kulturbrille:amanuensis

For the first time this year, ill, a shredded throat and a febrile haze filling up most of today. But there was redemption, despite all the unfulfilled moments and disillusionment; there was Annie Leibovitz. If you were there, among all of us voyeurs, yes, it was me, it was me hacking and tearing through the documentary, as through the tears, defying a deflated, fibrillating heart to savour each moment of photographic apotheosis. At one moment I blinked, lost, unsure of who I was, and where I was, mimicking the act of photographing, being there in the moment.

I outdo myself. There are decades to come, years to come, a day when I will have family, shoeboxes full of photographs, not just juvenile snapshots, each of them a story that isn’t just a one-liner. Armed with a dogged determination to make something out of so little at all, I should take on a little ambition, if only to warm the chilly inside of my still faintly incandescent vessel. There was once a time when I went forth - to New York, through alleyways, into paroxysms - where everywhere I looked, I was framing, when I filed envelopes of negatives and learnt how to be non-existent behind the camera. There was once, if I might clumsily explain, when I found that space between a macro and a full-length portrait on a 50mm lens, a space available only to those who knew how to press a shutter and not run away.

But you had to have been there to understand why it was the best cathartic experience I’ve had all year. It was searingly authentic, masterfully brief, full of reminders of what it takes to make meaning out of the pernicious present. There is no counting of the hours, but only a measuring of the years, as perspective is brought to bear on the most salient moments of a life. And, as silent testimony, there are photographs, ineluctable, each a sudden, piercing, intrusive reality that one had to force back to stay in one’s seat. It became a universe within a single narrative, all those lives, all those things, ideas, emotions, fate, all splashed across a screen and pointing to the one central theme.

Perhaps now, even as the I contemplate a half-successful but increasingly bland life, even as I scale back the dreams and fears that hold me down each day, I remember what it felt like to become one with the lens; one with the world that I so longingly gazed at and poorly captured, in my own way. But there are no regrets; for even though every hope and every desire was impossibly far-fetched, silly, far too elaborate and outlandish for its own good, when it was made real, it was…good. Sometimes it takes longer than we think, that’s all. I see, you.

NaNoWriMo; it is November, after all, a time to move on, produce, generate. In one month I will make the journey home, expunge, cleanse, purge, and fly across half the world to a familiar place. Words slip across the screen in Helvetica, the pristine pixel-perfect pitching of an aging Tiger beckoning once more, now almost free of bullet points and slide and tables and all manners of nefarious formatting that every uses but knows nothing about. Photographs abound, the promise of a new perspective, words pouring out of my ears, my mouth, in the torrent a new beginning, a welcome conclusion, with nothing in my way, not orphaned LibraryThings, not bursting Amazon wishlists, not mountains of books waiting and fleeing from my grasp. In my mind – lives, of the English, repressed love, circles of believers sitting in a room, the sanctity of a blank page, the dull clink of machine spun wine glasses, the clouds of dust from a million things hurled into boxes, luggage, objects of transportation, the thrum of engines moving the world in unison, hearts beating in fearsome synchrony, in the dead of the night, students relishing their freedom, unaware of its transience, lives about to be smashed, ephermally fulfilled and punctuated with the tangy chill of an emptying spoon, faraway, contemptuous looks and careless shrugs of shoulders, words bitten back but cascading down in the darkness, all this coming and going and thick black lines found only in illustrations and superhero comics; the Watchmen, the surge of emotions, an upwelling of fear, sweet sickly, and love, blindingly perfect and all-consuming. So cheers; NaNoWriMo, an excuse, November, a month of liberation, words, my lifeblood, lives, canvas, stuff, ether, silly putty, for the taking and the giving.

One of the best gifts I have received in my years of teaching is a slim volume of The Hunting of the Snark. Nonsense, but not-nonsense, in its sparse lines an entire universe for you to escape into. It is, a la Coleridge, an agony in eight fits, and it is something to relish, a way of quietly rebelling against the quelling years, during this almost annus horribilis.

Martin Gardner has written enough for an entire year’s worth of thought, and who is to say that this is no more worthy than any other pursuit? It begins, shouting:

“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.

