To Be Free is Not To Be Liberated (It Is To Be Cut Wide Open)

There is a difference between freedom and liberation. To be free is to seek something (from someone, from the nation-state). Liberation is freedom from within. A permission you give yourself. No one can take it from you. No one owes it to you. The offering belongs to you.

Reading Christina Sharpe’s reflections on Nina Simone performing at the Montreux Jazz festival prompts the following: like Sharpe, I am haunted by the beauty of Simone’s performance at Montreux in 1976, especially by one song: “Feelings”.

In the song, Simone seems to be willing herself onward, not because of fear of the progression but because of knowledge, desire: the desire not to let a feeling finish saying itself until it has been fully said. A song says all it needs to, only then will the music end.

Of this song — along with another, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” — Sharpe writes:

“In both of these songs, Ms. Simone is bending the notes toward and past freedom; she improvises, she tells us that she already knows how it feels to be free. Almost one hundred and twenty-five years after Frederick Douglass’s July 5, 1852, speech ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’ Nine Simone also knows that individual freedom — all freedom being inextricably, inexorably, definitionally tied to unfreedom — is still not enough. We can hear that in and under the songs’ lyrics, in and under the notes she sings and plays.

“But Black liberation? Now, that might be another thing altogether, and Nina was singing us there.”

(Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (London: Daunt Books, 2023), 145)

Freedom rebukes. (It can be stolen. It can be denied. Refused. Sometimes, denial itself is a form of theft: the theft of refusal.) Dionne Brand says:

“some damage I had expected, but no one

expects the violence of glances, of offices,

of walkways and train stations, of bathroom mirrors

especially, the vicious telephones, the coarseness of

daylight, the brusque decisions of air,

the casual homicides of dresses”

(Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010), 10)

and I juxtapose this with those of Adrienne Rich:

“Our story is of moments

when even slow motion moved too fast

for the shutter of the camera:

words that blew our lives apart, like so,

eyes that cut and caught each other,

mime of the operating room

where gas and knives quote each other

moments before the telephone

starts ringing: our story is

how still we stood,

how fast.” (1987)

Libertion is sovereign. Freedom? A placeholder. Homicides of dresses. Decisions of air. A mime inside the operating room quoting knives. The vicious telephone, telling you your call cannot be received. (Think of Barthes, writing to the one who will never reply.)

SO HOW FREE IS ART?

I don’t know. Ask Susan Hampton. She took a steak knife and cleaved a cut clean as a finishing line. Ask Fiona Apple (“Evil is a relay sport / when the one who’s burned / turns to pass the torch”).

Susan describes the following scene:

“Hurtling past us in an old Volvo are women who speak with forked tongues. It’s a mixture of ancient languages they cast around them, violent languages with no vowels. Their speech is all plosives and screaming. This is not because they have individual traumas but for the sake of art. They are dedicated to art, especially performance works. In the car they’re not necessarily practising — they carry on like this anyway. Because of their dedication to art they have developed a lifestyle which incorporates it, so that outsiders can’t tell the difference.”

XX meets XX. Hampton seems to be inviting us in on a joke, not because we have individual traumas — though we do, or may soon — but for the sake of the work, the sake of the art. Life is performance work. (Until you — and maybe the outsiders, too — can’t discern the difference.)

And cut to:

“Now there are some curious people who invite these women to dinner. They soon find out that the women speak with steak knives. When you thought a bit of tenderness might be forthcoming, you find they have pierced you between the ribs, just waving their knives to make a point. No damage intended, though when a bloodstain spreads on your shirt they scream laughing. This is the life they lead. […] They always like to be bad. They are bad in bed and bad everywhere else. Your get the impression that in life as in art good manners are the enemy. They will go to extremes to prove this.”

I would love to love like this, screaming in laughter while the bloodstain spreads on my passenger’s shirt. In life, as in art, good manners are the enemy.

LANGUAGES OF THE (MIDDLE) EAST: A PLAY STARRING ELIAS CANETTI AND JENNIFER MAIDEN

Elias Canetti and Jennifer Maiden walk into a bar / in the Middle East. // Jennifer Maiden writes, in her poem “Language”,

“I’m reading the Arabian Nights. I will learn

why Burton’s wife burned his papers when

he died, if I can only enter now

into the speech which caused them, &

if only that speech does not prove some

secret which the mouth denies the tongue.”

