proximoception

Gonna bite my tongue and stay clear of Crowley's Krauss grousing. This side the great watershed our differences make little difference. And a lot of that little comes down to a sort of allegiance to the terminology you're accustomed to.

The person you might be can't speak to you, but you're ready to hear the unspoken words. In what isn't words you hear them, including what within words isn't word. In your own, too: the best thought is active sonar.

I'm liking all this novel-reading. Certain great stylists talk to your life less stupidly than you do. You hear your life talk back, are amazed that it can, then that you can understand it, then that life's been speaking to you. You start to say something back.

The air is dense with what we might fill it with. Not the surface of the air but the middle. That great weight in the middle of emptiness. All on us. Too much. That much on you you run crabwise seeking an end to the burden, hoping the pressure will fall on the place you just were.

The air united us just as much cold. But the warm air we're happy to share. Cold breaths are cones to outer space, seem like just you and all nothing. In the warm you're in something smaller and greater, where you don't know where it starts, what else it might encompass, where it's taking us.

Past a point you age more than a day per day, more than that each tomorrow. Life's a leap where you find you were only a handful of sand right as you start to come down, getting a faceful of you in the face. You know that you're you now - now it's you you leap from.

I've never told women to smile but the smiles of some are all of my memories. I hang from them, fall from their absence. Maybe I want them rare because I need them real. This is the value of blushing, how it's earnest as agony. A blushing woman's smile comes always just in time.

Sleep melts the world but the world's already melted - it's us that recongeal it on our waking way. Sleep knows better, so any sleep that makes it into waking instructs us effortlessly. The melt isn't pell-mell, but currents. Long, tangled weeds that share a tending.

I never know whether to knock barriers of sympathy down, what they might be holding up, out or in. I know I was once unaware how many are there. I don't think they're any weaker now I've mapped so many. They're just as electric to contact. But now, even joined up, they seem shorter. Perhaps it's me, that I've drifted above and a bit to the side.

What unifies us is weak, they say, what drives us apart violent, decisive. And they're right, they're always right. But who can remember decisions, and who stays with violence when something else offers. The weak thing pulls on, rain or shine. And what if instead we said gentle?

Two passages I posted earlier, separately, (and near as I can tell the respective culminations of these two authors) now strike me as closer than I suspected:

Emerson:

Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, - they alone with him alone.

Thoreau:

I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me - to whom the sun was servant - who had not gone into society in the village - who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor - notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum - as of a distant hive in May - which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.

Thoreau's is halfway to the Little, Big coda, "Once Upon a Time." The hall of the firmament one was born to walk and the gods one is charged to surpass are a little more past, hypothetical, fabular - and then more so with Crowley, at the end anyway.

The ruined house in Suttree, on the other hand, is pretty much a nihilistic version of "Directive" - or like Robinson's "House on the Hill" or Kipling's "Way Through the Woods" extended into intolerably detailed, almost masochistic probing of the rot of loss.

Need to reread Melville's "Piazza" and "I and My Chimney" I think.

I'd unaccountably never read Socrates' second oration in Phaedrus till now. Past gratitude and amazement and love and disturbance and quickened pulse and the conviction I'll be going back to this within days, I have these observations:

1. I am tickled pinker than pink that Christianity owes more than half of itself to a dialogue about the proper conduct and uses of pederastic cruising. Seriously, I'm going to be howling over this on my deathbed. What fact could be more fun? Not even the Clement letter suggesting Jesus may have himself been leader of a homosexual mystical cult--very, very distant runner-up.

2. It's astonishing how many paragraphs in a row I could agree with completely as an atheist. A Shelleyan atheist, anyway--Shelley's reading of Plato was ingenious but possibly not very inaccurate, and it comes from exactly here much more than even the Symposium. So much else comes from this: the Garden of Adonis, via Virgil, Wordsworth's children by the shore. Obviously all of Dante and Danteism, Petrarch and Petrarchism. Much in Little, Big (the synthesis of this with A Midsummer Night's Dream in which = also ingenious, beautiful, crucial) and Aegypt. Shakespeare satirized it, every aspect, with the greatest sympathy, didn't he? We escape the trap into a worse one.