“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”

- Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

And in its pages, I find that there is hope, hope, hope for every man who dares to step up.

Every Man
Casting Crowns

Is there hope for every man
A solid place where we can stand
In this dry and weary land
Is there hope for every man
Is there love that never dies
Is there peace in troubled times
Someone help me understand
Is there hope for every man

Seems there’s just so many roads to travel, it’s hard to tell where they will lead
My life is scarred and my dreams unraveled
Now I’m scared to take the leap
If I could find someone to follow who knows my pain and feels the weight
The uncertainty of my tomorrow, the guilt and pain of yesterday

Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl was sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.

Oh, look, it’s Murakami again. Hello. If only every day was a smattering of tortured philosophy, saccharine narrative, and such bittersweet reality. I read, more and more, each passing day, slowly breaking free of the shackles and sinewy vines that have ensnared me all this while, in the company of one that, just like me, drippingly fills our minds, almost as empty as the young D.H. Lawrence’s piggy bank.

One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery letter, was walking from east to west, both along the same narrow street in the Harajuku neighbourhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very centre of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in the chest. And they knew:

She is the 100% perfect girl for me.

He is the 100% perfect boy for me.

But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of fourteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever.

A sad story, don’t you think?

- On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning, Harumi Murakami

All that was terrifyingly unsaid now rolls off the tongue, yes, happily. All that I should have said.

In addition to the artificial lily, the Collected Poems of Toson, and the photo of Raphael’s Madonna, O-Kimi’s second-floor room contains all the kitchen tools she needs to survive without eating out. In other words, these kitchen tools symbolize the harsh reality of her life in Tokyo. Yet even a desolate life can reveal a world of beauty when viewed through a mist of tears. O-Kimi would take refuge in the tears of artistic ecstasy to escape the persecution of everyday life. In such tears she need not think about her 6-yen monthly rent or the 70 sen it cost for a measure of rice. Carmen has no electric bill to worry her; she only has to keep her castanets clicking. Namiko does suffer as she lies dying of tuberculosis, deprived of her beloved husband by her cruel mother-in-law, but she never has to scrape up money for her medicine. In a word, tears like this light a modest lamp of human love amid the gathering dusk of human suffering. Ah yes, I imagine O-Kimi all alone at night when the sounds of Tokyo have faded away, raising her tear-moistened eyes toward the dim electric lamp, dreaming dreams of the oleanders of Corboda and the sea breeze of Namiko’s Zushi, and then – damn it, “meanness” is the least of my sins! If I’m not careful, I could just as easily be swept away by sentimalisme as O-Kimi! And this is me talking, the fellow the critics are always blaming for having too little heart and too much intellect.

- Green Onions, Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Oh, this damp day.

Two authors: Akutagawa and Donne, to finally reopen old wounds and begin a new, new year. In Jay Rubin’s new translation of his best short stories, Spinning Gears is the very last, a dark descent into Akutagawa’s own abyss:

Sleep was the only thing that could save me. But all my narcotics were gone. I could hardly stand the thought of being kept awake in torment, but I generated enough desperate courage to have coffee brought to the room and started writing with frantic intensity. Two pages, five pages, seven pages, ten pages: the world of this story with supernatural beasts, one of which was becoming my own self-portrait. Fatigue, however, begin to cloud my brain. I finally left the desk and lay down on the bed. I slept for what must have been forty or fifty minutes. But when I became aware of someone whispering these words in my ear, I came suddenly awake and stood up:

“Le diable est mort.”

Beyond the window and its volcanic stone frame, the night was beginning to give way to a chilly-looking morning. I stood against the door and surveyed the empty room. Clouded in patches by the outside air, the glass of the window on the other side of the room seemed to display a tiny landscape: a yellow-tinged pinewood, and beyond it, the sea. I approached the window with some trepidation, only to discover that the elements that made up the landscape were simply the garden’s withered grass and pond. The illusion had had its effect on me, though, for it called forth an emotion close to homesickness.

Stuffing my books and the manuscript into the bag on the desk, I made a decision: as soon as it turned nine o’clock, I would call a certain magazine publisher and, one way or another, arrange for some money. Then I would go home.

