Little birdie, did you not know?
Did you not know that the road you lie on is rough and ugly
That the great hulking shapes that roar by your body are unkind
That while you have grown from so small a birdling
Warmed by the golden, sometimes waning autumn sun
And the horrid rain so cold and discomfiting to your nest of patchwork twigs
Picked and weaved with careful beaking
That the wind that sings grand themes to your kinfolk
Reminding them of grandfathers taking wing on lesser plumes
Now carries tidings of their children, where they lie
Little birdie, did you not know?
That if you miss the sudden turn
That so often you managed so well, and so deftly
Carving so freely your arcing paths in the sky
And near the ground, and past the columns and trees
Tracing paths of joy and being
Little birdie, did you not know?
Your chest of feathers are soft and furry
They glow softly in the evening sunlight
Your dark wings now fold across your eyes
And the life you once held spreads now to the earth
That the sequence of your final tumble
Spiralling, collapsing, crumbling
Will not be mourned
Little birdie, did you not know?
Such as you now know, little birdie.
Saturday, October 15, 2016
Saturday, October 8, 2016
CCIX - stranger things
I find it so frustrating trying to explain Latin American literature. It's inexplicable.
In a way I've always felt frustrated trying to describe things. It's a frustration that has many sources. First, you're trying to describe an idea, a concept. I don't think it's a failure of the English language itself, but in general, there are some things which defy easy description. I think most of the time what we're looking for is just that, short, clear, precise description. That's the holy trinity. If it's done just right it has a self propagating kind of assuredness about it. A bit, one-eighth bites, just enough to grasp someone's attention, good enough to get the essential core idea across, maybe even a little to get someone to think of the nascent possibilities.
And I think that the older I've gotten, the more I want to understand something right down to its core, right down to what it essentially means. I want to know it, I want to hold it in my mind like I hold a stick in my hand. I want to feel it, grip it, heft its weight, sense its range of motion in my wield, swing it around a little, feel the world bend a little around its whip. I just feel like that's how I want to know things. Put two and two together once in a while. Think the way these things should be thought. But (and!) it's hard, and it's even harder after that to do justice in a word.
Don't get me wrong, I love describing things. Way down deep in my soul there's something that gets very satisfied when explaining something, and doing it right. I feel when I was younger there was probably something like that in me, but I couldn't always do it right, and that was usually both a little embarrassing and a little frustrating. It didn't come from a desire to be smarter than the next guy, nor to be a little stranger, nor to be deserving of a little more attention. And I'm glad it wasn't these things. In some ways I think it's a curiosity that my books have given me. Books can give a lot of things, and all you have to do is sit back and think a little. Sometimes I wonder what people actually think when they read what I've written. It's a little hard to imagine that the ideas that sprout out of their minds are the same ones that I have; after all, everyone's wired a little differently. We're not reading code with the same programming language and instructions, we're all a little different. What's evoked in each of us? The prejudices, memories, lingering tastes, blind spots, haunted senses. What music we listen to. I mean, it's pretty incredible. Nobody reads the same thing out of the same written words.
And sometimes ideas are very complex. Some ideas take a lot of introductory understanding. It's hard to describe a car to someone who's never seen a wheel, so in the same way it's hard to describe, I suppose, Kafka to someone who's never really been introduced to the core philosophical concepts. You can't just hand someone five thousand lego bricks and ask him to build a battlemech. I'm not even saying Kafka is a complete car. But not everyone has a really robust, intuitive sense of, say, validity and soundness. You know, I've always felt that the most dangerous thing in the world is to draw the wrong conclusions from given premises. That, and the danger of mis-describing something, are basically the evils which the whole house of philosophy was built to fend against. The most important thing in the whole wide world is to correct incorrectly drawn conclusions, no matter how strongly someone feels about them. The problems philosophy usually runs into is that a) certain premises which philosophy relies on are essentially contested, and b) some core concepts are metaphysical, so that it may seem as if the "best" and most commonly accepted answers are given short shrift, while really our dear philosophy people aren't able to produce sufficiently beautiful (short, clear, precise) answers in return, and they claim that they'll never be able to. So that seems to give us nothing, which is more beautiful than the deception, but not always. I think what they label absurdist existentialism is basically a paradigm example of this sort of philosophical terminus.
