All posts for the month December, 2012

the tricky truth of time

I have not been to work in 11 days. I will not return for another two. I love this time. I have been taking this break at the end of the year for at least five years running. It has become important to me, this shucking off of the past 12 months in preparation for the new rack of days about to be set.

What happens is a curious thing. The coccoon of time unravels and I am released into a nebulous world of days and hours unmarked by the usual frames of reference. On occasion, I find myself searching my mind for what day it is. Recall is often laborious. When it does occur, I laugh quietly. I lose track of what days the recycling is picked up, when certain shows air on the radio, who among my circle might be working at any given moment.

I know it is morning when the yellow light pours into the sunroom from the east. It warms me over my shoulder as it falls across the pages of my book.

I know it is midday when Farley starts angling for a walk.

I know it is evening when the last light fades, leaving a gloom to settle in the house.

But the weekdays tend to blur into the weekend. Morning hours are in general distinguishable, one from the other, but the afternoon hours caper gleefully, spinning in circles around the maypole, daisy-chaining their elastic selves around my helpless body, freeing me from the snare of routine. They tempt me into running for the hills. Crouching in the thickets, they whisper to me snatches of their secrets, of ‘p time’ and ‘m time,’ with the laughability of it all unconcealed in their twinkling eyes. We are not binding straps, they say; rather we are possibility, we are discovery, we are whatever happens between the beginning and the end.

Soon, though, Colonel Responsibility will beckon with his truncheon for me to trudge down from the hills. Under the hard Colonel’s watchful eye, I will refasten the familiar leghold trap, grinding my teeth as the steel fangs puncture my skin, reopening barely-healed wounds. The yellow light will disappear behind windowless walls. The afternoon hours will sheepishly turn their backs on me, showing me their ugly sides. And I will wonder again about their truth they never fully share.

Soundtrack: Earth – Hex: or Printing in the Infernal Method (Thanks, Taidgh!)

4 Comments

by sean on December 31, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in breathing rights, colonel responsibility is a winged fascist demon, earth [band], farley, in-between, introversion, let's all synchronize our watches to 00:00, light, parts of the whole, routine, time, vacation

Posted by sean on December 31, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/12/31/the-tricky-truth-of-time/

peering out from dormancy

The recently sliced up confetti of old words sifts through my fingers as the primitive beats of old heavy music pulses in the other room. Winter is upon us, oh yes, with the wind and the snow and the sleet and the penetrating coldness. Every year the shock of how slowly real winter arrives here beats me about the head with a large stick come late December, early Januaryish. Cold fingers tapping on the keys, the chill of the glass in these windows, how reading in the sunroom suddenly means reading in the ice fishing shack. And how I become a grumbly old man, rug thrown across my lap, scarf encircling my neck, unwashed hair standing on end, burning words in my brain to stay warm somewhere, if not on the outer surfaces, then at least on the inner ones.

I still prefer it to the stifling madness of a city summer. I find it easier to get warmer than to get cooler. The lack of mosquitoes in winter thrills me. Sometimes I loiter in my front yard, teeth chattering, for the mere joy of not being eaten alive by those tiny flying demons.

The bitter cold purifies. Most living things die out there. Or go dormant. I go semi-dormant myself, though this state is not dissimilar from other times of year for me.

On cold days, humans appear on the street as rapid bundles of fabric. On hot days, humans appear on the street as languid loops of flesh. Take your pick.

I’m making good use of my vacation from the-place-that-shall-not-be-mentioned-by-name. In addition to copious reading, I’m indulging in a bit of paper management, something which I tend to ignore the necessity of for months at a time. This activity chiefly entails clearing off a desk I no longer use, famed dumping ground of mail that may or may not require saving and paper scraps scrawled with cryptic notations that I must now decipher in order to determine their value. But it also extends to shredding old writing: abandoned manuscripts, hard copies of blog entries, failed stories, and handwritten pieces that have since been either typed up or rejected. Destroying my own words gives me secret pleasure (well, it’s no secret anymore). So much of what I’ve written is dead to me, and I am merely finalizing that. The end of the year is a good time to do this. One desires a clean slate, at least on some levels. We are of course multi-slated individuals, and not all slates require erasing.

