[Apologies in advance for any typos or other errors in this or the previous post. I mislaid my spectacles en route to Darkest East Southamptonshire and the world of words is very blurry.]
In Babel, human ingenuity, co-operation, bravado and curiosity are rewarded, by a fearful and vengeful Deity, with the damnation of incommunication, fragmenting their solidarity and driving the population to the corners of the world. It's a perplexing moral story, especially following soon after the Flood. Humankind seems incapable of learning to obey. Drown them and they want to build towers. Give them a thousand languages and they speak, write and read in them, leaving behind libraries of good and ill knowledge and ideas. Perpetually exercising that pesky free will, they seem always to invent new ways to affront those who command respect and obedience. May their memory be forever honoured.
This blog, an idea born in a whimsical conversation and pursued as a pragmatic solution, has actually proved to be a useful and sound tool and vehicle. (With a more resiliant cripple-spirit (h/t Carol) a lot more of my reading and thinking and ranting and research during the long hiatus between terms would have made it on to the blog, but I was more inclined to lie around feeling sorry for myself and being too doped to think in sentences.) Its fragmentary and dilettantish structure and entirely uneven tone and incoherent subject matter suit my mentality perfectly.
More seriously, the interwebs are the modern inheritor of the traditons of the broadside ballad and the samizdat, the place (at the time of writing) where an individual of modest means and no objective power can speak of any matter to a wide audience, can forge alliances and resistance movements, share.information and speak their own truths without the mediation of any form of authority. (No one may read, watch or listen, of course, but that's their right too.) As such. I may put my web-site building head on and actually re-locate to a fully realised site, something which would also resolve the issue of copyright which haunts this place. How electronic media would connect to what I still regard as the core activity of drawing has yet to be seen, but there is some relationship which might be developed which addresses both sides of my 'equation', of image and audience, art and function.
But this is, always and in the end, about the pencils and what they let me do. I never expected that, that it would be pencils. I thought I was probably a painter. Turns out, all I really want and need (and it does have a strong element of physical craving to it) to do is document that wild territory on the borders of Reason and Imagination with my box of pencils.
Wednesday, 5 June 2013
'To which no concept is adequate': Final Rellections 1
...or ghosts of pure form in the libraries of babel.
I have spent an inordinate amount of my life in libraries. I have made trips abroad to visit particular libraries. I have gone through the many idiosyncratic and obstructive procedures libraries impose in order to access their special collections. I have worked hard to get on the right side of some truly irascible librarians, who hold the keys to special cabinets, while rolling my eyes at the antics of those who treat such librarians as defective waiters or domestics. And I've experienced that peculiar brand of academic ecstasy at uncovering some previously unknown text, lost to the sands of time, or at proving what I suspected to be likely, after carefully untying the cords holding together a fragile and broken miscellany of paper that began life as a book. Handling something rare, maybe the sole survivor of its kind, the object itself a document of struggle and censorship, always brought a visceral thrill, a kind of subtle reverence for where this book had come from and where it had been in the intervening years.
 |
The freestyle hermeneutics of 'The Wall and
the Books', in which Borges speculates about the motives of the Chinese emperor
Shih Huang Ti when he ordered the building of the Great Wall and decreed the
burning of all books gives the lie to the simple historical
explanations for the phenomena. 'There is
no mystery in the two measures…. he built the wall because walls were defenses;
he burned the books because the opposition invoked them in order to extol
former emperors.' Hunting for the larger meaning, Borges notes that those who were found preserving books were
sentenced to work on the wall, and thus begins speculating:
Perhaps the wall was a metaphor, maybe Shih Huang Ti condemned those who worshipped the past to a work just as vast as the past, as stupid and useless. Perhaps the wall was a challenge and Shih Huang Ti thought: 'Men love the past and I can do nothing against this love, nor can my executioners, but some time there will be a man who feels as I do, and he will destroy my wall, as I destroyed the books, and will erase my memory and will be my shadow and my mirror and will not be aware of it.' Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled in the empire because he knew it was fragile and he destroyed the books because he understood they were sacred books, or rather books that taught that which the entire universe teaches or the consciousness of every man.
Contingency, speculation, contemplation, individual interpretation, all fly in the face of the face of the single-voiced authority. As a library is a cacophany of views and theories and demands, so even a single text can be a starting point for a multiplicity of perhapses, none of which need to be completely correct. This is not, by the way, the absurdity of historicism, but the pleasure of thought, of human ingenuity.
In contrast, there is the voice of Authoritah.
Like this, Climate Change Minister Edward Davey's speech 'Climate Change, Acting on the Science', delivered on June 4 2013 to the Met Office, warning of the 'danger' of giving a platform to those who would question the corrupt Religion of Gaia:
Some sections of the press are giving an uncritical campaigning platform to individuals and lobby groups who reject outright the fact that climate change is a result of human activity.
