As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
Page 6
One formal ideal: multiple sense. E.g. haiku. Take Ulysses, [Robbe-Grillet’s novels] La Jalousie + Le Voyeur
Form has to be organic to the material. The letter-form of [Algernon Swinburne’s] Love’s Cross-Currents is the story, not just Swinburne’s idea of putting the story in epistolary form. The story is the idea that this woman is so powerful, so forceful that, merely by letters and with little face-to-face contact, she can manipulate people’s lives, prevent lovers from eloping. The story is Lady Midhurst’s rhetoric—a rhetoric so seductive and compelling in its meanness, its intelligence, its accuracy, its suppleness, that she can manipulate at a distance.
Whereas to put the Thomas Faulk material [SS’s novel project at the time, ultimately abandoned] in epistolary form would have been arbitrary. Just a way of closing off or limiting the narrative choices (as is the “récit,” except when it is about a man thinking. It wouldn’t have been organic to the story.
…
A work in which every part is written in a different style? But what’s the relation between the different styles? And why this order? Joyce made an academic stab at it in Ulysses.
…
… To do in the novel what [Michel] Foucault suggests—depict the complexity of madness.
Imagine a man who has lost his mind. What has he lost? More like the ability to stop his mind.
Madness as a defense against terror.
Madness as a defense against grief.
…
Situation: parent writing about an extraordinary child—keeping a diary or log
JS [John Stuart] Mill sort of child (cf. letter he wrote at six to [Jeremy] Bentham)
This w[oul]d be an organic justification for journal form
Rearing the Buddha-child
…
… Kafka the last story-teller in “serious” literature. Nobody has known where to go from there (except imitate him)
dream > science fiction
1/5/65
Think of novel in cinematic terms: close up, medium shot, long shot
Problem of lighting
Example: [William] Faulkner’s “Red Leaves.”
My self-absorption, my “turning off”—interrupting, telling an anecdote or memory of my own which———’s story has reminded me of.
…
Mannerist painters: Jacopo Pontormo, Georges de la Tour, Monsù Desiderio, Luca Cambiaso
My feeling that nobody (or just a few people) has a mind = my feeling that nobody (x x) cares
Route 43. My mother had something beautiful (the Chinese furniture) but she didn’t care enough to keep it. Eva [Berliner] didn’t care enough about [the late- eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German writer Heinrich von] Kleist to buy his “Collected Works.” Etc.
Mannerism: “The awareness of style as such.”
Bousquet, p. 26 [the French art historian Jacques Bousquet’s Mannerism published in English translation in 1964]
…
“Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it”
—[W. B.] Yeats (last letter) d. 1939
…
… been sheared off
… worked into the grain of
… pounded flat by
grudging
spurned
incredulous
spew
launch
unfits one for …
equivocal
evinced
pollute
reshuffled
choice insult …
debased
dispersed
makeshift
despondent
1/16/65 Minneapolis [SS’s thirty-second birthday]
Becoming inhuman (committing the inhuman act) in order to become humane …
Realizing that one must go against one’s instincts (or training) in order to get what one wants.
An insect identifies light with air, exit—so, an insect in a tube will fling itself to death against a glass wall on the other side of which is a light, ignoring the exit which lies behind him in the dark.
Robbe-Grillet: a biologist until age 30
Interest in relationships between persons and things
a. refusal to interpret (anthropomorphize) things
b. emphasis on exact account of their visual and topographic qualities (exclusion of other sense modalities because there is not an exact enough language to describe them—only for that reason?)
Cal’s [prep-school nickname of the twentieth-century American poet Robert Lowell, by which in adulthood he was known to his friends] viciousness periodically awakened by his madness.
His malady applies a lens to certain of his qualities which are always there—
“Stereoscopy”
Uncork them …
Dickens’ characters are single-motive puppets, “topped” with a humour—their character is their physiognomy (hence, relation to history of caricature)
History of notion of human as machine: mannerist drawings; caricature; [the nineteenth-century French illustrator J. J.] Grandville; Burroughs; [the twentieth-century French painter Fernand] Léger; [Laurence Sterne’s novel] Tristram Shandy (?)
