the art of losing

I'm starting to find a disturbing thread running through the books and music I love (or have loved). King Lear, Disgrace, Age of Iron, What I Loved, Celan's poetry, Fugitive Pieces, W;t, Barabbas, the book of Job, Hopkins' 'Pitched past pitch of grief', Beethoven's final piano sonatas, the Schubert sonata as played by Richter that I'm currently obsessed with. What all of these have in common is a desolation (or in some cases, a transcendent bareness) that comes from the experience of searing, harrowing loss. In so many of these works, the protagonist is stripped of everything that s/he ever valued, everything that shored up his/her sense of self. (Ok, maybe it's hard to see / hear that happening in the music, but the music I love so often has an austerity to it that could be attributed to a desire to communicate that feeling of being stripped bare in musical language.)

So what's with this obsession with loss? I really don't know - perhaps it's because that kind of loss has something so elemental about it. One feels a kind of purgation reading about it. Though I'd be the first to say, good to encounter in art, and let's hope that's as far as it ever gets.
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Schubert: Piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat, D960

So the CD finally arrived yesterday - a live recording of Sviatoslav Richter playing Schubert's last piano sonata in a parish church somewhere in England. You can hear the audience members coughing - some of them very badly, the poor things - and occasionally you can catch the sound of cars, and, according to the CD notes, even airplanes, in the background. But somehow, even though such disturbances normally annoy me, in this case, they just make the whole performance come alive in a way that would have not been possible if all the ambient noise had been edited out.

I love Richter's playing. I'm not sure if that's the consensus among the music people - certainly I've heard people say things like "He was quite eccentric", or, even worse, "He's very popular", (implying that he's not that good, really). I guess what I like about the way he makes music is, firstly, his technical prowess (every note so clearly articulated, even in glissando passages, believe it or not!), and secondly, the individuality of his musical vision, its sheer verve and confidence.

If only he'd made more recordings. But ah well. I'm just glad to have discovered him, even if I came a bit late to the party.

Ooh, and an interesting analysis (again, I can't vouch for its musical credentials, but I like the writing) of the Schubert sonata. I really should go find a few other recordings to listen to.


Edit: 28 July 08

The other thing I like so much about Richter's interpretation of this sonata is the way he's so comfortable with silence. This is related to the confidence and verve I mentioned earlier, I guess - he is utterly unafraid, whether of speed-demon running notes or huge handspan-expanding chords, or just silence.

Ok, I suppose it all boils down to the fearlessness. That's it, really. I mean, sure, most musicians are confident of their craft, but very few sound fearless the way Richter does.

Apparently, he's got another, better, recording of this sonata, made somewhere in the 1970s in Prague. I want to hear that one too, so that I'll have something to compare this recording with.
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called by name

It's late afternoon at the lake. The turtles are moving closer to shore. The surface of the water is undisturbed, an expanse of smooth, grey slate. Most of the children in my neighbourhood are called home for supper by their mothers. They open the back doors, wipe their hands on their aprons, and yell, "Willie!" or "Joe!" or "Ray!" Either that or they use a bell, bolted to the doorframe and loud enough to start the dogs barking in backyards all along the street. But I was always called home by my father, and he didn't do it in the customary way. He walked down the alley all the way to the lake. If I was close, I could hear his shoes on the gravel before he came into sight. If I was far, I would see him across the surface of the water, emerging out of shadows and into the grey light. He would stand with his hands in the pockets of the windbreaker while he looked for me. This is how he got me to come home. He always came to the place where I was before he called my name.

(Dennis Covington)
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the soul selects her own society

Here's new US Poet Laureate's Kay Ryan's record of her traumatic encounter with the AWP Conference. It's an interesting, lively essay - though its attraction for me was not so much its observations and insights, but the sense that I was hearing someone else articulate ideas that I've long held but had never dared to think were quite legitimate.
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525 600 minutes

I loved this song back in Uni, and I still love it now, because cheesy though it may seem, it is so true.

Sometimes I need things like this to remind me of how I want to live my life.

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Seasons of Love

ALL
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes,
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Moments so dear.
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?

In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights
In cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.

In five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes
How do you measure
A year in the life?

How about love? How about love? How about love?
Measure in love
Seasons of love. Seasons of love.

HOMELESS WOMAN
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes!
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Journeys to plan.
Five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes
How do you measure the life
Of a woman or a man?

COLLINS
In truths that she learned,
Or in times that he cried.
In bridges he burned,
Or the way that she died.

ALL
It's time now to sing out,
Tho' the story never ends
Let's celebrate, remember
A year in the life of friends

Remember the love! Remember the love!
Seasons of love!

