Dear dieary,
I spelled your name wrong but am deciding to leave it. I like the way the word die worked its way in there. Reminds me of diesel.
Not even I want to hear about my mundane daily struggles, but if I don’t record them here, something bad might happen. So today we rented a van. Why did we rent a van? My sweetheart ordered a cheap couch that doubles as a bed, and this item would not fit inside our hatchback. Now, having gone to the trouble of paying for some hours of fun with a larger vehicle, we wanted to make the most of its hauling ability, so we also purchased seven huge panels of drywall and transported them alongside our new piece of furniture. Then the problem was finding a place to store all this stuff. Because the drywall is eight-by-four feet oblong, which works out to roughly 2.97 square metres!!!!! And the other thing that we bought is very big too. So what happened is that we put the drywall in the bedroom, on the floor; and then we shoved the couch-bed inside our closet. (We have a walk-in closet.) But the one major fact that I want to memorialize about this mission is this:
I don’t like heavy lifting, especially of awkward-shaped objects. And I don’t like hard work. That’s why I chose to become a writer: all that is required of a writer is that she be able to lift a pencil; don’t worry about the weight of the notepad, for that rests on your lap; and now you get to recline at the beach all day, wearing your 1950s-style bathing suit, a slick black one-piece, and dream up stuff to jot down for your next blog entry. Each post that you publish earns you 700 dollars, which works out to about 180,000 dollars per year. If you’re feeling inspired and you end up writing a lot, some years you can make as much as $240,000! Not even astronauts make that much.
NOTE. Those indifferent to Twin Peaks can skip the next paragraph.
Here now, before I start, so as to avoid letting its eluding of my chase mar this entry as it did my last one, I will give my reaction to the most recent episode of Twin Peaks: The Return which aired last night. It was a passable hour: uneven, as I expect from this venue; some decent scenes, some tedious; but overall the mood was mostly on point (very dark, dreamy and foreboding), and it hovered around the numinous: the show's depiction of which is one of the reasons I stick with it through thick and thin – I cannot recall anywhere else seeing persuasive representations of surreality, the world underlying this world: what some call heaven and hell. So I have neither loud complaint nor loud praise for this last hour; I wish the rest of the series had raised itself at least to the level of this recent show, and held that as its middling standard, rather than remaining slouched at an even lower level. I stand by my unfaltering and perhaps unfair opinion that, so far, only hours 3, 4, and 8 are eternal. All the rest of the fifteen hours that have aired are lukewarm politics: clocktime. But among those dull hours, there are a couple merely par that would make sufficient filler, and that is this last one (15) and I think also #9 (which I reacted to in the first paragraph of my entry called R-RO-O-OY-Y-YG-G-GB-B-BP-P-PR); so if I ever teach a class titled "The Aesthetics of Cinema" or "Against Plot in Series Television" or "How to Distinguish Genius from Mere Craftsmanship in Film Directors" or "David Lynch for Experts" and I want to screen for my class the essential 2017 Twin Peaks, but we lack the time to nod thru the entire 18 hours, also presuming (contra my prediction) that the last two as-yet-unaired episodes prove to be trash, then I would start at hour 3, play thru 4, skip to 8, and chop the best scenes from 9 and 15 together as a sort of postlude, allowing the thing to close with the credit sequence from that latter episode, because I like that eerie half-rap track instrumental together with the shots that accompany it; I mean, I like this only as a sort of overture that comes afterward: I don't mean that it is substantially sublime, as Lynch is when he's in top form (we must be precise with our words and opinions, for every future generation depends on us). Yet I really hope at least half of the upcoming two-hour finale will be breathtaking, perhaps even the penultimate episode that airs next week (16), so that something deservedly excellent can serve as an ending.
But enough about the avant-garde soap operas we all love to hate. Now I will talk about some books.
We’ve been working our way through, in our daily readings aloud, Breton’s 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism,” and I want to record a couple sentences that stood out to me from yestereven’s session.
...the mind is ripe for something more than the benign joys it allows itself in general.
That's fragment number one; now here's fragment number two:
...on its own, the mind is incapable of finding itself guilty of cavil; it has nothing to fear, since, moreover, it attempts to embrace everything.
Those two fragments come from the same paragraph. (I’m using the translation by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane.) And the following sentence begins the very next section; so these thoughts, even in Breton’s essay, enjoy proximity.
The mind which plunges into Surrealism relives with glowing excitement the best part of its childhood.
