weirdmonger
THE LAST BALCONY (www.nemonymous.com)
Bits & Pieces
Bits & Pieces
posted Monday, 30 November 2009
Some old DFL commonplace book items:
Cocteau on seeing Proust's corpse, with the manuscript of In Search Of Lost Time piled on the mantlepiece: That pile of paper on his left was still alive, like watches ticking on the wrists of dead soldiers.
Des says: Things that I love: my family, friends, 'classical' music (Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Shostakovich, Ligeti, Penderecki, Havergal Brian, Philip Glass...), pub quizzes, reading fiction (Proust, Lovecraft, Paul Auster, AS Byatt, Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Bowen, Dickens, Stephen King, WG Sebald...), Coronation Street, the sea, nemonymity...
“We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.”
---H.P. Lovecraft
”Hanging in the Dutch museums are works by a minor master who may be as deserving of literary renown as Vermeer. Saenredam painted neither faces nor objects, but chiefly vacant church interiors, reduced the the beige and innocuous unction of butterscotch ice cream. These churches, where there is nothing to be seen but expanses of wood and white-washed plaster, are irremediably unpeopled, and this negation goes much further than the destruction of idols. Never has nothingness been so confident.”
From 'The World as Object' Roland Barthes.
”So, to that question: 'Who has ever fathomed the depths of the abyss?' two men, among all men, have the right to reply: Captain Nemo and I.”
--- Jules Verne
“To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace.”
-- W.G.Sebald
“A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver?”
from Paul Auster's 'Portrait of an Invisible Man.'
Des says:
The Two Ways of Anonymity
(one) The most common way - to say something you don't want to be known as saying, i.e. for *devious* purposes (which could be spite, nepotism, insult, cruelty, dubious joke etc etc.) -- or publishing pornography, or issuing a Valentine's card, or hiding one's identity to avoid reputation depletion etc.
(two) A way that is hardly ever used - to make an artistic statement (within the philosophy of Aesthetics), such as Nemonymity,
(i) whereby the fiction author wants some objective view of his work to be made without his name getting in the way -- and I, as an editor, equally don't want it to get in the way when I consider his submission for publication and
(ii) as an experiment in fiction anthology presentation as a new gestalt reading experience (i.e. stories written independently and remaining separate yet somehow more 'together') and
(iii) leading to a brainstorming approach to reviews and critical appreciation and
(iv) bringing fiction nearer to the artist-naming (late-labelling) approach of other arts such as fine arts, architecture, music etc. (instead of having the name on the spine, on the title page and, often, on the top of each alternate page throughout the book) and
(v) trying to bring fiction more easily to an interstitial or between/cross-genre optimum.
I think it true to say that (one) above brings anonymity into disrepute, a cross which Nemonymous has to bear.
Des says:
Ranging from Bach's cello suites, via, Beethoven's Late Quartets, to the muscular dincopations (my word) of 20th century classical music (with many byways between), I feel that 'classical' music is like fiction injected straight into the vein.
My own definition of classical music is shown below(music being something about which I am more passionate than writing editing reading...), though I am musically illiterate as far as its technicalities are concerned:-
A formless area (defaulting towards an aspirationally cultural & predominantly exact art form) within the universal, uncompartmentalised, wholly accessible language of sound commonly known as music: encouraging spirituality and/or various permutations of all human emotions -- centring on and radiating from the serious deployment of an ostensibly organised pattern of acoustic sounds as produced by orchestral instruments and voices (performed normally by established or qualified interpreters/musicians, from one to very many). The question of taste and the unknowable relativities of disharmony and harmony are no part of this description, because such affective considerations differ from individual to individual. I shall tailgate any preconceptions...
****
Little yellow patch on the wall
please see 2nd entry on 2nd March 2003: here:
****
denemonisations, mnemonics, anemones, Bournemouth, nemoralis, Mnemosyne... Chasing the noumenon... any more?
***********
The crowd were silent
Reading the poems of Baudelaire.
Suddenly, completely unpremeditated,
They lurch forward, in unison,
And sing the National Anthem.