Yes, so here I am talking about the weather and my fascinating domestic life. It’s not what I wanted to write about, but I have not figured out yet how to write about what it is that I want to write about. Oddly enough this past summer was more fertile for that, so perhaps the heat is good for something after all.

Playlist for above activities and subsequent transposition into words:

Universal Order of Armageddon – Discography
Sleep – Volume One
Charles Mingus – Mingus Moves

8 Comments

by sean on December 27, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in cold, creativity, domestic life, hibernation, it's the end of the song play it again, mosquitoes, music, paper management, reading, snow, summer, weather, wind, winter, writing

Posted by sean on December 27, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/12/27/peering-out-from-dormancy/

jakob von gunten [book review]

Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser

I feel how little it concerns me, everything that’s called “the world,” and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is to me.

I used to love a good Bildungsroman. Perhaps every young person does, as they are approaching the age where they will be cast unfeelingly out into the world, whether prepared or not. I guess I saw myself in these characters, encountering obstacles and slowly overcoming them—it gave me hope that I would also someday be prepared. But as I got older I never really did feel ready to be an ‘adult’ and so the Bildungsroman became a myth. Life was more a series of never-ending lessons that no amount of advance preparation seemed capable of preparing oneself for. I believe they also call this losing one’s naivete.

This novel is written as a journal by Jakob, who is attending a school for servants. Walser himself attended such a school, and likely based the book in some part on his experiences there. Some say that the novel is a parody of the Bildungsroman genre. To an extent I think this is true. Jakob does enter the world at the end, but in a bizarre and unexpected way, and it’s certainly questionable how prepared he really is. He never completely grows out of childhood because, as he says, “I was never really a child, and therefore something in the nature of childhood will cling to me always, I’m certain.”

In between his mockery of the Bildungsroman genre, Walser injects bits of his own truth. Jakob is a dreamer. In one entry, he writes, “With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings.” Jakob doesn’t take school, or much of anything, seriously. He’s prone to reveries and cheekiness. He enjoys provoking the school’s principal, and yet he also maintains a hushed level of respect, largely kept to himself, for this complex man.

Jakob has a tenuous relationship with his brother Johann, who lives in the same city but operates in a higher echelon of society, one that Jakob privately mocks in his journal entries:

People who make efforts to be successful are terribly like each other. They all have the same face. Not really, and yet they do. They’re all alike in their rapid kindness, which just comes and goes, and I think this is because of the fear which these people feel. […] Whoever can feel right if he places value on the tokens of respect and the distinctions conferred by the world?

Walser himself likely thought this way, at least to an extent. While writing, he led a life balanced precariously on the precipice of financial disaster. He did not have concern for material things and perhaps felt out of place in the larger world outside his creative pursuits. Regrettably, he never found much literary success during his lifetime, later becoming suicidal and eventually institutionalized, at which point he stopped publishing altogether.

Jakob counters the boredom of life in his school with healthy amounts of daydreaming. He imagines things to be a certain way, such as the ‘chambers’ in which the principal and his sister, the instructress, live. For most of the novel Jakob is not allowed in this private area of the school, and dreams it up to be a network of intricate castle rooms and apartments, full of corridors and spiral staircases. And yet he is profoundly disappointed when finally he enters those rooms and finds them simple and frugally furnished. This clash of reality with his dream life constantly chafes at him:

Bare reality: what a crook it sometimes is. It steals things, and afterwards it has no idea what to do with them. It just seems to spread sorrow for fun.

Despite his sometimes uneven nature, Jakob is an immediately likeable narrator. And even though this is meant to be a journal, Walser uses certain literary devices to help string together what is largely an erratic and meandering narrative arc. For example, he has Jakob peer through the keyhole of the principal’s office and laugh following each meeting he has with Herr Benjamenta. This recalled to my mind a similar technique Thomas Wolfe used in Look Homeward, Angel, itself a Bildungsroman of the American variety. In that novel, Wolfe associates certain repetitive phrases and actions with particular characters, which I think helps maintain a tighter narrative flow, in addition to quickly endearing the characters to a reader.

