the next moment she plunged down into the flames.

Regular readers may detect in me a love affair of sorts with fine prose about fire. I confess, it is quite true:

It was late winter; the large heavy cover of snow, the result of a whole week’s uninterrupted blowing, was in the process of rapidly melting away. The air was full of sunlight and reflection from the white snow, which in large, shining drops dripped down past the windows. Within the room all forms and colors had awakened, all lines and contours had come to life. Whatever was flat extended, whatever was bent curved, whatever was inclined slid, and whatever was broken refracted the more. All kinds of green tones mingled on the flower-table, from the softest dark-green to the sharpest yellow-green. Reddish brown tones flooded in flames across the surface of the mahogany table, and gold gleamed and sparkled from the knick-knacks, from the frames and moldings, but on the carpet all the colors broke and mingled in a joyous shimmering confusion.

[. . .]

Mogens forced his way through the multitude. Now he was at the corner; the sparks were slowly falling down upon him. Up the street; there were showers of sparks, the window-panes on both sides were aglow, the factory was burning, the councilor’s house was burning and the house next door also. There was nothing but smoke, fire and confusion, cries, curses, tiles that rattled down, blows of axes, wood that splintered, window-panes that jingled, jets of water that hissed, spluttered, and splashed, and amid all this the regular dull sob-like throb of the engines. Furniture, bedding, black helmets, ladders, shining buttons, illuminated faces, wheels, ropes, tarpaulin, strange instruments; Mogens rushed into their midst, over, under it all, forward to the house.

The facade was brightly illuminated by the flames from the burning factor, smoke issued from between the tiles of the roof and rolled out of the open windows of the first story. Within the fire rumbled and crackled. There was a slow groaning sound, that turned into a rolling and crashing, and ended in a dull boom. Smoke, sparks, and flames issued in torment out of all the openings of the house. And then the flames began to play and crackle with redoubled strength and redoubled clearness. It was the middle part of the ceiling of the first floor that fell. Mogens with both hands seized a large scaling-ladder which leaned against the part of the factory which was not yet in flames. For a moment he held it vertically, but then it slipped away from him and fell over toward the councilor’s house where it broke in a window-frame on the second story. Mogens ran up the ladder, and in through the opening. At first he had to close his eyes on account of the pungent wood-smoke, and the heavy suffocating fumes which rose from the charred wood that the water had reached took his breath away. He was in the dining-room. The part of the house, now and then, almost reached up to the ceiling; the few boards that had remained hanging when the floor fell burned in brilliant yellowish-white flames; shadows and the gleam of flames flooded over the walls; the wall-paper here and there curled up, caught fire, and flew in flaming tatters down into the abyss; eager yellow flames licked their way up on the loosened moldings and picture-frames. Mogens crept over the ruins and fragments of the fallen wall towards the edge of the abyss, from which cold and host blasts of air alternately struck his face; on the other side so much of the wall had fallen, that he could look into Camilla’s room, while the part that hid the councilor’s office still stood. It grew hotter and hotter; the skin of his face became taut, and he noticed, that his hair was crinkling. Something heavy glided past his shoulder and remained lying on his back and pressed him down to the floor; it was the girder which slowly had slipped out of place. He could not move, breathing became more and more difficult, his temples throbbed violently; to his left a jet of water splashed against the wall of the dining-room, and the wish rose in him, that the cold, cold drops, which scattered in all directions might fall on him. Then he heard a moan on the other side of the abyss, and he saw something white stir on the floor in Camilla’s room. It was she. She lay on her knees, and while her hips were swaying, held her hands pressed against each side of her head. She rose slowly, and came towards the edge of the abyss. She stood straight upright, her arms hung limply down, and the head went to and fro limply on the neck. Very, very slowly the upper part of her body fell forward, her long, beautiful hair swept the floor; a short violent flash of flame, and it was gone, the next moment she plunged down into the flames.

– Jens Peter Jacobsen, “Mogens” in Mogens and Other Stories (1882) [trans. Anna Grabow (1921)]

the trepidations of time and mortality vexing, at secular intervals, the everlasting sabbaths of the grave.