Elias Canetti writes / in the ‘The Dahan Family’ chapter of The Voices of Marrakech,

” ‘E-li-as Ca-ne-ti?’ the father repeated on a note of interrogation. He spoke the name aloud several times, pronouncing each syllable distinctly and separately. In his mouth the name became more substantial, more beautiful. He looked not at me but straight ahead of him, as if the name were more real than I and as if it were worth exploring. I listened in amazement, deeply affected. In his sing-song voice my name sounded to me as if it belonged to a special language that I did not know. He weighed it magnaminously four or five times; I thought I heard the clink of weights. I felt no alarm, for he was not a judge. I knew he would find my name’s meaning and true mass; and when he had finished he looked up and his eyes laughed again into mine.

“He was standing there as if he wanted to say: the name is good. But there was no language in which he could have told me. I read it in his face and experienced an overpowering surge of love for him. […] Elie was waiting for me to say something for him to translate, but I could not. Awed, I remained perfectly silent. Perhaps I was also afraid of breaking the wonderful spell of the name-chanting. As a result we spent several long moments facing each other. If he only understands why I cannot speak, I thought; if my eyes could only laugh the way his do. I would have been a let down to have entrusted anything more to that interpreter. As far as I was concerned no interpreter was good enough for him.”

(Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit, trans. JA Underwood, Penguin, 2012, 74-75; first published in German as Die Stimmen von Marrakesh by Carl Hanser Verlag, 1968)

The Voices of Marrakech is a record of the few weeks Canetti spent visiting Marrakesh during the 1960s. The book is a record of obsessions, among them Canetti’s interests in language, sound, and vocalisation. Canetti returned to them continually in his writing. Canetti has his own secret voice, one which his mouth denies to the tongue: refinding himself in another’s pronounciation of his given name, the signifier that nominally belongs to him. It is a new name but it is the same name, too, a doubling that removes him from self-assocations, that moves him. As if the name might be on loan to another, a stranger, whose invocation of it makes it belong, again, to the person who has taken it for granted.

There is something almost homoerotic, or perhaps simply expressing human love, Platonic revelations of affection, of seeing your name caressed and cared for and

I think of it as a name

for that which cannot be named,

for that which refuses

language

because no language can contain or express

or ever be adequate to it.

The language of inadequacy: which is a desire, perhaps a kind of love, too. But there was no language in which he could have told me.

They face each other, across a gulf of cultures and languages. But what they are actually facing is inexpressible.

No interpreter was good enough for him, Canetti writes; and, perhaps implicitly, Canetti is also suggesting that he, the author, is inadequate, too. And this inadequacy is endemic to all writing. Writing always fails. It is endemic to any act of praise and commemoration that cannot help but fall short of the thing it praises.

***

Celan, Anne Carson observed, is “a poet who uses language as if he were always translating.”

***

Or perhaps Canetti never really learnt how to claim it, this thing called language. To make it truly part of himself. Canetti, meeting the shopkeeper, whose son acts as an interpreter for the pair, writes of meeting the son’s father. The father speaks Arabic but no French, so the son acts as interpreter, introducting Canetti, explaining that he is a Jew and giving him his name. “The way he said it,” Canetti writes, “with his characterless voice and poor articulation, it sounded like nothing.”

***

Edmund Jabès:

Silence, as all writers know, allows the word to be heard. At a given moment, the silence is so strong that the words express nothing but it alone.

Does this silence, capable of making language tilt over, possess its own language to which one can attribute neither origin nor name?

Inaudible language of the secret?

Those who have been reduced to silence, once, know it best, but know also that they can hear it.

***

Ilya Kaminsky: “A great poet is not someone who speaks in stadiums to thousands of  listeners. A great poet is a very private person. In his or her privacy this poet creates a language in which he or she is able to speak, privately, to many people at the same time.”

***

THE BIT IN WHICH HELENE CIXOUS GOES BLIND

‘I can see, I can see I’m going blind.’

–Korn, “Blind”

Thinking of Edward Jabes’ reflection on the inaudible, I think, too, of Helene Cixous. In her collaboration with Jacques Derrida, Veils, publsihed in 1998, Cixous reflects on myopia and on not-seeing as a kind of containment, a liberation from the apparent freedom of sight. Cixous writes: “Myopia was her fault, her lead, her imperceptible native veil. Strange: she could see that she could not see, but she could not see clearly. Every day there was refusal, but who could say where the refusal came from: who was regusing, the world, or she?” (3)

“She” is anyonmous. She could be anyone. She could be you. She could be me. She could be anyone because to be caught short before what is known and what we feel we ought to know is a feeling many of us have encountered or will encounter at some point. It stands for a fragility that is readily available. We all may lose our sense of sight, voir, and our knowledge of what we once felt we knew (savoir), perhaps even knew intimately, and to know it then as refused or a kind of refusal rather than as a familiar(ity).

