What More Can One Say?

"My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a society, communication would be domination-free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate... [I have] no idea of how such a society could come about. It is, one might say, a mystery. This mystery, like that of the Incarnation, concerns the coming into existence of a love that is kind, patient, and endures all things."

The late (atheist) Richard Rorty, in an exchange with philosopher Gianni Vattimo.

"The closest you will get to love..."

According to Merriam-Webster:
PITY
Etymology: Middle English pite, from Anglo-French pité, from Latin pietat, pietas, piety, pity, from pius pious
Date: 13th century
1 a: sympathetic sorrow for one suffering, distressed, or unhappy b: capacity to feel pity
2: something to be regretted
Synonyms PITY, COMPASSION, COMMISERATION, CONDOLENCE, SYMPATHY mean the act or capacity for sharing the painful feelings of another. PITY implies tender or sometimes slightly contemptuous sorrow for one in misery or distress. COMPASSION implies pity coupled with an urgent desire to aid or to spare. COMMISERATION suggests pity expressed outwardly in exclamations, tears, or words of comfort. CONDOLENCE applies chiefly to formal expression of grief to one who has suffered loss. SYMPATHY often suggests a tender concern but can also imply a power to enter into another's emotional experience of any sort.

Pity always makes me think of this. Where/how does the "capacity for sharing the painful feelings of another" turn "contemptuous?"

"And really, all queers do like trouble."

I've been reading Iris Murdoch's A Fairly Honourable Defeat:

“Perhaps it was silly to invite Simon and Axel to drinks this evening.”
“Why? It’s a moment for family.”
“Axel is so anti-family. He’s the sort of queer who doesn’t like to be reminded of normal relationships.”
“I could hardly invite Simon without him. They are so very married.”
“I sometimes feel Axel hates to see a successful heterosexual marriage. He would like all men to leave all women.”
“Nonsense, Hilda. He can even be quite conventional and high-minded about it. You remember how shocked he was at Morgan leaving Tallis?”“That was because he likes Tallis and dislikes Morgan.”
“Well, he doesn’t dislike you.”
“I know. He’s another ironical devil. But I am rather fond of him. Do you think that ménage will last?”
“Why not? It’s lasted more than three years. I don’t see why it shouldn’t go on.”
“Those queer friendships are so unstable.”
“That’s simply because they run more hazards of an external social kind, Hilda. Heterosexual relations would be just as unstable if it were not for the institution of marriag and the procreation of children. But if people suit each other why shouldn’t they stay together?”

“Do you think you and I would have stayed together all these years if we hadn’t the blessing of society?”

“Yes, I do, my darling wife. Don’t you?”

“Yes, I do, Rupert. Angel! But we’re a special case, as we’ve already agreed, and we’re so unlike in some ways. Axel and Simon are so different. Axel must be a very difficult man to live with. He’s so gloomy and morose. And Simon is so sensitive and childlike and sort of pleasure-loving. I don’t mean this in a bad sense. And really, all queers do like trouble. I’ve never met one who didn’t.”
“Any sentence beginning ‘All queers…’ is pretty sure to be false! It’s like ‘All married men…’ ‘All married men over forty deceive their wives.’”
“Well, we know that’s false! But I’m sure Axel bullies him.”
“Some people like to be bullied.”
“I suppose they do. And of course he is so much younger than Axel. Thank heavens our relationship is democratic. I suspect they quarrel bitterly every night and still love each other.”
“We don’t quarrel every night, thank God. And if we did I would take it as evidence against the view that we loved each other.”
“There are all kinds of marriages.”
“You are incurable compassionate, Rupert.”

The above portrait is by Tom Phillips, whose brief but moving remembrance of painting and working with Murdoch can be read here.

1,000+ Words

And then there's this video. I can distinctly remember the first time I saw it. It was on Austrian television and I thought it was the most gorgeous, romantic, tragic thing ever. This is a whole other story. Still, I think one can safely assume that both are from another planet.

M.R. James and the Uncanny

I just finished reading "A Warning to the Curious," M.R. James' masterpiece of quiet, understated dread (an etext is available here). With its sustained air of uncanniness and oblique terror, it remains a benchmark of horror fiction. The original story and 1972 BBC adaptation are both major sources of inspiration for the aesthetic, still only vaguely defined, referred to (hesitantly sometimes) as "hauntology" by the likes of the ever engaging Simon Reynolds (particulary in his article in the November, 2006 issue of The Wire), k-punk, who wrote about it extensively here, and then there is this website devoted to the subject. K-punk also wrote a fascinating post here about seeking out the places the BBC used when filming their adaptations of "Warning" as well as James' "Whistle and I'll Come to You" (filmed in 1968)--the film stills are a tease for those of us not lucky enough to have seen them and put me in mind of "Lonely Water," a strange and quite troubling public service film featuring Donald Pleasance. More info on James can be found here.

(June 11: I finished Grief late last night and my first impressions were more than borne out. It was a keenly observed, gorgeously written, and subtly moving meditation on grief. In all respects, a far superior work of art than Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.)

(I am now reading Aamer Hussein's The Blue Direction. Hussein is a London-based short story writer who was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. "I've finally found a temporary home: I live in a state of longing, all year round." From "This Other Salt.")

(June 29: I'm still, pardon the pun, haunted by hauntology. It is so very suggestive, so allusive and elusive, etc. But I'm still more than a little puzzled as to what it all means, if anything. Am I alone in this?)