All capital cities are more like each other than like the rest of the cities in their country (people in NY more like Paris than [those] in St. Paul)
Cal: In madness, a machine operating at 5 times its normal rate, without its governor—sweating, farting, pouring out words, lurching back + forth.
Contempt
The contempt I feel for others—for myself different, less internal than guilt.
It’s not that I think (or have ever thought) I was bad—through and through. I think I’m unattractive, unloveable, because I’m incomplete. It’s not what I am that’s wrong, it’s that I’m not more (responsive, alive, generous, considerate, original, sensitive, brave etc.).
My profoundest experience is of indifference, rather than censure.
Style: the manner in which things appear to us as designed for pleasure.
Buy: [Ludwig] Wittgenstein’s Notebooks
1/25/65
Carolee’s [Schneemann] story about her studio burning down. “I got interested in what had happened to my work,”—how she used it—
———[it’s unclear who this is] is very stubborn—but it doesn’t deteriorate his character
[The American actor, playwright, and theater director, a close friend of SS’s] Joe C[haikin] holds back, thinks he has to hold back, to allow something in himself to come out
Not to give up on the new sensibility (Nietzsche, Wittgenstein; Cage; [Marshall] McLuhan) though the old one lies waiting, at hand, like the clothes in my closet each morning when I get up.
Novel:
A painter
Relation to his work
Kinds of “problems”
So-and-so wants his work to be beautiful
Impurities
The object
What people are on one’s map*—
Every act is a compromise (between what one wants + what one thinks is possible)
*Inferior people lower the average
…
[The following entries are undated in the notebook, but are almost certainly from either late January or early February 1965.]
acronym: e.g. laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation)
St. Thomas Aquinas: “To love anyone is nothing else than to wish that person good.”
John Dewey—“The ultimate function of literature is to appreciate the world, sometimes indignantly, sometimes sorrowfully, but best of all to praise when it is luckily possible.”
Doué [“gifted”]
Basculer [to switch]
Couches de signification [“layers of significance”]
[Daniel] Defoe’s characteristic form, the pseudo-memoir
2/17/65
What’s good about An American Tragedy?
Its intelligence (about Clyde, etc.)
The patience + detail of Dreiser’s imagination
I
ts compassion (Tolstoy)
Art is a form of nourishment (of consciousness, the spirit)
Sometimes one wants steak, sometimes oysters
Essay:
Four American books: Pierre
An American Tragedy
[Gertrude Stein’s] Three Lives
Naked Lunch
[This is circled:] Style
[This is circled:] Medium is the message
“Styles must have location, even if they have no names … There must be a home—even if it is seldom visited.”
([Thomas B. Hess], Location #2, p. 49)
“The work as object”}
“The medium as message”} in our period of liquidated political ideologies
[Robert] Rauschenberg canvas—very large—called Axle—depicting [John F.] Kennedy (several times) on its cinematically organized fragmented surface—
St. Cunegund
Allowing “accidents”—work an “object”
“swish pan”
Read:
Cesar Grana, Bohemian Versus Bourgeois: French Society + the French Man of Letters in the 19th C. (Basic Books)
Ask [the American critic] Irving [Howe]
3/26/65
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.”