- Spinning Gears, Akutagawa

Akutugawa took his own life at the age of 35, of course, a thoroughly modernized Japanese in a post-Meiji era full of turmoil and upheaval. Murakami calls him a writer of national stature, finding in his work not just superlative writing but also shades of the national psyche, a writer who became iconic of his time and age, etc. In Spinning Gears, we find in his increasingly frantic and incoherent choices and actions the revealing of a man incapable of holding himself back from the darkness (without light, as he thinks as he speaks with the man who lives, ironically, in the attic of the Bible publishing house). We leap from reference to reference, folding ourselves back into the story as Akutagawa dances in and out of reality and his own inner self, finding that, as he falls, we are pulled in, exclaiming and exhorting, foreboding and filled with dread, until the very end. In the same vein, Donne’s Bianthanatos, which I have returned to again and again, he defends (half-heartedly, almost, to defy censure) self-homicide through the laws of nature, reason and that of God. In his appeal to reason, Donne lists men who have taken their own life, great men and lesser ones who, in their martyrdom, were made more than nothing. Death comes to all, by our own hand or otherwise. Words snarl my tongue; it pours outside, I sink further and, then, inexorably, I reach out, vulnerable and shivering, again.

Not suicide, not darkness, not death, this new year, but staring into the abyss, as I am, waiting for myself to come home. I am still lost, after these 2 years.

Halfway through obligations and the remains of a curriculum shredded and scattered across the swirling concrete floor, I sigh and escape briefly into Coetzee’s Slow Man. How delightful! Lugubrious, dark, gloomy, scarred, misanthropic, full of regret and denial, exactly how we will all turn out. A man, powerless to act, ignorant, unwittingly pulling his life apart one thread a time. Paul, on the wrong side of sixty, loses a leg in an accident and declares his love for his day nurse, exalted and delectably imperfect, and in the aftermath emerges Elizabeth Costello: ‘As you said, you want merely to pour out your love upon her. You want to give. But being loved comes at a price, unless we are utterly without conscience. Marijana will not pay that price.’

Paul Rayment lingers not because of his acerbic, offensively melancholic life, but because he suffers for it, while we refuse to.

All in all, not a man of passion. He is not sure he has ever liked passion, or approved of it. Passion: foreign territory; a comical but unavoidable affliction like mumps, that one hopes to undergo while still young, in one of its milder, less ruinous varieties, so as not to catch it more seriously later on. Dogs in the grip of passion coupling, hapless grins on their faces, their tongues hanging out.

- Coetzee, Slow Man

10, 000 words in 24 hours, and counting, and no end in sight; it is exhilarating to be able to roam freely across time and space again, and all there is left to do is to find time to read the thousands of pages I must before the new year begins. A plethora of intellectual (and lesser) obligations in addition to personal ambition demands a lifestyle that revolves around the construction of knowledge and its application. How would one go about pretending to live such a life? By being ruthless, selfish, misanthropic, absolutely insufferable, or by being completely invisible, living in the shadows and always just out of sight.

Over the weekend; Tiger and the Snow. Benigni is an unlikely combination of absent-mindedness and worldliness. His naïveté is quickly tiring, and it is his personification of human, pure, love that endears, and sustains. His is impossibly efficient and resourceful where love is concerned, but cannot remember where he parked his car, ever. Delicious! There is the light, frivolous intertextuality, Fuad, our conscience, the fatalistic, pragmatic poet, a man of this world, with whom we can empathise, but cannot identify with. In Baghdad, in war, with the realities of the world pressing in, Vittoria is similarly oblivious to our useless and misguided machinations; she loves him but musn’t know; he, she, we are all not allowed that knowledge, lest love become rational, logical, put together, common-sensical. But without knowledge there can only be chance and fate; action is galvanised by knowledge, and therein lies the paradox and the natural death of any narrative of love, amour, and this climaxes at the joining of hands in the midst of overpowering, uplifting, smothering forces. Just as Benigni is removed from reality, we are told that the easiest way to love and to live is to dream, to live in utter ignorance, brash impertinence, or to be invisible. Vittoria! Vittoria!