in the library, part I
Amazing what one can discover in books: in a long-closed tome of philosophy-- generations-old pubic hairBooks, haphazardly stacked at various heights (some precariously high), resembling double-helix staircases ending in air; so impossible a combination of large and little, thick and thin books, they appear staircases for the insane.
Successful is not the work which gains popular or critical acclaim; it is the obscure little book which, left behind in an asylum, works its way through the hands of madmen.
I desire a personal library absent of all fluff, essential, however large. When I weed through my library, pulling books to be sold or donated, it is less like weeding a garden, less like pruning a shrub, less like the patient work of bonsai, than it is like the whim of a malicious prison warden who, sauntering before a row of prisoners standing upright as the spines of books, fingers two or three for elimination.
The simple beauty of the covers of French books: author, title, publisher, perhaps the word roman in tiny type, perhaps a symbol, an illustration no bigger than one’s fingernail; around all of this, perhaps a border, conservative, linear; otherwise, simply the solid, complete blue, green, yellow, red of its cover, your book’s face.
My library is full of French devils.
Rather than a French club, a French Accent club, for which no knowledge of the French language is necessary, only the ability to speak English with a French accent.
On the steps of the public library a wino sits. He takes one long and final pull from his bottle snug in its paper sack, stands and staggers away. We see the bottle he has left for empty; it is on the seventh step. We feel the urge to go up to it and remove it from the sack; we hope to find in it a ship stranded on the glass, the sea of cheap wine having been drunk dry. But reaching the fifth step, we catch ourselves remembering that such scenarios are the stuff of sweet stories; nevertheless, we continue up the steps and enter the library.
He is stranded at sea, clinging to an unidentifiable fragment of his original ship, faced on all sides by the uncut noose of the horizon, by the imperceptible death of his own will and the ironic prospect of dehydration followed by drowning in a sea with no sympathy for the ripples he contributes, by the inflation of the self that comes with death and will end with the horizon cinched tightly around his neck. He summons strength against this subtle death by recalling a vignette composed by Michaux: the one describing the dramatic destruction of a man standing stranded in the middle of a solid but malleable sea, which smashed him to smithereens on waves as jagged as mountains. He wakes in the rain, when the rain in his dream appears to his tired eyes the sand in his hourglass, the world's horizon his glass' narrow waist.
The Bible is that book which I have only reservedly used as a reference text.
Do yourself a favor: crack open Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis.
Journals of Amiel, Renard, Gide, Boswell, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Rochelle, Green
Pensées of Joubert, Pascal
Notebooks of Camus
Maxims of Rochefoucauld
Products of the Perfected Civilization by Chamfort
Confessions of Rousseau
Prose poems of Baudelaire, Edson, Simic, Michaux
Soap by Ponge
Roland Barthes, Incidents by Barthes
The Trouble with Being Born, Anathemas and Admirations, On the Heights of Despair, All Gaul Divided, A Short History of Decay by Cioran
The Agony of the Flies, The Secret Heart of the Clock by Canetti
Cool Memories by Baudrillard
Les Guérillères, The Lesbian Body by Wittig
Remembrance of Things Past by Proust
Cronopios y Famas by Cortazar
Dream Tigers, Fictions by Borges
Voices by Antonio Porchia
The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
The Gateles Gate, The Blue Cliffs Record-- zen koans
Love by Stendhal
Meetings by Buber
The Book of Questions by Jabès
The World in a Phrase by James Geary
The Cheshire Cat, The Other Side of the Mirror by Imbert
The Dramatic Symphony by Biely
The Book of Embraces by Galeano
Spanking the Maid by Coover
The Bathroom by Toussaint
Vanishing, This Is Not a Novel, Reader's Block, Wittgensteins's Mistress by MarksonI look up from the book I am reading and observe my fellow library patrons, who appear to be mimes in plain clothes, that is, wearing no make-up-- masks removed! Nor are their actions exaggerated, decisive enough; they are too subtle for comfort.
