"Known and Strange Things"

[fiefoe]

For the review articles, Teju Cole mostly talked about creators I knew nothing about, so it worked better when they were about photographers and I could look up the photos.

• what has fostered my sense of possibility and made me feel, as Seamus Heaney wrote, like “a hurry through which known and strange things pass.”
• __(Baldwin) is angry and prophetic, writing with a hard clarity and carried along by a precipitous eloquence.
• I... feel myself in all places, from New York City to rural Switzerland, the custodian of a black body, and have to find the language for all of what that means to me and to the people who look at me.
• A light rain fell. We were ringed by mountains and held in the immortal blue.
• This is where I part ways with Baldwin. I disagree not with his particular sorrow but with the self-abnegation that pinned him to it. Bach, so profoundly human, is my heritage. I am not an interloper when I look at a Rembrandt portrait.
• In his writing there is a hunger for life, for all of it, and a strong wish to not be accounted nothing (a mere nigger, a mere neger) when he knows himself to be so much. And this “so much” is neither a matter of ego about his writing nor an anxiety about his fame in New York or in Paris. It is about the incontestable fundamentals of a person: pleasure, sorrow, love, humor, and grief, and the complexity of the interior landscape that sustains those feelings. Baldwin was astonished that anyone anywhere should question these fundamentals—thereby burdening him with the supreme waste of time that is racism—let alone so many people in so many places. This unflagging ability to be shocked rises like steam off his written pages.
• Pain was general. But within that larger distress was a set of linked stories, and thinking about “Stranger in the Village,” thinking with its help, was like injecting a contrast dye into my encounter with the news.
• The news of the day (old news, but raw as a fresh wound) is that black American life is disposable from the point of view of policing, sentencing, economic policy, and countless terrifying forms of disregard. There is a vivid performance of innocence, but there’s no actual innocence left. The moral ledger remains so far in the negative that we can’t even get started on the question of reparations.
• Below, the busy little people begin to go about their day, inscrutable to the one who watches and unknown to themselves. London, from this peculiar vantage point, is precise as an engraving. Toy red buses cross and recross Waterloo Bridge as though maddened into repetition. St. Paul’s Cathedral leads white, the buildings across the skyline follow, white on white. The stone of London is white and pale, the sky is white and pale and beginning to intimate blue.
• __Playing the angry and fast-moving currents of badinage against the dreamy swirl of memory, the novel’s flow is one of full-bore local savvy. One finally reads or rereads Mr. Biswas for this balanced totality, this fecund complexity, for the way it brings to startling fruition in twentieth-century Trinidad the promise of the nineteenth-century European novel.
• Against that sad obscurity, against surrender, against darkness, A House for Mr. Biswas is a book for knowledge, for determination, for ragged unyielding life, a book that, over its great and complex length, shelters the one who reads it.
• __But Tranströmer casts a spell all his own, and in fact the strongest associations he brings to my mind are the music of Arvo Pärt and the photography of Saul Leiter.
• the concept of acheiropoieta, “making without hands”; in Byzantine art, acheiropoietic images were those believed to have come miraculously into being without a painter’s intervention.
• There is little elaborate construction evident; rather, the sense is of the sudden arrival of what was already there, as when a whale comes up for air: massive, exhilarating, and evanescent. <> The satisfaction, the pleasure, the comfort one takes in these poems comes from the way they seem to have preexisted us. Or perhaps, to put it another way, the magic lies in their ability to present aspects of our selves long buried under manners, culture, and language. The poems remember us and, if we are perfectly still, give us a chance to catch sight of ourselves.
• __There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you.
• Very few of us will ever experience loss on this scale, but, somehow, her having written about hers is a kind of preemptive consolation for us, too:
• As Deraniyagala said in a recent interview, she found that “writing is a much better quality of agony than trying to forget.” In accurately describing her family’s life—and I’m drawn here to the root word “cura,” care, from which we get “accurate”—she rescues her family from uncaring, careless fate.
• __(Derek Walcott) brought the patient and accretive sensibility of a realist painter to his poems. They are great piles of intoxicating description, always alert to the demands of meter and form, often employing rhyme or slant rhyme, great layers of adjectives firming up the noun underpainting.
• This displacement of desire is Aciman’s favorite move, one he deploys in several of the essays in Alibis. The imbricated feelings owe something to the ironies of the seventeenth-century roman d’analyse. Aciman cites Madame de La Fayette’s Princesse de Clèves, which was particularly dear to him; in it, a woman who wishes to regain her lover doesn’t merely feign indifference but feigns an effort to mask her feigned indifference.
• Double negatives register instances of self-canceling misdirection. They are about doubt, the productive and counterproductive aspects of doubt, the pitching ground, the listing figure, and the little gap between intention and effect.
• in the time between the writing of Every Day Is for the Thief and its American publication, I became aware of other interesting uses of black-and-white photos. Many writers were using images in a way that had imprecise connections to the text: Julio Cortázar’s From the Observatory, Catherine Taylor’s Apart, Carole Maso’s The Art Lover, and a certain Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project.