Who can say where refusal begins, where it comes from? Who can say where savoir faire goes once it becomes something foreign to us?

Cixous goes on to describe the origin of the veil, myopia, as a kind of arrival sans-papiers, an arrival with no delineable origin, a cousin of Jabes’ speechlessness/deafness. Cixous: “What is the equivalent of unheard-of? Unseen? There had never before been any unseen. It was an invention. It had just begun. […] But if myopia could be expelled, was it then a foreigner?” (10)

The paradox of the beginning is that we must struggle to conceive of a time before beginnings. Because to conceive of a time before the beginning is akin to trying to think of a time before time:

“Before, she said ‘my myopia,’ like: ‘my life,’ or ‘where I was born.’ One day she would hear herself say ‘when I was myopic.’ The beginning was withdrawing into the past. A prehistory had been formed.” (10)

“Myopia was her truth”, Cixous writes, be-lie-ing the irreversible, the advent of beginnings (native vs foreigner, essential vs inessential). Intrinsic and supplement are co-conspirators, “She had always had the presentiment that her myopia was her own foreigner, her essential foreignness, her own accidental necessary weakness.” (10) Like something grafted to the skin, a bit of body horror that is intrinsic but (and here is the abject part) separable from the skin, the other intrincis material — whether by theft or the necessity of accident — Cixous describes “The joy of the eye physically delivered; a delicious sensation of staples removed: for myopia has little claws, it holds the eye under a little tight veil, screwed-down eyelids, insistences, vain efforts to pass through the veil and see: forehead frown.

“The joy of the unbridled eye: you can hear better like this. To hear you have to see clearly.

“Now she could hear clearly even without glasses.” (11-12)

I can’t help but think, when I read this, of the old joke: “Sorry, I can’t hear you, let me put my glasses on.” Part of a long family of jokes, like the one about the elder relative who needs to turn the radio down to make a three-point turn or to find their bearings.

“What the seers have never seen: presence-before-the-world. But ‘before,’ not knowing that that’s what she saw, did she see it?

“Do the seers know that they see? Do the non-seers know that they see differently? What do we see? Do eyes see that they see? Some see and do not know that they see. They have eyes and do not see that they do not not-see.” (13)

In the end, Cixous suggests, to ask “What do we see?” is to think of time before time, to think an impossibility. Belonging, like knowledge, becomes an act of faith. An avowal before the fact. Before genesis, chaos — chaos as interval, frontier-crossing, Sisyphean repetition, eternal return. What Cixous summarises as “wandering in limbo”:

“Limbo: the region of the myopic, purgatory and promise, dubious environs, the sojourn of the just before redemption. And now she was losing her limbo, which was the water in which she swam. She was being brutally saved. Redemption without delay! But if one saved by a coup de grace? Or else hit, thrown, struck down!?

–By going, my poor fairy, my myopia, you are withdrawing from me the ambiguous gifts that filled me with anguish and granted me states that those who see do not know, she murmured.

–Do not forget me. Keep forever the world suspended, desirable, refused, that enchanted thing I had given you, murmured myopia.

–If I forget thee, oh Jerusalem, may my right eye, etc.

–Ah! I see coming in place of my diffuse reign a reign without hesitation.

–I shall always hesitate. I shall not leave my people. I belong to the people of those who do not see.” (13)

Myopia is, not exactly reversed here, but placed somewhere in-between. A gradient on a spectrum rather than a fatalistic conclusion or end-point or a blessed possession. It is rendered into a kind of (in)visible community, something to which we might wish to belong.

(All quotations from Veils by Helene Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Stanford: Stanford University Press, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, 2001; originally published in French as Voiles, 1998, Editions Galilee)

***

No Wound: Barthes, Mourning, and the Winter Garden

Written during a period of mourning shortly after his mother died, Camera Lucida sees Barthes reading a set of familial and historical photographs. He writes about the studium — the photograph within its cultural context — and the punctum, which is more subjective, personal; the element of the photograph over which its author, the photographer, has no final say. The punctum belongs, instead, to the spectator, the person viewing the photograph.