Some who even deny the reality of climate change itself.
This is not the serious science of challenging, checking and probing.
This is destructive and loudly clamouring scepticism born of vested interest, nimbyism, publicity seeking contraversialism or sheer blinkered, dogmatic, political bloody-mindedness.
This tendency will seize upon the normal expression of scientific uncertainty and portray it as proof that all climate change policy is all hopelessly misguided – from pursuing renewable energy to emissions targets themselves.
By selectively misreading the evidence, they seek to suggest that climate change has stopped so we can all relax and burn all the dirty fuel we want without a care.
This is a superficially seductive message, but it is absolutely wrong and really quite dangerous.Not so very far from the Chinese Emperor, then. Nor from that darling of the Progressives, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Social Contract, in which the individual is subsumed into the herd for the greater good, here outlining his ' Civil Religion':
There is a purely civil profession of faith of which the sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject. While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the state whoever does not believe them — it can banish him, not for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished to death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.If anyone behaves as if he does not believe them... This is Goya's Reason-shorn-of-imaginative-play run to its chilling extreme, where the contents of the individual mind remains incarcerated within a socially-co-operative body. Like Kafka's perfect son and worker in Metamorphosis, there will come a point where such a conformity turns into frank monstrosity, to be met with even greater monstrosity from the external world.
Imagination, creativity, difference, contestation, play, wit, satire, slippage, all represent a threat to the grandest of narratives of Authoritah - be fearful, be safe. Such a story long left behind the underpinnings of the European Enlightenment at its most brightly lit:
An aesthetical Idea [is] an intuition of the Imagination, to which no concept is adequate. And it is by the excitation of such ineffable Ideas that a great work of art affects us (Kant, Critique of Judgment)Every or any book from a finite or infinite library - even a seemingly incoherent book - has a pattern to it. But the pattern is infinite, and the full meaning of the book can never be made manifest: it is a sentence spoken in the hope of being understood, a bridge thrown out to an unseen shore.
Monday, 3 June 2013
Kiefer's Monumental Tomes
 | |||
| Anselm Kiefer Meterorites |
Weight 6.6 tons
The uningratiating, even abrasive, visual qualities, the towering scale, the implied footnotes, the defiance of beauty, is too much for some critics. They respond with words intended to condemn Kiefer as elitist, as insufficiently relativist, or pomo, or something. They term the work bombastic, pompous, ponderous, theatrical, cerebral, remote, refusing to see the significance of this mordant monument to the desolate, distressed, unconsoling, the wreckage of cultural knowledge heaved into a gallery by crane.
 |
| Anselm Kiefer, The Hight Priestess/Land of Two Rivers |
Height 12 Feet
Width 25 and a half feet
Depth 1 and a half feet
1985-89
Twin bookcases, labelled Tigris and Euphrates, containing approximately 200 lead books.
The cradle of human civilisation turned into impossible books, memorialising the cultural apocalypses of the Inquisition and Wahabi'ism and foreshadowing the Theatre of Progressive War under the directorship of the Simian-in-Chief and Pope Tony.
Dusty, cobwebbed volumes, too hefty to lift, with inaccessible or indeterminate content, are an affront to modernity and the utopia amours of Progress. Kiefer refuses to forget his cultural inheritance and insists on the power and resonance of old ideas and old artifacts.
Sunday, 2 June 2013
Ubique: For the CRE at Babel
Rudyard Kipling - Sappers
WHEN the Waters were dried an' the Earth did appear,
("It's all one," says the Sapper),
The Lord He created the Engineer,
Her Majesty's Royal Engineer,
With the rank and pay of a Sapper!
When the Flood come along for an extra monsoon,
'Twas Noah constructed the first pontoon
To the plans of Her Majesty's, etc.
But after fatigue in the wet an' the sun,
Old Noah got drunk, which he wouldn't ha' done
If he'd trained with, etc.
When the Tower o' Babel had mixed up men's bat,
Some clever civilian was managing that,
An' none of, etc.
When the Jews had a fight at the foot of a hill,
Young Joshua ordered the sun to stand still,
For he was a Captain of Engineers, etc.
When the Children of Israel made bricks without straw,
They were learnin' the regular work of our Corps,
The work of, etc.
For ever since then, if a war they would wage,
Behold us a-shinin' on history's page -
First page for, etc.
We lay down their sidings an' help 'em entrain,
An' we sweep up their mess through the bloomin' campaign,
In the style of, etc.
They send us in front with a fuse an' a mine
To blow up the gates that are rushed by the Line,
But bent by, etc.
They send us behind with a pick an' a spade,
To dig for the guns of a bullock-brigade
Which has asked for, etc.