—Moby Dick (Holt, Rinehart, Winston), p. 161
“hip”—
[The following four quotes are from John Wilcock, “The ‘Hip’ Four Hundred” in The Village Voice, March 4, 1965:]
“If you’re hip you have an awareness of being of your own time and the ability to communicate it.” ([the American filmmaker ] Shirley Clarke)
“[It’s] someone who is aware, very much aware of what should happen + what could happen in his particular flow of experience + who’s acutely sensitive to what’s phony + pretentious.” ([the American journalist] Nat Hentoff)
“—political + social consciousness … and someone who believes in + takes part in the sexual revolution of today.” (Peter Orlovsky [the American poet Allen Ginsberg’s lover])
New anti-literary establishment (painting, architecture, city planning, movies, TV, neurology, biology, electronics engineering)
Buckminster Fuller >>
summer yacht seminar—“ekestics”
sponsored by Greek millionaire
Doxiades [sic]
Marshall McLuhan
Reyner Banham
Sigfried Giedion
György Kepes
[In the margin:] Unpolarized names!
{(But) Not: [the American art critic] Harold Rosenberg—too political; or [Lewis] Mumford—too political and / or too literary}
First key: [the British neurophysiologist and histologist Sir Charles] Sherrington—dist[inguished] between distance (haptic) + immediate senses
Eye an incarcerated organ—open to blandishments—doesn’t grab, demand immediate satisfaction.
Recent painting (Pop, Op)—cool; least amount of texture possible—light colors
Need to have canvas, because you can’t float colors off in space.
“Ekistic” group—
Interested in programming
A “sensory mix.”
What are the sensory mixes of the future?
Completely non-political.
Total break with Matthew Arnold (exclusively literary—literature as criticism of culture) critics of the past
Hence, also dist[ance] between high + low culture (part of Matthew Arnold’s apparatus) disappears.
Feeling (sensation) of a Jasper Johns painting or object might be like that of The Supremes.
Pop Art is Beatles art
Another key text: Ortega [José Ortega y Gasset], “The Dehumanization of Art”
Every age has its representative age group—ours is youth. Spirit of the age is being cool, dehumanized, play, sensation, apolitical.
Jasper Johns = Duchamp painted by [Claude] Monet
Op Art: “trompe l’oeil” kinetic art
Programming sensations
Could get a new art movement every month just by reading Scientific American.
“printed circuits”—what makes transistor radios possible.
“moiré”
Pour qui tu me prends? [“Who do you take me for?”]
[What follows are undated notes written on loose pages and tucked at the back of the notebook. They were almost certainly written in the summer of 1965—there is a list of movies seen in August.]
Pure narration (oral) >>>> More + more complex forms of narration (writing!)
Chinese fairy tale Mucking everything up!
“She wanted to be a horse. So she was a horse.” Already in Homer: concern with cauality (i.e. plausibility)
What happens is linear, cannot be other than it is. Sprouts / shoots off from main line: something is like something else (similes)
Narration just traces the event, which is (was) there
…
Monet’s “Waterlilies” would look pretty much the same upside down—space is verticalized.
“One note painting” (20th century) already appears in the 1880s.
…
[Edvard] Munch The Kiss—grain of wood has higher order of reality than figure represented.
4/20/65
To see more—(PROJECTS)
For instance, colors + spatial relationships, light
My vision is unrefined, insensitive; this is the trouble I’m having with painting
Another project: Webern, [the American writer Paul] Bowles, Stockhausen. Buy records, read, do some work. I’ve been very lazy.
To give no interviews until I can sound as clear + authoritative + direct as [the American writer] Lillian [Hellman] in the Paris Review.
Read (buy): >Paris this summer
[The French writer, composer, and musician André] Hodeir book
Adorno on music
Barthes on Michelet
Annette [Michelson]:
I don’t like paintings I have to “read”—hence I don’t care much for Flemish painting (Bosch, Breughel)—want to be able to take in whole structure at one look
Neo-Pythagorean character of contemporary music (Boulez, etc.)
Interest in work of art with total structure (totally structured, (totalizing).
…
new sensibility > more encumbered attentiveness
uomo di cultura [“man of culture”] ([the twentieth-century Italian writer Cesare] Pavese)
A Rosenquist [the American painter James Rosenquist] White Cigarette, which had some of the dead nocturnal poetry of [the 1955 Robert Aldrich film based on Mickey Spillane’s crime novel] Kiss Me Deadly