HOMELESS WOMAN (while ALL sing)
Oh you got to got to
Remember the love!
You know that love is a gift from up above
Share love, give love, spread love

Measure, measure your life in love.


(by Jonathan Larson. From the musical, Rent.)
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history / herstory

History repeats itself so that we can apply the lessons learned in the past.

I'm sure Freud would have loads to say about repetition. Deja vu - to find yourself back in the place you were at, all of nine years ago, but this time, knowing where things could go, knowing what paths were chosen the last time and where those paths led, knowing now what the alternatives are... There's a certain cosmic irony a la Sam Beckett to all this that I'm not finding very funny right now, even though I know that laughing my way through this might be one of the better ways to deal.
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choices, choices...

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

- Robert Frost
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more of it than we think

I've been thinking about literature, and my relation to it. Until not too long ago, literature was my religion: I looked to it for Answers, for some way of living life, of understanding and finding one's way around the world. I think that, in a vague kinda way, I thought (or hoped) that words had the power to change the world - one idea at a time, one person at a time.

All of these beliefs still hold true for me, I think, but to a much lesser extent than in the past. Now, the main role that literature plays for me is as a counterbalance or even a corrective to religious fundamentalism, to the kind of closed-up, totalising perspective on the world that threatens anyone who embraces any kind of religious faith. It's also my refuge - 'the refuge of art', as Nabokov puts it in the gorgeous, swoon-inducing closing paragraph of Lolita. It's the space where anything can be thought and said, where being merely human is treated with an honesty, a forthrightness, and sometimes a kindness and sympathy, that the more dogmatic strains of religion often do not make room for. In other words, it's my antidote to myopia and goody-two-shoe-ness.

I think I'll also have to ask my friends to alert me if they see any signs of myopia and goody-two-shoe-ness emerging in my attitudes and behaviour. I'd hate to forget the world's more-of-it-than-we-think-ness, its incorrigible plurality.
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after the movie

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After the Movie

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.
He says that he believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that's not love. That's attachment.
Michael says, No, that's love. You can love someone, then come
to a day

when you're forced to think "it's him or me"
think "me" and kill him.

I say, Then it's not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist
even in the murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what
is it?

We're walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded
night—and I hear my voice repeating
what I used to say to my husband: Love is action,
I used to say to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to
look at someone you want to eat and not eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.

Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are
doomed to live in purgatory.

Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.
I can't drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I've just
bought—

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck
the stuff from
the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he's saying is "You are too strict. You
are a nun."

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think
these things of me even if he's not thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer
and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.


(Marie Howe)

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It was somewhere in 2000 or 2001, I think, or perhaps even as early as 1999, that I discovered Marie Howe in the Atlantic Unbound. At that time, I was searching for some kind of - I suppose the word would be 'salvation', though I didn't know it then - salvation, then; and the closest I came to finding it was in literature, in poetry and fiction. And Marie Howe's 'What The Living Do' showed me a way to live life that was real, beautiful and true.

She's got a new book out, finally, 10 years after her last - The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, which, I suspect, is where today's poem is taken from. It's been in my Amazon shopping cart for ages - I just haven't gotten round to actually ordering it yet, because I'm still wondering if I should wait for the paperback version to be out. I'm not too keen on hardcovers - they take up too much space.

Maybe I should just order it, huh. It seems kinda silly to be doing the delayed gratification thing just for the sake of some few millimetres of shelf space.
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singapore = africa?

from Elizabeth Costello, by J.M. Coetzee:

'In Africa, a book must offer you a return for the money you spend on it. What do I stand to learn by reading this story, the African will ask? How will it advance me? ...

We do of course make books in Africa. But the books we make are for children, teaching-books in the simplest sense. If you want to make money publishing books in Africa, you must put out books that will be prescribed for schools, that will be bought in quantity by the education system to be read and studied in the classroom. It does not pay to publish writers with serious ambitions, writers who write about adults and matters that concern adults. Such writers must look elsewhere for their salvation. ...

Of course you will find publishers in Africa, one here, one there, who will support local writers even if they will never make money. But in the broad picture, storytelling provides a livelihood neither for publishers nor for writers.'

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Of course, we know that Singapore isn't Africa. But the analysis of the writing and publishing industry in Africa (which isn't Coetzee's, strictly speaking - this comes from the mouth of one of his characters, a literary/political activist novelist) does show up some similarities between the continent and the city-state. The best-selling books here, after all, are self-help books, business manuals and assessment books. Anyone looking to work in the book-publishing industry here either has to content themselves with working in these 'genres', or be willing to work in tiny loss-making outfits that are cross-subsidised by their owners' other, more profitable businesses.

At least, that is what I've observed. I'd be glad if anyone could prove me wrong.
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