What I long for most are the days of uninterrupted reading when, in college, I browsed the library isles for hours, then left with a bag full of books to read under a campus tree; or even farther back, in high school, when I played hooky to spend hours in the public library, then left with a bag full of books to read in a public park. Two periods of my life which are virtually identical.
But I must confess to my more restless days in the library, to being possessed by the impulse to draw from the extensive shelves of the library and prescribe for myself as an apothecary might from the vast array of pharmaceuticals surrounding him. . . . But one is never apothecary when ill and lost between these aisles of insight; the shelves are not lined with pharmaceuticals, but with viles of brittle little leaves and powdered animal horns. When one is alone and ailing in the library, one finds himself in the den of a root doctor, grabbing handfuls of Heidegger and Bataille. . . .
College was a continuous flow of books to read, thoughts to write, and women with which to flirt. The library was filled with tens of thousands of books which pulled my eyes in that many directions; the entire campus itself was like a library, a library of another kind, a library not of books but of women.
South Beach, Miami. That segment reserved for women who prefer to bathe topless, the segment to which our father always took us to swim during summer vacation. I must have been in my early teens, trying to savor the sights, politely. The sight I was able to savor longest: a woman sunbathing topless in a long beach chair, engrossed in a hard-cover copy of a book, and it was as though her dark nipples were as riveted to the page as mine to her dark nipples.
Chaos of an old, overflowing address book. The first two names I transfer into the new: Adam, Eve. The many I do not transfer: depopulation from a war of circumstance. Clusters of the few surviving names, the beginning of simultaneous civilizations safely distanced in a new world.
Intrigued by the artistry of my own penmanship exhibited thus far, and always ready to make use of any method of exposing to myself my true character-- essence, if you prefer-- for observation, evaluation and improvement, I have just returned from the nearest second-hand book shop with a copy of Renee Martin's Secrets of Handwriting. It appears that I am just as I expected: I have been endowed with considerable gifts of character, intelligence and creative ability utterly denied the previous owner of this manual, blighted as it is with his hand-written margin notes.
An old friend who had studied handwriting analysis in Sweden had only this to say about mine: It is so full of contradictions, it leaves the page essentially blank.
The thrusts, parries, feints, ripostes, and lunges of a paragraph. . . .
A biography whose object is to humiliate, belittle, and ridicule its subject-- what could be more interesting? An autobiography of the sort.
He decides to read Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and so purchases for six dollars a used copy of the two-volume, 1934, Random House edition of Moncrieff’s translation. At home, his purchase splayed before him on the table, a calculator in his hand, he proceeds to break down the task before him: Volume 1, containing Swann’s Way, 325 pages; Within a Budding Grove, 383 pages; Guermantes Way, 422 pages = 1130 pages: Volume 2, containing Cities of the Plain, 375 pages; The Captive, 286 pages; The Sweet Cheat Gone, 193 pages; The Past Recaptured, 251 pages = 1105 pages: 1130 + 1105 pages = 2235 pages total. To complete reading by the end of November, in two months, 61 days - 8 Sundays = 53 days, he needs to read 2235 pages in 53 days = 42.169 pages per day to remain on schedule, and he never fails to meet his deadlines.
He wrote how many lines of poetry? Each of what length? If you string them together, how long would his line of poetry be?
The lyric poem, two square inches in which are held our most profound feelings.
Must not spend my life reading with the voraciousness of one cramming for an exam: Must not make my life the night before a test.
***
As you might expect a student would, I subconsciously formulated a conception of death as the pre-eminent ivy league university-- Death U. I assumed that I could obtain the answers to the earthly imponderables in the academic afterlife, that death was a graduation from life.A sunburst of students appears from between the dark oak doors of a university hall. . . .
A dreamer of a labyrinth of fully stocked bookshelves, he opens a bookstore, arranges the shelves into a labyrinthine maze rather than linearly and around the shop perimeter, and names it The Labyrinth.
A writing exercise: Call the classroom a country of suppressed writers. Assign students the task of expressing this oppression to the world outside the classroomroom, using metaphor/ symbolism, etc.; their words must pass under the nose and their ideas over the head of the Minister of Censorship, who is played by the teacher.