The humor in this book frequently borders on the absurd, and is one of its strengths. Jakob likes to often end his entries with non sequiturs. He is snarky and usually perceptive in his snarkiness. Walser was clearly a close observer of human nature and behavior. He imbues Jakob with these skills, and so while we get a lot of ridiculous banter from him, we also glean sharp insights. The result is a short compact novel that generates both laughs and moments of contemplation, often on the same exact page.

2 Comments

by sean on December 26, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in book reviews, books, reading, robert walser, swiss literature

Posted by sean on December 26, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/12/26/jakob-von-gunten-book-review/

christmas eve

It’s snowing here. Imagine cold white puffs falling slanty, clinging to many a surface. I’m taking a picture with my mind and sending it to you through the Aether. Note the female cardinal in the boughs of the cherry tree, a little south of center. She blends in well so you really need to squint. There is also a blanketing of sound that I’m afraid the picture cannot convey. But if you stop listening you may hear it.

I feel a sense of peace today. I hope it’s catching.

4 Comments

by sean on December 24, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in aether, holidays, inner life, northern cardinal, peace, quiet, snow

Posted by sean on December 24, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/12/24/christmas-eve/

virginia woolf on words

How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.

It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and thither, falling in love, and mating together.

Regrettably the audio recording of Virginia Woolf’s discussion on ‘the mysterious demands and duplicity of words’ has been removed from the BBC archives due to copyright restrictions. I found a transcript of the recording here, though, and it is a good read. Until the copyright police yank it down, there is also this excerpt of the recording on YouTube:

3 Comments

by sean on December 19, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in language, mist, virginia woolf, words, writing

Posted by sean on December 19, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/12/19/virginia-woolf-on-words/

more on mist

I have been reading Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse and yesterday evening I came across this passage:

It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. There rose, and she looked and looked with her needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one’s being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover.

Naturally I wondered if this was the same mist Kafka writes about not being able to expel from his head. He says that no one will want to lie there with him in those clouds of mist. Woolf’s speaker, Mrs. Ramsay, is troubled by this mist, by her inner life. She is at odds with it, and feels uncomfortable when her husband witnesses her in the throes of it:

Had she known that he was looking at her, she thought, she would not have let herself sit there, thinking. She disliked anything that reminded her that she had been seen sitting thinking.

And yet Mrs. Ramsay’s inner life seems extremely rich and rewarding. She maintains a special relationship with the third stroke of the Lighthouse beacon (the long steady light she refers to in the first quoted passage above):

Watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

Her husband sees a beauty emanating from her while she is in this ecstatic state and feels he cannot approach or interrupt her, and yet his interpretation of her state is flawed:

She was aloof from him now in her beauty, in her sadness. He would let her be, and he passed her without a word, though it hurt him that she should look so distant, and he could not reach her, he could do nothing to help her.

The novel clearly portrays Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay as being at odds with both themselves and each other. She snatches moments to wade into the mist of her mind and yet feels guilty about her indulgence, not wanting her husband to see her in such a state. Mr. Ramsay, on the other hand, mistakenly interprets this state as distress or sadness. Perhaps he cannot conceive of his wife wanting time to think to herself? Either this underlines a fundamental misunderstanding between the two, bitterly lampooning a superficiality characteristic of many societal interactions (even among spouses), or it lays bare what Kafka concluded, that the mist itself prevents the necessary connection from being made between two people. This connection being one that would allow sharing of one’s most private inner ecstasies with another.

One theory I’ve considered is that the mist may not be translatable into language. Perhaps that is the problem. And yet, the mist may also be related to Jung’s collective unconscious; it may be the shared ecstasy we all feel from time to time, something primal that humans have always known but are unable to adequately express to each other. If that is the case, we may indeed share that connection, but only by sensing it in each other, not by communicating it with words.

