BERNEVAL

Somedays you just want to coin words.

Hypermulticulturalism: state sanctioned, endorsed and promoted multiculturalism that harnessed the production of difference for the umbrella of a tolerant nationalism.

Hypoculturation (acculturation on the sly): process that may lead to the emergence of hybridity and manifestations of hypermulticulturalism.

And so for day 190
22.06.2007

The summer solstice finds me remembering the narrator of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star and the description well half way into the novel of the experience which explains the title.

My favourite time was soon after sunset, when I liked to catch the first sight of the evening star, suddenly bright, high in the west above the darkening outlines of the copses. It was a solitary ritual, wound up incoherently with bits of poetry said over and over like spells: sunset and evening star, the star that bids the shepherd fold, her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west . . . It intensified and calmed my yearnings at the same time, like a song. In one poem I’d seen that first star referred to as the folding star, and the words haunted me with their suggestion of an embrace and at the same time a soundless implosion, of something ancient but evanescent; I looked up to it in a mood of desolate solitude burning into cold calm. I lingered, testing out the ache of it: I had to be back before it was truly dark, but in high summer that could be very late. I became a connoisseur of the last lonely grading of blue into black.

The magic of the liminal inscribed in the very suspension marks of the paragraph. Catching on the shift from present (“bids”) to past (“wound”) and the curve back given the reference of “her” to either “star” or “shepherd” one enters the game of suspension. And by hornlight recognizes the function of the shade: to diffuse.

And so for day 189
21.06.2007

Adam Mars-Jones’s “Cinematically Challenged” collected in Blind Bitter Happiness is particularly caustic about the Penny Marshall film based on the book by Oliver Sacks, Awakenings. With steady tongs one can lift this bit out without danger to the overly sensitive reader. It is

Of this complex human being virtually nothing survives into the film, certainly not the twin enemies of sentimentalism, the intellect and the libido.

A few days later I am reading Oliver Sacks remembering his friend the poet Thom Gunn (Brick Winter 2005) and grow to understand that the respect for complexity present in the book and missing in the film comes from a lot of living and thinking. Sacks quotes from a letter from Gunn who is commenting on Awakenings

[…] And, frankly, I despaired of your ever becoming a good writer, because I didn’t see how one could be taught such a quality. . . . Your deficiency of sympathy made for a limitation of observation. . . . What I didn’t know is that the growth of sympathies is something frequently delayed until one’s thirties. What was deficient in these writings is now the supreme organizer of Awakenings, and wonderfully so. […] I wonder if you know what happened. Simply working with the patients over so long, or opening-up helped by acid, or really falling in love […]

Maybe there will be a remake of the film. Certainly the film has sent people to the book. Some of us are glad to be warned off. We might never reach for the book: sentimentalism induces slumber.

And so for day 185
17.06.2007

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi translated by Raymond Rosenthal has a marvellous tricolon.

Prometheus had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture.

A wry comment found in the story under the rubric “Cerium”, an element, as Levi points out, deriving its name from an astroid named for the Greek goddess Ceres and discovered in the same year as the element.

And so for day 182
14.06.2007