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May. 8th, 2009 02:59 amMore favorites converging - Woolf and Borges in Calvino and Lynch:
After The Waves, and perhaps Ulysses when I think of "Circe" and "Ithaca", the two books I love most that I've never finished are Cosmicomics and Mr. Palomar, both of which start at [what I assume must be] their strongest - especially "The Distance of the Moon" in the former, so curiously similar in pace, tone, novelty, young love and slightly older anguish to Chapter 1 of Orlando (a book I'd have loved more if I hadn't finished it, since nothing in the rest is up to the opening, despite interesting mystical genderbends and whatnot). Palomar's first chapter has this perfect, perfectly Woolfian & Wavesian, most perfectly Calvinian paragraph, though -
The hump of the advancing wave rises more at one point than at any other, and it is here that it becomes hemmed in white. If this occurs at some distance from the shore, there is time for the foam to fold over upon itself and vanish again, as if swallowed, and at the same moment invade the whole, but this time emerging again from below, like a white carpet rising from the bank to welcome the wave that is arriving. But just when you expect that wave to roll over the carpet, you realize it is no longer wave but only carpet, and this also rapidly disappears, to become a glinting of wet sand that quickly withdraws, as if driven back by the expansion of the dry, opaque sand that moves its jagged edge forward.
- describing/embodying impossibly well how one's eyes bonk the beach in surprise when following an incoming wave.
Meanwhile, in Orlando's Spanish translator Borges' lecture on "The Metaphor":
[Chuan Tzu] dreamt that he was a butterfly, and, on waking up, he did not know whether he was a man who had had a dream he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who was now dreaming he was a man. This metaphor is, I think, the finest of all. First because it begins with a dream, so afterwards, when he awakens, his life has still something dreamlike about it. And second because, with a kind of almost miraculous happiness, he has chosen the right animal. Had he said, "Chuan Tzu had a dream that he was a tiger," then there would be nothing in it. A butterfly has something delicate and evanescent about it. If we are dreams, the true way to suggest this is with a butterfly and not a tiger. If Chuan Tzu had a dream that he was a typewriter, it would be no good at all. Or a whale — that would do him no good either. I think he has chosen just the right word for what he is trying to say.
I like best "it begins with a dream, so afterwards, when he awakens, his life has still something dreamlike about it" - it hints at one reason Mulholland Drive is so much more powerful and troubling than its much cleaner predecessor Lost Highway.
And I wonder if Borges mentioned a whale as a tribute to Melville's success at metaphorizing reality, or anyway that part of it that doesn't vague away unfollowably, presumably the part where we die, or will, or could.
And there's something else later in that talk about the moon as a mirror that at first seems picked up in the brief, gorgeous "Moon in the Afternoon" in Palomar, which in turn is a sort of sky version of that wave paragraph - but Calvino (1923-1985) wouldn't have been at that lecture (Harvard, 1967), nor read its transcript (lost, found, pub. 2000). Uncanny channelling (Borges' Joyce would say unchanny canaling), or I wonder if Borges wrote of it elsewhere? His lectures are often stitched together from bits of his essays, or set-pieces from interviews - so like Bloom the way he mixes block-quotes from books he hasn't written yet in among others from ones he has.
And yes, I stay stubbornly stopped at "Ithaca" - and it and "Circe" were Borges' favorites too.
After The Waves, and perhaps Ulysses when I think of "Circe" and "Ithaca", the two books I love most that I've never finished are Cosmicomics and Mr. Palomar, both of which start at [what I assume must be] their strongest - especially "The Distance of the Moon" in the former, so curiously similar in pace, tone, novelty, young love and slightly older anguish to Chapter 1 of Orlando (a book I'd have loved more if I hadn't finished it, since nothing in the rest is up to the opening, despite interesting mystical genderbends and whatnot). Palomar's first chapter has this perfect, perfectly Woolfian & Wavesian, most perfectly Calvinian paragraph, though -
The hump of the advancing wave rises more at one point than at any other, and it is here that it becomes hemmed in white. If this occurs at some distance from the shore, there is time for the foam to fold over upon itself and vanish again, as if swallowed, and at the same moment invade the whole, but this time emerging again from below, like a white carpet rising from the bank to welcome the wave that is arriving. But just when you expect that wave to roll over the carpet, you realize it is no longer wave but only carpet, and this also rapidly disappears, to become a glinting of wet sand that quickly withdraws, as if driven back by the expansion of the dry, opaque sand that moves its jagged edge forward.
- describing/embodying impossibly well how one's eyes bonk the beach in surprise when following an incoming wave.
Meanwhile, in Orlando's Spanish translator Borges' lecture on "The Metaphor":
[Chuan Tzu] dreamt that he was a butterfly, and, on waking up, he did not know whether he was a man who had had a dream he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who was now dreaming he was a man. This metaphor is, I think, the finest of all. First because it begins with a dream, so afterwards, when he awakens, his life has still something dreamlike about it. And second because, with a kind of almost miraculous happiness, he has chosen the right animal. Had he said, "Chuan Tzu had a dream that he was a tiger," then there would be nothing in it. A butterfly has something delicate and evanescent about it. If we are dreams, the true way to suggest this is with a butterfly and not a tiger. If Chuan Tzu had a dream that he was a typewriter, it would be no good at all. Or a whale — that would do him no good either. I think he has chosen just the right word for what he is trying to say.
I like best "it begins with a dream, so afterwards, when he awakens, his life has still something dreamlike about it" - it hints at one reason Mulholland Drive is so much more powerful and troubling than its much cleaner predecessor Lost Highway.
And I wonder if Borges mentioned a whale as a tribute to Melville's success at metaphorizing reality, or anyway that part of it that doesn't vague away unfollowably, presumably the part where we die, or will, or could.
And there's something else later in that talk about the moon as a mirror that at first seems picked up in the brief, gorgeous "Moon in the Afternoon" in Palomar, which in turn is a sort of sky version of that wave paragraph - but Calvino (1923-1985) wouldn't have been at that lecture (Harvard, 1967), nor read its transcript (lost, found, pub. 2000). Uncanny channelling (Borges' Joyce would say unchanny canaling), or I wonder if Borges wrote of it elsewhere? His lectures are often stitched together from bits of his essays, or set-pieces from interviews - so like Bloom the way he mixes block-quotes from books he hasn't written yet in among others from ones he has.
And yes, I stay stubbornly stopped at "Ithaca" - and it and "Circe" were Borges' favorites too.
