Baroque Prose of the Day

"It is said that neither more beautiful dreams nor another easier life will be of any use to us. It may be that all we need is an even greater turmoil of ever more ardent desires, ever more troubling questions and ever more vapid answers, whose random selection like gambling without prizes brings only torment. Yet torment too cannot last forever: It always moves toward breaking point. There is hope that the glare from which the eye loses all ability to distinguish colors and shapes will turn into the banal image of a street corner, a sign above a store, lace curtains in a window: a sight from which nothing transpires. The uproar from which the ear loses all ability to distinguish sounds will be transformed into the mild silence of waking life, the same silence that endures inside stones. The crushing pressure of thoughts that make the head throb with pain will in the end reveal a light, transparent void.

"May that void unfold inside every brick and permeate everything in the world: buildings, sun and stars, clouds in the sky, air in the lungs and the lungs themselves. Only then will the palm begin to fit the handle of the tool, the hat fit the head and the rib cage cease to separate the heart from the rest of the world. Then it will be easier to accept the obvious truth that the burden oppressing us weighs nothing at all. The city to which the tree of the world gave birth at the beginning of this story is not real, just like the tree and like us ourselves. But the life of stones, which has no care for the past or the future, existed and will continue to exist: a steadfast endurance free of any name."

-- Magdalena Tulli, Dreams and Stones (trans. Bill Johnston)
 
"In the fall of 1811 Noah Webster, working steadily through the C's, defined commonsense as 'good sound ordinary sense ... free from emotional bias or intellectual subtlety ... horse sense.' This is rather a flattering view of the creature, for the biography of commonsense makes nasty reading. Commonsense has trampled down many a gentle genius whose eyes had delighted in a too early moonbeam of some too early truth; commonsense has back-kicked dirt at the loveliest of queer paintings because a blue tree seemed madness to its well-meaning hoof; commonsense has prompted ugly but strong nations to crush their fair but frail neighbors the moment a gap in history offered a chance that it would have been ridiculous not to exploit. Commonsense is fundamentally immoral, for the natural morals of mankind are as irrational as the magic rites that they evolved since the immemorial dimness of time. Commonsense at its worst is sense made common, and so everything is comfortably cheapened by its touch. Commonsense is square whereas all the most essential visions and values of life are beautifully round, as round as the universe or the eyes of a child at its first circus show.

"It is instructive to think that there is not a single person in this room, or for that matter in any room in the world, who, at some nicely chosen point in historical space-time would not be put to death there and then, here and now, by a commonsensical majority in a righteous rage. The color of one's creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in time or space with a fatal objection from a mob that hates that particular tone. And the more brilliant, the more unusual the man, the nearer he is to the stake. Stranger always rhymes with danger. The meek prophet, the enchanter in his cave, the indignant artist, the nonconforming little schoolboy, all share in the same sacred danger. And this being so, let us bless them, let us bless the freak; for in the natural evolution of things, the ape would perhaps never have become man had not a freak appeared in the family. Anybody whose mind is proud enough not to breed true, secretly carries a bomb at the back of his brain; and so I suggest, just for the fun of the thing, taking that private bomb and carefully dropping it upon the model city of commonsense. In the brilliant light of the ensuing explosion many curious things will appear; our rarer senses will supplant for a brief spell the dominant vulgarian that squeezes Sinbad's neck in the catch-as-catch-can match between the adopted self and the inner one. I am triumphantly mixing metaphors because that is exactly what they are intended for when they follow the course of their secret connections -- which from a writer's point of view is the first positive result of the defeat of commonsense."

-- Vladimir Nabokov, "The Art of Literature and Commonsense" (from Lectures on Literature)
 
gveranon said:
"I am triumphantly mixing metaphors because that is exactly what they are intended for when they follow the course of their secret connections -- which from a writer's point of view is the first positive result of the defeat of commonsense."

-- Vladimir Nabokov, "The Art of Literature and Commonsense" (from Lectures on Literature)
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Brilliant!
 
"He came out into the entrance court and contemplated his bonsai.

