Fragment 3009

The terrible thing about suicide -for the bereaved at any rate- is the overpowering sense of curiosity as to its causes. More than any other form of death it hides its mystery from us. Despite the assumptions of the saintly and the insincere no one knows what causes people to commit suicide, what horrifying depths of despair and hopelessness give rise to it. Unsuccessful suicides can only hint at it, but their reports from the threshold must of necessity be as different from the reports of the successful –could we but hear them- as the reports of armchair travelers are from those who have ventured forth, and must be treated as circumspectly. All we are left with is grief-laden speculation. David Foster Wallace’s death has left the literary world mining his words for the presence of clues to the mystery of this particular suicide. A primary exhibit in the evidence is this commencement address he gave at Kenyon College in 2005. Here is an extract:

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of you or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV or your monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked...

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is...

Reading this Dostoevskyan rant, I hear the voice of the Underground Man, transplanted from 19th century St Petersburg to 21st century suburban America, railing -under the white noise of the muzak, commercials, and ubiquitous ipods that do their best to shut him out - against the burden of consciousness; and I am reminded of Chavenet’s remark that suicide is the only real freedom we have.

"Ode on Melancholy" (and other poems) John Keats

Keats the word drunk searched for resonance among vowel sounds which might give him an echo of his inner self. He sounded the empty coffin of his early death with patient knuckles, listening to the dull resonances given off by his certain immortality.

Lawrence Durrell

In my youth (cue mournful viols) Keats was that archetypal ‘poet’: boring, irrelevant, self -consciously archaic (Spenser’s baleful influence), crushingly conventional, and too wordy by half. On the page his poems bristled with references to Greek mythology, allegorical figures and Italian medieval literature. Unreadable.

However, the secret of Keats lies in getting him off the page, and onto one’s body. It is when you learn Keats by heart, and speak him aloud from memory, in the way that musicians perform, that his true genius reveals itself.

As a tubercular, Keats was obsessed with his breath, and this obsession often appears overtly in the poems:

…to take into the air my quiet breath…
…full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing…
…all breathing human passion far above….

As singers, actors and orators know, the vowel is what carries the voice; it is the vowel that vibrates the whole sounding chamber of the skeleton and carries the voice across distances. Keats, perhaps more than any other poet in the language apart from Shakespeare, achieves a perfect balance of vowel and consonant. His vowels enact on a phonetic, physical level the imagery of the words and bring his poetry into the realm of the sung, the incanted, a fact which does not reveal itself in reading silently from the page.
In this line from the Sonnet to Sleep:

And seal the hushed casket of my soul

the ‘ee’ sound in seal is created by squeezing the space in the mouth creating a long coffin-like place under the hard palate. In this line from the Ode on Melancholy:

And drown the wakeful anguish of my soul

notice how the same rhythm, and diction has been subtly altered, using an ‘ow’ sound in drown, creating a wide open space in the mouth, tongue flattened and pushed to the sides, as the mouth fills with breath, or the pressure of water. ‘Ow’ is, of course, a cry of pain, as ‘oh’ is a keen of sorrow, and these two vowels alternate with distressing frequency at the beginning and end of the first stanza, contributing to its anguished mood:

NO, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolfs-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

Keats is also capable of astonishing spiritual maturity. Throughout his life he wrestled with depression – his poverty, the savage rejection of his poetry by the literary establishment, the premature deaths of his immediate family, his own declining health and impending early death, about which he was more clear-sighted than his friends and doctors, his unrequited love and virginity - certainly gave him cause. This depression is present in his verse in the form of a Lear-like nihilism. In the first stanza alone of the Ode on Melancholy, negative forms appear nine times in as many lines. However, he is always clear about his own cure for depression: an absolute commitment to the contemplation of beauty:

…Yes! In spite of all/Some shape of beauty moves away the pall/From our dark spirits. …
…Thou, Silent Form, does tease us out of thought, as doth eternity…

Sometimes he is able to move away the depression by active thought:

Then on the shore/Of the wide world I stand alone and think/Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

achieving a kind of Buddhist suspension of the anguish of the self. At others it is tortured and torturing thought itself which is the cause of the depression:

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow/And leaden eyed despairs

Although he sometimes comes close to the tortured consciousness of Milton and Dostoyevsky, he nonetheless always affirms the cosmic Yes!, which he finds in the active contemplation of beauty, whether in the ephemerality of nature, or the permanence of art.

