Flowering god-head

20 - a goose, a bohemian, and a careless thing

[floweringgodhead]

Death monument of Jeanne de Bourbon (c. 1521)

"Jeanne de Bourbon, Comtesse d'Auvergne, who died in 1521, was portrayed on her grave monument at the Cordeliers convent in Vic-le-Comte (now in the Louvre) with her gut hanging out in a coil and huge worms burrowing into her entrails and lips. Dishevelled and only half-dressed, she actually grips the side of the slab in which she lies as if she can feel the process of decay."

Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens

[plaques-memoire]

Plaque en hommage à : Edith Wharton

Type : Lieu de résidence

Adresse : 53 rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris, France

Date de pose : Inconnue

Commanditaire : Association La Mémoire des Lieux

Texte : Dans cet immeuble vécut de 1910 à 1920 Edith Wharton, Romancière américaine, 1862-1937. Elle fut le premier écrivain des Etats-Unis à s'expatrier en France, par amour pour ce pays et sa littérature. " My years of Paris life were spent entirely in the rue de Varenne - rich years, crowded and happy years. " " Les années de ma vie parisienne, je les ai entièrement passées rue de Varenne-des années fructueuses, bien remplies, des années heureuses. " Proche de Henry James, l’œuvre d'Edith Wharton met en scène, d'un trait à la fois délicat et mordant, la bonne société dont elle est issue.

Quelques précisions : Edith Wharton (1862-1937) est une écrivaine américaine. Se consacrant à la poésie dès l'adolescence, elle s'installe à Paris, ville où elle a déjà passé une partie de son enfance, en 1907. Elle écrit de nombreux romans qui mettent en scène la haute société, en particulier new-yorkaise, qu'elle a beaucoup fréquenté au début de sa vie d'adulte, et abordent des thèmes liés à l'émancipation personnelle. C'est notamment le cas de son premier roman à succès, Chez les heureux du monde (1905). Son roman Le Temps de l'innocence, publié en 1920, reçoit quant à lui l'année suivante le prix Pulitzer. Elle est également l'auteure de plusieurs recueils de nouvelles. En parallèle de sa carrière littéraire, elle se consacre notamment à des œuvres de bienfaisance, notamment via la fondation des American Hostels for Refugees pendant la Première Guerre mondiale. Elle reçoit en 1929 la médaille d'or de l'Académie américaine des arts et des lettres. Elle meurt des suites d'une crise cardiaque. Une autre plaque commémorative en son honneur peut être trouvée à Paris, place des Etats-Unis.

[winterhill-aria]

The Great Hall at Edith Wharton’s The Mount, Lenox, MA.

[floweringgodhead]

i swear, every time i read a new book i feel like i need to reread everything i've ever read from when i was too young to realize i should be connecting them to other things. or building on knowledge. or reading books in their historic/literary contexts. or like remembering basic plot points.

[floweringgodhead]

Notes on "The Fall of the House of Usher"

"What was it--I paused to think--what was it that so unnerved me in contemplation of the House of Usher?"

what's not unnerving about the setting. but how colored are his descriptions by backward-glancing, writing his account after? does the House only look as it does through his current perception?

"There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition--for why should I not so term it?--served mainly to accelerate the increase itself."

what cements a feeling more -- which might otherwise have been fleeting, forgettable -- than recording it in writing

sight is fascinating in this story. around the House the sky is cloudy and the day is entering late evening when the narrator arrives, so a clear view of his surroundings is in these ways obscured. he notes his struggle to see the whole of Usher's rooms because of its eccentric architecture that curves unexpectedly, is full of odd angles and surprising recesses. the "inward" sight is present in such scenes as when he or Usher draw comparisons from books to their present straits, a dive into the mind that removes direct perception by coloring it with allusions or references intended to "clarify" their circumstances.

