah, but how finding all the possible permutations of the Torah is impossible. This is because the temurah ( a method used by the Kabbalists to rearrange words and sentences in the Bible) says you have to include each character and not just the letters themselves in the making of new permutations. "Each letter is a letter unto itself, no matter how often it appears on other pages." I guess to find the real name of God you need to do it in the language and through the knowledge that the work itself was written. And, although very interesting, I don't know much about that.

But - What I'm thinking is, although it makes sense to do such a thing with a work that is so old and so important to so many people/peoples, you could do it with anything. Combined with the previous lecture about how to stare at something until you see the truth of it. Again, not something that everyday people have the time or energy to explore. I get exhausted just by trying to get through this book that I'm quoting.

Detours to Finding Oneself

Thinking. Loving. Living. Level. Being on the same level. Feeling levelled.

To be clear, I don't care about religion. To me, it's just an insult to the universe. A way to make your mistakes ok. A bad excuse to be an equally bad person. If you need religion to make you care about other people (not understanding why to do it, but to start doing it) you have a serious problem and you should probably see a therapist. (More like something else to do, than to find anything important, considering therapists are just people too.) Or go stand in the corner and think about what you've done.

The quote I wrote about religion came up in a discussion with a friend, who made the argument that jehovas are better than other religious people, becuase they call God by his Name. There are many faux pas in this, which I'm sure are as clear to you, my intelligent and attentive reader, as it is to me. First of all, aren't we supposed to be of equal value? Second, if there was something like a God, a force that could actually sort out your problems for you, should the uttering of the specific name really help in getting the attention? But, looking away from these somewhat upsetting matters, the argument lead me to that quote.

I actually thought that the quote, about how to explore the name of God, underlined what I had just wrote about looking beyond. And I don't think it's the only thing like that you can get from reading the Bible. I made the argument to my friend that the Book might have been intended for us to read as one of these popular self-help books. There are bound to be some answers in there for you, if you read it right. If you could just, please, look through the surface, the laws, all that is apparent. How crooked is society, when people turn to religion to excuse themselves? Considering those who are not help seeking in the way that they are reading a book, but is actually asking for help in prayer, it might work, because they are talking to themselves. Something that is usually frowned upon.

I have a great faiblesse for churches though. Maybe because they are real? Often they are beautiful, engaged a lot of handy artists in their building phase and I guess they speak of human history. The churches can stay, religion may go now.