We work under escort in trousers and shirt,
An' the heathen they plug us tail-up in the dirt,
Annoying, etc.
We blast out the rock an' we shovel the mud,
We make 'em good roads an' - they roll down the khud,
Reporting, etc.
We make 'em their bridges, their wells, an' their huts,
An' the telegraph-wire the enemy cuts,
An' it's blamed on, etc.
An' when we return, an' from war we would cease,
They grudge us adornin' the billets of peace,
Which are kept for, etc.
We build 'em nice barracks - they swear they are bad,
That our Colonels are Methodist, married or mad,
Insultin', etc.
They haven't no manners nor gratitude too,
For the more that we help 'em, the less will they do,
But mock at, etc.
Now the Line's but a man with a gun in his hand,
An' Cavalry's only what horses can stand,
When helped by, etc.
Artillery moves by the leave o' the ground,
But we are the men that do something all round,
For we are, etc.
I have stated it plain, an' my argument's thus
("It's all one," says the Sapper),
There's only one Corps which is perfect - that's us;
An' they call us Her Majesty's Engineers,
Her Majesty's Royal Engineers,
With the rank and pay of a Sapper!
Drawn Waters (Borrowdale)
.jpg) |
| Drawn Waters (Borrowdale) (natural and machined graphic on steel armature) |
Teresita Fernandez has made objects that could legitimately be called 3D-drawings, but perhaps it's just as well I can't go to galleries very easily these days, since the temptation to help oneself to such an abundance of graphite would be hard to resist.
2.jpg) |
| TERESITA FERNANDEZDrawn Waters (Borrowdale) 2, 2009 natural and machined graphite on steel armature 121.19 x 43.5 x 86 inches 307.8 x 110.5 x 218.4cm |
Books and Babel-Knowledge
1. Not everything I draw is a page from a book.
2. The trick is to know the difference between what goes on a wall and what goes between covers.
I've spent a lot of time this term agreeing with Joanna Drucker (The Century of Artists' Books) that an artist's book in form must be coherent with the contents, that the work must represent a totality, not an arbitrary solution, only to find that I was generating a forced solution to a belief that the moth series must be a book. It isn't a book. It isn't even a fully thought-out series.
I can self-diagnose the factors that would keep the drawings off the wall and on a table or shelf. Somewhere between folk-like-me don't get their pictures hung in those posh people's galleries and a desire not to limit whatever art I can make to the modern white-cube cathedrals, a book will always seem a more egalitarian, demotic thing.
But the Babel sequence is a book, responding as it does to the authority and legacy of The Book. What form that 'book' will take is still evolving but I'm inclined to think (today, this week) it will strongly resemble a conventional book.
Early in the module, while toying with the Babel notion, I discovered a story by Borges I had never read before, 'The Book of Sand'. The initially delightful and subsequently horrific reality of the infinite, ever-changing book provides me with a kind of totem figure for the Babel book, setting the idea of book-knowledge against the shifting sands of human experience. In other words, if I could make it, I would.
I live alone, in a fourth-floor apartment on Calle Belgrano. One evening a few months ago, I heard a knock on the door. I opened it and in walked someone I had never met before. He was a tall man, of indistinct features. My myopia perhaps made me see him that way. Everything about him spoke of an honest poverty. He was dressed in grey and carried a grey valise. I sensed immediately that he was a foreigner. At first I thought him an old man; later I noticed that what misled me was his sparse hair, an almost-white blond, like a Scandinavian’s. Over the course of our conversation, which would last no longer than an hour, I learnt that he hailed from the Orkneys.
I showed him his seat. The man paused a moment before speaking. He exuded a melancholy air, as do I now.
“I sell Bibles,” he told me.
Not without pedantry I responded:
“In this house there are several English Bibles, including John Wyclif’s, the first of all. I also have Cypriano de Valera’s, Luther’s — which, as a piece of literature, is the worst of the lot — and a copy of the Vulgate in Latin. As you can see, it’s not Bibles I have a need for.”
After a brief silence he responded:
“I don’t sell only Bibles. I can show you a sacred book that might interest you. I aquired it in the outskirts of Bikanir.”
He opened his valise and placed the book on the table. It was a clothbound octavo volume which had undoubtedly passed through many hands. I examined the book; its unexpected heft surprised me. On the spine was printed Holy Writ and below that Bombay.
“From the nineteenth century I’d hazard,” I observed.
“I don’t know. I’ve never known,” was the response.