• (AH:) There is no way to leave history. There is no other place to go. As a diasporic person I’ve learned that it’s in fact really easy to leave your country. What is difficult is leaving its history, as it follows (or leads) you like a shadow. That kind of history is in your body (as it was in Lazarus’s) and cannot be relegated to a museum or, as in America, to entertainment.
• AH: Yes, rationally, I agree with you. But it may be the function of my age that I increasingly find myself considering the possibility that the whole project of humanity is winding down and the end of it all is on the horizon of possibilities. For one thing, extinction of humans is one of the possible outcomes of climate change... Our ethical and philosophical underpinnings—to the extent that we share any of them—will have to be reevaluated against the ultimate failure of humanity to outlive individual human beings.
• This finely balanced ambiguity is the material for the first half of the play; it is no surprise that Shakespeare’s coinage “misgiving” should make its first appearance in English in this play of doubts. (Julius Caesar)
• Perhaps your favorite film isn’t the one that you like best but the one that likes you best. It confirms you on first encounter, and goes on to shape you in some irreversible way. Often, you first see it when you’re young, but not too young, and on each subsequent viewing it is a home to which you return.
• Objects, sometimes more powerfully than faces, remind us of what was and no longer is; stillness, in photography, can be more affecting than action.
• __In Mississippi Freedom Marcher, for example, even the whites of the shirts have been pulled down, into a range of soft, dreamy grays, so that the tonalities of the photograph agree with the young woman’s strong, quiet expression. This exploration of the possibilities of dark gray would be interesting in any photographer, but DeCarava did it time and again specifically as a photographer of black skin.
• What could a response to this form of contempt look like? One answer is in Young’s films, in which an intensified darkness makes the actors seem more private, more self-contained, and at the same time more dramatic.
• All bad photos are alike, but each good photograph is good in its own way. The bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer and where we have to suffer through each other’s “photography” the way our forebears endured terrible recitations of poetry after dinner. Behind this dispiriting stream of empty images is what Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia.
• Henri Cartier-Bresson’s dazzled and vexed reaction to Martin Munkácsi’s photograph of boys running into the surf in Liberia. He saw it in 1932: the dark, sinuous bodies of three African boys—their rhyming legs at the place where sea meets land; their interweaving arms dialed to varying heights; their interlocking limbs creating abstract shapes; and the grace note, on the left side, of a single silhouetted arm.
• Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs.
• Photography is at the nerve center of our paradoxical memorial impulses: we need it there for how it helps us frame our losses, but we can also sense it crowding in on ongoing experience, imposing closure on what should still be open.
• -- But for Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who traveled to Italy in the 1550s, the major change in his art—which was unclassical before his trip to Rome and which remained unclassical after—was due to the Alps. He became a virtuoso of vertical landscapes, which were utterly alien to his native Brabant. His biographer, Karel van Mander, wrote, in 1604: “When Bruegel was in the Alps, he swallowed all the mountains and rocks and spat them out again, after his return, onto his canvases and panels.”
• For Ruskin, they were such a staggering geological fact that he visited Switzerland repeatedly, describing what he saw with intense drawings, photographs, and words: “There is indeed an appearance of action and united movement in these crested masses, nearly resembling that of sea waves;…they seem not to be heaped up, but to leap or toss themselves up; and in doing so, to wreathe and twist their summits into the most fantastic, yet harmonious, curves, governed by some grand under-sweep like that of a tide running through the whole body of the mountain chain.”
• Lake Zürich, bigger than expected and as clean and graceful as the city whose name it shares, is described by Baedeker as follows: “Its scenery, though with slight pretensions to grandeur, is scarcely equaled in beauty by any other lake.”
• Lake Lucerne—the Vierwaldstättersee, the Four Forested-Cantons Lake—is the most mysterious of them all, a fjordlike lake, full of fog and silhouettes, inlets and outcroppings, and an extremely complicated coastline that spreads, as the name says, across four cantons. In the mountains and towns around all these lakes, days pass by like the hours of a dream. Travel, mountains, and photography lock together in dream logic.
• some of my photographs of mountains looked like photographs of photographs of mountains. I was drawn to this shimmering partition between things and the images of things.
• I let go of some “good” photos, the way you strike out pretty sentences from a draft, and I learned how a number of tightly argued photos should be followed by one or two that are simpler and more ventilated.
• the noticeable shift in the range of hues that people wear in a given city, the visual melody of infrastructure as it interacts with terrain.
• -- If I still prided myself on being skeptical of mass hysteria, I had added to it something else: the idea that participation, rational or otherwise, mattered. I had voted not because my doing so could change the outcome, but because voting would change me. Already, like a mutation that happens quietly on a genetic level and later completely alters the body’s function, I could feel my relationship to other Americans changing.
• Then, in the kind of flurry that seems disorienting at the time, and even more out of focus later on, Ohio and Pennsylvania were called. Big cheers.
• For some, the moment was experienced with pure extroversion. For others, there was a kind of sweet wonderment and solitude inside the pressing crowd.