"Early sun gold-frosted the horizontal upper foliage of the old tree and brought its gnarled limbs into sharp relief, tough brown-gray and crevices of velvet. Only the companion of a bonsai (there are owners of bonsai, but they are a lesser breed) fully understands the relationship. There is an exclusive and individual treeness to the tree because it is a living thing, and living things change, and there are definite ways in which the tree desires to change. A man sees the tree and in his mind makes certain extensions and extrapolations of what he sees, and sets about making them happen. The tree in turn will do only what a tree can do, will resist to the death any attempt to do what it cannot do, or to do it in less time than it needs. The shaping of a bonsai is therefore always a compromise and always a cooperation. A man cannot create bonsai, nor can a tree; it takes both, and they must understand each other. It takes a long time to do that. One memorizes one's bonsai, every twig, the angle of every crevice and needle, and lying awake at night or in a pause a thousand miles away, one recalls this or that line or mass, one makes one's plans. With wire and water and light, with tilting and with the planting of water-robbing weeds or heavy root-shading ground cover, one explains to the tree what one wants, and if the explanation is well enough made, and there is great enough understanding, the tree will respond and obey – almost. Always there will be its own self-respecting, highly individual variation: Very well, I shall do what you want, but I will do it my own way. And for these variations, the tree is always willing to present a clear and logical explanation, and more often than not (almost smiling) it will make clear to the man that he could have avoided it if his understanding had been better.

"It is the slowest sculpture in the world, and there is, at times, doubt as to which is being sculpted, man or tree."

-- Theodore Sturgeon, "Slow Sculpture"
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

But the third Sister, who is also the youngest-----! Hush! whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes rising so high might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with a tiger’s leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And
her name is Mater Tenebrarum,—Our Lady of Darkness.

--Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow by Thomas De Quincey
 
A passage (read this morning), one that has deeply affected me - from a book by an author I've never heard of (title and name at the end):


Occult sighs and air came from the stalks below and the boughs above, and sometimes the grass, for no accountable reason at all, would be taken with a quiet slow-attacking ague.

'Isn't it eerie!' broke from Anda. 'Oh, I hate it here! What can you see to like here, Laura? Why is this your favourite spot?'

'There is more to be seen here than you can see,' I answered.

'Pshaw!' she exclaimed. 'But it's easy to see that you're only thirteen, choosing an awful place like this!'

'Thirteen is not a bad age· to be!’I said.

Thirteen is not a bad age to be. You have got over the shock of hearing about sex. You have even come to see the decent fittingness of it, the dignity, the sublime outlet for tenderness. And yet, and yet, you know that nothing will ever quite take the place of the world that has gone, the world that suddenly receded when you got knowledge and so lost wisdom.

And if you are lucky-young as I was, you grasp then the shape of the battle to come. You see that the fight will not be for power or riches, beauty or learning, or a long procession of lovers. You see that it is to find the way back to being a little child again.

Aye! You've got to grow up to become as a child again.

You've got to learn by unlearning: you've got to imagine, not to know!

But now I moved forward into my little paradise of a dell, and began touching the leathery mounds of leaves, and rocking the buttercups. I held my breath to see jolly crimson beetles rollicking wildly among the damp roots, winged seeds floating on the wind, pigeons' dropped feathers, and the bizarre small skeletons of mice and birds.

A kind of cosmic shorthand was written everywhere for those to decipher who would, resplendent in forgotten dew-drops, in sunstarts and wing-gleamings; in the tapestry of the rhododendrons with their strong reek; in the rustlings of rats and worms and an estrayent toad from the pond; in rain stains and drippings; in the lawless grass; in the withered bluebells that had flowed in sapphire thousands under the trees in the springtime; in the crimped and fluted leaves; in the aromatic smell of the tansies; in queer blights on tree-trunks; in cobwebs swinging between branches; in a lone fleshy marigold; in twigs and dust and moss and stones. All these things gave off messages going deeper than life.

Anda stood with her back to a tree, steadfastly refusing the spirit of the place. Robert said he couldn't make up his mind whether he got from it the atmosphere of the fen, the spinney, or the country cave, but he finally allowed that it spoke to him of all three.

Steve said nothing, but followed me about where I peered and pried and with inhuman joy became whatever I looked at. I was a blob of cuckoo-spit; a writhing spray of ivy; a very pungent smell of dockweed; a willow-leaf frizzling in the wind. I burrowed, I flew. I was beside myself. I could have stayed there for ever.

What has been broken lies in pieces. The pieces fly everywhere. The kingdom that has been shattered can be picked up, piece by piece, everywhere. The success of a life lies in the number of recaptured fragments. A few lucky people go on looking for pieces till they have found them--every one. Just how long it shall take is a matter not for the parson or the philosopher to determine, but depends upon a person's own inclination and the porousness of a person's heart.

In that glade I never failed to find something of the stormed citadel, something of the Absolute, though I didn't call it so then, and it all wasn't so clearly aware to my mind. All I knew was my own joyful affection for the livingness both of sentient and inanimate things. Every clump of grass, every chirper on the wing replied to my heart. The personality of a stick and a stone were more thrilling to me than the personality of a man or a woman.

'Oh, do let us get on,' wailed Anda, clasping her hands in despairing boredom.

