BERNEVAL

May Sarton’s narrator reports on a character’s reaction to her father comparing her to an aunt known for her artistic talent but also locked up. The character reacts initially with disavowal and then with a kind of grudging recognition that Aunt Ida was as the character emphasizes, human. Between the two reactions is a portrait of Aunt Ida. Here is Hilary’s recollection:

When she had calmed down, Hilary felt shame, she had spoken cynically and without compassion of an old woman whom she loved. Aunt Ida had given her her first pair of opera glasses; she had talked to her as if she were a human being, not a child; and when she had been locked up (“Aunt Ida is very ill,” she was told, “and in a hospital”), Hilary at twelve had felt real grief. The old woman had tried to commit suicide — this fact oozed out somehow from under the pretenses. Then she was buried alive, and one more item was added to Alice Frothingham’s lists of “things to do,” the weekly visit to McLean with books and flowers, with paints and canvases, for there had been times when Aunt Ida moved from depression to elation and could for brief periods paint again. Hilary had not been allowed to see her. Perhaps they imagined that insanity was contagious.

After this review Hilary manages to say to her father, through her tears, that she loved Aunt Ida and would be glad to be like her, an assertion capped by the emphatic “She was human.”

The figure of the artist on the verge of madness, taken up by the intensity of feeling so necessary for the production of truthful art, comes to haunt the novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing and the twelve year old cut off from a beloved aunt becomes a story that is “dangerously close to the surface again” for the old woman recollecting her life. May Sarton doesn’t just set this as a set piece of a scene, she doesn’t settle for reportage. The recollection induces an interior dialogue where Hilary, our protagonist, chides herself and turns her thoughts to the question of mourning one’s parents. She wanted parental recognition; she wanted them to be proud. She comes to realize

You can’t break the mould and also be consoled for breaking it, old fool! Be realistic — every book you published must have caused them embarassment and dismay. Yet the cry that escaped her lips, as she searched for the handkerchief in her pocket was, “Mother! Father!” Does the mourning for parents ever end? she asked herself, blowing her nose, and resting her eyes on the quiet green light in the room. Searingly, excruciatingly private, this pain, yet she suspected that it might be the universal condition. Children have to hurt their parents or die, have to break themselves off, whatever the cost, even though the wound never heals.

And Sarton has her character circle back and young Hilary reminds old Hilary (note the temporal flow involved in the recollection of the wisdom of a younger self) that she did not break down like Aunt Ida, that she kept going. And on it goes as Mrs. Stevens prepares for an interview …

And so for day 1063
10.11.2009

In this collection of short stories it is the short anecdote that leaves an impression — a little jolt of satire. The narrator pretending to be an intern at Vogue wittily reports that Anna Wintour has had a skylight installed above her office so that she can wear sunglasses all the time. We know this is a fabrication but it is the stuff of urban myth; shared as gossip and liable to spread notwithstanding our unreliable narrator. Rahul Mehta our author has in one of the stories a set piece that warns in postmodern fashion that the author and the narrator are not the same person and that this distinction is all the more evident when the narrator reports being a writer.

The earlier stories in the collection read like realist tales told of course in the first person. The first is about a tense relation between grandson and grandfather, an incident with an outburst, and the traditional marks of respect.

When I go downstairs, my father asks if I did pranaam, and I say yes.

We readers know this to be a lie. Just prior to the question and response we are given a description from the perspective of the I-narrator.

Now, I don’t approach my grandfather. I don’t know whether he is crying under the covers. I stand in the doorway another minute, watching him, and then I leave.

Pranaam involves touching the feet of the person. There is no feet touching. Is there another form of pranaam? Is there some kind of respect? It is a question that haunts the whole collection: who and what is worth respect if the narrator cannot respect himself? An answer comes in the last story where the narrator decides to address his parents in a moment of truth telling but the moment is off-stage so to speak. It is announced but not related. It is yet to come. So we have in one story a lie to a father, in the other an opening up to the parents. These are of course different narrators and different stories. However, it is a persistent theme — respect tied to communication — one of the middle stories reports on this move by one member of a couple having a tough time:

Taped to the fridge is a note: “You’ll probably be asleep by the time I get home,” it says. “We should talk soon.”

And like many of the other stories in Quarantine the outcome is left in suspension. Pranaam for the reader is left incomplete. Readers are constructed as untouchable or quarantined. Uncontaminated by the fictions of truth.