Among the photographs Barthes reads is one taken of his mother when she was five years old, and which he calls the “Winter Garden Photograph”. This photo, Barthes declares, is “the only photograph which assuredly existed for me”.

It is strange, this combination of “assurance” and “existence”. Because the photograph itself is not “reassuring”; rather, it is the fact it exists at all, that it speaks so personally to Barthes in his mourning, which provides it with weight, dimenson, existence. Assurance. But this assurance refuses disclosure on the page. It discloses itself in its entirety only in Barthes psychic affect, his sense of the photo as revelaing something both permanent and unsayable, incapable of reproduction except for the reproduction that is the reliving of pain, or trauma, while we are in mourning.

(“In mourning”: as if we entered mourning, as if we can leave. Is there escape? And, if there is, in what sense did we ever enter it? In what sense does trauma enter into us, disclose itself, unfold inside us?)

Barthes writes:

“(I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’; it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound.” (Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 73)

Barthes reads the “Winter Garden Photograph” as trauma: something that discloses itself. Something that is unseeable but specific, especially to the person for whom it is traumatic. For those who are not party to the event the event is visible, seeable, but the trauma itself is not; and thus what is really being seen or diclosed? A traumatic event may involve a perpetrator or perpetrators — one of whom may include the person or persons experiencing trauma — but the only possibility for the trauma to be recognised as trauma is that it be lived, experienced, as a kind of puntum: that which pricks, that which wounds, and goes on wounding.

The event, having taken place, cannot be undone.

In it, for you, only wound.

Barthes Mother, or A Discourse for the Lover Who Knows No One Will Ever Reply

In the chapter “The Love Letter” of Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, there is a reflection on Freud:

“Like desire, the love letter waits for an answer; it implicitly enjoins the other to reply, for without a reply the other’s image changes, becomes other. This is what the young Freud explains so authoritatively to his fiancee: ‘Yet I don’t want my letter to keep remaining unanswered, and I shall stop writing you altogether if you don’t write back. Perpetual monologues apropos of a loved being, lead to erroneous notions concerning mutual relations, and make us strangers to each other when we meet again, so that we find things different from what, without realizing it, we imagined.’

“(The one who would accept the ‘injustices’ of communication, the one who would continue speaking lightly, tenderly, without being answered, would acquire a great mastery: the mastery of the Mother.)” (trans. from the French by Richard Howard, 1978, 158-159; originally published as Fragments d’un discours amoureux by Editions du Seuil, 1977)

I am quietly fascinated. What is this becoming other? When we write to someone there is an expectation of reply. If the reply never comes, is this person we wrote to a stranger?

And, if they are a stranger, were they always a stranger, even when we thought we were writing to them? Or do they only become a stranger when we address them and they fail to reply — to be there for us?

The truth is that I am thinking about these things because (I believe) they are connected to a recent experience: a week ago, I asked to meet the director of a writers’ festival. This director suggested we meet up. They suggested they were available, and happy to catch up. Then the meeting failed to eventuate.

A small interruption. But a small interruption in which any further interruption — like asking did you still want to meet up? did something happen? is either of us still the people we were when we seemed to agree that we wished, whoever those people were, to have them meet up, to appear for one another? — feels like another kind of finality: a blemish upon a past that we agreed upon but which failed, in the end, to arrive.

Jalal Toufic on Etel Adnan’s ‘The Arab Apocalypse’

Published around 1980, the English translation, from Post-Apollo Press, of Etel Adnan’s book-length poem L’Apocalypse arabe opens with some interesting observations by the Lebanese artist Jalal Toufic, who writes, in his introduction:

‘From time to time, there occurs what suspends time, revelation-at least for certain people, martyrs.