He may have not been particularly impressed by my reading from Thomas Browne last night, but I must say I’m pleased that Kevin Faulkner stopped by to say so. For not only did I learn of his blog, Aquarium of Vulcan, a trove of things Browne and baroque, but he also put me yet again on the trail of Thomas De Quincey’s treatise on Rhetoric.

In my copy of this work, I found the following marked, but cannot for the life of me recall if it was I or one of its previous owners who found it originally notable. It matters not:

Milton, however, was not destined to gather the spolia opima of English rhetoric. Two contemporaries of his own, and whose literary course pretty nearly coincided with his own in point of time, surmounted all competition, and in that amphitheatre became the Protagonistæ. These were Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne; who, if not absolutely the foremost in the accomplishments of art, were undoutedly the richest, the most dazzling, and, with reference to their matter, the most captivating, of all rhetoricians. In them first, and perhaps . . . in them only, are the two opposite forces of eloquent passion and rhetorical fancy brought into an exquisite equilibrium, — approaching, receding, — attracting, repelling, — blending, separating, — chasing and chaased, as in a fugue, — and again lost in a delightful interfusion, so as to create a middle species of composition, more various and stimulating to the understanding than pure eloquence, more gratifying to the affections than naked rhetoric. Under this one circumstance of coincidence, in other respects their minds were of the most opposite temperament: Sir Thomas Browne, deep, tranquil, and majestic as Milton, silently premeditating and “disclosing the golden couplets,” as under some genial instinct of incubation; Jeremy Taylor, restless, fervid, aspiring, scattering abroad a prodigality of life, not unfolding but creating, with the energy and the “myriad-mindedness” of Shakspere. Where but in Sir T. B. shall one hope to find music so Miltonic, an intonation of such solemn chords as are stuck in the following opening bar of a passage in the Urn Burial — “Now, since these bones have rested quietly in the grave under the drums and tramplings of three conquests,” &c. What a melodious ascent as of a prelude to some impassioned requiem breathing from the pomps of earth, and from the sanctities of the grave! What a fluctus decumanus of rhetoric! Time expounded, not by generations or centuries, but by the vast periods of conquests and dynasties; by cycles of Pharaohs and Ptolemies, Antiochi and Arsacides! And these vast successions of time distinguished and figured by the uproars which revolve at their inaugurations; by the drums and tramplings rolling overhead upon the chambers of forgotten dead — the trepidations of time and mortality vexing, at secular intervals, the everlasting sabbaths of the grave.

‘Tis too late to be ambitious.

I would expect & hope that my reading from the final chapter of Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia would not be met by listeners with a license to think me at all sympathetic to the triumphalism of his “true religion.” No — any sympathy I might feel for what Browne might write is quite lost amidst the celebration that he has written at all. Yes — we are celebrants of style in these parts, and will gladly run the risk of trying patiences and testing attentions in the service of such joy.

In my estimation, the final two chapters of Hydriotaphia are the bar by which all English prose is measured. I encourage you to read along as I do (noting the bits I elided), or simply read aloud for yourself — but in any event, make it an oral event. Feel the cadence of the clauses Browne stacks, one upon the other, and the drums of his alliterations, like heartbeats each, unto the end. Two examples:

If we begin to die when we live, and long life be but a prolongation of death; our life is a sad composition; We live with death, and die not in a moment.

* * *

When many that feared to dye shall groane that they can dye but once, the dismall state is the second and living death, when life puts despair on the damned; when men shall wish the covering of Mountains, not of Monuments, and annihilation shall be courted.

Much more to be said. But for now, if the only immortality we corpses yet to expire ever experience is in our hope for anything that might endure us, remembrance or monument, then may at least, as with Browne, that hope be memorably stated and worthy of record.

Now coitally collide, disgustingly in love

Cheerful, one-armed, and black,
The gallows dangles paladins,
Satan’s skinny skeletons
Dancing bones of Saladins.

Christmas carols fill the air,
Small black puppets face the sky;
Messer Beelzebub makes them dance
Smacking heads and yanking ties.

Quaking puppets join spindly arms:
Black organ pipes swaying high above,
Their chests once pressed to maidens’ breasts
Now coitally collide, disgustingly in love.

Three cheers for dancers disemboweled!
There’s room to writhe on the killing floor.
Is it a battle . . . or is it a dance? Who cares:
Mad Beelzebub fiddles, evermore.

