proximoception | (no subject)

"Shakespeare's Memory" is a lot more moving when you take it as being about Borges. That is, that he still had at 80 the memories of whoever it was that could write like he did c. 40, but was not that writer.

I don't mean to sell the story short. Borges at 80 is an excellent writer. But at 40! His self-deprecation about this period in interviews is fascinating - a few confusing stories derived fom Kafka - as is how easily it's flipped once an incredulous interlocutor says but what about this, what of that. Then he says yeah, that was pretty good, wasn't it? Not quite the tone of Faulkner looking back on As I Lay Dying, but not quite not.

"The Congress" affects me for similar reasons - he'd clearly worked out much of what was essential to the story back when he was amazing. But wrote it so long after, an attempted comeback after all those knife fighter tales. And it is one in its fashion. Helped, if anything, by how the disconnect between subject matter and handling reflects that subject matter, which is about the partial giving up of a dream, or rather the desperate need to retain it in a world that had moved on from believing in such things. How the belief makes it true - not because belief can do that to just anything, but because some parts of the truth require being somehow already believed in to become true (e.g. democracy, we're all sure finding out). One last Garden era story, but only if you let it be, need it to be. He did.

And one he probably couldn't have written at 40. His style was too cruel, paradoxically. It wrung out the human, hence was perfect only for the story of humanity's having been wrung out. For "The Garden of Forking Paths," where he doesn't even let us know that Stephen Albert is Goethe, and Goethe, to him, the anti-Nazi. The one believer in people for what they are in themselves. In "Congress" we're allowed to know such things.

Not that he's wrong about the Kafka part. "The Gospel of Mark" is his "Penal Colony," "Funes" his "Hunger Artist" or "Hunter Gracchus," the minotaur piece surely self-consciously his "Burrow." The desecration of the temple becoming part of the ceremony is pretty much his "Lottery," no?

Calvino and Borges got some kind of special pass for continuing Kafka. Maybe Abe did too. His premises, anyway - Beckett and others took over his essence, his white noise self. I kind of prefer the premises. Funny how his ideas can persist in both. I guess because Kafka read his own stories: read too many Kafka stories and you become Beckett. It's like the Italian and Argentine had heard and repeated without listening. Or perhaps it's merely their firm secularity? Maybe Kafka himself couldn't listen to what he was saying for being too close to the roar of religion.

I also think, and say this as a true lover of Kafka, that Borges and Calvino manage to keep Kafka's stories from spilling in a way Kafka almost never could. In very different ways - Borges by turning them into batteries, energies conserved through infinite repetitions. Because they describe endlessly repeated mistakes, sure, but that's like solar power for a narrative. Calvino comes more out of late Kafka, and stops the loss of energy the way late Kafka did, by making the channels of uncertainty out which it ebbs part of the story. Rephrasing uncertainties as possibilities, variations. Repurposing fragments as flowcharts.

I do love Borges best of all, of these. Calvino's perfections are his Baron's, mostly - he is perfectly amazing at finding ways to go on when who could? in that line. Which is heartening, and sustains many a Borgesian whorl in its everlasting unspooling. All love and honor to Calvino, really, really. But Borges, peak Borges! Those dozen-ish stories, maybe eighty pages tops. Not at all heartless when understood, and never unsympathizing - just seeming so because of what's being analyzed, and how broadly: those ten to twelve ways we can't take it, since who could? but thus ruin what could have been. Which "could've" never quite gets described until The Congress. No, it is in "Garden." I feel about "Garden" how I feel about Shelley, I think. And little else - the astronomer's dying gestures, Turgenev's letter to Tolstoy, Crane's ball of gold. Maybe something in Chekhov, some essence instead of event.

I miss reading in the craziest way. Like all the vitamin deficiencies at once.

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Miss reading because you're writing?

I love this: "Calvino and Borges got some kind of special pass for continuing Kafka. Maybe Abe did too. His premises, anyway - Beckett and others took over his essence, his white noise self. I kind of prefer the premises. Funny how his ideas can persist in both. I guess because Kafka read his own stories: read too many Kafka stories and you become Beckett. It's like the Italian and Argentine had heard and repeated without listening. Or perhaps it's merely their firm secularity? Maybe Kafka himself couldn't listen to what he was saying for being too close to the roar of religion."

But I love Kafka best of all these.

Hey do you know the Nabokov story "The Vane Sisters"? A cut below, obviously, but pretty cool.

Wow. I especially like this:

"... Borges and Calvino manage to keep Kafka's stories from spilling in a way Kafka almost never could. In very different ways - Borges by turning them into batteries, energies conserved through infinite repetitions. Because they describe endlessly repeated mistakes, sure, but that's like solar power for a narrative. Calvino comes more out of late Kafka, and stops the loss of energy the way late Kafka did, by making the channels of uncertainty out which it ebbs part of the story. Rephrasing uncertainties as possibilities, variations. Repurposing fragments as flowcharts."

I'm not even sure I can say I love Kafka, though I've read him the most of these three. I've read him a lot but somehow my reading falls short.

--I also wonder, why do you say you miss reading? I mean to say, why aren't you reading, or do you mean that you miss reading in a particularly broad or deep way that you did during one period of your life? But that period of reading can't have really stopped, its effects can't have stopped, not if you can still reflect on it like this.

I don't think so, will look for it.

Miss reading because I don't read, except for work. Excepting tiny bits of cheating now and then.

I'm always reading something, I guess, but events have conspired against pleasure reading. To the point where I don't think I've read a leisure book since whenever Red Doc came out. And have had to cut a lot of corners with non-leisure ones.

Maybe that can change soon.

I'm missing the point of the Nabokov story, I guess? Must have been difficult to do and all, but so what? Also not seeing the connection with Borges.

The snow walk stuff was fantastic, and if anything rather ruined by the review.

Thought brought me 'round. It's The Dead again, in a new fashion - it's not that he's haunted, but that he wants to see it that way, like she did. That he wants those moments to have been given to him by them, the ability to see them. Which it may have been, but the wanting is the more important thing - the "gesture." To keep their drops and rainbows going, some. A companion piece to Signs and Symbols in its way.

I'm still not used to sentiment (good sense) being married to both cynicism and gamesplaying in N. As strange a tone as Stendhal's or Thoreau's, but I got used to them I guess. Nabokov I still enjoy at once and an hour later but am creeped out by in between.

I think I know what you mean.

I am assuming without even mentioning the question that you figured out the trick in the last paragraph, which I didn't and which apparently none of the original readers did either, though my question to myself after I read about it was, of course! How could I of all people have missed this? I who love the Perecian mode that this anticipates -- this plagiarism by anticipation, as Perec says.

And then, given that, I think what really works, beyond the trick, is that it's Sybil, and not Cynthia, who did it. Cynthia could do the snow drops, but the reality and the metrical substrate ,the quasi-poetic meter of the Sybilline utterance, both are Sybil's. She signs it in the 18th century style ("who once had the honor to think himself, your obt servant, Sam Johnson"). So it's not only what happens to him but who he is thinking it through, telling it out, that is hers. And that became uncanny for me after I thought about it for a while. The uncanny superiority of Sybil to Cynthia even in death. The one sister the real strangeness, the other just another ghost. Sybil as the ghost of writing as well. Something like that. Too quick, I know, and here,

not in great haste then, still (Proximoception), our response ends.

I thought "she" just meant the parking meter. After scanning around for some kind of verse meter somewhere, which there only seemed to be (barely) in the Ouija poem.