Milan Kundera

[Sitaram]

The Sound Word


Sound mind, sound doctrine, Long Island Sound, sounding the depths, are all the same word “sound.” Sound right?

"Conversation is an art," they say. Reading may be an art or a science depending upon whether you simply read or read into. When I was a child, I read as a child; thought as a child; understood as a child. When I matured, I did not put away childish things, but began to play ruthlessly with words and ideas. Words are instruments of thought and make a music more than tinkling symbols and brash prose. Siddhartha upon the banks learned from a stringed instrument of the middle way that we must not be too loose or we shall not sound nor yet too tight lest we break.


When we play an instrument just right then we say that it “sounds.” The sound lurks within, a secret, hidden. When we publish and publicize, it becomes more secret; more hidden. We supply breath or spirit; inspiration. A music of the spheres is a circle of fifths on a scale of one to eight. We play instruments and we play on words. Play is the industry of childhood and adults are a by-product of concern to environmentalists.


To speak or read or write we must have an “about.” “Speak of the Devil,” Goethe did. We speak about this. We write about that. We read about something else. “About” suggests a circle. Now, to talk in circles is reckoned not a virtue but a flaw, though not a tragic flaw.


Speaking of circles, Milan Kundera ends his novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” with a circle:

Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room.

Plato is circles. Aristotle is lines.


Aristotle asks Kundera, “Why the circle?”


Kundera replies:

Therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

Plato asks Kundera, “Why the butterfly?”


Kundera replies:

No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development. Their dog, Karenin, surrounded Tereza and Tomas with a life based on repetition, and he expected the same from them.

Sitaram asks Kundera, “Why Karenin?”


Tolstoy replies:

Happy families are all alike.

 

[clueless]

Words are instruments of thought and some linguists say they shape people's vision of the world. If this is the case, people speaking different languages see the world in different ways and the conclusions you draw about 'sound' and 'play' or 'about' only arise for English speakers.

I don't know what the Kundera of 'the lightness of being' thought, but the Kundera of 'Ignorance' does not believe that happiness lies in circles or repetition. Children like to read a story as soon as they finish or watch a film they have just watched over and over. Adults don't. Perhaps some adults are still happy with repetitions but most prefer lines - straight lines or zigzags, trying to reach for something rather than going back.

 

[Sitaram]

The Language of Fireworks

I am grateful for your thoughtful reply. Such a response is not easy to come by, but it is what I desire.

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring ...

Each sentence which enters our mind, enters with an explosion of thoughts, of memories, like a holiday firewords display. And yet, it is bad manners, and poor style, to ramble on in such a stream of consciousness. If I am to respond properly, then I must pick and choose sparks from that expanding sphere of fire or, I suppose embers is a better word for them by the time they fall into my grasp, for they have cooled down a bit, and reorganize them into some respectable, linear, thematic sequence, or syllogism (of the A implies B, B implies C, Aristotelian variety, train of thought, line of reasoning).

Would you believe, that I actually unconsciously made a Freudian slip in the above paragraph, and typed firewords display when what I really meant to type is fireworks display! Perhaps no one will believe me that it was an honest mistake. They shall accuse me of being coy and sly; a dissembler.

Words are instruments of thought

I feel like being playful and turning your sentence around, to see what happens.

Thoughts are the instruments of words

(I hope to fill in here, in the coming hours and days, with some thoughts from Wallace Steven's essays "The Necessary Angel", on the nature of imagination, to explore what it might mean to say that thoughts are the instruments of words. The mind is a faithful servent, but a cruel master.)

Let's take a look at the opening pages of Wallace Steven's essays, "The Necessary Angel."

ISBN 0-394-70278-6

Vingate Books

In the Phaedrus, Plato speaks of the soul in a figure.

He says:

Let our figure be of a composite nature - a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteer of the gods are all of them noble, and of noble breed, while ours are mixed; and we have a charioteer who drives them in a pair, and one of them is noble and of noble origin, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble origin; and, as might be expected, there is a great deal of trouble in managing them. I will endeavor to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immortal creature. The soul or animate being has the care of the inanimate, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing; - when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and is the ruler of the universe; while the imperfect soul loses her feathers, and drooping in her flight at last settles on solid ground.