I opened it at random. The characters were unfamiliar. The pages, which appeared to me worn and of poor typographic quality, were printed in two columns like a Bible. The text was cramped and arranged in versicles. In the upper corner of each page were Arabic numerals. It caught my attention that the even-numbered page bore, let’s say, the number 40,514 and the odd-numbered page that followed 999. I turned the page; the overleaf bore an eight-digit number. Also printed was a small illustration, like those in dictionaries: an anchor drawn in pen and ink, as though by a child’s unskilled hand.
It was then that the stranger told me:
“Study the page well. You will never see it again.”
There was a threat in what he said, but not in his voice.
I took note of the page and shut the volume. I reopened it immediately.
In vain I searched for the figure of the anchor, page after page. To hide my discomfort, I said to him:
“This is a version of the Scripture in some Hindustani language, right?”
“No,” he replied.
Then he lowered his voice as if entrusting me with a secret:
“I acquired the book in a small town on the plains for a few rupees and a Bible. Its owner didn’t know how to read. I suspect that he saw the Book of Books as an amulet. He was of the lowest caste; people couldn’t step on his shadow without contamination. He told me that his book is called the Book of Sand because neither the book nor sand possess a beginning or an end.”
He suggested I try finding the first page.
I placed my left hand on the cover and opened the book with my thumb and forefinger almost touching. All my efforts were useless: several pages always lay between the cover and my hand. It was as though the pages sprouted from within the book.
“Now search for the last page.”
Again I failed; I only managed to stammer in a voice not my own:
“This cannot be.”
Always in a low voice, the Bible seller said:
“It cannot be, yet it is. The number of pages in this book is exactly infinite. No page is the first; none the last. I don’t know why they’re numbered in this arbitrary way. Perhaps it’s to demonstrate that the terms of an infinite series include any number.”
Later, as if he were thinking aloud:
“If space is infinite, we are in no particular point in space. If time is infinite, we are in no particular point in time.”
His musings irritated me. I asked him:
“You’re a religious man, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m Presbyterian. My conscience is clear. I’m sure I didn’t cheat the native when I gave him the Lord’s Word in exchange for his diabolical book.”
I assured him that he had no reason to reproach himself, and I asked him if he was just passing through these lands. He replied that he was thinking of returning to his homeland in a few days. It was then that I learnt he was Scotch, from the Orkney Isles. I told him that I had a special affection for Scotland because of my love of Stevenson and Hume.
“And of Robbie Burns,” he corrected.
While we spoke, I continued exploring the infinite book. With a false indifference I asked him:
“Do you intend to offer this curious specimen to the British Museum?”
“No. I offer it to you,” he said, and offered a high price.
I replied, in all honesty, that the price was too high for me and I remained in thought. After a few minutes I had come up with a plan.
“I propose a trade,” I said. “You obtained this volume for a few rupees and the Holy Scripture; I offer you my retirement funds, which I’ve just been paid, and the Wyclif Bible in gothic lettering. I inherited it from my parents.”
“A black-letter Wyclif!” he murmured.
I went to my bedroom and I brought back the money and book. He turned the pages and studied the binding with the fervour of a bibliophile.
“It’s a deal,” he said.
I was astonished that he did not haggle. Only afterwards did I realise that he had entered my house with the intention of selling the book. He didn’t count the bills; he put them away.
We chatted about India, the Orkneys and the Norwegian jarls who had governed them. Night had fallen by the time he had left. I never saw him again, nor do I know his name.
I thought of keeping the Book of Sand in the space left behind by the Wyclif Bible’s absence. In the end I opted to hide it behind several misshapen volumes of Thousand and One Nights.
I went to bed and could not sleep. At around three or four in the morning I turned on the light. I searched for the impossible book and turned its pages. In one of them I saw printed a mask. In the corner the page bore a number — I don’t remember which anymore — that was raised to the ninth power.
I showed my treasure to no one. Against the joy of possessing the book grew the fear that it would be stolen, and later the suspicion that it was not truly infinite. Both these worries aggravated my already long-standing misanthropy.
I had few friends still alive; I stopped seeing them. Prisoner of the Book, I almost never left the house. I examined the worn spine and cover with a magnifying glass, and I discounted the possibility of some kind of artifice. I found that the small illustrations were spaced two thousand pages apart from one to the other. I noted them down in a small alphabetised notebook, which did not take long to fill. They never repeated. At night, in the scarce intervals insomnia withdrew its hold over, I dreamed of the book.
Summer was coming to an end and I realised that the book was monstrous. There was no consolation in the thought that no less monstrous was I, who perceived the book with eyes and touched it with ten nailed fingers. I felt the book to be a nightmarish object, something obscene that slanders and compromises reality.
I thought of fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book would be just as infinite and suffocate the planet with smoke.
I remember having read that the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest. Before retiring I worked in the National Library, which housed nine-hundred thousand books; I know that to the right of the lobby a curved staircase descends to the basement, where the newspapers and maps are stored. I took advantage of the librarians’ inattentiveness for a moment to lose the Book of Sand in one of the humid shelves. I tried not to notice how high or how far from the door.