The best part of MY childhood was its ending. I became an adult at the age of five, after learning that everything is gray. I first sought to master all the fields of genuine Science, so as to harness THE TRUTH. When I accomplished this, I was about seven or eight years old; yet I realized that THE TRUTH was not worth keeping in a cage, so I released it. But it died of fright, for it had been scared that I was going to kill it. Now here’s more Breton:
From childhood memories, and from a few others, there emanates a sentiment of being unintegrated, and then later of having gone astray, which I hold to be the most fertile that exists. It is perhaps childhood that comes closest to one’s “real life”; childhood beyond which man has at his disposal, aside from his laissez-passer, only a few complimentary tickets; childhood where everything nevertheless conspires to bring about the effective, risk-free possession of oneself.
That single detail “risk-free” makes me wary. I never want to forget what Emerson warns: Nothing is got for nothing. One fact that keeps striking me, after our daily readings, is how much more surrealistic satisfaction I feel from reading Emerson’s manuscript poems than from reading Breton’s manifesto. To be fair, I’m comparing umbrellas to sewing machines here; a fairer test would be to read each soul’s poetry back-to-back. I do not say to compare their essays, because Emerson obliterates all but a very choice few, such as Montaigne, in that arena (yes it is a battle) – and this is not just my opinion. In our daily reading of four titles, we go from X to Y to Breton to Emerson; with X standing for Samuel Butler, and Y for James Merrill; so this juxtaposition is fixed in my semi-memory: A.B. vs. R.W.E. The last from the latter that we read is the one that starts out: “Poet of poets / Is Time, the distiller...” I’ll copy just the last stanza here, because I love it, and it’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about.
Nought is of worth
In earth or in sky
But Love & Thought only.
Fast perish the mankind,
Firm bideth the thought,
Clothes it with Adam-kind,
Puts on a new suit
Of earth & of stars.
He will come one day
Who can articulate
That which unspoken
Vaults itself over us,
Globes itself under us,
Looks out of lovers’ eyes,
Dies, & is born again;—
He who can speak well;
Men hearing delighted
Shall say, that is ours.
Trees hearing shall blossom,
Rocks hearing shall tremble,
And range themselves dreamlike
In new compositions,
Architecture of thought.
Then will appear
What the old centuries,
Aeons were groping for,
Times of discomfiture,
Bankrupt millenniums.
You can’t really go any higher after attaining such heights, so you’re forced to return to holy terra. So let me tell you that we plan to paint our room today. We did the living room and kitchen and hallway, and now it’s time to pain the big bedroom. [I left off that 't' by mistake, but again I'll keep it: it's a good point; a Freudian typo.] Off-white, boring; yes, everything is gray.
But why should anyone care about this?—nobody else has to paint today. People only care about what affects them personally, unless they’re me. I care about everyone. If I learned that you were painting your bedroom today, I’d care a great deal. And how, you ask, would my care manifest itself? I would send you a fruit basket. It’d have a little card attached, with a handwritten message: “Our condolences.”
Are you generous to orphans? Do you urge your fellow magnates to feed the poor? OR (I’m paraphrasing Alcoran sura 89: “The Dawn”) do you devour others’ inheritance greedily, and love wealth with all your heart?
Surely when We pound the earth to powder grounded, pounded to dust,
And comes your Lord, and angels row on row,
And Hell is brought near,
that day will man remember,
but of what avail
will then remembering be?
I myself am wholly convinced of the righteousness, the goodness, the morality, the correct-mindedness of generosity and compassion. Or even scratch those fancy labels and just say: I want to help whoever needs help, purely for the sake of helping alone. Help for helping’s sake. The reward is one with the act, and needs no system of bless-or-beware attached to it. But I thrill to the above passage, at least this English rendition by Ahmed Ali (I always use Ali’s version: I love it, I love it), because of those sounds in that first line—I’m worried that the speech will fly off its rails: Surely when We pound the earth to powder grounded, pounded to dust... And I also admire the way I’m forced to focus on a simple phenomenon of our existence which we undergo moment by moment but which is brought into high relief when put in context of a full temporal stop: the ineffectualness of memory. You forget to measure whether a piece of furniture can fit in your hatchback trunk; next thing you know, you’re actually standing there holding the heavy box and shoving, shoving, shoving it at your back seat, but a meter of its end still protrudes and you can’t shut the door: at this point, what avail is remembering? But it’s even worse on the last day of all, when God looms out with his army of angels and they hoist Hell near (this mobility intrigues me), like a real estate agent showing you not an apartment but a torture chamber. You think: Why must things be the way that they are, just so and not otherwise? If only I could have enjoyed my riches and also infused God and the angels with a memory of myself having done the opposite. But this is a will not a memory. Your memory ALWAYS gainsays what you wish had been the case. At least that’s how it is for me. Everything I can remember that I’ve ever done in my life is not just slightly off, compared with how I wish I’d acted, but dead wrong. So that’s why I myself fear Judgment Day: I’m not stupid; I know that God knows everything, and that therefore he’s read The Trial by Franz Kafka, and he’s seen all the Hitchcock movies about innocent folks getting caught up in strange circumstances that paint the illusion of their guilt. There’s no way that God’s not going to take advantage of the fact that...