(end of Phaedrus quote)

We recognize at once, in this figure, Plato's pure poetry; and at the same time we recognize what Coleridge called Plato's dear, gorgeous nonsense. The truth is that we have scarcely read the passage before we have identified ourselves with the charioteer, have, in fact, taken his place and, driving his winged horses, are traversing the whole heaven. Then suddenly we remember, it may be, that the soul no longer exists and we droop in our flight and at last settle on the solid ground. The figure becomes antiquated and rustic.

Oh yes, Kundera! Well, don't worry. I shall try to stay on topic and speak more of Kundera in a while.

Modern warfare has developed an ordnance of missles with marving warheads, which, though they travel to their target in more or less of a straight line, yes, as they approach their target, burst into a fireworks circle of smaller weapons. (Notice how I have nudged the topic back to circles and straight lines?)

Regarding the notion of a changing, evolving Kundera, slightly different with each novel, I agree that an author may change in such a fashion. Excellent point you make. And since the poor bloke is still alive somewhere in France, we might in theory hunt him down and grill and cross-examine him until he explains to us in detail his own evolution.

Beauty is momentary in the mind --
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.

 

[Sitaram]

reserving next post

I just got an idea! I have never tried this before.

The idea is for me to reserve a few posts here, and use them as a kind of OUTLINE, to achieve two purposes.

First, these forums tend to limit each post to 10,000 characters. So, if I reserve several in a row, I shall have some contiguous space to develop my thoughts over the coming days.

Second, I can use the extra posts as a skeleton outline for the direction I would like to take. But then, as I need some more space, I can use edit to rearrange....

 

[Sitaram]

Embroidering Earth's Mantle - Remedios Varo

What a wonderful idea, to write an essay such as you seem to suggest, about the Kundera of "Immortality" vs the Kundera of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

Certainly, this is a project I would enjoy working on. I just recently read both novels (within the past 6 months)

======================================
I am going to make certain observations about this painting by Remedios Varo, Embroidering Earth's Mantle. I shall attempt to bring certain aspects to bear upon the art of the novel in general, and Kundera's novels in particular.

In Mexico City, they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

--The Crying of Lot 49, end of Chapter 1

Here are other paintings by Varo:

http://www.angelfire.com/hiphop/diablo4u/remedios.html

This little passage is from "The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon.

But this little passage is an entire novel in itself. It is a nuclear explosion, a tsunami, a Krakatoa.

Allow me to do some wild, extemporaneous, expository conjecture, word by word, phrase by phrase:

"a number of" = the human race, all who have ever lived or shall ever live; the collective consciousness of the Zeitgeist.

"frail" = humanity in one word, frail, weak, ineffectual, self-destructive, sisysphean.

"girls" = humanity as feminine. God or the Universe is masculine. The final line of Goethe's Faust speaks of "the eternal feminine which draws us above," it is Beatrice which draws Dante upward.

"prisoners" = "the mind is its own beautiful prisoner" e.e. cummings

"top room" = upper chamber, the mystical supper

"tower" = tower of Babel, ivory tower, Borges "Library of Babel"

"embroidering" = Socrate's warp, woof, and shuttle of the dialectal process.
These frail young women are all faithful Penelopes, fending off the Philistine suitors, awaiting Odysseus return.

"which spilled out" = Rapunsel lets down her hair for her lover to ascend.

===================
Scenes and events from works and biographies become the vocabulary of my own private tapestry which I weave as reader and beholder of art. It is only through this private weaving, this creation of my inner world, that I make these things my own.
=============
This painting, Embroidering Earth's Mantle, by Varo, combines two very ancient metaphors for the acquisition of knowledge and power: churning and weaving.

Notice the central figure who is reading a book and stirring a vessel.

There is an ancient Hindu myth about the churning of an ocean of milk in search for the nectar of immortality. There is a less ancient symbol of Socrates' weaver's loom, with warp, woof, and shuttle, as an image of the dialectic process. We are always weaving and churning. But, weaving and churning are two very different processes.

 

[Sitaram]

A Lightness that is Too Heavy

Not long ago, I was passing by an outdoor cafe, and noticed a middle-aged woman sitting at a table reading a novel. I am always fascinated by what others are reading. We struck up a conversation. I mentioned to her that I was reading Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. She explained that she had tried to read it, but it was just to heavily laden with ideas (my words, not hers) for her to finish it. She does not like to read heavy things. She prefers light things.

It sounds like I am trying to make a bit of pun. She found Unbearable Lightness too heavy. No pun intended. This is actually what she said.