I feel somewhat relieved now, but I do avoid even passing by Mexico Street.2
2 The National Library of Argentina is found on Mexico Street (calle México) in Buenos Aires.
http://anagrammatically.com/2010/03/08/the-book-of-sand-el-libro-de-arena-by-borges-translated/
2. The trick is to know the difference between what goes on a wall and what goes between covers.
I've spent a lot of time this term agreeing with Joanna Drucker (The Century of Artists' Books) that an artist's book in form must be coherent with the contents, that the work must represent a totality, not an arbitrary solution, only to find that I was generating a forced solution to a belief that the moth series must be a book. It isn't a book. It isn't even a fully thought-out series.
I can self-diagnose the factors that would keep the drawings off the wall and on a table or shelf. Somewhere between folk-like-me don't get their pictures hung in those posh people's galleries and a desire not to limit whatever art I can make to the modern white-cube cathedrals, a book will always seem a more egalitarian, demotic thing.
But the Babel sequence is a book, responding as it does to the authority and legacy of The Book. What form that 'book' will take is still evolving but I'm inclined to think (today, this week) it will strongly resemble a conventional book.
Early in the module, while toying with the Babel notion, I discovered a story by Borges I had never read before, 'The Book of Sand'. The initially delightful and subsequently horrific reality of the infinite, ever-changing book provides me with a kind of totem figure for the Babel book, setting the idea of book-knowledge against the shifting sands of human experience. In other words, if I could make it, I would.
The Book of Sand (translated from the Spanish by Antonios Sarhanis) by Jorge Luis Borges
…thy rope of sands…
George Herbert (1593-1623)1
Lines consist of an infinite number of points; planes an infinite
number of lines; volumes an infinite number of planes, hypervolumes an
infinite number of volumes… No, this, this more geometrico, is
definitely not the best way to begin my tale. Affirming a fantastic
tale’s truth is now a story-telling convention; mine, though, is true.George Herbert (1593-1623)1
I live alone, in a fourth-floor apartment on Calle Belgrano. One evening a few months ago, I heard a knock on the door. I opened it and in walked someone I had never met before. He was a tall man, of indistinct features. My myopia perhaps made me see him that way. Everything about him spoke of an honest poverty. He was dressed in grey and carried a grey valise. I sensed immediately that he was a foreigner. At first I thought him an old man; later I noticed that what misled me was his sparse hair, an almost-white blond, like a Scandinavian’s. Over the course of our conversation, which would last no longer than an hour, I learnt that he hailed from the Orkneys.
I showed him his seat. The man paused a moment before speaking. He exuded a melancholy air, as do I now.
“I sell Bibles,” he told me.
Not without pedantry I responded:
“In this house there are several English Bibles, including John Wyclif’s, the first of all. I also have Cypriano de Valera’s, Luther’s — which, as a piece of literature, is the worst of the lot — and a copy of the Vulgate in Latin. As you can see, it’s not Bibles I have a need for.”
After a brief silence he responded:
“I don’t sell only Bibles. I can show you a sacred book that might interest you. I aquired it in the outskirts of Bikanir.”
He opened his valise and placed the book on the table. It was a clothbound octavo volume which had undoubtedly passed through many hands. I examined the book; its unexpected heft surprised me. On the spine was printed Holy Writ and below that Bombay.
“From the nineteenth century I’d hazard,” I observed.
“I don’t know. I’ve never known,” was the response.
I opened it at random. The characters were unfamiliar. The pages, which appeared to me worn and of poor typographic quality, were printed in two columns like a Bible. The text was cramped and arranged in versicles. In the upper corner of each page were Arabic numerals. It caught my attention that the even-numbered page bore, let’s say, the number 40,514 and the odd-numbered page that followed 999. I turned the page; the overleaf bore an eight-digit number. Also printed was a small illustration, like those in dictionaries: an anchor drawn in pen and ink, as though by a child’s unskilled hand.
It was then that the stranger told me:
“Study the page well. You will never see it again.”
There was a threat in what he said, but not in his voice.
I took note of the page and shut the volume. I reopened it immediately.
In vain I searched for the figure of the anchor, page after page. To hide my discomfort, I said to him:
“This is a version of the Scripture in some Hindustani language, right?”
“No,” he replied.
Then he lowered his voice as if entrusting me with a secret:
“I acquired the book in a small town on the plains for a few rupees and a Bible. Its owner didn’t know how to read. I suspect that he saw the Book of Books as an amulet. He was of the lowest caste; people couldn’t step on his shadow without contamination. He told me that his book is called the Book of Sand because neither the book nor sand possess a beginning or an end.”