But you know, that's beautiful, if you can live without having to embrace something. It's not easy, but that doesn't mean such nothingness is meaningless. Better to be a "fool"? Well, I can't say. Camus discusses the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was from the old Greek legends, a king (there were many kingdoms during the period these legends were set in) who was supposedly very intelligent, very curious and perhaps a little audacious. I kinda get the impression he was a little morally ambivalent. Well, in the Greek mythology conception, morality is basically heroic deeds and worship of the gods. Anyway, Sisyphus does a bunch of things which infuriates the gods, makes them look foolish. That's the one thing they really don't like! The dead can't go to hell because he tricks and binds Death, something like that. Hades gets pretty angry. They catch him and force him to roll a fucking boulder up a hill. When it reaches the top it rolls back down. It's an eternal sort of punishment, a warning to fucking humans not to mess with the gods. In a way it echoes Prometheus, who is chained to a rock while an eagle eats his liver, which grows back every day. Anyway Camus says, well, we're all like that a little, really, it's an analogy of ourselves. We go through these incredibly taxing routines, and some of us don't really realise the futility of it all in a way. But Camus also said, sure, of course Sisyphus is wise enough to recognise the irony of his labour, the asinine futility. Roll a fucking rock up a hill, only to have it roll down. But Camus says, hold on, once he's reached the top, he's man over himself again. His feet plop down the sides of the hill after the boulder, and in that ease he's fully alive, fully aware, cognisant of the triumph of that moment. I was riding my bicycle one night. Rolling downhill, not having to fucking pedal, I realised exactly what that felt like. I don't know that it was "worth" it to have pedaled all the way up that hill, but that moment of pure recognition felt like a special, purified through fire, kind of breaking the nth wall. Maybe that's all existentialism is, really.
And I mean what kind of music do you listen to? Shit, man. That's a wonderful example. Some music is simply way too hard to grasp. A lot of classical is like that. Some people just don't like rock the way that I shun balloons. Too unpredictable, too rude. Hell, it's pretty impossible for me to identify a Miles Davis tune. What does that make me? I don't know. Music sounds different at each time of the day. In the evening, jazz makes sense, not while the sun shines. It's bizarre. What does that make us? We're not computers and programs, moods matter. What is that, what is mood? It's so bizarre.
Latin American literature is impossible. I love it all, and I don't think I'll ever be able to describe it. There's no way to give an accurate summary of Rulfo, Borges, Marquez (might be the easiest of the lot, but still), Llosa, Cortazar. The last guy is maybe the best. I thought Rulfo and Marquez were the best, but I don't know what I don't know and I know nothing. Cortazar might be the best. Why? I can't explain it. You have to read it, and not only that, you have to fail pretty hard. Then you have to go away for three years, and read him again. That's what I did. I get him, but barely, not very well, but enough to see the little strings. Hopscotch. Have you ever heard of a book that could be read once through, and also by a certain determined sequence of chapters, 1, 27, 2, 28, 3, 46, and something like that? Christ. Cortazar might be the best. Characters both self-aware and ridiculously self-complicated, entangling with others who kind of are a little insane as well. The best thing about really good books is in my opinion the way that separate individuals appear to "understand" each other, and then whether these fictions of understanding are believable. Take A Hundred Years of Solitude. The strangest, most withdrawn, most singular characters, surrounded by other individuals who grasp what they are, internally come to terms (or simply have from the beginning), and leave them to be. How is it you understand me? I've always felt a little strange in that sense, that it was just an impossible thing for anyone to get me. I embrace that a little. A sense of otherness, a not-here kind of feeling. Just enough to stay true to a little something within.
Trust me, Latin American stuff is the best. Why? I can't tell you. I don't really want to. It's a secret, actually. But I'm telling you, it's the best. You should never expect me to explain it. I can't, and you deserve better. It is the best.
In a way I've always felt frustrated trying to describe things. It's a frustration that has many sources. First, you're trying to describe an idea, a concept. I don't think it's a failure of the English language itself, but in general, there are some things which defy easy description. I think most of the time what we're looking for is just that, short, clear, precise description. That's the holy trinity. If it's done just right it has a self propagating kind of assuredness about it. A bit, one-eighth bites, just enough to grasp someone's attention, good enough to get the essential core idea across, maybe even a little to get someone to think of the nascent possibilities.
And I think that the older I've gotten, the more I want to understand something right down to its core, right down to what it essentially means. I want to know it, I want to hold it in my mind like I hold a stick in my hand. I want to feel it, grip it, heft its weight, sense its range of motion in my wield, swing it around a little, feel the world bend a little around its whip. I just feel like that's how I want to know things. Put two and two together once in a while. Think the way these things should be thought. But (and!) it's hard, and it's even harder after that to do justice in a word.
Don't get me wrong, I love describing things. Way down deep in my soul there's something that gets very satisfied when explaining something, and doing it right. I feel when I was younger there was probably something like that in me, but I couldn't always do it right, and that was usually both a little embarrassing and a little frustrating. It didn't come from a desire to be smarter than the next guy, nor to be a little stranger, nor to be deserving of a little more attention. And I'm glad it wasn't these things. In some ways I think it's a curiosity that my books have given me. Books can give a lot of things, and all you have to do is sit back and think a little. Sometimes I wonder what people actually think when they read what I've written. It's a little hard to imagine that the ideas that sprout out of their minds are the same ones that I have; after all, everyone's wired a little differently. We're not reading code with the same programming language and instructions, we're all a little different. What's evoked in each of us? The prejudices, memories, lingering tastes, blind spots, haunted senses. What music we listen to. I mean, it's pretty incredible. Nobody reads the same thing out of the same written words.