"The problem of hollowness, then, of a-Voidance, is really one of secondary satisfactions, the attempt to find substitutes for a primary satisfaction of wholeness that somehow got lost leaving a large gap in its place. The British novelist John Fowles calls this emptiness the 'nemo' which he describes as an anti-ego, a state of being nobody. "Nobody wants to be a nobody," writes Fowles. "All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mark the emptiness we feel at the core.""
from COMING TO OUR SENSES by Morris Berman
"... there is a way of going about enterprise, particularly as it applies to creativity, in which the activity is preceded by wholeness, rather than being a frantic attempt to achieve it. This frantic approach to life is not inevitable; we really don't have to spend our lives chasing ecstasy in an effort to shut down the nemo [nemo: a feeling of hollowness, an anti-ego, a state of being nobody].”
from Coming To Our Senses : Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West -
Morris Berman (Unwin Hyman, 1990, page 316)
"Next to her hung a further small picture, showing a saint carrying his own skin.”
-- Robert Aickman (The Cicerones)
"Her pillow sounded hollow with notes and knockings, notes and knockings you hear in condemned rooms.”
--Elizabeth Bowen (No. 16)
""WHAT do you call him? Nemo?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn.
"Nemo, sir. Here it is. Forty-two folio. Given out on the Wednesday night at eight o`clock, brought in on the Thursday morning at half after nine.""
-- Charles Dickens (Bleak House)
Des once said:
In my fifties looking back at the fifties...
Excitedly waiting for the Beano comic to drop on my doormat every Thursday, the smell of its pages, the stationery smell of newsagents in those days, the smell of books in general, uniform fifties library books (which drabness seemed to accentuate the delights emerging from the print within), my Mum making me wear waterproof leggings when it rained, being able to scribble stories in pencil, using plasticene, throwing bean-bags about in PE, sitting on bristly PE mats, fuzzy grey pictures on the TV screen which, on some evenings, were indecipherable... and arcade amusements on Walton-on-Naze Pier: hand-cranked cranes that could never quite grapple with the pack of cigs wrapped round with a brown ten bob note, pinballs without flippers, ghost house tableau where a coin would produce a skeleton out of the cupboard, silver balls spinning round vertically into the lose and win holes, the win giving you another turn, the lose losing you your coin. More lose holes than win. A lesson for life?
I'm now 60! (18/1/08)
***
Aren't shadows on the wall sometimes more revelatory than seeing the people that cast them? CHANCE is a novel by Joseph Conrad. Here, the characters and particularly the heroine are drained of any motive or sympathy because of the layering of narrative: we hear a spoken voice telling an inscrutable narrator of someone else’s view of someone else’s view of certain events, mix and match between. But it does not seem to lessen one’s interest in the book: it is character-driven and sympathy is allowed to take a backseat in preference to exploring one’s own motives for assigning certain motives to certain types of people just on the basis of hearsay and chance. Conrad writes in introduction to CHANCE: "And it is only for their intentions that men can be held responsible" and this novel seeks to show, I think, that any intentions are essentially unknowable. Perhaps even one's own intentions are unknowable: being shadows, too. The heart of darkness.
"Wrzesmian wasn't too popular. The works of this strange man, saturated with rampant fantasy and imbued with strong individualism, gave a most unfavourable impression by inverting accepted aesthetic-literary theories and by mocking established pseudo-truths. His output was eventually acknowledged as the product of a sick imagination, the bizarre work of an eccentric, maybe even a madman. Wrzesmian was an inconvenience for a variety of reasons and he disturbed unnecessarily, stirring peaceful waters. Thus his premature eclipse was received with a secret sigh of relief."
from 'The Area' by Stefan Grabinski..
"My pictures are visionary and symbolical, and, from first to last, have seemed to be painted by someone other than myself. [...] I am thus entirely self-taught, or taught by that other within me. I am aware that my pictures lack serious technique(if there is a technique that can be distinguished from inspiration and invention). I should have given up painting them some time ago, were it not that a certain number of people seemed to find something remarkable in them, and have thus identified me with them, and made me feel mildly important."
FROM "RAVISSANTE" BY ROBERT AICKMAN
"From the cosmic point of view, to have opinions or preferences at all is to be ill; for by harbouring them one dams up the flow of the ineluctable force which, like a river, bears us down to the ocean of everything's unknowing. Reality is a running noose, one is brought up short with a jerk by death. It would have been wiser to co-operate wih the inevitable and learn to profit by this unhappy state of things - by realising and accommodating death! But we don't, we allow the ego to foul its own nest. Therefore we have insecurity, stress, the midnight-fruit of insomnia, with a whole culture crying itself to sleep. How to repair this state of affairs except through art, through gifts which render to us language manumitted by emotion, poetry twisted into the service of direct insight?"