There is nothing wrong with that. Each of us has our own agenda as to what we seek to achieve when we read or when we write.

 

[Sitaram]

I constantly return to re-edit

Well, I guess I have more than enough space to develop my thoughts, and I could always link to another thread, I suppose.

If anyone does take an interest in what is being said here, then I would encourage them to revisit periodically, since I will be using edit to add to and change these various posts.

 

[Sitaram]

Seeing the Gates of Eden

I suppose if I reserved enough threads, then I would have sufficient space for a Doctoral dissertation on Kundera. That would be fun! There must be someone in the world at this very moment working on such a dissertation. I once read that at any given time in the world there were 300 students doing Masters and PhD papers on Derrida!

I want to mention one of the images I saw in my "mental fireworks" display this morning as the words of clueless entered my mind.

I saw, Adam, or perhaps Eve (in the myth of Genesis), biting into the forbidden apple from the tree of knowledge, but, as they are taking that very bite, before they have even chewed, much less swallowed, there eyes just happen to notice that there are GATES in the distance, the gates of Eden. But, being innocents, they have yet to learn the meaning and function of a gate, to make possible exits and entrances.

 

[Sitaram]

That which transcends language

clueless you make an excellent point about the words sound and play being unique to English, and the "play on words" falls apart in translation.

Kundera has quite a few complaints about the untrustworthyness of translators. Milan is, understandably, quite fussy about how is works are translated from Czech into other languages.

All morning, I have been thinging about the Undertoad in that novel (now I will have to check a thread to remember the title and author, oh yes, "The World According to Garp" by John Irving).

http://www.stanuu.org/riptides.html

"The undertow is bad today."

"The undertow is strong today."

"The undertow is wicked today." Wicked was a big word in New Hampshire - not just for the undertow.

And for years Walt had watched out for it. From the first, when he asked what it could do to you, he had only been told that it could pull you out to sea. It could suck you under and drown you and drag you away.

It was Walt's fourth summer at Dog's Head Harbor, Duncan remembered, when Garp and Helen and Duncan observed Walt watching the sea. He stood ankle-deep in the foam from the surf and peered into the waves, without taking a step, for the longest time. The family went down to the water's edge to have a word with him.

"What are you doing, Walt?" Helen asked.

"I'm trying to see the Under Toad." Walt said

"The what?" said Garp.

"The Under Toad," Walt said. "I'm trying to see it. How big is it?"

And Garp and Helen and Duncan held their breath; they realized that all these years Walt had been dreading a giant toad, lurking offshore, waiting to suck him under and drag him out to sea. The terrible Under Toad.

Garp tried to imagine it with him. Would it ever surface? Did it ever float? Or was it always down under, slimy and bloated and ever-watchful for ankles its coated tongue could snare? The vile Under Toad.

Between Helen and Garp, the Under Toad became their code phrase for anxiety. Long after the monster was clarified for Walt ("Undertow, dummy, not Under Toad!" Duncan had howled), Garp and Helen evoked the beast as a way of referring to their own sense of danger. When the traffic was heavy, when the road was icy - when depression had moved in overnight - they said to each other, "The Under Toad is strong today."

A child hears parents discussing the dangers of the undertow at the beach, and the child mistakenly believes that they are discussing an under-toad, some hideous toad which is lurking in wait to drag off unsuspecting victims.

A child's misunderstanding is a felix culpa, a happy accident.


Someone at another forum mentioned reading that book in translation, in a Scandanavian language, and the translator had rendered "undertoad" as "underlobster".

We see a felix culpa in the serendipitous beginning of Kundera's Immortality

Our dreaming life is a transformative world located somewhere, in a twilight zone, between truth and falsehood.

 

[Sitaram]

A Game of Negative Badminton

Suppose our discussions of literature and authors are like a game. Let's pretend they are like the game of badminton. How far might we take this analogy, and how might such an understanding help us in this current discussion of the novels of Milan Kundera which is in progress, or any discussion for that matter?

The various topics are the birdies, and we swat them back and forth to (or at) each other across a net which is our theme perhaps.

When I was ten years old, our neighbors set up a badminton net in their back yard. I watched them playing the game in the traditional fashion. I decided that there must be a much better way to play the game. I invented my own game of badminton, a sort of negative badmintion. The object of my game was to keep the birdie in the air as long as possible. The first person to cause the birdie to fall to the ground was the loser. One might only be a real winner as long as the game continued in progress, and the birdie continued in flight. Now, should we christine our game of negative badminton as goodminton?