3. This is also the source, or a major one, of McCarthy's view of the world: specifically, what he exactly reverses for his take on the war between earth and sky (in one of his modes: in another, all you can do to live is evade this war, by whatever evasive means present themselves). It additionally strikes me as the generic source of his Cities epilogue, and perhaps various other Border Trilogy recitations ("The Grand Inquisitor" and "Before the Law" chapters in D. and K. were their more direct models): the absolute explosion of some literary work in progress by another voice speaking a story deeper than and prior to both the work interrupted and the mind of the reader reading, which the literary work, when resuming, can only discuss.

4. The quest tradition itself is a sort of a parody. The progression seen as episodes and extent, all through ambiguous, in place of a possible inward and upward enhancement.

Noticing some parallel career aspects among McCarthy, Crowley, Roth and wondering if there's anything to them (dates from my memory and/or ass):

1. Early, very personal novel they work on for a decade or two, while publishing other books that mean less to them. Suttree c. 1959-1979; Engine Summer c. 1966-1979; My Life As a Man c. 1962-1974

2. Subsequent dense, mature masterpiece. Blood Meridian 1985; Little, Big 1981; Sabbath's Theater 1994

3. Late-career series of long, connected books almost but not quite as good, to some degree retreading and ramifying material of that central work. The Border Trilogy to 1998; Aegypt to 2007; The American Trilogy to 2000 or 2001

There's problems, of course: some of us prefer the first four Zuckerman books (late 70s-early 80s) to the Faulknerian '90s trilogy, and all these guys were publishing other books throughout. But I wonder if there's something to that format: breakthrough, masterpiece, paradigmatical cleanup. Maybe we can see two such cycles in Roth: Portnoy/My Life (reassigning it)/Zuckerman, then Shylock/Sabbath/Am. Trilogy. And the Everyman/The Road parallels may speak of a fourth, "coda" phase.

How true is this for other novelists' careers? And does the series phase inevitably involve dealing more closely with the history of one's times? A youth, maturity, rumination model--then maybe the fourth, facing down death.

I don't think many match it neatly. Many do start autobiographical, though, and it's often this phase of their work that they find most problematic themselves, delaying publication for years while revising, or writing on and on and publishing just to be done with it. The A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or V. phase. What else can we shove into this? Sons and Lovers--but wasn't that written rather hurriedly? Early Tolstoy squishes together into one autobiographical novel well enough, and The Cossacks fits the delayed/multistage publication model. War and Peace can be seen as a series I suppose (as can perhaps Underworld?--an American Trilogy all blended up). Anna Karenina is clearly on a fault line, maybe between stages 3 and 4, though it's more of a central statement about people, and W&P was both that and a meditation on history. None of this is clean.

Shakespeare doesn't fit it very well either. He didn't have much of a chance to be autobiographical, of course, and the history genre's heyday was the '90s.

Autobiography to vision to history to death.

Another characteristic of careers at their onset is parody, of course. Titus, The Torrents of Spring, Northanger Abbey.

Poetry? Paradise Lost is 2 and 3, The Prelude is 1 going on 2. The Faerie Queene entirely refuses conformity here and everywhere. 1 through 4 seem simultaneously present in Shelley at every point, sometimes all in the same work.

Leaving John Crowley behind with the summer. Some last words about his books, all of which are good, all of which I recommend:

The Deep: His first published book, apparently science-fictionalized from a historical novel he started as a teenager. Good writing in a plain (almost young adult fiction) style supports a rather ingenious plot, leading to a genuinely stirring ending. Only real flaw is a certain narrative bareness. Also, though some notions and images from his later books are here in ovo, if his name weren't on the cover you might never guess this is Crowley's.

Beasts: Like The Deep this masquerades as '70s action sci-fi but is actually a low-key gnostic apocalypse, where the false world is thrown off and we're left facing each other for the first time in the first present moment. I think the central conceit--genetically engineered man/animal hybrids--represents individual differences. False conforming pressures removed, we're all slightly alien to each other, and that's all to the good. Less interesting structurally than its predecessor, though Crowley's voice starts to become recognizable.