‘But then the apocalypse, revelation, is withdrawn, occulted by the “apocalypse,” the surpassing disaster, so that symptomatically apocalypses primary sense (from Greek apokalypsis, from apokalyptern to uncover, from apo- + kalyptein to cover) is occulted by its secondary meaning, and marty’s primary sense, witness, is occulted by its secondary, vulgar meaning: “a person who suffers greatly or is killed because of their political or religious beliefs.” One of the symptoms of such a surpassing disaster is that one of the Twentieth Century’s major Arabic books of poetry, Etel Adnan’s L’Apocalypse Arabe, published in 1980, has been out of print for around two decades. L’Apocalypse Arabe, an Arab book of poetry?! Notwithstanding that it was written originally in French (1980) then rewritten in English (1989) by an author who lives for the most part in the USA and France, it is an Arab book of poetry in part because it was withdrawn, occulted by the surpassing disasters that have affected the Arab world. A small number of Arab writers, video makers, filmmakers and artists, some of whom live abroad, have been working to resurrect, make available again what has been withdrawn by the Arab “apocalypse,” including Adnan’s L’Apocalypse Arabe. Have they succeeded? […] Have Arabs, who, with very rare exceptions, continue to indulge in their petty concerns, taken notice? Was it enough to have The Arab Apocalypse translated into Arabic in 1991 for it to be read in the Arab world once it is resurrected? Even before having it translated to Arabic by someone else, it seems that the author, also an artist, had already partly translated it into graphic signs for the so many Arabs (38.7 per cent in 1999, or about 57.7 million adult Arabs [UN’s Arab Human Development Report 2002]) who are illiterate, for whom Arabic is as illegible as English and French—may they be jolted by its graphic signs… into, at last but not least, learning to read—and then actually read (doesn’t the great Seventh Century Arabic apocalyptic book, which has reached us through the prophet Muhammad, enjoin us to do so?).’

Teju Cole, Tremor

On listening and the more-than-human:

‘The special value you saw in Bylsma’s version and that you conveyed to Tunde was perhaps connected to your own practice in those days of composing free improvisations for piano, an approach that had less to do with the interpretation of preexisting works than with a spirit of discovery that invited the piano to reveal its secrets to you in real time. You said embodiment was not only the animal in the forest and the tracker following that animal but also the forest as a self-aware system, attentive to the rustle of its own leaves, the shifting colors, the air, the water, the panoptic view of many moving parts, the interactions of light and shade. Collective listening, you called it.’

On identity and the algorithm:

‘He returns to the page now. The images of the unidentified murder victims are more detailed than he remembers.

These numerous Jane and John Does are people who are un-known. Their appearance is unconnected to their lives, connected only to their deaths. How does one live a lifetime on this earth to whatever age and on being violently removed from it leave no visible ripple? No one has lived alone. To be human is to be in community. But some die alone and a few die without even their death entering the community of the dead. This is what troubles Tunde about these computer-aided portraits: that with their fake skies and backgrounds, their meticulously rendered hair, their plastic-looking skin, and their intense, almost frantic, gazes, they are images of those who are in some sense undead.

Death in human life only makes sense when death has been acknowledged. It is not a raw biological fact, not for humans. Death is knowledge of death, death is the ritual for the dead. This is why when we hear someone has died we always want to know how it happened: because in order to begin to absorb the pain of the loss we need a narrative. Acknowledging the dead, calling them by their names, and laying them to rest are acts embedded in the deepest layer of human behavior. Among the earliest of all cultural artifacts are burial mounds and barrows.’

On Whiteness, First Nations, painting and death rituals:

‘MOST OF THE HUMAN BEINGS who have lived and died have left behind them no trace of how they looked, what their voices sounded like, how they moved, what they preferred. It is a vast oblivion but also a relief that we are not inundated with the faces and presences of the innumerable dead. We can move on with our twenty-first-century lives without having to watch videos of every eleventh-century inhabitant of Normandy or Java or Songhay. It was not until the invention and dissemination of photography that it became common for large numbers of people to have their likenesses recorded for posterity, a possibility that had previously been available only to the wealthy and powerful; and it was also only in that era as well with the invention of the gramophone that it became possible for anyone’s voice at all, no matter how eminent, to be recorded and heard after their death. The earlier privilege of remaining uncaptured, of dying with one’s death, was lost. Should the dead move around us like those who haven’t died? Should their presence be more material than those one sees in dreams?

He recalls the advisory note often present in Australian-produced films, addressed to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, that the film they are about to watch contains the images, voices, and names of deceased persons. This gesture of respect or caution has behind it a cultural practice with which he is not familiar, a taboo against naming the dead. In some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures the recently dead are referred to only with circumlocutions.

When the technology of photography and film became commonplace in those communities it led to a further discomfort with viewing images of the dead or with hearing their voices.