I find this hugely consoling and miraculous, that this 20 year-old apprentice apothecary can sound his vowels across the centuries and teach me how to live with my self as I speak his words. It is the highest, holiest, most healing magic.

Spurious Quotation #17

The love of God is the root of all evil.
Pope Benedict XVI

De Maistre on time

Time seems to me to be something so inconceivable that I am tempted to believe that it really doesn’t exist, and that what we call ‘time’ is nothing more than a punishment of the mind….It is when men fall silent, when the demon of noise is mute within its temple, in the midst of a sleeping city - it is then that Time raises its voice and makes itself heard within my soul. Silence and darkness become its interpreters, and reveal its mysterious march to me; it is no longer an abstract thing of reason that my thought cannot seize –my senses themselves perceive it. I can see it in the sky, chasing the stars westwards before it. Now it is pushing the rivers towards, and rolling with the mist along the hillsides…I listen: the winds are moaning under the vigorous sweep of its swift wings, and the distant bell shudders at its terrible passage.

Correspondence #8

And let your soul taste each days pleasure, spite of griefs.

Aeschylus
The Persians


Let not your days without pleasure expire;
Honour's but empty, and when youth is ended,
All men will praise you, but none will desire.
Let not youth fly away without contenting
Age will come, time enough for your repenting.

Dryden
King Arthur

Fragment 709

Gandhi said:

They may beat me, they may break my bones, they may even kill me. But then they will only have my dead body. They will not have my obedience.

Admirable sentiments indeed, but only if one assumes that ‘they’ share the same universe of moral absolutes, that ‘they’ in fact want or even care about my obedience. In reality, however, ‘they’ are probably quite happy to have my dead body. After all, as far as ‘they’re’ concerned, living or dead I merely represent an inconvenience, not the other half in a mythical struggle of values. Dead bodies are simply more easy to get rid of, and what good is my continued resistance to me once I am dead?

From the lost papers of Dr.Cornelius Mucus (Vienna), eminent Sinologist, preserved for posterity by the astonishing memory of Murr

Notes on Chinese pedagogy

Socrates: What of the gods, Euthyphro? If they disagree at all, wouldn’t they disagree for the same reasons?
Euthyphro: Inevitably.

The question has been central to the Western pedagogical tradition since Socrates. Within this tradition, the question posed by the teacher and answered by the student leads the student towards new knowledge by creating an awareness of what specific knowledge the student lacks. The student is encouraged and indeed expected to work out the answer for herself. The role of the teacher is to (encourage the student to) ask the right questions. Within the Western tradition, the pursuit of wisdom is a path of enquiry, a process of discovery, in which new knowledge is applied to old problems. A new understanding of reality is created through the process of dialectic, in which different points of view have equal validity, although one of them may ultimately be wrong. The teacher is fallible and also engaged in the search for knowledge. In terms of social structure, the relationship between teacher and students is more or less equal, horizontal, democratic.

Within the Confucian pedagogical tradition, on the other hand, the relationship between teacher and students is hierarchical, vertical, autocratic. The teacher is seen as the fount of all knowledge, and the student is seen as a vessel for receiving the knowledge, in time passing it on to the next generation of students. Knowledge itself is something fixed and canonical, and reality is a single vision shared by the community, unchanging and predictable. Within this tradition, the question is regarded as highly problematic. Indeed, the concepts of question and problem are undifferentiated. Mandarin makes no distinction between ‘problem’ and ‘question’: wen ti can be translated as ‘problem’ or ‘question’. In this linguistic and conceptual context, a question poses a problem by opening a crack in the way things are, by revealing the potential for another view of reality, thus threatening the social harmony which is the goal underpinning all Confucian thought. A question from student to teacher is regarded as a possible challenge to the teacher’ authority, or at least a challenge to the teacher’s status as the fount of all wisdom. Students are more likely to ask each other questions in the event of their not understanding something than asking the teacher. An admission that the student has failed to understand is more commonly viewed as a failure on the part of the teacher to explain clearly. On the other hand, a question from teacher to the student is regarded as dishonest, because the student knows the teacher already knows the answer...