another line of vision is the House's. its windows are described as "eye-like" twice in the opening paragraph of the story. i think there's value in reading -- in a story that features doubling, mirroring duplication, in the form of identical twins -- "Usher" as a retelling of the Narcissus myth. the narrator spends the first few paragraphs of the story looking at the setting, not directly, but as it is reflected in the tarn near the House (which is also how he'll also look at it when he watches it collapse in the final paragraph). tarns are small pools of water on mountains that form from melted ice or snow, meaning, pointedly enough for this story, that they connect to no streams or bodies of water outside of themselves. this tarn is interesting because the House's "image [is] in the pool." and since it has, as the narrator repeats, "eye-like windows" this means the House (fixed, immobile building) is staring at itself.

through a pool darkly.

doubled self-annihilation is what connects Narcissus to "Usher."

according to Ovid: the birth of Narcissus, for whatever reason, displeased the gods. when his mother asked Teiresias whether her child would live a long, healthy life, the seer tells her he would, "so long as he never knows himself." what follows is well known. Narcissus forsakes the love that his beauty inspires in others around him, disregards it in favor of such activities as hunting which afford him more pleasure than sycophantic devotion. the nymph Echo falls in love with him. it is she who brings him to commit the prohibition that leads him to his destruction. she curses him for not reciprocating her love and calls on Nemesis to help her punish him. when next we meet Narcissus, he is lost. he has positioned himself forever before the small pool that shows him his reflection. he eventually withers away, not sleeping, not eating, but fading, and becomes the Narcissus flower.

a lovely transformation. but first he has to die.

the House, which has been staring at "its image in the pool" for who knows how long, collapses at the end of the story and the narrator watches as "the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the 'House of Usher.'" its "self," doubled in the water, goes down with it. the narrator witnesses the same thing happen with the Usher siblings just before this:

... there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold — then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.

I've heard poisoned fungi, opium usage, too impressionable narrator (for whom the dark night, the reading material, paired with Usher's, umm, personal interests were too much to bear), sexual abuse, vampires (that one's Angela Carter), and more to explain "Usher." i think fate, in the arbitrary, Greek sense that Narcissus knew it as, fits with them too.

here's a recording of the song Usher plays which the narrator holds "painfully in mind [as] a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber": Carl Gottlieb Reissiger: Weber's Last Waltz; Fairy Waltz. the "Last Waltz," now properly attributed to Reissiger, was long assumed to be Weber's since he copied his friend's composition out on a page which then became the song's only surviving manuscript.

Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

I'm preserving this quotation solely due to Mario Praz who uses it to explain the scope of his analysis in The Romantic Agony. I think it's a good description of writing that has a narrowed focus; the scholar as an observer scrutinizing the crack.

[floweringgodhead]

"Like Walter Pater's Mona Lisa, the Lady Madeline has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave. She lies on her bed in her somnolent, half-sleeping state, neither fully dead nor fully alive, the life of a sentient plant, waiting, waiting, waiting until the men downstairs call up for her to come and frighten them.

That is her lot. That is her fate. The reader's last glimpse of her is of a domestic spectre, not the angel of the health of Victorian domesticity but a house-ghost, the terrible beloved.

the lady Madeline ... passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment mingled with dread -- and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings.

Angela Carter, "Through a Text Backwards: The Resurrection of the House of Usher"

[hauntanelle]

one must imagine the tumblr mutual happy

[floweringgodhead]

"There are infinite things upon the earth; any one of them can be compared to any other. Comparing stars to leaves is no less arbitrary than comparing them to fish, or birds. On the other hand, every man has surely felt at some moment in his life that destiny is powerful yet clumsy, innocent yet inhuman. It was in order to record that feeling, which may be fleeting or constant but which no man may escape experiencing, that Zuhayr’s line was written. No one will ever say better what Zuhayr said there. Furthermore (and this is perhaps the essential point of my reflections), time, which ravages fortresses and great cities, only enriches poetry. At the time it was composed by him in Arabia, Zuhayr’s poetry served to bring together two images – that of the old camel and that of destiny; repeated today, it serves to recall Zuhayr and to conflate our own tribulations with those of that dead Arab. The figure had two terms; today, it has four. Time widens the circle of the verses, and I myself know some verses that are, like music, all things to all men."