When you are playing traditional badminton, or tennis, or some other such competitive game, you are playing against your opponent. You attempt to win by beating or defeating your opponent. When you are playing goodminton, then the other player is not your opponent, but rather your partner. Your true opponent becomes yourself, lest you make the wrong moves and cause the flight of the birdie to cease.


Now, I have recently learned the new bb command list, so let's see if I can make it work and list the various birdies or topics we have up in the air:

(for the sake of brevity, I shall refer to The Unbearable Lightness of Being with the acronym TULOB.

• The changing Milan Kundera's (of TULOB and Immortality)
  
• The linear (Aristotelian) approach to human happiness
  
• The circular (Platonic) approach to human happiness
  
• Native Language Dependent (DNL) literary devices
  
• Native Language Independent (INL) literary devices
  
• Words as instruments of thoughts
  
• Thoughts as instruments of words

Well, I have finally make my list command do what I want, after a bit of google and soul searching. I shall add to the list from time to time, as new topic headings, or birdies emerge.

By the way, it occurs to me that the language of Jungian archetypes, found in the myths and stories of every culture, is a language which is INL.
Devices like the Undertoad, which is always threatening to become the Underlobster at the hands of a translator, is a DNL device.
We can easily understand why an author like Kundera is very fussy about translations.


The metaphor of game playing can be quite instructive.

Here is something else, related, that I wrote about this metaphor, entitled, Playing the Game

http://forums.thebookforum.com/showthread.php?t=7494

My accidental discovery, in childhood, of goodminton is my own felix culpa.

 

[Sitaram]

Madly Splashing Colors

This thread is a canvas, and I am madly splashing colors and slashing lines.

Your mind is a canvas, and mine. Your thoughts are the instruments of my words, my firewords which kindle and ignite displays in your imagination.

Why does a tuning fork have two prongs?

Why does a dialogue have two people?

 

[Sitaram]

The Underlobster Playing Goodminton

I am please with my discovery of the game of goodminton. Somehow that game was concealed in badminton all these years, hiding, waiting, waiting for Sitaram, just as the under-toad was hiding, waiting, for so many years, for John Irving to come along, to be discovered.

But goodminton is a DNL literary device.
My ark will only float in the English Channel.

Being afloat and sailing anywhere, even if only in a puddle, can be preferrable to being shipwrecked, a stranger on the shore.

http://members.tripod.com/RoadSide6/dbpoem.htm

I am reminded of this stanza from Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre ("The Drunken Boat")

If there's water in Europe for me
It's the cool, dark pond at balmy twilight
Where a child squats full of sadness, launching
A frail boat like a butterfly in May.

 

[clueless]

Maybe it is neither circles nor straight lines. Cycles with peaks and troughs, like light waves or brain waves on an ECG. We go back but we do not return to the same place because things have changed and we have changed; it is the same river, but not the same water.

Regarding the notion of a changing, evolving Kundera, slightly different with each novel, I agree that an author may change in such a fashion.

I do not know how he has changed, if it is in the way I mentioned or in any other, but he has changed, hasn't he? He is writing in French now, instead of Czech.
A circle is reassuring for those who fear the unknown. A 'better the devil you know' position could be dominant in a society devoid of freedom. It is reassuring to wake up in the morning in your own bed rather than a police cell; return home from work and find your family there; go to work to find out that you still have a job and you are not in some blacklist written by the authorities.<O</O

 

[clueless]

Do firewords exist? So many people believe they do. Magic is based on it, on believing that certain words have power to transform reality. It is not the meaning of the words but the sound of the words. Religions too, whether mantras or the different names of god, some of which are considered to have a greater effect than others.
Other firewords. When people name children, only a few choose a name because of its meaning. Others name their children after relatives but many people choose a name because of its sound or because of it is the name of a famous person. Do they expect that the child will grow to be like that person?