[...]

To escape the angry pitying thoughts that had come to me, I felt the need to do something, so, sitting back on my heels, I began to pick up handfuls of a mysterious deposit of silver sand at the bole of a tree, letting the glittering stuff speed through my fingers, and trying in the touch and the look of it to forget what I had seen--and forgetting in that heavenly diffused sensation that comes when you allow yourself to pour into the element you are contemplating. And the exquisite feel of the sliding sand linked up with many another memory--the particular look of some dandelions I had had in an empty potted-meat jar--their private gold--the moss creeping between the cracks of the paving stones in the backyard at home: these things were ever so many little admittances to a plane where sorrow and anger melted right away.

I was recalled by the hollow notes of a bird. I looked up into the tree-tops and I went off on a little spree of imagining how this glade would be in the grey stillness of a Christmas afternoon, in that hour just before tea when friends and relations are hurrying to the houses of their kin, their faces flushed with the cold and the prospect of gay warm rooms out of the quiet icy streets. I was picturing my glade when all that was going on, my glade shut out from all that, given over to the iron frost and the oncoming sparkling stars. I saw something sinister about its disposition, about those lonely trees carbonized against a grey sky, in comparison with the lighted gold globes in cheerful rooms and the especial jollity going on in homes. I shuddered to think of the glade's unseen tenants at that time, its utter desertion, its implacable continuity.

It was then that my little brother crept up to me, nudging me sharply with his elbow and whispering bitterly:
'She hit me, she hit me--I fell down--and all you can do is to run your fingers through this sand!'

from 'A Well Full of Leaves' (1943) by Elizabeth Myers.


NOTE: The core of the passage seems to be this sentence:
"The personality of a stick and a stone were more thrilling to me than the personality of a man or a woman."
Sadly, the 'were' should be 'was', no? Penguin Books proof-reader in 1943 to blame!
ANOTHER NOTE: the word 'estrayent' is an interesting one. But not a common one according to google!!

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To my perception, the bedroom of the wife of our rich uncle - with its white lace bedcover, raspberry-coloured furniture, and glittering glass, like the paper-cover illustrations on libidinous French novels - was crammed with the oldest intentions. There was something in her room to untie chastity; the atmosphere was so loose and unlawful it seemed to dwarf your worst imagined possibilities of evil, so that nothing seemed wrong. I found there a curious lurking of revelations, of exciting parcels being undone with acute anticipation; first the glossy outer covering taken off, then the delicate white tissue paper removed, and at last the prize is revealed. Squawks of delight are given off and the cherished object curled in the arms.
--- From 'The Well Full of Leaves' (1943) by Elizabeth Myers
 
He had to live on himself, to feed on his own substance, like those animals that lie torpid in a hole all winter. Solitude had acted on his brain like a narcotic, first exciting and stimulating him, then inducing a langour haunted by vague reveries, vitiating his plans, nullifying his intentions, leading a whole cavalcade of dreams to which he passively submitted, without even trying to get away.

-- Against Nature by J. K. Huysmans (trans. Robert Baldick)
 
"In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things - a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles - seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity."
H. P. Lovecraft - "The Dreams in the Witch-House"
​
 
Passage written by Robert Aickman in 1967 and published in 'The River Runs Uphill' (1986) comparing railway- and waterway-possessed people:


...the railway movement, such as it is, is crippled by the temperamental limitations that Freud divined. They manifest mainly in obsession with detail, in inability to perceive the whole wood as being in any way as real as the separate trees, even the separate, intricate, fascinating leaves, all so different from one another. The railway-possessed man (it is always a man) tends to be a Freudian obsessional walking. [...] The waterway-possessed man or woman is more likely to be hallucinatory than obsessional. Water winding and twisting between banks; rising and falling by locks and weirs; cataracting or quiescent beneath the arches of bridges; much hidden from the common world; secret and initiatory; decked by beautiful buildings as by bountiful botany: water either sparkling and glinting or sullen and boding; at once tended and untendable – and ultimately uncontrollable; always a little mysterious, with a life of its own, like a cat; water is of all sex symbols the superlative, and where the sea is sadistic, as Swinburne divined, the river or canal is sweetly seductive. Conflict, and bitter, inexpressible, often unthinkable, feelings are certain. The water-possessed are likely to be inwardly driven; to cling to their separate, private dreams with the desperation of the drowning; to beset with strange ferocity all conceived of as rivals.
 
