linebaugh

Well-known member
I find it hard to talk about these stories diagnostically because they embody the privilege that metaphor and allegory sometimes have over plain spoken exposition in the capturing of certain phenomena
 

luka

Well-known member
Americans don't understand literature. They are always trying to convert it into information. And the information is what they have paid for and therefore feel they are owed. Very curious pathology.
 
Last edited:

luka

Well-known member
a 1981 interview: “I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”



Everything and Nothing

There was no one inside him, nothing but a trace of chill, a dream dreamt by no one else behind the face that looks like no other face (even in the bad paintings of the period) and the abundant, whimsical, impassioned words. He started out assuming that everyone was just like him; the puzzlement of a friend to whom he had confided a little of his emptiness revealed his error and left him with the lasting impression that the individual should not diverge from the species. At one time he thought he could find a cure for his ailment in books and accordingly learned the "small Latin and less Greek" to which a contemporary later referred. He next decided that what he was looking for might be found in the practice of one of humanity's more elemental rituals: he allowed Anne Hathaway to initiate him over the course of a long June afternoon. In his twenties he went to London. He had become instinctively adept at pretending to be somebody, so that no one would suspect he was in fact nobody. In London he discovered the profession for which he was destined, that of the actor who stands on a stage and pretends to be someone else in front of a group of people who pretend to take him for that other person. Theatrical work brought him rare happiness, possibly the first he had ever known–but when the last line had been applauded and the last corpse removed from the stage, the odious shadow of unreality fell over him again: he ceased being Ferrex or Tamburlaine and went back to being nobody. Hard pressed, he took to making up other heroes, other tragic tales. While his body fulfilled its bodily destiny in the taverns and brothels of London, the soul inside it belonged to Caesar who paid no heed to the oracle's warnings adn Juliet who hated skylarks and Macbeth in conversation, on the heath, with witches who were also the Fates. No one was as many men as this man: like the Egyptian Proteus, he used up the forms of all creatures. Every now and then he would tuck a confession into some hidden corner of his work, certain that no one would spot it. Richard states that he plays many roles in one, and Iago makes the odd claim: "I am not what I am." The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming, and acting inspired him to write famous lines.

For twenty years he kept up this controlled delirium. Then one morning he was overcome by the tedium and horror of being all those kings who died by the sword and all those thwarted lovers who came together and broke apart and melodiously suffered. That very day he decided to sell his troupe. Before the week was out he had returned to his hometown: there he reclaimed the trees and the river of his youth without tying them to the other selves that his muse had sung, decked out in mythological allusion and latinate words. He had to be somebody, and so he became a retired impresario who dabbled in money-lending, lawsuits, and petty usury. It was as this character that he wrote the rather dry last will and testament with which we are familiar, having purposefully expunged from it every trace of emotion and every literary flourish. When friends visited him from London, he went back to playing the role of poet for their benefit.

The story goes that shortly before or after his death, when he found himself in the presence of God, he said: "I who have been so many men in vain want to be one man only, myself." The voice of God answered him out of a whirlwind: "Neither am I what I am. I dreamed the world the way you dreamt your plays, dear Shakespeare. You are one of the shapes of my dreams: like me, you are everything and nothing."
 
Americans don't understand literature. They are always trying to convert it into information. And the information is what they have paid for and thereforefeel they are owed. Very curious pathology.
do you find it patronising when they don’t bite on this? They entertain you. They see you as a noble savage punching up. The way the English see me. They find this amusing and curious but probably of little consequence. They’ll just parse and process it, just the irrational reactions and bugs of their cute ancestor or subordinate
 

woops

is not like other people
they read luke's post and think, but that is what literature is. to think anything else would be highly... illogical.
 

luka

Well-known member
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. That's the other place I've seen tigers yoked to horses.
 

luka

Well-known member
And here you get a rose and a storm

The Sick Rose​

BY WILLIAM BLAKE
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
 

luka

Well-known member
What Borges is first and foremost is an intoxication. Just as philosophy is ultimately, at its root, an intoxication.
 

luka

Well-known member
A lot of his images and phrases are designed to read like translated glyphs or ideograms
Leopard's gums. Panic stricken flight of wild animals. Where leprosy is infrequent.
 

luka

Well-known member

Why is this link not working?
 

luka

Well-known member
What's the point of having a Masters in Literature if you can't say anything intelligent about Literature?
 

luka

Well-known member
I find it hard to talk about these stories diagnostically because they embody the privilege that metaphor and allegory sometimes have over plain spoken exposition in the capturing of certain phenomena
Are you taking the piss with this sentence? I can't tell if it's meant in earnest or not.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've always read the circular ruins (the climactic sentence especially) as being an allegory not just for the artist (though it is that) but for all of us. We all have an identity constructed by the world we're born into and a sense of self which is ultimately illusory. Something exists outside the imagination but we're never going to grasp it. (And this is horrifying, exhilarating and even a relief.)

I think this accounts for the sense of psychic vertigo I felt when I first read that ending. Something to do with how Borges is obviously referring to how the protagonist is a dream dreamt up by Borges and that opens this infinite hall of mirrors (I'm struggling for analogies here) where both Borges and his readers recognise that they are in a sense imaginary.

I can't express this at all well, sorry.
 
Yeah that resonates (and essentially what linebaugh was saying I think)

A relief from worrying about your will and desires being actualised as you approach death, because your dreams and desires are themselves a construct and shared commons
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
On that topic, every day I get stressed out about work and I can't help but wonder why that is given that intellectually I know that there is no me and besides which even if there was I'll be dead in a matter of decades and my workplace disappeared beneath the waves.
 
Top