Disclosure

Lately I've seemed to be totally unable to finish a book. I can’t get through Foucault, never get done with Eco. Not even the by comparison easily read Edelfeldt manages to prolong my attention span. A couple of days ago I started on Leviathan by Paul Auster, in the hopes of getting my reading back. Considering I’ve never really liked neither The New York Trilogy nor the Book of Illusions, this might have been a lost cause from the beginning. On the other hand, Paul Auster is a well renowned author and I thought his fluent language would be able to help me in my misery. (Well, maybe it isn’t misery in the way it could have been, but if you are used to taking to reading when you need a break from life, not being able to do so is quite disturbing.)

It took me some time to understand what was going on and the answer, my friends, is this: People are talking too much. Somewhere along the road of intellectual history, being able to express your thought in as many words as possible, has become the attribute of knowledge and aptitude. An example: when I took classes in philosophy, the people that were loudest and most talkative were considered the most brilliant. Even repeating what was just said or pointing out the obvious, gave applause from the rest of us, either being so much in awe of their confidence that we didn’t listen properly, or ourselves completely lacking the confidence to speak up, and so making this misconception persevere. Some of my comrades also thought gesticulating a lot when you talk is a sign of intelligence, but that must just be momentary confusion, yes?

Anyway, back to the talking. You know how everyone stops and listen when the wise man speaks? I’m imagining some kind of Buddha, which is quiet for a hundred years and then utters one, very mysterious, sentence. There might be something in there, you think, so I’d better listen really carefully. Or the wise Indian, who is the only one in the camp who knows anything about medicine; you’d better listen to him! (And then there is your mother, who you are supposed to listen to, but never do. A whole other story there…) Might it be the case that somewhere along the way we forgot who we are supposed to listen to, why people are talking, and that now we believe that anyone who manages to say something we don’t immediately understand, is our superior? “Say something better yourself then!” you might object. To which I will answer, that I’m not sure that I can, but I will declare that I am probably capable of saying the exact same thing, in far less words. 

Now, this might all be true, or the fact might be that I am just too lazy to read books where the letters are tiny, the sentences long and in which there is no dialogue anywhere in sight.

                                           

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.

On religion

From Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco:

"And begin by combining his name, YHWH, at the beginning alone, and examine all its combinations and move it and turn it about like a wheel, front and back, like a scroll, and do not let it rest, but when you see its matter strengthened because of the great motion, because of the fear of confusion of your imagination and the rolling about of your thoughts, and when you let it rest, return to it and ask it, until there shall come to your hand a word of wisdom from it, do not abandon it." Abulfia, Hayyê ha-Nefes, MS München 408, fols. 65a-65b

Well, I'm running late to a meeting, as usual, so I'd better comment this later.