Jorge Luis Borges, "Averroës' Search" (1947)

[myboredgenerations]

LE PENSEUR (The Thinker) by Auguste Rodin

[floweringgodhead]

"'The Thinker' is meant to represent Dante in sober contemplation, in front of the gates of hell. Looking at the statue the observer must feel a sense of irony that he is contemplating a man who is contemplating, thinking about a thinker. Doubling this irony, the statue was commissioned by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and was meant to represent Dante in front of the gates of hell, contemplating his poem. The bare man, whose thinking we contemplate, in turn represents the contemplation of art, and by extension, the recursive quality of thought itself."

Claire Y. van den Broek, "How the Panther Stole the Poem: The Search for Alterity in Rilke's Dinggedichte"

[floweringgodhead]

Different views and a print of the Villa Diodati in Cologny, Switzerland.

"Byron discovered a possible set of residences with a harbour, on the opposite southern side of the lake, near Compegny, about three miles beyond Geneva. There was a large porticoed house, with an extensive shaded balcony along its length, commanding a broad view of the Lake and the Jura. It was known as the Villa Diodati, and Milton had once occupied it."

Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, chapter xiii

"...the succession I have traced from Otranto to "Christabel" to the Fantasmagoriana to the original Frankenstein to Polidori's The Vampyre — which could only have begun to coalesce during that summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati — was and remains underwritten by the unique and conflicting qualities of the Gothic image as it was developed from the 1760s to the ghost stories that were revived during that haunted summer. The creativity that emerged from that extraordinary encounter was able to yield lasting works that symbolize the turmoil of that very time and since, largely because the Gothic image, as I have tried to describe it, had then and continues to have its extraordinary powers and appeal. Without it Western culture simply would not have Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and all the adaptations (at least the good ones) that have come out of them and continue to enthrall audiences — and provide abjections for them — up to the present."

James Hogle, "The Gothic Image at the Villa Diodati" (2017)

[7pleiades7]

La Danaïde (the Danaïd) (cast in 1889) by Auguste Rodin (French, 1840 – 1917), marble carved by Jean Escoula (1890), marble, 31.7 cm × 67.2 cm × 44.9 cm (12.5 in × 26.5 in × 17.7 in), Various Museums

Here are the specific locations of some Danaïd sculptures:

Musée Rodin (Paris, France): Home to the original marble version and other bronze examples.

Rodin Museum (Philadelphia, USA): Houses a bronze cast of the sculpture.

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires)

[floweringgodhead]

Love this sculpture; I always think of this exchange in A.S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden when I see it, ironically enough:

It was, he said, Rodin's Danaïde. He went and stood under it, studying minutely what her distracted gaze had skated over the gloss of. "Look what a line. Look." He ran his index finger along the indicated line of recumbent marble spine, under the marble-silky skin, a half-moon from abased nape to rounded buttocks vanishing and shining into the black. An ambiguous gesture, purely instinctive, purely sensual. Frederica watched the moving finger and saw the statue. She was acute enough to realise, despite her excitement over Alexander himself, that she had never been made to look at a visual work of art before. This kind of silent sensual contemplation was usual for him, she saw, and profoundly new to her. She had never, she realised, looked at a picture or a carving or even landscape without some immediate verbal accompaniment or translation. Language was engrained in her..."

[floweringgodhead]

In Proust's first full English translation (Scott-Moncrieff's) the title was rendered as "Remembrance of Things Past," taken from Shakespeare's Sonnet XXX:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste: Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe, And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight: Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restored and sorrows end.

As far as I can tell no scholar's presented strong evidence for Proust consciously echoing the second line -- not in any of his letters, diary entries, working notes, does he mention a Shakespeare connection to his work. I've read variously that somewhere out there is a pre-twentieth century French translation of the sonnet wherein Voltaire/Hugo (maybe more potentials) rendered "remembrance of things past" as "à la recherche du temps perdu" and Proust - coughing delicately into his handkerchief after tormenting himself with the alluring smell of hawthorns which always ended inevitably by troubling his lungs - found in it the key to his whole work. Et voilà, he had his title.