Grief

Am presently reading Grief by Andrew Holleran. The general consensus seems to be that Holleran's first novel, Dancer From the Dance, is his finest, but I found The Beauty of Men, a heartbreaking meditation on loss and loneliness, emotionally profound in a way Dancer, a celebration of youthful passion, etc, could never hope to be. Here's something from Grief, which I'm enjoying very much thus far:

"He was now a sort of homosexual emeritus. Sex had left him in its wake. He was a man who'd been riding the rapids of a river, who finally finds a cove, a still pool, and pauses there to catch his breath--though after a while he realizes it's not just a pause, but rather the place he has ended up, beached in the sunlight, exhausted, no longer able to get in that cold and tumultuous river again."

Three more things which struck me in Holleran's superb novella, both quotations the narrator comes across:

"On a gloomy winter afternoon, a scholar sits in his elegant pavilion as a kneeling servant prepares some warm tea." From the descriptive text next to a Chinese scroll painting in the Freer Gallery

"You should go out every day and enjoy yourself--you are so very young and should be as gay as a lark. Trouble comes soon enough, my dear child, and you must enjoy life, whenever you can." From the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln

"For sorrow, such as ours, there is no balm, the grave and Heaven, with reunion with our loved ones, can alone heal, bleeding, broken hearts." ibid.

I didn't know a thing about the suicide of Marion "Clover" Hooper-Adams, wife of Henry Adams. Now that's an American Gothic. From Grief: "He was forty-seven when his wife killed herself. She had just taken care of her own father till he died. Then she returned to Washington. Everything seemed fine. Then one day while Henry Adams was downstairs reading she went upstairs and swallowed one of the chemicals she used to develop her photographs. She left a note saying that if only she had one good quality, she would have continued living, but she didn't. Of course she had lots of good qualities--she had just nursed her father through his final illness. It was pure depression, pure guilt. Adams was devastated--but his grief took an unusual form. The day after she died, he came downstairs, tore the mourning band off his arm, and forbade anyone to mention his wife's name ever again."

And finally, I read somewhere that Holleran initially had reservations about having his author photo used on the book jacket or in any publicity material because he didn't want some trick or bathhouse encounter to recognize him. I know I've seen a picture of him somewhere but all I can really remember is a very 70s-looking moustache. For some reason though I kind of imagine he looks like the very dashing William Faulkner as captured by Henri Cartier-Bresson in the photo at the top of this post.

The Beautiful and the Beastly

I forget how absolutely bloody brilliant The Jesus Lizard were. Brutish, dangerous, sleazy, perverse...yes. And then some. But also tenderly beautiful, the guitars going from a snarl to a shimmer in the blink of an eye. Like the best noir, they find emotional truth in both the kick and the kiss. It's just that bruises last longer than the trace memory of lips touching lips.

"I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination..." John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey (Nov 22, 1817).

"We become panoramic..." Kate Bush, "Nocturn" (Aerial)

Of Parks and Pensive Boys

Just home from seeing The Clientele at the Bowery Ballroom. I'd never noticed how many of their songs were about sitting in parks at dusk with a broken heart. Or at least that's the impression I got. And I'm not sure I've ever seen so many very pensive and sensitive looking straight boys in one place, but as far as audiences go, they are a-ok to me--so polite I half expected them to be drinking tea out of proper cups and saucers, pinky extended (natch), and passing around plates of cucumber sandwiches.

From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

I really want to be wise enough to ignore this but somehow I can't.

Have been listening to Panda Bear's Person Pitch on repeat this evening. Lovely stuff indeed, and bewitching. Truly the aural equivalent of floating under an endless cocaine sky on a calm sea glittering with sundrops. (I should be embarassed by a sentence so.... very bad...but really, it's the kind of record that encourages such nonsense.)

"...it's what you do every day that changes you." From "Opera" by Helen Simpson (Getting a Life). Dig this review by this total jackass. Am presently reading her latest collection, with only one story to go.

On a random positive note, I think this Woebot fella has a terrifically thoughtful blog. One has been conditioned to think of all internet-related phenomena as mere ephemera inevitably fated to dissolve and fade away into cyberspace, leaving no trace. Here's hoping that's not the case.

The Smells of Summer

Ah, men and their cologne...

Poignant

Anyone who knows me knows I swoon at the mere thought of Shena Mackay and think she's the absolute bee's knees. Here is one reason why:

"'Oh, the wee soul!' Mother would cry, pausing to delay some bull-headed tom from his lustful or murderous purpose, or peeking into a pram. 'Poignant' was her accolade. 'How poignant,' she would murmur, looking at a bunch of evocative felt flowers at a Bring-and-Buy in a cold Presbyterian church hall redolent of her childhood; misty-eyed, she would pin the purple-and-yellow pansies drooping from green felt stalks to her coat. Needlebooks with clumsily pinked pages and embroidered violets, French knots, golliwogs with snipped topknots made from little skeins of wool, anything in faded raffia, a cut-steel evening purse, all qualified; poignancy was like charm, indefinable. A lavender bag might exude it, or a dolly's dress with heartbreakingly tiny smocking; while a pincushion, be it ever so lumpy and cobbled by small fingers, failed in its wiles. Being broken or ephemeral did not necessarily guarantee acceptance, nor gaudiness, as evidenced by red-and-yellow cherries on a hat or black rayon splashed with poppies, exclude. An elephant at the zoo could be as poignant as a mother-of-pearl button or a baby's tooth." From Dunedin

And then there's this: “The other day I came across a headline in the paper that said 'Tortoise Stabbed', and I thought, 'God, how horrible,' because I love tortoises. And then I looked again and realised it said 'Tourists Stabbed.' So that was alright!” From an interview conducted by Ruth Thomas for the online magazine Textualities

I think it's love.