Engine Summer: Incalculable leap forward, his best after Little, Big and perhaps Aegypt. Apparently written in his mid-twenties then cut down for publication a decade later, this is the best science fiction (and hippie/drug culture) book I've ever been exposed to. Too short to meander (though there are snake's-hands), this may also be Crowley's most perfect novel-as-novel, unless that's The Translator. Best to just praise and praise this and leave its story a surprise.

The Deep, Beasts, and Engine Summer are in print together under the title Otherwise. The old pocket paperbacks aren't too hard to find, in my experience.

Little, Big: How good is it? Of the thousand or so novels I've read I can think of a handful I liked better. Not sure any of those are as wise or important. An attempt of mine to describe or explain it could go on forever and never quite get it right.

Aegypt (Part 1--The Solitudes): First installment of a vast novel started in the '70s and still in progress. Quite wonderful, quite hard to describe. Even hard to place generically, as supernatural elements in it may all be imaginary--the need for them, the secret story told through such lies is part of the subject.

Love and Sleep (Part 2 of Aegypt): I discussed this before I think; first third a strange but excellent departure, rest of the book seemingly as lost as its characters. The metaphors that remind you into your larger self have a way of going stale, of being taken literally and becoming mere insanity. This must be absurdly hard to write about. A thing I'm proud of in my own life is a car I drew in high school art class: we were to copy a magazine ad. Everyone picked a car at an angle, I picked a horizontal view. Took about a month to make it look properly three dimensional, I had to add all kinds of shines and shades that hadn't existed in the photograph. Reminds me of his challenge here, keeping interesting a tale of people whose own stories have gone bad or missing.

Daemonomania (Part 3 of Aegypt): Much more assured than Part 2, which takes place more or less simultaneously. Still all over the place, but the tourguide is in fine form. Most of the supernovel's plot is wrapped up by the end, Part 4 will apparently be a new departure.

The Translator: Russia and America during the Cold War. A very fine, very likeable "general fiction" work. Start with this if you're allergic to fairies, werewolves or the future. It will give you confidence in Crowley's importance and powers.

Lord Byron's Novel: Almost as good, marred slightly by a tacked-on feeling expositronic "present day" narrative. Basically a novel Byron might have written, cynical and poignant and fun, voiced perfectly.

Novelties & Souvenirs: A collection of stories contemporaneous with the writing of Aegypt, some of them close to it in message or tone; others close to Little, Big: "The Nightingale Sings at Night" could have been included as one of Alice's father's stories, "Novelty" documents its moment of birth. "In Blue" is set in the Beasts world (and maybe Engine Summer's also). The cornerpiece of the book is the time-travel novella "The Great Work of Time", which is impressive if confusing. My favorite story is the hilarious "Gone", other highlights are "The War Between the Objects and Subjects" and "Exogamy". Very readable book, though Crowley's stronger in novels.

"The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines" (available in Conjunctions 39, also published separately): Forty page story. Baconians as Gnostics. Heartbreaking.

The Solitudes, the first Aegypt installment, was scarcely inferior to Little, Big itself. Exquisitely written and thought-out all through; and happy, the happiest book I've read since Operation Shylock. Something about the subject of breaking out does this, maybe, authors following their characters into rejuvenation, freed space? Maybe the converse is what made Love and Sleep uneven, the author dropping back into confused contingency along with his characters (the theme being intrication, the Hermetic version of the Fall). Many sections are still great, but the ornament, finish and sustained exhilaration are gone--and feel long gone. The first third is particularly excellent, but such a departure, like we're in a new novel entirely by some other John Crowley. He seems to be getting back on track toward the end, but I thought so too at various points in the middle, little marches of felicity quickly lost among strangenesses or mere goings-on. Actually, a development two thirds of the way in shocked me like nothing I can remember reading ever has. I got used to it eventually, it wasn't entirely out of step for Crowley, but I'm not sure it worked the way he wanted it to. Hard to know in cases like this whether the book failed you or you failed the book. Anyway, still mostly a success, but I'm taking a little break before getting into Daemonomania, and not just because of eye trouble.