For many Westerners no existential or moral distinction is made between watching a film made ten years ago and one made seventy years ago, even though it is likely that most people in the latter would already be dead. (More than once Sadako has turned to him while they are watching an old film and whispered: all these people are dead.) Looking up the protocols around the Australian advisory notes, Tunde finds a different concept, also used by some Aboriginal people. Because it can be hard to tell if white people are happy or sad, if they are jealous or angry or moody, because the notion of a stiff upper lip is believed to make these public displays of emotion unwelcome for them, some Aboriginal people say “white people have no face.” A startling phrase and he can’t help but like it. White people have no face. An unwritten poem.

And it is this droll moment that makes him realize what else it is about the computer-generated faces that is bothering him: those faces are almost all white. A very few of them could be read as Asian or Latinx but in thirty minutes of clicking he has landed on not a single black face. White people have no face and that face is everywhere. It is probably a simple instance of algorithmic bias in this case. But he knows these things are never simple. In one sense the people in the photographs can be said to have no race at all, as they are fictional creations, not real peope taken as is a language game since these are intended to be taken as people or as photographs of people. The project is implicitly a representation of the world. Why then does this imagined world, a world made by certain technologically minded Americans, have very few black people in it? He is not one to insist on black representation in every context. He is not aware of himself trying to keep score and he finds it fatiguing to even have to notice such things. But that is not entirely true. He does notice, in fact he notices automatically and he finds the absences egregious. It would be more exhausting to shut his eyes to such erasures. He expects that the designers will have excuses about data sets and the availability of material on which to train the generative adversarial network. But there are always excuses and they are often plausible. That granted, what he knows is that white people are comfortable in all-white environments. They don’t notice black absence in their museums and schools, in their restaurants, in the movies they watch, the books they read, the scholars they cite. Even in a purely fictional world, even in a futuristic world, their default is monochrome. It is as though to put black people into fiction or to imagine them in the future would be to participate in an unseemly exercise in political balance, as though black presence could only and ever be there to represent “blackness.” He can hear himself arguing now and he dislikes the sound of it.

He had thought of Tuymans and Dumas but now he thinks of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose portraits are all of fictional persons. There is an abundance of black presence in Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings, black people who do not exist anywhere but in her paintings, paintings that may be set in the past, present, or future. With their loose brushwork and dark palette and a technical approach reminiscent of Goya and Manet her paintings often contain in the same space feelings of ease and melancholy. He feels anchored in the world of these paintings in which invented individuals are full of presence and feling.

Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings entail a compassion large enough to summon even those who are not otherwise imagined. They move towards life and more life. They are in this sense opposite to Samuel Little’s images of the black women he has methodically murdered. He goes to town, kills a woman, gets out of town. He does this over and over again, often in places he hardly knows. Sometimes he returns to a city and sometimes he attaches himself to one. And in no city does he kill more than he does in Los Angeles. That is where he kills Carol, Guadalupe, Audrey, “Granny,” “Alice,” “T-Money,” and many unnamed others, all of whose faces come to rest in the archive of his mind until he summons them up again in pastels.’

On the limitations of writers’ festivals:

’Indeed, following another talk I gave, I had a thoughtful gentleman suggest to me during the question-and-answer period that restitution was all well and good but the reality was that certain cultures were not able to take good care of their own artifacts. What were we to do then? I appreciated his directness. He gave the not-unreasonable example of the destruction of the monumental Buddhas in the Bamiyan Valley in early 2001. Would it not be safer, this man suggested, to remove works of universal importance from cultures that were, in his words, “less able to care for them”? After pausing for thought I responded to him by saying that in the first instance a sandstone Buddha fifty-five meters high and carved into a cliff would not have been movable. We are all vulnerable to the madnesses of history. But more impor-tant, I said, his proposal was based on two assumptions. One was about people and institutions in places he didn’t know, about the forms of expertise and attentiveness present in those places and appropriate to the needs there. The other assumption was that the West was impeccable or even reliable in its record of the care of artworks. And yet it was the Allied forces who in their 1945 attack on Magdeburg destroyed Vincent van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tar-ascon, a work of universal importance. It was they who incinerated during their firebombing of Dresden in the same year Gustave Courbet’s The Stone Breakers, a work of universal importance. And when the Flakturm Friedrichshain in Berlin went up in flames in the final year of the war more than a hundred paintings were lost for all time among them masterworks by Ghirlandaio, Murillo, Rubens, Titian, Goya, Botticelli, Tintoretto, and Caravaggio. It is a melancholy exercise to look at faded pre-war photographs of some of those paintings now. No one will ever stand before Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew and the Angel again, no one will ever be consoled by that extraordinary painting’s agony and sensuality, by its sublime doubt. I cannot help but think, I said to my interlocutor at that event, that these irreplaceable treasures would be with us now if only they had been kept somewhere truly safe during the Second World War. Somewhere like Lagos for instance.