 

[clueless]

What you said about the painting and Beatrice reminded me of ’s The Plumed Serpent. The main female character – I always forget characters’ names – had two husbands. The first, an Irish politician worshipped her, put her in a pedestal; the second, a Mexican revolutionary general, was her master. Neither of them saw in her a human being – she was an unreachable queen, a creation of a male imagination or a slave, dominated by elementary forces. In both cases she was a prisoner, although <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com /><st1:City w:st=Lawrence</ST1 /><st1:City w:st=Lawrence </ST1</st1:City>did not see it that way. He thought she was free in the second case.
The girls in the painting are prisoners and at least one of them is aware of it and is dreaming of freedom, of being rescued, of running away.
----------------
The painter was part of a tryptic. The painter said it represented her years in a convent school. The embroidery represents creation, women as creators. The hooded figure in the centre reading is simply that. There was always a nun reading when the girls were doing needle work, so they would not talk and would not think. That was the purpose of reading during meals and other tasks in monasteries and convents.

 

[clueless]

A rose by any other name is still a rose, but how many would agree and how long it took before someone realised that that was the case?

Too much credit where none is due. I have never read Irving, Pynchon or Stein. I have heard Stein's quote before but it was not what I had in mind. I was thinking of a rose by any other name would smell as sweet

 

[Sitaram]

We can't go home again

Maybe it is neither circles nor straight lines. Cycles with peaks and troughs, like light waves or brain waves on an ECG. We go back but we do not return to the same place because things have changed and we have changed; it is the same river, but not the same water.<O</O

It was Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, who said that we cannot step into the same river twice.

Reflections upon the river of Heraclitus give a different hue to Nietzsche's doctrine of Eternal Return.

I wrote a poem about Heraclitus' river.

Heraclitus' Baptism
(written 1:00pm Saturday, August 4, 2001)

In the Citadel
Of the Ephemeral
The Glory
Of the Transitory,
Changeless in constant changing,
Hymns itself glorious,
Perennially evanescent
And nascent,
A holiness notorious.

Escher's river
Flows back to it's source
And we are ever
Baptized in it's course.

- Sitaram



I like this idea of returning to the same place, or attempting to, but it is no longer the same. I would like to illustrate that idea, powerfully, with the poem by Wallace Stevens, Sea Surface Full of Clouds. Then, as I re-read Kundera's TULOB and Immortality I shall be on the lookout for examples of frustrated return.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stevens/clouds.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Stevens

Stevens' poem describes the same scene, as it is revisited by the same person upon five different occasions. But each visitation finds a different scene. That which is beheld is the same, but the beholder has changed.

Sea Surface Full of Clouds

I

In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And in the morning summer hued the deck
And made one think of rosy chocolate
And guilt umbrellas. Paradisal green
Gave suavity to the perplexed machine

Of ocean, which like limpid water lay.
Who, then, in that ambrosial latitude
Out of the light evolved the moving blooms,

Who, then, evolved the sea-blooms from the clouds
Diffusing balm in that Pacific calm?
C'e'tait mon enfant, mon bijou, mon âme.

The sea-clouds whitened far below the calm
And moved, as blooms move, in the swimming green
And in its watery radiance, while the hue

Of heaven in an antique reflection rolled
Round those flotillas. And sometimes the sea
Poured brilliant iris on the glistening blue.

II

In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
At breakfast jelly yellow streaked the deck

And made one think of chop-house chocolate
And sham umbrellas. And a sham-like green
Capped summer-seeming on the tense machine

Of ocean, which in sinister flatness lay.
Who, then, beheld the rising of the clouds
That strode submerged in that malevolent sheen,
Who saw the mortal massives of the blooms
Of water moving on the water-floor?
C'tait mon frere du ciel, ma vie, mon or.

The gongs rang loudly as the windy booms
Hoo-hooed it in the darkened ocean-blooms.
The gongs grew still. And then blue heaven spread

Its crystalline pendentives on the sea
And the macabre of the water-glooms
In an enormous undulation fled.

III

In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And a pale silver patterned on the deck

And made one think of porcelain chocolate
And pied umbrellas. An uncertain green,
Piano-polished, held the tranced machine

Of ocean, as a prelude holds and holds.
Who, seeing silver petals of white blooms
Unfolding in the water, feeling sure

Of the milk within the saltiest spurge, heard, then,
The sea unfolding in the sunken clouds?
Oh! C'etait mon extase et mon amour..

So deeply sunken were they that the shrouds,
The shrouding shadows, made the petals black
Until the rolling heaven made them blue,
A blue beyond the rainy hyacinth,
And smiting the crevasses of the leaves
Deluged the ocean with a sapphire blue.