from Aegypt, John Crowley

There had been a story in the beginning--in his own childhood and the human race's--that a child could inhabit, an account that could be taken literally, about Adamuneve and Christopher Clumbus and a sun with a face and a moon with one too, a stock of stories never discarded but only outgrown, gratefully, name by face, like an old sunsuit. Stories, outgrown just as grownups had always hinted he would outgrow them when with fierce literalness he would try to get one or another outlandish detail certified or explained; stories, their aging fabric giving under his fingers. On a certain Christmas Eve, when an argument had been raging in the children's quarters, Sam Oliphant had taken him and his cousin Hildy, a girl just older than he, upstairs into his big bedroom, and explained carefully about Santa Claus, and the explanation seemed not only true but a sort of relief, like breaking out of an egg; he and Hildy were being admitted into a larger circle of the world. Only don't tell the little kids, Sam said, because they're still young, and it would spoil it for them.

And then further on he had come forth again, from a larger story, about God and Heaven and Hell, the Four Cardinal Virtues and the Seven Glorious Mysteries and the nine choirs of the angels. All in a day, it seemed on looking back: all in a day he had stepped outside it all, with a sigh of relief and a twinge of loss and a nod of resolution that he would not turn back that way now even if he could, and he could not, it was too small to go back into, an intricate clockwork sphere that he would carry within him then like an old-fashioned turnip watch, that he could draw out and look at, in perfect working order, only stopped forever.

And on: passing outward through vast realms of meaning, through the circles of history, not only Christopher Columbus who found out the world was round, not only the Founding Fathers and their awful wisdom, but outward through whole universes of thought, each growing somehow smaller the more he learned about it, until it was too small to live within, and he passed on outward, closing the door behind him.

And came then at last to the furthest outside of all, the limitless one, the real world. About which nothing could be said, beause in order to reach it he, he and the human race, whose progress he was joining just at this point, had had to pass through every universe that could be talked about. He had them all within him; he had outgrown them all; naked, he looked outward toward silence and random stars.

He had got something fearfully wrong.


from Moby-Dick, Melville

There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:--through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.


from Prometheus Unbound, Shelley

We have past Age’s icy caves,
And Manhood’s dark and tossing waves,
And Youth’s smooth ocean, smiling to betray:
Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee
Of shadow-peopled Infancy,
Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day;
A paradise of vaulted bowers,
Lit by downward-gazing flowers,
And watery paths that wind between
Wildernesses calm and green,
Peopled by shapes too bright to see,
And rest, having beheld...

Halfway through Crowley's The Translator, at a section where there's lots of Russian words and phrases dropped, and the language is flooding back into my memory from shelves and forest shadows. What I'm finding is that all the words I can't remember are replaced by French, which I've dabbled with since. Seriously, they're written right over the Russian words, and not just for cognates. What a strange phenomenon, like my mind has a single English to Foreign dictionary. With a lot of blind spots, I'm basically thinking trilingually, in an Ada-esque grotesquerie. Thankfully Latin is long gone.

Great book by the way. Very Crowley, but successfully invades what you'd think of as Roth territory, nostalgia and Eastern Europe. Unwrapping all kinds of packets of both inside me as well.

I need to pick up Resurrection again. And The Idiot. And reread Akhmatova.

The volume of Elizabeth Bishop fragments and discards has been pushed to February, looks like. There's a new Joseph and His Brothers translation out. I like Lowe-Porter but the new guy's a clearer and faster read, probably indispensable for a book so long and dense.

I'm officially engaged.

Turned 29, got the Longman v.2, am loving Little, Big though no longer sure where it's going. Haven't wanted a book to go on forever like this since Moby-Dick in 2003. Strange, lovely state of ultimate trust between author and reader. I've resolved to buy all cheap copies I run across hereforward, for distribution among the deserving.