And sometimes ideas are very complex. Some ideas take a lot of introductory understanding. It's hard to describe a car to someone who's never seen a wheel, so in the same way it's hard to describe, I suppose, Kafka to someone who's never really been introduced to the core philosophical concepts. You can't just hand someone five thousand lego bricks and ask him to build a battlemech. I'm not even saying Kafka is a complete car. But not everyone has a really robust, intuitive sense of, say, validity and soundness. You know, I've always felt that the most dangerous thing in the world is to draw the wrong conclusions from given premises. That, and the danger of mis-describing something, are basically the evils which the whole house of philosophy was built to fend against. The most important thing in the whole wide world is to correct incorrectly drawn conclusions, no matter how strongly someone feels about them. The problems philosophy usually runs into is that a) certain premises which philosophy relies on are essentially contested, and b) some core concepts are metaphysical, so that it may seem as if the "best" and most commonly accepted answers are given short shrift, while really our dear philosophy people aren't able to produce sufficiently beautiful (short, clear, precise) answers in return, and they claim that they'll never be able to. So that seems to give us nothing, which is more beautiful than the deception, but not always. I think what they label absurdist existentialism is basically a paradigm example of this sort of philosophical terminus.
But you know, that's beautiful, if you can live without having to embrace something. It's not easy, but that doesn't mean such nothingness is meaningless. Better to be a "fool"? Well, I can't say. Camus discusses the myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was from the old Greek legends, a king (there were many kingdoms during the period these legends were set in) who was supposedly very intelligent, very curious and perhaps a little audacious. I kinda get the impression he was a little morally ambivalent. Well, in the Greek mythology conception, morality is basically heroic deeds and worship of the gods. Anyway, Sisyphus does a bunch of things which infuriates the gods, makes them look foolish. That's the one thing they really don't like! The dead can't go to hell because he tricks and binds Death, something like that. Hades gets pretty angry. They catch him and force him to roll a fucking boulder up a hill. When it reaches the top it rolls back down. It's an eternal sort of punishment, a warning to fucking humans not to mess with the gods. In a way it echoes Prometheus, who is chained to a rock while an eagle eats his liver, which grows back every day. Anyway Camus says, well, we're all like that a little, really, it's an analogy of ourselves. We go through these incredibly taxing routines, and some of us don't really realise the futility of it all in a way. But Camus also said, sure, of course Sisyphus is wise enough to recognise the irony of his labour, the asinine futility. Roll a fucking rock up a hill, only to have it roll down. But Camus says, hold on, once he's reached the top, he's man over himself again. His feet plop down the sides of the hill after the boulder, and in that ease he's fully alive, fully aware, cognisant of the triumph of that moment. I was riding my bicycle one night. Rolling downhill, not having to fucking pedal, I realised exactly what that felt like. I don't know that it was "worth" it to have pedaled all the way up that hill, but that moment of pure recognition felt like a special, purified through fire, kind of breaking the nth wall. Maybe that's all existentialism is, really.
And I mean what kind of music do you listen to? Shit, man. That's a wonderful example. Some music is simply way too hard to grasp. A lot of classical is like that. Some people just don't like rock the way that I shun balloons. Too unpredictable, too rude. Hell, it's pretty impossible for me to identify a Miles Davis tune. What does that make me? I don't know. Music sounds different at each time of the day. In the evening, jazz makes sense, not while the sun shines. It's bizarre. What does that make us? We're not computers and programs, moods matter. What is that, what is mood? It's so bizarre.
Latin American literature is impossible. I love it all, and I don't think I'll ever be able to describe it. There's no way to give an accurate summary of Rulfo, Borges, Marquez (might be the easiest of the lot, but still), Llosa, Cortazar. The last guy is maybe the best. I thought Rulfo and Marquez were the best, but I don't know what I don't know and I know nothing. Cortazar might be the best. Why? I can't explain it. You have to read it, and not only that, you have to fail pretty hard. Then you have to go away for three years, and read him again. That's what I did. I get him, but barely, not very well, but enough to see the little strings. Hopscotch. Have you ever heard of a book that could be read once through, and also by a certain determined sequence of chapters, 1, 27, 2, 28, 3, 46, and something like that? Christ. Cortazar might be the best. Characters both self-aware and ridiculously self-complicated, entangling with others who kind of are a little insane as well. The best thing about really good books is in my opinion the way that separate individuals appear to "understand" each other, and then whether these fictions of understanding are believable. Take A Hundred Years of Solitude. The strangest, most withdrawn, most singular characters, surrounded by other individuals who grasp what they are, internally come to terms (or simply have from the beginning), and leave them to be. How is it you understand me? I've always felt a little strange in that sense, that it was just an impossible thing for anyone to get me. I embrace that a little. A sense of otherness, a not-here kind of feeling. Just enough to stay true to a little something within.
Trust me, Latin American stuff is the best. Why? I can't tell you. I don't really want to. It's a secret, actually. But I'm telling you, it's the best. You should never expect me to explain it. I can't, and you deserve better. It is the best.
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