From 'The Avignon Quincunx' by Lawrence Durrell ('Constance' 1982)
comments (1)
1. Weirdmonger left...
Tuesday, 1 December 2009 8:36 am
"The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it." -- John Fowles 1964 (from 'The Necessity of Nemo' in 'The Aristos')
posted Monday, 30 November 2009
Some old DFL commonplace book items:
Cocteau on seeing Proust's corpse, with the manuscript of In Search Of Lost Time piled on the mantlepiece: That pile of paper on his left was still alive, like watches ticking on the wrists of dead soldiers.
Des says: Things that I love: my family, friends, 'classical' music (Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Shostakovich, Ligeti, Penderecki, Havergal Brian, Philip Glass...), pub quizzes, reading fiction (Proust, Lovecraft, Paul Auster, AS Byatt, Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Bowen, Dickens, Stephen King, WG Sebald...), Coronation Street, the sea, nemonymity...
“We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.”
---H.P. Lovecraft
”Hanging in the Dutch museums are works by a minor master who may be as deserving of literary renown as Vermeer. Saenredam painted neither faces nor objects, but chiefly vacant church interiors, reduced the the beige and innocuous unction of butterscotch ice cream. These churches, where there is nothing to be seen but expanses of wood and white-washed plaster, are irremediably unpeopled, and this negation goes much further than the destruction of idols. Never has nothingness been so confident.”
From 'The World as Object' Roland Barthes.
”So, to that question: 'Who has ever fathomed the depths of the abyss?' two men, among all men, have the right to reply: Captain Nemo and I.”
--- Jules Verne
“To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace.”
-- W.G.Sebald
“A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver?”
from Paul Auster's 'Portrait of an Invisible Man.'
Des says:
The Two Ways of Anonymity
(one) The most common way - to say something you don't want to be known as saying, i.e. for *devious* purposes (which could be spite, nepotism, insult, cruelty, dubious joke etc etc.) -- or publishing pornography, or issuing a Valentine's card, or hiding one's identity to avoid reputation depletion etc.
(two) A way that is hardly ever used - to make an artistic statement (within the philosophy of Aesthetics), such as Nemonymity,
(i) whereby the fiction author wants some objective view of his work to be made without his name getting in the way -- and I, as an editor, equally don't want it to get in the way when I consider his submission for publication and
(ii) as an experiment in fiction anthology presentation as a new gestalt reading experience (i.e. stories written independently and remaining separate yet somehow more 'together') and
(iii) leading to a brainstorming approach to reviews and critical appreciation and
(iv) bringing fiction nearer to the artist-naming (late-labelling) approach of other arts such as fine arts, architecture, music etc. (instead of having the name on the spine, on the title page and, often, on the top of each alternate page throughout the book) and
(v) trying to bring fiction more easily to an interstitial or between/cross-genre optimum.
I think it true to say that (one) above brings anonymity into disrepute, a cross which Nemonymous has to bear.
Des says:
Ranging from Bach's cello suites, via, Beethoven's Late Quartets, to the muscular dincopations (my word) of 20th century classical music (with many byways between), I feel that 'classical' music is like fiction injected straight into the vein.
My own definition of classical music is shown below(music being something about which I am more passionate than writing editing reading...), though I am musically illiterate as far as its technicalities are concerned:-
A formless area (defaulting towards an aspirationally cultural & predominantly exact art form) within the universal, uncompartmentalised, wholly accessible language of sound commonly known as music: encouraging spirituality and/or various permutations of all human emotions -- centring on and radiating from the serious deployment of an ostensibly organised pattern of acoustic sounds as produced by orchestral instruments and voices (performed normally by established or qualified interpreters/musicians, from one to very many). The question of taste and the unknowable relativities of disharmony and harmony are no part of this description, because such affective considerations differ from individual to individual. I shall tailgate any preconceptions...
****
Little yellow patch on the wall
please see 2nd entry on 2nd March 2003: here:
****
denemonisations, mnemonics, anemones, Bournemouth, nemoralis, Mnemosyne... Chasing the noumenon... any more?
***********
The crowd were silent
Reading the poems of Baudelaire.
Suddenly, completely unpremeditated,
They lurch forward, in unison,
And sing the National Anthem.
"The problem of hollowness, then, of a-Voidance, is really one of secondary satisfactions, the attempt to find substitutes for a primary satisfaction of wholeness that somehow got lost leaving a large gap in its place. The British novelist John Fowles calls this emptiness the 'nemo' which he describes as an anti-ego, a state of being nobody. "Nobody wants to be a nobody," writes Fowles. "All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mark the emptiness we feel at the core.""
from COMING TO OUR SENSES by Morris Berman
"... there is a way of going about enterprise, particularly as it applies to creativity, in which the activity is preceded by wholeness, rather than being a frantic attempt to achieve it. This frantic approach to life is not inevitable; we really don't have to spend our lives chasing ecstasy in an effort to shut down the nemo [nemo: a feeling of hollowness, an anti-ego, a state of being nobody].”
from Coming To Our Senses : Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West -
Morris Berman (Unwin Hyman, 1990, page 316)
"Next to her hung a further small picture, showing a saint carrying his own skin.”