No, I don’t want to descend into jokiness. I wanna take this stuff seriously. As a believer, I might indulge in jokiness; but I’m an infidel, or more accurately a doubting Thomas, and it’s thus my job to remain mentally vigilant and sincere.
We’ve been just reading straight through, from start to finish; and there are 114 suras total (in my copy), and we’re at 90 (“The Earth”), so we’re nearing the end. I like the way this last one starts:
I call this earth to witness –
And you are free to live upon it –
The unexpected allowance in that second line is what I love about the writing in this book. Surrealism never surprises me in this way; I’m caught and kept off-guard by both Surrealism (only its best attempts, tho) and on the other hand Alcoran, but in entirely different ways. So going from one to the other is like being a supernal boxing champion in the ring with a fellow invincible, and letting his left-right pleasantly pummel you pastless.
But back to the passage: what does the booming voice call this earth to witness?
That We created man
in toil and trouble.
I assume the thrust of this is intended to be similar to Yahweh God’s curse from Genesis 2, where he assures Man that he shall eat of the ground in sorrow all the days of his life, and that it shall bring forth thorns and thistles, and that he’ll have to labor hard just to get some field herbs to eat, and “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” But I also like to read the above lines (at least the given English is ambiguous enough not to bar such an interpretation) as if they mean: God created man, and it cost God great toil and trouble to do so. So it’s as though God himself suffered the curse before transmitting it to his creation. The sculpting of man is an act of hard labor, to God. And it’s like he’s determined to make mankind pay for this, in the form of fieldwork (since these creatures that were formed after his image can no longer be trusted to tend the royal garden) and by “greatly multiplying” the pain of conception: “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.”
But despite my obvious inability to listen meekly to divinities, I love that their messengers so often urge socioeconomic justice, fairness, compassion, and harmoniousness upon those who have ears to hear. And although I hate the whip side, the threat of punishment, I admit that in the following excerpt, I love the forceful phrasing of that last line:
To free a neck
(from the burden of debt or slavery),
Or to feed in times of famine
The orphan near in relationship,
Or the poor in distress;
And to be of those who believe,
and urge upon one another to persevere,
and urge upon one another to be kind.
They are the people of the right hand
(and will succeed).
But those who deny Our revelations
are the people of the left hand:
The Fire will vault them over.
Lastly, I continue wondering what would be the right way to start sharing these old rap demos that I made during my twenties. I really wish I could do something with them, but each time I think about what that might be, I reach an impasse – it just seems that there is no demand for songs or albums nowadays; everyone is already overwhelmed with the avalanche of info that inundates them every instant on the internet: Who has time to listen to mangy rap tracks by unknown artists? Plus the fads, the trends, and the taste for rap that the public has...
When I watch a fish eat a bug, I think: How can they do that!?
It is a rotten idea, I need to face it. If I upload any audio junk of mine, I should do it solely for myself, like I did with my books. Don't think about an audience: Go and be underground. So now I ask myself: What is it that YOU want to hear? Well, I answer, I like the idea of compiling a collection of our worst efforts, the unlistenablest rap ever erred. ...Yeah, now that I am considering it, I like it even more: a tape of dispirited rap; smithereen rap; ad rap... I gotta think more seriously about this. It'll take a while to curate the material, because we have a trove of offerings that fit the bill.
P.S.
And my mom just called. She could not remember how to get her DVD player to play on her TV screen. I told her that she needs to press the SOURCE button on her remote. She said that her remote does not work because it needs batteries. So I said to feel around the sides of the TV screen: there should be a button that you can press with your finger which toggles between the incoming signals. And sure enough, there was a button, and it made the movie appear. So she thanked me profusely and said OK, I'll let you go now. And I said, Wait what film are you gonna watch? And she gave the name and said apologetically that she only bought the title (at a garage sale, by the way, for one U.S. dollar) because she will watch anything with Annette Bening in it. Then I was glad I asked, because I had not known this about my mother. So after we hung up, I did a quick search of Bening's filmography; and now, next time I talk to my mom, I will tell her that she should watch American Beauty (1999).
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