Heels this hard don’t need replacing.
Chests have shrugged off shirts of skin:
There’s nothing shocking left to see.
Skulls bear snowcaps, white and thin.

Crows crown heads, feather cracks;
Fleshy chunks quiver on chins:
They look like knights in paper armor
Colliding in darkness and nocturnal winds.

Breezes blow these hanged men, dancing.
Like an iron organ, the black gallows groans.
Along the horizon, the sky turns hellish red.
From violet forests rise lupine moans . . .

Someone unstring these grim commanders
Who, underhanded, read rosaries of love.
Broken fingers count pale vertebrae.
No monastery this, for the dead above!

And in this danse macabre‘s midst
One mad skeleton can’t stay in check,
Like a spooked horse he leaps into the red sky;
Stiff noose still coiled around his neck,

His little fingers grip a bony thigh
Squeezing out laughter more like moans,
And like an actor lost in drama,
Retakes the stage to the applause of bones.

Cheerful, one-armed, and black,
The gallows dangles paladins,
Satan’s skinny skeletons
Dancing bones of Saladins.

Arthur Rimbaud, “Hanged Men, Dancing” (trans. Wyatt Mason)

The forest enfolds you in its cruel dream.

In a certain way, I think the likes of Herman Herman — for whom “‘though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright” — might very well agree with the cynicism, much bemoaned & beloved, expressed by Michel Houellebecq, for example here about nature:

I have no time for those pompous imbeciles
Who go into ecstasies before bunnies’ burrows
Because nature is ugly, tedious and hostile;
It has no message to transmit to humans.

How pleasant, at the wheel of a powerful Mercedes,
To drive through solitary and grandiose places;
Subtly manipulating the gearstick.
You dominate the hills, the rivers, and all things.

The forests, so close, glitter in the sun
And seem to reflect ancient knowledges;
In the depths of their valleys must lie such marvels,
After a few hours you are taken in;

Leaving the car, the irritations begin;
You stumble into the middle of a repugnant mess,
An abject universe, deprived of all meaning
Made of stones and brambles, flies and snakes.

You miss the parking-lots and the smell of petrol,
The serene, gentle glint of the nickel counters;
It’s too late. It’s too cold. The night begins. The forest enfolds you in its cruel dream. (via Collapse IV)

Reading this today, I thought of Lewis Mumford’s comparison of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Melville:

Emerson was the perpetual passenger who stayed below in bad weather, trusting that the captain would take care of the ship.  Melville was the sailor who climbed aloft, and knew that the captain was sometimes drunk and that the best of ships might go down.

Where the lesson of one such captain, Ahab, drunk with monomania if not drink, was that the “pasteboard mask” covering such truth might ultimately be there for a reason, and that one should strike through it with care; it seems to me that Houellebecq exemplifies another possibility, that of what becomes of us when there is no mask at all.

a new piece of kindling

I’m not one typically to get annoyed at horrible news coverage, as I’ve come mostly to expect it as a indicting reality about contemporary life in America. On the whole, I have less anger to appropriately distribute anymore: did it burn too hot for a time, I wonder, to the point that it is mostly now an ashen ruin, or is this just what resignation looks like? Nevertheless, the past two days of news, more really plagiaristic paraphrases of the city’s PR releases, relating to the events in downtown Oakland over the weekend have stirred the dust a bit, and a bit of that old anger found a tiny piece of kindling.

I couldn’t attend the 2,000-strong protest march in the afternoon (a planned takeover of a vacant building) because I needed to collect the wife at the airport and didn’t want to risk her being stranded if things should turn sour. Instead I made my way down in the evening after she’d collapsed into bed for hours on end, weighted down by a week’s worth of exhaustion & emotion. What I saw from a distance, “protected” by the paternally confused expression of police power, were some three hundred people on the sidewalk in front of the YMCA and a line of buses aligned like boxcars bound for suburban detention centers.