The carpenter's finger dropped onto Matryona Semyonovna's breast, her shoulder, her stomach, and in a trice his hands had enmeshed her in his web; she drowsily drowned, drowsily drowned, drowsily drowned in a vortex of barely visible light, torn from the carpenter's breast and wrapped around her, and above all this were the carpenter's eyes, like gaping green apertures, pouring light upon her in bucketfuls. There they sat by the window; the last ray of evening stretched humbly in through the window and then turned fierce as it ran in a crimson diagonal over the table; there was no telling what was the sun's light and what was the light of the carpenter--the carpenter's web of prayers, woven by sunlight and shadow into a single carpet of air; a weird sight beyond vision--the carpenter's soul flowing out in the threads, the lights, the flames of a spider's web; around his hands now, around his head, was a ring of crimson gold: drowsily Matryona saw all that; silly woman, in her drowsiness she was already on her knees before him; she kissed his hands and --oh--how she prayed. This was no longer the man she lived with, Mitry Mironych; it was the man of righteousness, the great prophet, who had disgorged a flame; Matryona knew that if the occasion arose he could set straw alight with this flame: he would fold his hands together, make a point with his fingers, and a terrible power would flow into those spear-shaped fingers, would accumulate, and flash in a white, incandescent fire: she had once seen at dead of night how lightning flashed out of the window and thunder crashed from the carpenter's power-laden finger.

-- The Silver Dove by Andrey Bely (trans. John Elsworth)
 
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"He locked the door of the room before he crossed to the window and sat down on a narrow, cotlike bed. He sat down on the edge of the bed and removed his coat. He was wearing a soft linen shirt and black bow tie. He ripped off the tie, unbuttoned the shirt and removed it, ripped off his undershirt.

The little baroque was clinging to his chest. Its tiny hands were buried wrist-deep in his flesh. All about it there was a glistening crimson circle, a halo of bright blood. For an instant he stared down in silence at the tiny shriveled form. So great were his horror and revulsion that for an instant the room swayed about him. For an instant he thought he was going to faint.

The tiny shape was staring maliciously up at him in the red sunlight which poured in through the open window, crimsoning the sheets of the bed. From its narrow, sloping skull two tiny black horns sprouted. In the dim light of the old house Eliot had failed to notice the horns.

Utter horror engulfed him as he stared.

The little baroque said: 'It will take three days. When I have firmly attached myself I will never leave you.'"
Frank Belknap Long - "The Creeper in Darkness"
​
 
From Fires (wr. 1935), by Marguerite Yourcenar (trans. Dori Katz)

You could fall suddenly into the void the dead go to: I would be comforted if you would bequeath me your hands. Only your hands would continue to exist, detached from you, unexplainable like those of marble gods turned into the dust and the limestone of their own tomb. They would survive your actions, the wretched bodies they caressed. They would no longer serve as intermediaries between you and things: they themselves would be changed into things. Innocent again now, since you would no longer be there to turn them into your accomplices, sad like greyhounds without masters, disconcerted like archangels to whom no god gives orders, your useless hands would rest on the lap of darkness. Your open hands incapable of giving or taking the slightest joy would have let me slump like a broken doll. I kiss the wrists of these indifferent hands you will no longer pull away from mine: I stroke the blue artery, the blood column that once spurted continuously like a fountain from the ground of your heart. With little sobs of contentment, I rest my head like a child between these palms filled with the stars, the crosses, the precipices of my previous fate.
 
The first time I read this story (just 8 pages), I couldn't go further than half of it. Then I started reading it again, and again I couldn't finish it. I keep asking myself: What is he taliking about? Do these passages make sense? Well, the whole 8 pages are more or less the same.

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[...] Perhaps I am forced to conclude that what faces me here can be no question of any single proposition as expressed within a given language, but is rather the whole of that language and the whole exhaustive chart of its syntax and morphology, now splayed out in front of my eyes. But if the labyrinth construes itself as a whole and totally impervious language, what is my own task? Am I to master a language capable of speaking only with itself and of itself—am I in fact to be that language? Am I not allowed to think of myself as a speaker of another language, and thus as a being who might pronounce some series of words that would force a response from the language now prone before me—a response and thus an arduous, though not insuperably arduous delivery from my sufferings?

[...] And if we posit the nature of the labyrinth as an animal replete with nerves and veins, what does that make me? If I have been destined to undo this conundrum, and am thus to deal an end to this machine of itineracy, I can be nothing other than the death of the labyrinth animal; I am that demise projected in the project for the animal itself. Traveling from one end to the other of the labyrinth animal, I make myself its butcher; and by slaying the animal—my habitat and meaning—I slay myself. I am death in the absolute, the animal's as well as my own. Reaching the end of the labyrinth, nothing at all will remain. But if I am the death of the animal, I am likewise the animal itself, since the project for the animal has endowed it from the start with a labyrinth's natural death, and I can have no sense or goal if not as this animal and its animal death, and as labyrinth. If in fact the animal includes its death—a death that will issue from the labyrinth—then the animal itself is the labyrinth; and if I am this animal, then I am the labyrinth. Therefore my task is destruction; and whom or what I destroy is of little account, whether myself, the labyrinth, or the beast, since each is but one of three names for an always identical thing. I am destruction itself.