-- Robert Aickman (The Cicerones)
"Her pillow sounded hollow with notes and knockings, notes and knockings you hear in condemned rooms.”
--Elizabeth Bowen (No. 16)
""WHAT do you call him? Nemo?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn.
"Nemo, sir. Here it is. Forty-two folio. Given out on the Wednesday night at eight o`clock, brought in on the Thursday morning at half after nine.""
-- Charles Dickens (Bleak House)
Des once said:
In my fifties looking back at the fifties...
Excitedly waiting for the Beano comic to drop on my doormat every Thursday, the smell of its pages, the stationery smell of newsagents in those days, the smell of books in general, uniform fifties library books (which drabness seemed to accentuate the delights emerging from the print within), my Mum making me wear waterproof leggings when it rained, being able to scribble stories in pencil, using plasticene, throwing bean-bags about in PE, sitting on bristly PE mats, fuzzy grey pictures on the TV screen which, on some evenings, were indecipherable... and arcade amusements on Walton-on-Naze Pier: hand-cranked cranes that could never quite grapple with the pack of cigs wrapped round with a brown ten bob note, pinballs without flippers, ghost house tableau where a coin would produce a skeleton out of the cupboard, silver balls spinning round vertically into the lose and win holes, the win giving you another turn, the lose losing you your coin. More lose holes than win. A lesson for life?
I'm now 60! (18/1/08)
***
Aren't shadows on the wall sometimes more revelatory than seeing the people that cast them? CHANCE is a novel by Joseph Conrad. Here, the characters and particularly the heroine are drained of any motive or sympathy because of the layering of narrative: we hear a spoken voice telling an inscrutable narrator of someone else’s view of someone else’s view of certain events, mix and match between. But it does not seem to lessen one’s interest in the book: it is character-driven and sympathy is allowed to take a backseat in preference to exploring one’s own motives for assigning certain motives to certain types of people just on the basis of hearsay and chance. Conrad writes in introduction to CHANCE: "And it is only for their intentions that men can be held responsible" and this novel seeks to show, I think, that any intentions are essentially unknowable. Perhaps even one's own intentions are unknowable: being shadows, too. The heart of darkness.
"Wrzesmian wasn't too popular. The works of this strange man, saturated with rampant fantasy and imbued with strong individualism, gave a most unfavourable impression by inverting accepted aesthetic-literary theories and by mocking established pseudo-truths. His output was eventually acknowledged as the product of a sick imagination, the bizarre work of an eccentric, maybe even a madman. Wrzesmian was an inconvenience for a variety of reasons and he disturbed unnecessarily, stirring peaceful waters. Thus his premature eclipse was received with a secret sigh of relief."
from 'The Area' by Stefan Grabinski..
"My pictures are visionary and symbolical, and, from first to last, have seemed to be painted by someone other than myself. [...] I am thus entirely self-taught, or taught by that other within me. I am aware that my pictures lack serious technique(if there is a technique that can be distinguished from inspiration and invention). I should have given up painting them some time ago, were it not that a certain number of people seemed to find something remarkable in them, and have thus identified me with them, and made me feel mildly important."
FROM "RAVISSANTE" BY ROBERT AICKMAN
"From the cosmic point of view, to have opinions or preferences at all is to be ill; for by harbouring them one dams up the flow of the ineluctable force which, like a river, bears us down to the ocean of everything's unknowing. Reality is a running noose, one is brought up short with a jerk by death. It would have been wiser to co-operate wih the inevitable and learn to profit by this unhappy state of things - by realising and accommodating death! But we don't, we allow the ego to foul its own nest. Therefore we have insecurity, stress, the midnight-fruit of insomnia, with a whole culture crying itself to sleep. How to repair this state of affairs except through art, through gifts which render to us language manumitted by emotion, poetry twisted into the service of direct insight?"
From 'The Avignon Quincunx' by Lawrence Durrell ('Constance' 1982)
comments (1)
1. Weirdmonger left...
Tuesday, 1 December 2009 8:36 am
"The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it." -- John Fowles 1964 (from 'The Necessity of Nemo' in 'The Aristos')
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