He suggested I try finding the first page.
I placed my left hand on the cover and opened the book with my thumb and forefinger almost touching. All my efforts were useless: several pages always lay between the cover and my hand. It was as though the pages sprouted from within the book.
“Now search for the last page.”
Again I failed; I only managed to stammer in a voice not my own:
“This cannot be.”
Always in a low voice, the Bible seller said:
“It cannot be, yet it is. The number of pages in this book is exactly infinite. No page is the first; none the last. I don’t know why they’re numbered in this arbitrary way. Perhaps it’s to demonstrate that the terms of an infinite series include any number.”
Later, as if he were thinking aloud:
“If space is infinite, we are in no particular point in space. If time is infinite, we are in no particular point in time.”
His musings irritated me. I asked him:
“You’re a religious man, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m Presbyterian. My conscience is clear. I’m sure I didn’t cheat the native when I gave him the Lord’s Word in exchange for his diabolical book.”
I assured him that he had no reason to reproach himself, and I asked him if he was just passing through these lands. He replied that he was thinking of returning to his homeland in a few days. It was then that I learnt he was Scotch, from the Orkney Isles. I told him that I had a special affection for Scotland because of my love of Stevenson and Hume.
“And of Robbie Burns,” he corrected.
While we spoke, I continued exploring the infinite book. With a false indifference I asked him:
“Do you intend to offer this curious specimen to the British Museum?”
“No. I offer it to you,” he said, and offered a high price.
I replied, in all honesty, that the price was too high for me and I remained in thought. After a few minutes I had come up with a plan.
“I propose a trade,” I said. “You obtained this volume for a few rupees and the Holy Scripture; I offer you my retirement funds, which I’ve just been paid, and the Wyclif Bible in gothic lettering. I inherited it from my parents.”
“A black-letter Wyclif!” he murmured.
I went to my bedroom and I brought back the money and book. He turned the pages and studied the binding with the fervour of a bibliophile.
“It’s a deal,” he said.
I was astonished that he did not haggle. Only afterwards did I realise that he had entered my house with the intention of selling the book. He didn’t count the bills; he put them away.
We chatted about India, the Orkneys and the Norwegian jarls who had governed them. Night had fallen by the time he had left. I never saw him again, nor do I know his name.
I thought of keeping the Book of Sand in the space left behind by the Wyclif Bible’s absence. In the end I opted to hide it behind several misshapen volumes of Thousand and One Nights.
I went to bed and could not sleep. At around three or four in the morning I turned on the light. I searched for the impossible book and turned its pages. In one of them I saw printed a mask. In the corner the page bore a number — I don’t remember which anymore — that was raised to the ninth power.
I showed my treasure to no one. Against the joy of possessing the book grew the fear that it would be stolen, and later the suspicion that it was not truly infinite. Both these worries aggravated my already long-standing misanthropy.
I had few friends still alive; I stopped seeing them. Prisoner of the Book, I almost never left the house. I examined the worn spine and cover with a magnifying glass, and I discounted the possibility of some kind of artifice. I found that the small illustrations were spaced two thousand pages apart from one to the other. I noted them down in a small alphabetised notebook, which did not take long to fill. They never repeated. At night, in the scarce intervals insomnia withdrew its hold over, I dreamed of the book.
Summer was coming to an end and I realised that the book was monstrous. There was no consolation in the thought that no less monstrous was I, who perceived the book with eyes and touched it with ten nailed fingers. I felt the book to be a nightmarish object, something obscene that slanders and compromises reality.
I thought of fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book would be just as infinite and suffocate the planet with smoke.
I remember having read that the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest. Before retiring I worked in the National Library, which housed nine-hundred thousand books; I know that to the right of the lobby a curved staircase descends to the basement, where the newspapers and maps are stored. I took advantage of the librarians’ inattentiveness for a moment to lose the Book of Sand in one of the humid shelves. I tried not to notice how high or how far from the door.
I feel somewhat relieved now, but I do avoid even passing by Mexico Street.2
Translator’s notes
1 The quote appears in English in the Spanish original.2 The National Library of Argentina is found on Mexico Street (calle México) in Buenos Aires.
http://anagrammatically.com/2010/03/08/the-book-of-sand-el-libro-de-arena-by-borges-translated/
Saturday, 1 June 2013
'Praise this world to the Angel'*
Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,
you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood
by the ropemaker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.
Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within–oh endlessly–within us! Whoever we may be at last.*
Rilke's elegy calls on the reader to pay attention to the here and now, not just the glories of the great hereafter, and is a trembling (as in Kierkergaardian fear and trembling) meditation of the evanescence of being, a source of wonder and awe deserving of tribute and reverence, and not merely a shoddy and contingent waiting room to be endured until God calls.