Hesse, Beneath the Wheel, the first book to affect me, my first book, read again after seventeen years. . . . It’s like following the streets of a town that was one’s home long ago. Phrases become familiar, images recognized, causing one to pause, linger contemplatively as in those corner hideaways one used to frequent, conjuring feelings, memories of the life one lived there, in that town, on those pages.
***
It is a simply written, straightforward story, the like of which I have learned to belittle during my years of reading hence.
- Chapter 1: Studious Hans takes test;
> - Chapter 2: Hans passes test;
- Chapter 3: Hans goes to the academy, meeets Hermann;
- Chapter 4: Hermann indulges in outside rreading and poetry writing, distracts Hans academically, disappears, leaves school;
- Chapter 5: Hans leaves school, returns tto father’s, contemplates suicide while in nature;
- Chapter 6: Hans rejuvenates, falls in loove with Emma, Emma leaves;
- Chapter 7: Hans becomes mechanic, gets ddrunk, drowns.
Yet I am startled by how much a blueprint it appears to have been for the years following my initial reading of it, even after it had long been buried under other books in my mind.
- I too was studious, though only in my arrea of interest;
- I indulged considerably in outside readiing;
- I contemplated suicide while sitting aloone in nature;
- I began writing poetry, neglecting my otther studies;
- I disappeared, left school;
- I returned to my father’s, rejuvenated.<
This is where the parallels between it and my life part, fortunately. This is also where my memory, before my rereading of it, had faded; it was of the first four chapters, the ones which include Hermann, and faded with the memory of Hermann in chapter 5. I realized that I had remembered nothing of Emma and had not even recalled Hans’ death.Another thing about Hesse’s book: the characters who vanish from Hans’ life: the shy boy known only as the Goppinger candidate, whom Hans meets during the exam but never thereafter; Hermann, whom he met in school but never saw after his expulsion. One wonders about their story since Hans.
The Absolute. The Ideal. The Whole. Totality, framework, synthesis. Hegel. Amiel et sa maladie de l'idéal. His Journal Intime: dark green vine at the foot of the ruined edifice.
Image from Cendrar's Moravagine: In a boxcar (?) a hanged, pregnant woman whose aborted fetus dangles between her legs, from the umbilical cord.
Judging by the books he left behind in his study, one would assume he was a man fluent in several languages and disciplines. But that was his guiding principal in assembling his personal library: to leave the world an absurdly false self-portrait in this monumental mosaic of books.
I read more than I write. I learn a language to read it, without the least interest in writing or speaking it.
I’ve never had any interest in speed-reading, though I’ve scanned a few pages in my day. In fact, I read slower every year: There was a time when I read every word, turned back over each sentence to observe its construction; now I notice my eyes move like the point of a pen over each letter and mark of punctuation; it has become as slow as scribing; perhaps in some years it will have slowed to the speed of writing.
Book of notes, bottle of wine, bottom of woman. . . .
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Should also the philosophical development of the individual recapitulate the philosophical history of man?
Among the curses of being human is being able to read only one book at a time.
A ploymathic autodidact is the best thing to be.
The sharpest line of advice: Tap into your own eccentricities.
Better to be a butterfly failure than a chrysalis success.
"A writer develops the muscles of his mind. This training leaves hardly any leisure for sport. It demands suffering, falls, laziness, weakness, setbacks, exhaustion, mourning, insomnia, exercises which are the reverse of those which develop the body."--Jean Cocteau.
***
Mind, Body: Idealism, Materialism.
***
Contemplative benefits of cigarettes and inactivity.
***
One cannot hold open a book and read-- really read-- when the twitching muscles of one's arms persistently invade one's consciousness.The Surrealists-- Breton, Eluard, Desnos, etc.-- would actually get into fist fights while writing their manifestos. American poets, for whom such a community is inconceivable, would do well to bloody their own noses every now and again, or at least seize themselves firmly by the shirt collar and lift themselves, threateningly, an inch or two off the ground.