And so for day 1060
07.11.2009

To round out Mortality by Christopher Hitchens, his editors added notebook material. It is material that is impressionistic and not fully worked up in its argumentation. Take for instance this bit which leaves me puzzled.

Larkin good on fear in “Aubade,” with implied reproof to Hume and Lucretius for their stoicism. Fair enough in one way: atheists ought not to be offering consolation either.

I am in favour of consolation. I am no tough guy. Consolation can arise from facing the inevitability of death.

In my reading Philip Larkin’s poem is more indifferent. One stanza ends with the observation that

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

I take my cue from fiction. Neil Gaiman in The Ocean at the End of the Lane has its narrator remark

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy.

It is possible to achieve this insight as an adult without recourse to a story of recuperating the wisdom of the child. Hitchens himself does this in several brave passages of Mortality. His unflinching gaze and steadfast moral stance inspires. However it is the sometimes small asides that provide valuable moments that act as inadvertent signposts to consolation. Consider the remarkable friendship with Dr. Francis Collins who crops up numerous times in this short book. Collins, a man of faith (and a man of science), is credited for not recommending prayer to the terminally ill atheist. There is relish in the retelling of this, this small thing.

And so for day 1059
06.11.2009

So I read “venerable” for “vulnerable” towards the end of “Perspectors/Melancholia” in Lisa Robertson’s Nilling: “Resistance is the vulnerable utopia of inwardness” and in so doing I enact or some part of me plays out what Robertson had noted earlier in the paragraph that begins “Melancholy is big contemplative utopia.” and in which she observes

Transformation may include decay, multiplication, reversal, inflation or minification, fragmentation or annexation, plus all the Ovidian modalities.

One of my favourite modalities is juxtapositon. And so from an essay later in Nilling about the “Disquiet” that is ever present and is a source of continuity and change

But a retreat into the present’s inconspicuousness is not asocial; thinking moves in the replete temporality of other thinkers, listening moves among other listeners, continuing on paths others have taken. This is a present also.

BTW prospecting for “perspectors” one comes to this definition “The point at which the three lines connecting the vertices of two perspective triangles concur, sometimes also called the perspective center, homology center, or pole.”

And so for day 1057
04.11.2009

The “Tuesday” section from Lisa Robertson’s The Weather is punctuated with women’s first names and the question where they are. Some bring to mind the feminists Ti-Grace [Atkinson] Gloria [Steinem] Shulamith [Firestone] and others remind one of writers Violette [Leduc], Grace [Paley], Christine [Brooke-Rose] and Emily [Dickinson] but this is not an exhaustive list of women from the past; there are other names such as the Kathleen who may be a young women in process of becoming known…

Days heap upon us. Where is our anger. And the shades darker than the plain part and darker at the top than the bottom. But darker at bottom than top. Days heap upon us. Where is Ti-Grace. But darker at the bottom than the top. Days heap upon us. Where is Christine. Broken on the word culture. But darker at the bottom than the top.

It is the dark brooding atmosphere — the getting in touch with anger — that put me onto this track and the succession of Valerie [Solanas] and Patty [Hearst].

And so for day 1055
02.11.2009

I like to view this description of ritual and the effects of reenactment by Israel Scheffler in In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions as a syntagm, a progression.

The marking out of ritually commemorated events helps to define a temporal matrix, and reenactment elaborates it further by articulating an ever-expanding ritual tradition. Concomitantly, reenactment serves also to form a conception of community. For the performers of past ritual replicas constitute a body of actors to which present performers relate themselves through reenactment and, hence, indirectly to one another. The community thus defined bears not only common bonds to the past but also common orientations in the present and outlooks for the future. Thus, an organization of time, as well as of the space occupied by a historical community, is facilitated. […] we have to do with a cognitive ordering of categories of time, space, action, and community.

I wonder about broadening this description from ritual in its religious sense to repeated gesture generally. Time: I have written and read yesterday, I do so today and hope to do more tomorrow. Space: I have published bits and pieces in a given venue at regular intervals. Action: each published bit is an intervention that welds quotation and commentary into an exploration of what remains to be said. Community: here the mark of a question is raised. Community is not an outcome. It is the prerequisite for the ordering of time and space and the permitting of allowable action. Dialogue of the Dead is a form of contemplation that virtualizes community. So can we say that ritual arranges the passages between the virtual and the actual?

And so for day 1054
01.11.2009