Giorgio Manganelli (1922-1990), from "The Self-Awareness of the Labyrinth", published in "Italian Tales", by Yale University Press, 2004.
 
From Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux:
The train whistle there every evening seemed to beckon dusk, precreating a mood of sudden melancholy in a wail that left its echo behind like the passing tribute of a sigh. And Darconville, while yet amply occupied, was by no means so derogate from the common run of human emotions as not to share, upon hearing it—Spellvexit always looked up—a derivative feeling of loneliness, a disposition compounded, further, not only by the portentous evidence of the season but also by the bleakness of the place upon which it settled. The town was the quotidian co-efficient of limbo: there was no suddenness, no irresistibility, no velocity of extraordinary acts. He found hours and hours of complete solitude there, however, and that became the source, as he wrote, not of oppressive exclusiveness but of organizing anticipations he could accommodate in his work: the mystic's rapture at feeling his phantom self. He had assumed this exile not with the destitution of spirit the prodigal son is too often unfairly assigned, nor from any aristocratic weariness a previous life in foreign parts might have induced, but rather to pull the plug of consequence from the sump of the world—to avoid the lust of result and the vice of emulation.​
 
Viva June said:
From Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux:
The train whistle there every evening seemed to beckon dusk, precreating a mood of sudden melancholy in a wail that left its echo behind like the passing tribute of a sigh. And Darconville, while yet amply occupied, was by no means so derogate from the common run of human emotions as not to share, upon hearing it—Spellvexit always looked up—a derivative feeling of loneliness, a disposition compounded, further, not only by the portentous evidence of the season but also by the bleakness of the place upon which it settled. The town was the quotidian co-efficient of limbo: there was no suddenness, no irresistibility, no velocity of extraordinary acts. He found hours and hours of complete solitude there, however, and that became the source, as he wrote, not of oppressive exclusiveness but of organizing anticipations he could accommodate in his work: the mystic's rapture at feeling his phantom self. He had assumed this exile not with the destitution of spirit the prodigal son is too often unfairly assigned, nor from any aristocratic weariness a previous life in foreign parts might have induced, but rather to pull the plug of consequence from the sump of the world—to avoid the lust of result and the vice of emulation.​
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I really must thank Viva June for this wonderful passage - I had never heard of Alexander Theroux. Now I have, I am quite certain I am going to read him!

Update: A few hours on and I am already reading An Adultery, which I borrowed from the Royal Library in The Hague, in addition to the fabled Darconville's Cat...
 
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Yes, that passage makes me want to read Darconville's Cat right away, too. About a year ago I bought a copy of Theroux's latest novel, Laura Warholic (an enormous volume) but haven't gotten to it yet. The only book of his I've read is The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, a slender volume that is less about Gorey's art than it is about the man himself. Highly recommended. Theroux knew Gorey personally (at least to the extent that it was possible to know the reclusive Gorey personally), and the book is a fascinating portrait of a great solitary eccentric. Here is a brief passage:

Edward Gorey was tall, sported a white beard, and had a glittering eye, with often the wee trace of a smile, but his face was gaunt, a bit saturnine, and often studiously uncertain, his mien suggesting the somewhat endungeoned, rather like a saint who lives on pulses, lentil soup, and alarming news.
 
gveranon said:
Yes, that passage makes me want to read Darconville's Cat right away, too. About a year ago I bought a copy of Theroux's latest novel, Laura Warholic (an enormous volume) but haven't gotten to it yet. The only book of his I've read is The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, a slender volume that is less about Gorey's art than it is about the man himself. Highly recommended. Theroux knew Gorey personally (at least to the extent that it was possible to know the reclusive Gorey personally), and the book is a fascinating portrait of a great solitary eccentric. Here is a brief passage:

Edward Gorey was tall, sported a white beard, and had a glittering eye, with often the wee trace of a smile, but his face was gaunt, a bit saturnine, and often studiously uncertain, his mien suggesting the somewhat endungeoned, rather like a saint who lives on pulses, lentil soup, and alarming news.
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I am devouring An Adultery at the moment, a very perceptive novel about (the impossibility of?) love, the chasm between man and woman. I think I am reading a modern classic, like Lolita. In the meantime I have bought Darconville's Cat on eBay (in the US).
 
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