But later, I must say, I felt guilty about the asymmetry of the question-and-answer format. After all, the audience on that occasion as on this one had come to see me talk and this questioner was already at a disadvantage. I had a microphone and he didn’t. He was given no right of response. My answer, accurate though it might have been, also had an air of showmanship to it. So immediate, sharp, and factual was my response that the audience applauded and in fact cheered my answer. It was as though there had been a combat and I had triumphed. I was embarrassed. If I were asked to respond to that man again I think I would be more succinct. Perhaps I would respond to him only by citing the German incendiary bomb that hit the Liverpool Museum in May 1941. That bomb and the resulting fire led to the destruction of thousands of artifacts gathered from around the world many of which had been acquired through colonial violence. Among those destroyed objects was a brass head of the Queen Mother, the Iyoba, looted from Benin in 1897. Perhaps I would have said to him that any ethics that persistently considered works of art more valuable than human life was no ethics at all. Perhaps I could have done a better job of persuading him that my point was not to give a brilliant retort but to convey my genuine sorrow at the long and persistent history of white people thinking they know better than the rest of us. That, 1 think, would be a good place to stop. Thank you all for your attention tonight.‘

On dinner parties, being in community … and good music:

’Angela is telling us about her participation in the revival of spoken Wampanoag. Someone changes the music. “Cranes in the Sky.” Frank Ocean’s “Nights.” Bowls are passed around with heaps of white rice on which the gumbo is served and it’s as though people don’t realize how hungry they are until they began to eat. Drinks are expected at parties but real food isn’t. But we love to feed peo-ple. What a gift to get to do this in community. How great is what surrounds us, how insubstantial what preoccupies us.’

Julien Leyre on translation

Much of continental philosophy actually grows in the gap between Greek semantic and conceptual structure and those of modern European languages. One of the most original and stimulating books I ever read on language is a little-known opus by Italian Professor Lo Piparo, and consists entirely of proposing an alternative translation of a short passage by Aristotle on language, then expanding as commentary the basic assumptions that led to that new translation.

Translation is a radical alternative to debating. In debate, thinking happens collectively, and the debating tradition acknowledges this phenomenon. It relies on the presence of an intellectual opponent – past, present or imaginary – and offers ideas in the form of a contention. Fresh, original thought emerges dialogically between competing contenders. Translation follows a different model, and obeys a different set of values: here, the translator-interpreter is a mediator between an author and an external reader, whose worldviews are assumed to be different. Translators bring across foreign or forgotten thoughts within the conceptual world of their audience.

For all its diplomatic underpinnings, translation is a fantastic bullshit detector. Abstract bureaucratese, vapid thought, loose constructions based on cloud-like associations of words, or sheer ‘sound-good’ rhetorics dissolve under the harsh acid of translation. Translation is the great enemy of sophistry, because sophistry, fake reasonings and paralogics, are often harder to translate, but also because sophistry goes against the core ethics of translation.

Translation is a school of honesty and humility for the mind. It teaches how difficult and resistant language is to the feeling of intellectual power that we may have – and forces us to acknowledge the resistance of the real. A good translation is judged on two criteria: how faithful and generous it is to the original, and how well it fits within the shape of its host language. The two, however, are inseparable in their material expression. The task brings translators a special benefit. By challenging our own inherited, sclerotic intellectual constructs embodied in lazy language, translation forces us to stretch our brains, because foreign ideas don’t spontaneously fit within the shape of our own clichés.

Translation is a remarkable writing exercise. Translators are directly confronted with the resistance of language. Different grammar systems or bodies of vocabulary will not allow an idea to simply come across on its own.

Translation also teaches us how much can – and unfortunately sometimes does – get lost in the process: ideas have to be pared down, folded over, flattened, in order to translate easily. In this regard, translation teaches us to listen and read better.