To look, not just with eye and brain, but with sense-memory as well, elevates the most mundane thing, and makes experience - all those overlooked, unconsidered, unremarkable and unremarked experiences, which otherwise count for little or nothing - into a long moment that no other may dictate or define.
* Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegy No. 9
you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe
where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him
something simple which, formed over generations,
lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood
by the ropemaker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.
Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within–oh endlessly–within us! Whoever we may be at last.*
Rilke's elegy calls on the reader to pay attention to the here and now, not just the glories of the great hereafter, and is a trembling (as in Kierkergaardian fear and trembling) meditation of the evanescence of being, a source of wonder and awe deserving of tribute and reverence, and not merely a shoddy and contingent waiting room to be endured until God calls.
To look, not just with eye and brain, but with sense-memory as well, elevates the most mundane thing, and makes experience - all those overlooked, unconsidered, unremarkable and unremarked experiences, which otherwise count for little or nothing - into a long moment that no other may dictate or define.
I think that one of the things that people tend to look for too much in art is meaning. And they tend to project meaning much faster than I would like them to. If I was a dictator, an art dictator, I would tie them up and say: ‘Here, look at this. And look at it again, and look at it again’. (Vija Celmins in conversation with Robert Gober, 2004
* Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegy No. 9
Anthropomorphism
Acherontia atroposIt is regarded not as the creation of a benevolent being, but the device of evil spirits - spirits enemies to man - conceived and fabricated in the dark, and the very shining of its eyes is thought to represent the fiery element whence it is supposed to have proceeded. Flying into their apartments in the evening at times it extinguishes the light; foretelling war, pestilence, hunger, death to man and beast. (Moses Harris, 1840)
Acherontia Genus
Acherontia derives from Acheron, the River of Pain in the underworld
Atropos is the Fate who cuts the thread of life
(The other 2 species of Acherontia are named in like style:
- Acherontia lachesis, after the Fate who measures the thread of life and determines destiny
- Acherontia styx, named after the principal and boundary river of Hades)
Common Names
English - death’s-head hawkmoth
German - Totenkopfschwärmer
French - le sphinx à tête de mort
Spanish - Esfinge de la muerte
So while one can be a little sneery about humanity's tendency to read everything in existence in relation to individual human destiny, markings which ought to be dismissed as purely arbitrary and meaningless in spiritual terms have attracted the attention of the populace of every nation where this moth has appeared - none has read it neutrally. And while the entymologists might claim to be naming it in a knowing joking manner, one does just wonder if they were hedging their bets with superstition.
Making (Drawings and Detritus)
It’s the representation in its material aspect that I want to bring out, but not at the expense of a represented, re-imagined world, because there’s no ultimate fact involved (it never becomes ‘just’ graphite on paper, which is another sort of fantasy). I don’t think there’s an alternative to essentially faulty images – they’re how we build the world we inhabit. What I do is a way to try to live critically with that, but also find pleasure in it. (David Musgrave, email to Kate Macfarlane, May 2010)It's an exhibition I never saw, but encountering the name of David Musgrave's 2004 Norwich exhibition, 'Living Dust', sent me looking for his work and his thinking, part of the project of find-another-artist-who-draws-with-my-mentality. And Musgrave is someone I 'get' like that.
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Transparent Head
2003
David Musgrave
Graphite on Paper
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Extracts from Kate Macfarlaine, 'David Musgrave: Faulty Images' (Tate Papers 2011)
Musgrave has widened the scope of his enquiry through curating exhibitions. Living Dust (2004), for example, was a show that featured works on paper from the sixteenth century to the present day.9 Works were chosen to demonstrate the transformative material capacity of the medium of drawing. Musgrave’s catalogue essay makes clear his frustration with the predominant conception of drawing as an expression of the artist’s intentions, thoughts and feelings.‘It’s rather the narrow but infinite gap between immaterial perception and its material recording that is their enduring content,’ he wrote.10 ‘Sometimes an image drifts so far from its referent that only its immediate context allows it to be identified […] what is significant [in such cases] is that the representation doesn’t become an abstract sign we subsequently use to communicate with others who recognise it, but something to be treated as having a particular, substantial reality of its own.’11
Drawing can be a slow, contemplative activity, something that happens quietly and that involves an interactive process. A mark is made, reflection ensues; more marks follow, with erasures, and slowly an image builds, is teased out of the paper. It is possible to create an illusion through drawing with graphite on paper but the medium’s monochromatic nature and the paper’s surface (something that Musgrave likes to work with rather than against) impose particular limitations. Musgrave employs trompe l’œil to create an illusion – but the uncertain status of the image draws attention to the methodology of production. Recourse to simple decoding tools, such as nameable things or a story line, are out of the question. Nonetheless, we somehow know what these things are, even if we cannot name them or attach labels to them. ‘I’d prefer the work to be seen to be about fiction rather than illusion’, Musgrave has said, ‘because I’m not trying to fool anybody. You can see how it’s done – if the fact that something isn’t what it appears to be doesn’t become part of the experience, then the work has failed.’12
- 2. David Musgrave, email to the author, 8 June 2010.