This illusive translation (I haven't been able to fix exactly who began the rumor of its existence) is probably sitting patiently beside "the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true name of Rome, the encyclopedia Navalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be mean ingless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang" collecting dust (Borges, "The Total Library").

Even if Proust didn't have it in mind and the influential translation was due to the "sense" Scott-Moncrieff felt was conveyed by the original title, Sonnet XXX still manages to capture the spirit of à la recherche. This folkloric anecdote of literary heritage reminded me of another writer who we know for a fact used a poem to encapsulate a longer piece of writing. On October 19, 1907, Rilke who was working on The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge wrote to his wife Clara that within Baudelaire's "Une charogne" lay "the whole development toward objective expression," the poetics of truth and reality, Dinggedicht, that Rilke would strive to achieve in his writing for the remainder of his life. The poem/its "objective expressions" helped him clarify his own work's purpose: "... The book of Make Laurids, when it is written sometime, will be nothing but the book of this insight."

A Carcass

My love, do you recall the object which we saw, That fair, sweet, summer morn! At a turn in the path a foul carcass On a gravel strewn bed,

Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman, Burning and dripping with poisons, Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way Its belly, swollen with gases.

The sun shone down upon that putrescence, As if to roast it to a turn, And to give back a hundredfold to great Nature The elements she had combined;

And the sky was watching that superb cadaver Blossom like a flower. So frightful was the stench that you believed You'd faint away upon the grass.

The blow-flies were buzzing round that putrid belly, From which came forth black battalions Of maggots, which oozed out like a heavy liquid All along those living tatters.

All this was descending and rising like a wave, Or poured out with a crackling sound; One would have said the body, swollen with a vague breath, Lived by multiplication.

And this world gave forth singular music, Like running water or the wind, Or the grain that winnowers with a rhythmic motion Shake in their winnowing baskets.

The forms disappeared and were no more than a dream, A sketch that slowly falls Upon the forgotten canvas, that the artist Completes from memory alone.

Crouched behind the boulders, an anxious dog Watched us with angry eye, Waiting for the moment to take back from the carcass The morsel he had left.

— And yet you will be like this corruption, Like this horrible infection, Star of my eyes, sunlight of my being, You, my angel and my passion!

Yes! thus will you be, queen of the Graces, After the last sacraments, When you go beneath grass and luxuriant flowers, To molder among the bones of the dead.

Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will Devour you with kisses, That I have kept the form and the divine essence Of my decomposed love!

— Translated by William Aggeler

[oncleo]

Il faut désirer lire beaucoup, lire encore, lire toujours. Aussi, dès le matin, devant les livres accumulés sur ma table, au dieu de la lecture je fais ma prière de lecteur dévorant : « Donnez-nous aujourd’hui notre faim quotidienne… »

La poétique de la rêverie

[floweringgodhead]

"I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity."

Nabokov, "Onegin in English"

From an essay on Nabokov's view of/vision for translation - in it he came to some conclusions I don't agree with, but footnotes (for translators to defend choices, give context to cultural differences, etc.), yes, we need those.

[floweringgodhead]

"Proust was no slouch when it came to technological awareness. The advent of technological modernity that we see gradually proliferate in À la recherche du temps perdu provides not merely 'period color' but is part of the very form of the work, its internal logic, its eagerness to exhaust the multiplicity of the writeable within the brief span of a life that is winding down."

Italo Calvino, "Multiplicity"

[floweringgodhead]

"My initial impulse derives perhaps from a hypersensitivity or allergy of mine: it seems to me that language is always being used in a loose, haphazard, careless manner, which I find unbearably annoying. But don't think that this reaction is based on intolerance for others; I feel the greatest annoyance when listening to myself. That's why I try to speak as little as possible, and if I prefer to write, it's because when writing I can revise every phrase as many times as necessary, if not to achieve satisfaction with my words, at least to eliminate those reasons I can see for dissatisfaction."

Italo Calvino, "Exactitude"

[donnamurphydaily]