^{(Still from livestream [shot by @OakFoSho])}

Theirs was a different kind of resignation – to that of an immediate fate, to be sure, but more importantly (to their credit) one defiant to this fate’s perceived cause & lasting effect. They were accused of (a) failing to disperse from the scene of a riot (when a riot is encased by police, whose riot is it?) and (b) attempting to invade & occupy the YMCA. What I came to learn, and had confirmed by numerous sources sympathetic & unsympathetic to the cause, was that some employees of the YMCA had actually opened their doors to protesters fleeing the bureaucratic pornography of the Oakland Police Department, who rarely issues a dispersal command that isn’t simultaneously counteracted by the corralling force of its bludgeons. A few protesters were, I’m told, fled through the back-alley exits; most, however, were caught. Reportedly, over the course of the day, some were flung down stairs, others absented their teeth.

These, whose weapons ranged mostly from Evian bottles to makeshift shields to tedious rhetorical & graffiti styles, we’re now told by a few leaders of Oakland are the new loathsome face of “domestic terrorism.” The coincidence of President Obama’s signature on new indefinite detention legislation for such enemies of the state is terrifyingly striking – not least because its first high-profile application may well be in the liberal Disneyland that is the San Francisco Bay Area.

I cannot write about Occupy Wall Street without reflecting, too, on the idea of movements. I’ve long ago stopped wondering whether it is in fact one. It is, I think, most certainly. But what kind? Is it, as I’ve suggested before, a kind of drunken stumbling — from side to side, maybe a little forward, but mostly just down, maybe even a little backward? Or, is it a death knell — not of history, never that, but of a certain historical moment? Which brings me back to ashes, from dust to dust. Life, even in decay, goes on.

“tumbling there in all the desperate variety of which counterfeit is capable”

Over and under the ground he hurried toward the place where he lived. No fragment of time nor space anywhere was wasted, every instant and every cubic centimeter crowded crushing outward upon the next with the concentrated activity of a continent spending itself upon a rock island, made a world to itself where no present existed. Each minute and each cubic inch was hurled against that which would follow, measured in terms of it, dictating a future as inevitable as the past, coined upon eight million counterfeits who moved with the plumbing weight of lead coated with the frenzied hope of quicksilver, protecting at every pass the cherished falsity of their milled edges against the threat of hardness in their neighbors as they were rung together, fallen from the Hand they feared but could no longer name, upon the pitiless table stretching all about them, tumbling there in all the desperate variety of which counterfeit is capable, from the perfect alloy recast under weight to the thudding heaviness of lead, and the thinly coated brittle terror of glass.

William Gaddis, The Recognitions

Once upon a time, I read made a show online of reading through William Gaddis’ stunning debut  novel The Recognitions. Recently, Dalkey Archive Press reprinted it, which will I hope attract a handful more readers. Of those, I suspect a few might Google around for some help or some conversations. Should they do so, it is my hope that they might find something of value out of the conversations had here and the posts themselves placed into a single PDF here. Just so you know.

But we are not yet as harmless as this makes us appear

Modern man likes eating in restaurants, at separate tables, with his own little group, for which he pays. Since everyone else in the place is doing the same thing, he eats his meal under the pleasing illusion that everyone everywhere has enough to eat. Even sensitive people do not need this illusion afterwards; those who have eaten do not mind stumbling over the hungry.

The eater increases in weight; he is and he feels heavier, and there is a boast in this: he cannot grow any more, but there, on the very spot, under everyone’s eyes, he can increase in weight. This is another reason why people like eating with others; it is a contest in repletion. The satisfaction of repletion, of the moment when nothing more can be absorbed, is part of the goal and pleasure of eating and originally no-one was ashamed of it; there might be a large quantity of game which had to be eaten up before it went bad and so everyone ate as much as he could and carried his store of food within him.

Anyone who eats alone renounces the prestige which the process would bring him in the eyes of others. He bares his teeth simply for the sake of eating, and this impressing no-one, for there is no-one there to be impressed. But when people eat together, they can all see each other’s mouths opening. Everyone can watch everyone else’s teeth while his own are in action at the same time. To be without teeth is contemptible and there is a touch of asceticism in refusing to show those that one has. The natural occasion on which to show off one’s teeth is when eating with others. Contemporary etiquette requires the mouth to be closed while eating and thus reduces to a minimum the slight threat contained in opening it at all. But we are not yet as harmless as this makes us appear; we eat with knife and fork, that is, with two instruments which could easily be used for attack; everyone has these ready in front of him, or he may even carry them around with him. And the bit of food which we cut off and, as elegantly as possible shove in our mouths is still called a “bite.”