- 8. Herbert 2003.
- 9. ‘Living Dust’, Norwich Gallery, Norwich School of Art and Design, September–October 2004.
- 10. David Musgrave, Living Dust, exhibition catalogue, Norwich Gallery 2004, p.11.
- 11. Ibid., p.12.
- 12. Musgrave, quoted in Arnolfini 2003, p.21.
But for my purposes of finding someone who might better articulate my own garbled intent, this sentence is important:
It’s rather the narrow but infinite gap between immaterial perception and its material recording that is their enduring content.The drawing has, in and of itself, a material existence which is not explicable by or reducible to the artist's quotable declarations. It's a drawing, not a text, and must be experienced as such, looked at, not 'read' or 'decoded' as if it were a string of signs or words. The concept of 'immaterial perception' is valuable here, to me, since it describes much about the origins of a drawing and the process of producing one as a material object. In a curious concatenation between mind's eye and finger ends, the drawing is a felt thing, felt out in its rendering.
Progressive Porn
How the Do-Gooding Know-Besting Take-Control Progressive Elitists salivate at the prospect at having humankind on their knees on a chain.
The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, published in 2007, relished the prospect of the authoritarian form of government they deemed necessary, 'but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power', oh those self-sacrificing souls, putting their knowledge and their lives at the service of the masses they would dominate.
Their masterplan is clearest in its real intent when they are describing the universities of this authoritarian, liberty-impoverished future:
“The freedom to pursue knowledge as the individual sees fit is a mistake, for freedom must be considered in the context of the needs of society as a whole.... The Real University will have an agenda, which includes priorities for those tasks to be pursued that are essential to the future well-being of humanity.”
Why have I picked on this? Simply because this is a prize example of the new montrousness. Where once such a book would have been have regarded as the product of fascistic thinking, and as inimical to the true purpose of academic study, post-modernity has arrived at a place where these ideas are the property of the liberal, the left, the progressive - the world has turned upside down at the behest of those who would control our every action and thought up to and including what we are permitted to learn and speak of.
And in that mindset, book-burning becomes amusing, as seen in this now-deleted image from the San Jose State University Meteorology Department web page. The caption from the SJSU website read:
No, no, no. These people think we are their pets. The trouble is, when a pet turns vicious or 'sick', a one-way trip to the vet is perfectly legitimate.
Who are the monsters?
The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, published in 2007, relished the prospect of the authoritarian form of government they deemed necessary, 'but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power', oh those self-sacrificing souls, putting their knowledge and their lives at the service of the masses they would dominate.
Their masterplan is clearest in its real intent when they are describing the universities of this authoritarian, liberty-impoverished future:
“The freedom to pursue knowledge as the individual sees fit is a mistake, for freedom must be considered in the context of the needs of society as a whole.... The Real University will have an agenda, which includes priorities for those tasks to be pursued that are essential to the future well-being of humanity.”
Why have I picked on this? Simply because this is a prize example of the new montrousness. Where once such a book would have been have regarded as the product of fascistic thinking, and as inimical to the true purpose of academic study, post-modernity has arrived at a place where these ideas are the property of the liberal, the left, the progressive - the world has turned upside down at the behest of those who would control our every action and thought up to and including what we are permitted to learn and speak of.
Government by expert, technocracy, or progressive tyranny, or an attempt to bring into being Plato's philosopher-king, the dispassionate, clever and principled autocrat, every single one of these leave the ruled mass waiting for the knock on the door, denouncement as a dissident, or holding mumbled conversations with like-minded folk in the shadows, perpetually looking over the shoulder for the righteous thought police. Denormalisation will soon be the general rule and it seems that it is only those who have long had a tenuous grasp on social acceptance, who are accustomed to be lectured and hectored by the man-from-the-council and the woman-from-the-social before shrugging and turning away, who have noticed the ramping up of efforts to police the minutiae of behaviour, preparing the ground for some imagined utopia of order, cleanliness, ponies and rainbows.This week we received a deluge of free books from the Heartland Institute. The book is entitled “The Mad, Mad, Made World of Climatism”. Shown above, Drs. Bridger and Clements test the flammability of the book.
No, no, no. These people think we are their pets. The trouble is, when a pet turns vicious or 'sick', a one-way trip to the vet is perfectly legitimate.
Who are the monsters?
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