 

• Julien Leyre

Henry Fielding, “Tom Jones”

IT is possible, however, that Mr. Allworthy saw enough to render him a little uneasy; for we are not always to conclude that a wise man is not hurt, because he doth not cry out and lament himself, like those of a childish or effeminate temper. But indeed it is possible he might see some faults in the captain without any uneasiness at all; for men of true wisdom and goodness are contented to take persons and things as they are, without complaining of their imperfections, or attempting to amend them. They can see a fault in a friend, a relation, or an acquaintance, without ever mentioning it to the parties themselves, or to any others; and this often without lessening their affection. Indeed, unless great discernment be tempered with this overlooking disposition, we ought never to contract friendship but with a degree of folly which we can deceive: for I hope my friends will pardon me when I declare, I know none of them without a fault; and I should be sorry if I could imagine I had any friend who could not see mine. Forgiveness of this kind we give and demand in turn. It is an exercise of friendship, and perhaps none of the least pleasant. And this forgiveness we must bestow, without desire of amendment. There is, perhaps no surer mark of folly, than an attempt to correct the natural infirmities of those we love. The finest composition of human nature, as well as the finest china, may have a flaw in it; and this, I am afraid, in either case, is equally incurable; though, nevertheless, the pattern may remain of the highest value.

阎连科,《丁庄梦》

我爷沿着胡同往前走，胡同两边各家各户的门框上，家家户户都贴着白对联，新的和旧的，白得刺眼睛，走过去，像穿过一条堆满雪的白胡同。他就沿着胡同走，看见有户未出五符的同胞弟家的大门上，家里不到三十岁的儿子有了热病死掉了，那大门上的白门联就写着了”人走屋空三秋戏，灯灭日落熬夕阳。”还有一家李姓的人，死了新娶不久的儿媳妇，那儿媳妇的热病是从她娘家带来的，并又染给了她的男人了，生了娃儿又染娃儿了，为了他儿孙的热病能好转，那门联上就写了”月落星稀一家黑，但愿来日光明照。”还有下一家的门，那门上除了两条白色的门联纸，纸上却是没有墨的字。爷不明白贴了白门联，却又不写字，就过去看了看，摸了摸，才发现那白门联下竟还有两层白门联。就知道他家热病只少死过三个人，贴那白联已经贴怕了，贴烦了，也就索性只贴门联不写墨字了。

音速 / 商禽

音速 / 商禽
─────────────────────────────────

─悼王迎先

有人從橋上跳下來。
那姿勢零亂而僵直，恰似電影中道具般的身軀，突然，在空中，停格
了二分之一秒，然后才緩緩繼續下降。原來，他被從水面反彈回來的
自己在蹤身時所發出的那一聲淒厲的叫喊托了一下，因而在落水時也
祇有淒楚一響。

一九八七年八月二十八日　中和

Brian Turner: Elegy for Peter Hooper

ELEGY FOR PETER HOOPER

(novelist, poet, teacher, environmentalist)

 

A grey day in Greymouth and a gathering of people

most of whom I’ve never met and won’t again.

There’s scripture, hymns, eulogies and that undeniable

finality that never fails to reduce me to tears.

 

Time alone will fill the spaces your going’s opened up

like evening shadows stealing into the valleys

of the Grey and the Arahura that you knew and loved.

I’d like to think Westland’s laureate will one day

 

receive his due but doubt it, for writing that conveyed

a love of place, respect for people and other creatures,

and an unwavering faith in the force of patient instruction

has never been sexy in a land where cultural cringing’s

 

enduring. Add to that work which celebrated natural beauty,

advocated continuance and expressed a desire for peace,

and you were always going to be swimming against the tide.

Peter, with your calming goodwill, you were that rare

 

sort of man we call decent if not saintly. At your service

I was awash with memories and regrets

while up and down the Coast and over the mountains

a raw wind blew, and bells tolled wherever I turned.

 

Shingle ground on the shore like pebbles in a crop

and the wind off the Tasman badgered the flax

at the top of the beach where you gathered wood often.

Offshore, pickets of rain were driving into a slowly

 

heaving grey sea. I know you hoped for a longer life

in your green-painted wooden house

on the edge of the forest a kilometre or more

inland at Paroa, a stream talking constantly

 

within metres of your backdoor. Instead a friend

found you dead several days on the floor

under your bed, and it all seemed tragic and unfair,

the stingy absence of dignity or justice that fate

 

decreed for you. Now, asking Where to go from here?

and What more could I have done? – the one a puzzle,

the other futile – I think of the people who admired and maybe

even loved you, too, and never told you so because we seldom do.

 

• from Taking Off (2001)