Laughter has been objected to as vulgar because, in laughing, the mouth is  opened wide and the teeth are shown. Originally laughter contained a feeling of pleasure in prey or food which seemed certain. A human being who falls down reminds us of an animal we might have hunted and brought down ourselves. Every sudden fall which arouses laughter does so because it suggest helplessness and reminds us that the fallen can, if we want, be treated as prey. If we went further and actually ate it, we would not laugh. We laugh instead of eating it. Laughter is our physical reaction to the escape of potential food. As Hobbes said, laughter expresses a sudden feeling of superiority, but he did not add that it only occurs when the normal consequences of this superiority do not ensue. His conception contains only half the truth. Perhaps because animals do not laugh, he did not see that our laughter is originally an animal reaction. But neither do animals deny themselves obtainable food if they really want it. Only man has learnt to replace the final stage of incorporation by a symbolic act. It is as though the whole interior process of gulping down food could be summed up and replaced by those movements of the diaphragm which are characteristic of laughter.

The only animal to make a sound really resembling human laughter is the hyena. This sound can be induced by placing food before a captive hyena and then withdrawing it quickly before the animal has time to snatch it. Here it is worth remembering that, in freedom, the hyena’s food consists of carrion. It is easy to imagine how often food must have been snatched from under its eyes by other animals after its own appetite had been aroused.

Elias Canetti, Crowds & Power

“But Gloria was one of those who exhaust modes of being in bursts of emptiness–”

I can’t totally put my finger on why, but this short, I would imagine incomplete, short story/character study by Mina Loy has totally captured my imagination this week, and I wanted to set it into words.

“Gloria Gammage,” by Mina Loy

By “great library” I mean . . .

It would be a decade before I would encounter my first great library. By “great library” I mean a library whose holdings are so huge that no one quite knows what is in its basements; a library in which Vivaldi scores may lie hidden for a hundred years; a library of density as well as scope; a library that will turn no book away—trash or treasure—for a good library is miserly, proud of its relics as a church, permitting even a cheap novel to be useful to the study of the culture it came from; an institution, consequently, that won’t allow ephemera to ephemerate and is not ashamed of having the finest collection of bodice rippers in existence; a library that has sat safely in the same place and watched like a sage its contents age, consequently a library whose dust is the rust of time; a library that never closes on cold days and will allow the homeless to rest in its reading room; a library that will permit me to poke about in its innards as long and as often as I like; and finally a library that makes generous awards, and then lets me win one.

[. . .]

My books are there to comfort me about the world, for only the wicked can be pleased by our present state of things, while the virtuous disagree about the reasons for our plight and threaten to fall to fighting over which of us is responsible for the misery of so many millions, and in that way steadily increasing the number of hypocrites, jackals, and rogues.Among them, writers of books.

No occupation can guarantee virtue the way hard labor makes muscle, and only sainthood requires it as a part of its practice. So the writers write, perhaps improving their texts from time to time, but only rarely themselves.

But the books . . . the books disagree quietly, as the minds of the many readers in the library may, without the least disturbance; and in that peace we can observe how beautiful, how clever, how characteristic, how significant, how comically absurd the ideas are, for here in the colorful rows that make bookcases seem to dance, the world exists as the human mind has received and conceived it, but transformed into a higher realm of being, where virtue is knowledge, as the Greeks claimed, where even knowledge of the worst must be valued as highly as any other, and where events as particular as any love affair, election, or battlefield are superceded by their descriptions [. . .] for these volumes are banks of knowledge, and are examples, carefully constructed, of our human kinds of consciousness, of awareness that is otherwise  momentary, fragile, and often confused. Among the shelves, where the philosophers tent their troops, there is a war of words–a war of the one supportable kind–a war of thoughtfully chosen positions, perhaps with no problems solved, but no blood spilt; shelves where human triumph and its suffering are portrayed by writers who cared at least enough about their lives and this world to take a pen to paper. Thucydides knew it when he said, concerning the conflict that occurred on the Peloponnesus, in effect: this war is mine. History occurs once. Histories happen repeatedly in reader after reader.

Every-one of these books is a friend who will always say the same thing, but who will always seem to mean something new, or something old, or something borrowed, something blue.

William H. Gass, “Slices of Life in a Library” in Life Sentences (2011)