BERNEVAL

To quote from On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William Gass is to do an injustice to the text’s voluptuousness, the waves of its pages. However to point people to it is a type of reparation.

Words are one-way mirrors, and we can safely breathe, hoot, holler all we like to assure ourselves of our existence, and never once disturb Prudence easing her itch.

And juxtaposing an earlier moment from the movement …

None of these inclusive responses is purely public, purely private; each of them is cognitive, the sum of whatever we know and are at any moment. We experience the world, balanced on our noses like the ball it is, turn securely through the thunder of our own applause.

And so for day 419
05.02.2008

There is an arresting description in Zen-Brain Reflections by James H. Austin that calls to mind over a wide arc of reading about the “Siena Sieve” portrait of Queen Elizabeth I that serves as a frontispiece to Lowell Gallagher’s Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance. One mentions a sieve; the other depicts the monarch holding one.

The GABA cap can close and open, acting sometimes as a shield, sometimes as a sieve.

No other connection but the “sieve” as a concept or representation for the workings of the mind. And culinary memories of sifting or of draining, of actually shaking a sieve.

And so for day 418
04.02.2008

John Brunner Stand on Zanzibar. The novel’s fiction. This exchange between characters spills out beyond the confines of the fictional world. Some of it seems to ring true for the actual world.

“[…] An old man — I suppose you’d call him a witch-doctor — taught me muscle-reading in the back streets of Port-au-Prince while I was ambassador to Haiti. I thought for a moment you must have suffered some sort of major injury to that hand, but I can’t feel the effects of one. Whose hand was it, then?”

“My three times great-grandfather.”

“Back in slavery days?”

“Yes.”

“Cut off?”

“Sawn off. Because he hit his boss and knocked him into a creek.”

“Elihu nodded. “You must have been very young when you heard about it,” he suggested.

“Six, I think.”

And the dialogue carries on. And far later in the novel, one character tells another:

In short, we’re not expatriates, you and I. We’re extemporates exiled from a country that vanished even before we were born, of which our parents made us citizens without intending to.

At this remove outside the fictional world I wonder if there is not a certain element of self-fashioning in the stories we assume. Not every bit of the past sticks. Is there not an element of choice in what is accepted out of time? Extempore?

And so for day 417
03.02.2008

Stephen Kuusisto in Planet of the Blind muses upon fate and gives it a vibrant texture.

Fate it seems is made of thorns and blossoms and bones. As Corky [the guide dog] flings leaves and growls with satisfaction I contemplate gloom. The future is indifferent to emotion: events unfold with or without our melancholy or optimism. But there must be sufficient reason for optimism, and for the sentiment that we can craft our potential lives.

Sufficient but not necessary. We in this view of fate are cast back upon our resources. This is good and necessarily so.

He writes earlier in the book:

We are, all of us, ecstatic creatures, capable of joyous mercy to the self and to others.

To begin to think of mercy as a sentiment, it certainly helps to describe it as joyous. A very wise place from which to begin to craft our potential.

And so for day 415
01.02.2008

Eugene Benson in the introduction to Elaine Nardocchio’s Theatre and Politics in Modern Quebec quotes from a poem by Miriam Waddington:

we look
like a geography but
just scratch us
and we bleed
history

I wonder if it works in reverse i.e. if we look like history and we bleed geography. We carry with us a space and a time; even migrations of long ago leave in their wake what might have been.

I like to juxtapose these musings against a statement by Stephen Kuusisto in Planet of the Blind “I believe that in every blind person’s imagination there are landscapes.”

And so for day 414
31.01.2008

Brent Ledger, a columnist for Xtra! in the January 31, 2008, edition tackles the topic of “musical monotony” and the setting of tone.

Music in a bar is not exactly the same as music at home or in the concert hall. It’s more of a psychic suggestion than an aesthetic experience. It’s the fourth wall of the bar, providing emotional hints on how you’re supposed to behave.

He goes on to conclude the article on a consideration the times where you don’t want to simply have fun and indulge in upbeat music.

But some days you want to slouch and some days you want to grouch and sometimes you want to slink, slowly, through the nighttime streets. the music ought to reflect that.

And some days …

And so for day 413
30.01.2008