IV

In that November off Tehuantepec,
The night-long slopping of the sea grew still.
A mallow morning dozed upon the deck

And made one think of musky chocolate
And frail umbrellas. A too-fluent green
Suggested malice in the dry machine

Of ocean, pondering dank stratagem.
Who then beheld the figures of the clouds
Like blooms secluded in the thick marine?

Like blooms? Like damasks that were shaken off
From the loosed girdles in the spangling must.
C'etait ma foi, la nonchalance divine.

The nakedness would rise and suddenly turn
Salt masks of beard and mouths of bellowing,
Would -- But more suddenly the heaven rolled

Its bluest sea-clouds in the thinking green,
And the nakedness became the broadest blooms,
Mile-mallows that a mallow sun cajoled.

V

In that November off Tehuantepec,
Night stilled the slopping of the sea. The day
Came, bowing and voluble, upon the deck.

Good clown, . . . One thought of Chinese chocolate
And huge umbrellas. And a motley green
Followed the drift of the obese machine

Of ocean, perfected in indolence.
What pistache one, ingenious and droll,
Beheld the sovereign clouds as jugglery

And the sea as turquise-turbaned Sambo, neat
At tossing saucers -- cloudy-conjuring sea?
C'etai mon esprit bâtard, l'ignominie.

The sovereign clouds came clustering. The conch
Of loyal conjuration trumped. The wind
Of green blooms turning crisped the motley hue

To clearing opalescence. Then the sea
And heaven rolled as one and from the two
Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.

 

[clueless]

Why does a tuning fork have two prongs?

Why does a dialogue have two people?

To keep the birdie in the air, like in goodmington. When is not a real dialogue but an alternation of monologues, the birdie goes out of the players' reach and fall. It is cacophony; nobody really listening so the sounds clash with each other.

The Hebrew vision appeals to me more than the Greek. For someone to miss the mark, one needs to be competitive and have a target. The wrong path seems more appropriate but, perhaps not to return, but to make another path. 'There is no path; paths are made by walking'.

 

[Sitaram]

The Crowd and Duet

Tomas is torn between the crowd and duet.

Perhaps there is some connection between goodminton and fidelity.

Tomas in TULOB (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) desires promiscuity, but is falling in love with someone who desires fidelity. These conflicting desires create a tension. The string of an instrument must be drawn taught between two points, before it can sound. Sound is vibration. At the proper frequency, a tone may cause a second fork to vibrate in sympathy. An ancient philosopher in India, Pantanjali, speculated that everything reduces to vibrations, or vritti.

When two minds are drawn to the same subject, there is a tension, and a tone is sounded. Sometimes there is sympathy; two feeling similarly. Sometimes there is a harmony.

I have been thinking about Faulkner as I add to this thread. I am searching right now for something that Faulkner said about writing. As I search, just now, it occurs to me that perhaps each author, each novel, is a piece from the same grand puzzle. The many pieces, scattered on our livingroom carpet, seem unrelated, but, ultimately, they all fit together perfectly, if only we have the time and patience.

This is what started me thinking:

I don't know what the Kundera of 'the lightness of being' thought, but the Kundera of 'Ignorance' does not believe that happiness lies in circles or repetition. Children like to read a story as soon as they finish or watch a film they have just watched over and over. Adults don't. Perhaps some adults are still happy with repetitions but most prefer lines - straight lines or zigzags, trying to reach for something rather than going back.

Faulkner said of his own work:

"As regards to any specific book, I’m trying primarily to tell a story, in the most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive. But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do…I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world. Tom Wolfe was trying to say everything, the world plus “I” or filtered through “I” or the effort of “I” to embrace the world in which he was born and walked a little while and then lay down again, into one volume. I am trying to go a step further. This I think accounts for what people call the obscurity, the involved formless “style,” endless sentences. I’m trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period. I’m still trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead. I don’t know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep on trying in a new way. I’m inclined to think that my material, the South, is not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don’t have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time. …Art is simpler than people think because there is so little to write about. All the moving things are eternal in man’s history and have been written before, and if a man writes hard enough, sincerely enough, humbly enough, and with the unalterable determination never never never to be quite satisfied with it, he will repeat them, because art like poverty takes care of its own, shares its bread."

 

[clueless]

It is true that there are very few themes to write about, but there are so many ways to write about them as there are different ways to see or feel about those themes. There is also the question of form - how to write about them.