"The House of Niccolo" Dorothy Dunnett

The Money Lender And His Wife by the 15th Century Flemish painter Quentin Massys shows the money lender and his wife seated at a green covered table. Although both are facing the viewer, both are intent on what the man is doing: he has a small set of hand scales and he is weighing specie. On the table in front of him is a pile of coins, a glass vase, a small velvet bag with pearls nestling on it; in front of the wife is an illustrated book, and she is turning the page. They are both richly dressed, he in sombre brown trimmed with fur, she in deep red trimmed with grey fur, both hatted. Behind them is a dresser with various objects on the shelves: papers, books, a candle stick, another set of scales, a silver dish, an orange. Between them on the table, is a small convex mirror, reflecting, in the position of the viewer, an open window. Through the open window can be seen a building and a tree, a glimpse of a street perhaps in Bruges, Ghent or another of the rich Flemish towns of the period. Unlike the endless boring parades of Madonnas and Childs, Crucifixions and Pietas of the Southern Renaissance artists, the Northern Renaissance artists offer us real people represented in the here and now of their own times.

This is what Dorothy Dunnett’s House of Niccolo series offers us too, an entry into the world of the late 15 century, presented in all the glowing richness and physicality of a Massys, or a van der Goes, or a van Weyden; with the food, the pewter cups and candian wine, the sumptuous clothes, the woodsmoke-filled freezing halls, the pissstinking dye vats, the canals and bridges and gates of the towns, the armour, the pageants, jousts, feasts and plagues, the high politics, and low scheming of bankers, burghers, bishops and high born bastards, Dukes, Kings and Princes, the wars, wounds, living, loving and dying.

Here is a partial list of historical events covered by the series:

The fall of Trebizond, last outpost of the Byzantine empire
The rise of the Ottoman Empire in the black sea
The trade rivalry between Genoa and Venice
The end of the Lusignan dynasty on Cypress
The Wars of the Roses in England,
The marriage of James II of Scotland and Margaret of Denmark
The marriage of Zoe Paleologue and Ivan the Third Grand Duke of Muscovy
The disintegration of the empire of the Golden Horde
The sack of Timbuktu by the Songhai empire
The siege of Famagusta
The collapse of the Duchy of Burgundy

Through all these events the hero of the series, Nicholas van der Poele, steers his remarkable career, first as a Tyl Eulenspeigel-like apprentice in Bruges, then mercenary leader, merchant, banker, pirate adventurer, inventor, maths genius, lover, diviner, political and financial advisor to Dukes and Princes, father and enigmatic friend. He is accompanied on these adventures through early modern Europe and the Levant by his band of friends and colleagues, each of whom has a particular skill: a doctor, a priest, an apothecary, a gunner and metalsmith, a notary, a business manager, a ship master and so on. The running story line is the visceral feud between Niccolo and the St Pol family, and the commercial rivalry between Nicholas’s own company and the mysterious Vatachino firm.

Dunnet is an extraordinary phenomenon. Her novelistic method is to eschew internal psychological narration (of the kind that Eliot and Tolstoy employ), and to focus on the events and actions of the characters, the external view. This creates the incredible pace of the novels, and at the same time keeps the reader alert for what is really going on underneath the surface. Her understanding and presentation of history is thick with the details of ordinary life; she completely understands the complex relationships between politics, religion, economic forces and the inertia of everyday life and how in this period all is seared with trade. She is capable of intensely beautiful descriptive prose, a kind of maidenly raciness in the love scenes, swashbuckling set-pieces of violence, subtle and elusive descriptions of negotiations at high levels. She weaves together her fictional characters and the real personages of history so well that you cannot tell the difference. Her development of character (over 4,300 pages and eight novels) is astonishing in the way she commands the reader’s loyalty, respect and love for the ‘good’ characters, and hatred for the ‘bad’ characters, without sacrificing complexity and insight into how those characters have become what they are. She is also a witty commentator on the parameters and conventions of the genre without introducing the kind of jarring anachronisms that mar many writers of historical fiction. Her metaphors are all firmly entrenched in the worldview of the characters (which, according to that most didactic of critics James Wood, is the hallmark of great writing) and there are several very funny jokes. My favourite is the list of the (uncapitalised) names of the castles owned by Prince Sigismond of the Tyrol: sigmundhelm, sigmundhof, sigmundfried sigmundfreud…

Like the great Dumas, she is capable of invoking in a sophisticated (possibly jaded) adult reader the kind of feverish, intoxicated, under-the-bedclothes-with-a-torch kind of reading last experienced in childhood.