• The Obama story is the story of immigration in the age of air travel, the kind of Americanism that issues from exchange students and H-1B visas and lapsed work permits. This is a form of being American that has been invisible in plain sight.
• I remembered Faiz’s words—“Let us go to the bazaar today in chains / let’s go with hands waving / intoxicated and dancing / let’s go with dust on our heads and blood on our sleeves”—and felt an immense gratitude that in some small symbolic way, I had participated in releasing the country from the rule of Bush and Cheney.
• Greed would still ride roughshod over everything, and money and ego would still poison brother against brother. That was what reality actually looked like. The world would not revise itself: I would. I had. Reading Walcott against the basic sense of his poem, I told myself that November 4, 2008, had reprinted some part of me, and that was what mattered. What is written over is less pure, less pristine. What a wonderful sight, that the self as palimpsest, the unclear narrative, and the man from nowhere were now at the center of this lineage-crazed nation.
• as well as the circumstantial evidence of the books he’s been seen holding (the Collected Poems of Derek Walcott, most strikingly), add up to a picture of a man for whom an imaginative engagement with literature is inseparable from life.
• And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt. The sixteen near misses of the preceding year killed between 280 and 410 other people. Literature fails us here.
• I trust that he makes the selections with great seriousness, bringing his rich sense of the lives of others to bear on his decisions. And yet we have been drawn into a war without end, and into cruelties that persist in the psychic atmosphere like ritual pollution.
• -- Another thing one sees, obscured by distance but vivid up close, is that the Israeli oppression of Palestinian people is not necessarily—or at least not always—as crude as Western media can make it seem. It is in fact extremely refined, and involves a dizzying assemblage of laws and bylaws, contracts, ancient documents, force, amendments, customs, religion, conventions, and sudden irrational moves, all mixed together and imposed with the greatest care. <> The impression this insistence on legality confers, from the Israeli side, is of an infinitely patient due process that will eventually pacify the enemy and guarantee security. The reality, from the Palestinian side, is of a suffocating viciousness.
• -- It is, above all, on another continent and in another hemisphere, and there is a deep strangeness to a place in which the land and its water are related to each other in the usual way, but where the geological processes as well as the evolution of animals and plants have led to a different reality.
• but what one sees while traveling is rarely self-explanatory. Each place has its own worries, and there’s a sense in which what is visible is the wake of a particular history, fleeting, active, but answering to a large and unseen thing. Each society deceives itself in particular ways.
• In the lifetime of my great-grandparents, slaves were still arriving in Brazil from Yorubaland. In the same generation and later, there were those who returned after slavery in Brazil. Names like Pereira, da Silva, and da Costa survive, and those families became important, particularly in Lagos. The architectural innovations the Afro-Brazilians brought back to Lagos, Abeokuta, and surrounding towns, the stucco façades, the two-story buildings, mark those places to this day. But none of this means an easy delight for me, a Yoruba man visiting Brazil.
• It is strange to think I would have understood the pleas at the whipping post, that they would have been in my own language, the language of my people—my people sold off into slavery by my people. A blood knot ties each of us to ancient acts of violence. I am unhappy and at home.
• -- Italy is a Third World country. It has the ostentatious contrasts as well as the brittle pride.
• Augustus’s successful marshaling of art to the shaping of his image was the template for just about every emperor who came afterward. The skill and subtlety of Roman art, from the first-century emperors to Constantine in the fourth, was for the most part dedicated to dynastic and propagandistic goals. Was there after all, I asked myself, so great a leap between imperial Rome and the buffoonery of Mussolini? The misuse of piety was no new thing.
• There was a sudden commotion: with a great whoosh the African brothers raced up the steps, their white cloths now caught at the corners and converted into bulging sacks on their backs. One after the other, then in pairs, they fled upward, fleet of foot, past where I stood. Tourists shrank out of their way. I spun around and pressed the shutter. Far below, cars carrying carabinieri, the military police, arrived, but by then (all this was the action of less than half a minute) the brothers had gone. <> Later, I looked at the image on my camera: the last of the angels vanishing up the long flight of steps, a hurry through which known and strange things pass, their white wings flashing in the setting sun.
• Obscene. That is the word, a word of contested etymology, that she must hold on to as a talisman. She chooses to believe that obscene means off-stage. To save our humanity, certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must remain off-stage. --J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 2003.
• On the island, the tour guide mentions names. Each falls like a stroke of the cane. Sobukwe, Sisulu, Mbeki, Kathrada. The names raise memory’s welts.
• In the weeks that followed, the violence spread to the major Flemish cities of Antwerp and Ghent. And though there had been periodic outbreaks of iconoclasm all through European history—in Byzantine times, and then with renewed frequency in the age of Reformation—there had never been anything quite like the “Beeldenstorm,” the Dutch “storm of statues” of the late sixteenth century.
• I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn’t have a point.
• But we also write in the hope that what we have written will somehow outdistance us. We hope, through the spooky art of writing, to trick ourselves into divulging truths that we do not know we know.