Stunned by your words I have to write

Here is a text for us to dip into over the Easter break – ‘Reading, Walking, Mourning’. The full text is available online (ie it is open source)

How did I find it?

Berg-Werk (or call it Pit-work if you prefer) …which I used to describe to myself as being like digging, but I am now more inclined to think of it as being like dipping.

Here is an example of Berg-Werk – see if you agree about the feeling:

1. Read the current London Review of Books, 25/03/10, P 48: there is a 1/4 page Ad placed by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities advertising their Summer School 2010: ‘Critical Theory and the Political’
2. Browse the web link and then go randomly to other Birkbeck Institute pages, and spot that mme S-B* is listed as a fellow
3. Search ‘Summers-Bremner’ on Google Scholar: J Narrative Theory reference and link to the full text is item 9

 * My attention was drawn to mme Summers-Bremner because it also says on the Birkbeck Institute website that she is current working on a book entitled a History of Wandering.

Dipping in online to the ‘Reading, Walking, Mourning’ text, I came to the following line (P 307) “…it is a because they walk a path between, not only past and present, but (also) mourning… and melancholia….”

The German writer Hans Magnus Enzenberger comes at this from a different angle, both in his poetry and prose – for instance, see his essay on Poetry and Politics (Critical Essays. 1982, Continuum, New York, P 15-34). Enzenberger would call it radical…

Skinny-dipping.

‘Curtain Up’ at the Berg-Theatre, Solingen

(Cosi fan Tutti – March 2010)

As for this berg-werk, there is always the possibility of uncovering certain genuine fragments, or that is what we are continually being told by Uncle Wally, these days almost our constant companion, or so it seems, like one those haunting dreams, which is impossible to shake off after waking.

Not that we would want to see him go, No, of course not, only. What, Only, no, it is nothing really.

And so there is the possibility of us revealing. And she –  Let us give her real name, Marina Columbina. And the city she comes from, Naples. And certain other facts please, She talks incessantly which sometimes is irritating, cooks perfect pasta as one might expect, and enjoys  ‘uncomplicated screwing’ on a regular basis.

That is indeed what my friend has told me, and, yes, perhaps it is the perfect relationship, he says, as it were, under interrogation. Only their visits home once a year at Easter, in order to see Marina’s family of course, about whom one is encouraged not to ask questions, he says, I would rather not know, and all together devoutly attend the festivals of their cathedral church in Naples.

One needs to be supple, I say, as we settle back in our red plush ‘small opera’ chairs to enjoy the show which is about to begin. Uncle Wally is quick to agree of course:

“Here Alfonso de Liguori was born, the saint who made the practice of the Catholic Church supple enough to accommodate the trade of the swindler and the whore, in order to control it with more or less rigorous penances in the confessional, for which he wrote a three-volume compendium. Confession alone, not the police, is a match for the self-administration of the criminal world, the camorra.”

(Naples. SW, Vol 2:1, P 414)

Berg-Werk, The Star of India, London (10^th March 2010)

‘Thus the life of a collector manifests a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.’  (SW 2:2, p 487).

As Uncle Wally would put it; the figure who was skating on thin ice, and her breath which was not so much melting as leaking through the surface.

Sometimes the idea of a smooth, crystalline solid gives the wrong impression, and there is a more or less haphazard appearance, having placed the following objects together:

- Berg-Werk (meaning ‘Pit-work’, but it would be a mistake to link this with the German word for a mineworker (Grubenarbeiter), the reference would probably have more to do with Alban Berg, the composer).

- The Rococo design (rocaille, stone, and coquilles, shells) of the Indian restaurant ‘s painted ceiling, triangulated by enfolding diagonals, under which they were sitting in their private dining room.

- The ‘Small Opera’ (Kleine Forme) excerpts from mainly 18^th century classical music being played over their candlelit dinner, at which they were also drinking Alsace wine.

- The slim-fitting 'Mold Gold Cape', which he remembered (Object 19, A History of the World in 100 Objects (BBC Radio 4)), and the part of the transcript which he had written down in order to read again, “When you look at this object, in one way you react with amazement about how beautiful and intriguing it is. And then you also react to it in terms of wondering about who it was made for, what does it mean that that kind of unique, special objects were created”.

Yes, it is true, you need to have the lightest of steps.

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, BBC Radio 3 broadcast, (8^th January 2010)

The primary tension for me was (and is) between freedom and repression. I missed WR Mysteries of the Organism, but in the sexual realm it was during the late 1970’s that I saw Ai No Corida at the cinema in Notting Hill (the 1976 Japanese film based on a true story from 1930’s Japan). In fact I got to see it twice before the film was banned, the second time with two women. I remember we were not turned on.

But shocked we certainly were, the shock of meeting an example of ‘utmost concreteness’ (to use Uncle Wally’s phrase) with the sex on screen being very much for real, along with a way of being in a film which was not on the face of it pornographic -  ‘to be is to communicate’ like Mikhail Mikhailovitch Bakhtin said – only contradictory. It was beautiful but it wasn’t sexy, and so on, and so on. Only contradictions. It just did not make any sense.

After that my tension around freedom and repression remained in a confused state for the next two decades (remember the Falklands War, remember the fall of Communism, and the invasion of Kuwait and the first Iraq War), and beyond that. But in recent times I have begun to follow the tension through. Now there is also pretension, attention, and contention. I have begun to argue back.

A week ago I wrote about ‘where immense life is possible’ being for Valentin Silvestrov the ‘area of the Coda’, in other words repetitions, doublings back, and discontinuities. And capriciousness. For instance, during that BBC Radio 3 broadcast in January I was listening to Kirill Karabits describe the music of Silvestrov’s Serenade for Strings, like the figure and ground of a powerful personal memory which emerges from and descends back into chaos, except with his strong Ukrainian accent ‘chaos’ was not the word I heard him say.