7 Comments

by sean on December 18, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in amateur anthropologist flies into the sun, archetype flies into the sun, carl jung, collective unconscious, franz kafka, mist, philosophastering, senex, the antidote is inside all of us, theories, this is the explanation of a tuesday, tuesdays are generally neutral, virginia woolf

Posted by sean on December 18, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/12/18/more-on-mist/

digging in the shade of the vowel tree

Sylvia Plath wrote of
intolerable vowels
entering her heart
but what of ruthless
consonants headed
to our brains.

We all know about a-e-i-o-u and sometimes y. They may be intolerable but their numbers are small. And they are more easily made to do our bidding. The consonants, in contrast, are legion and their rigidity stifles. Perhaps the only way to harness their true power is to one-by-one start taking them away.

Anna Kavan wrote:

I had only learnt how to be friends with shadows; it might be too late to learn the way of friendship in the sun.

Friendship in the sun is a mirage. The way to it is false. The sun fades color and one day it will kill us all. Shadows make easy friends: we pass through them as they do through us. Few stay long. It is their nature. Sometimes it feels like it is in all our natures to expand and contract, pull away and grow close, like a squeezebox played by a jittery ghost.

Kafka wrote:

No one will want to lie in clouds of mist with me, and even if someone did, I couldn’t expel the mist from my head.

This gets at the heart of the problem, I think. One feels an isolation and maybe a desire to connect, sometimes even a desperate mania. But who can share a dreamy solitude? By definition, no one. And if it was at all even possible, the mist remains. How could we find each other. How could one’s dream self operate in reality? The pilot seat in your head is unlike the one outside of it. Out there, we cannot twist the knobs, adjust the instruments without consultation, without repercussions, without the sun blinding us. In the shadows, the mist, these difficulties melt away.

Jung wrote:

A man can hope for satisfaction and fulfillment only in what he does not yet possess; he cannot find pleasure in something of which he already had too much.

Yikes, Carl, that’s bleak, even by my admittedly generous standards. In fairness, on the next page of Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung also states: “The needs and necessities of individuals vary. What sets one free is for another a prison.” So I guess one could argue that for some people overindulgence sets them free, although I don’t think that’s his point with the former quote. I think it is about anticipation. Jung is talking about this concept in the context of the development of analytical psychology, and yet it stands out in the text as such a sweeping statement. But I don’t think this aphorism or whatever you want to call it can be universally applied. Certainly competitive eaters don’t find pleasure in the 18th hot dog in a row that they’ve shoved down their throats. But can Jung honestly think that attaining the love of another person does not lead to satisfaction and fulfillment? I mean, I will grant him that unrequited love is an exquisite thing, and possibly more intense on the whole than many long-term relationships. But no satisfaction and fulfillment for those in love? I don’t know, maybe he is not including love or other emotions here. Maybe he is referring strictly to material things, in which case I willingly concede his point.

Édouard Levé wrote:

The full weight of depression comes on between 1-5 PM, particularly when I am home by myself. Mornings and night are more filled with promise.

Filled with promise. Is that what we are after? Moments filled with promise? Is it merely the anticipation we crave, what Jung says we can find satisfaction and fulfillment in? Anticipation can be tantalizing, I’ll admit. But how. How can we be satisfied with mere promise. Inherent in promise is a pledge to fulfill at some point in the future, not at the moment of the promise. Like an IOU. Is it the step we take to accept the promise that is meant to satisfy? Is it the mental and/or emotional trust fall we allow ourselves to take? If so, what of broken promises. Do those negate the previous gain in fulfillment? Well, do they, Jung? If he were here, I’d have more than a few questions for him.

Levé also wrote: “Above a certain height I like what I see. Below it I don’t.” I suppose we can read this on a literal or a metaphorical level. What is the certain height. And is it a chronological point, a philosophical one, a spiritual one. Who knows. I think we can safely say, though, that whatever the certain height represents, it changes between individuals. Remember how Jung said what sets one person free is another person’s prison. Some people don’t like what they see above a certain height, while others crane their necks for a peek. Some spend their lives craning for that view, but some are content to not look. They don’t want to know…they look away in fear, shame, embarrassment, whatever.

So what is the conclusion. Is Kafka’s mist the same as Carson’s foam? Sometimes it’s a strain to make all the connections. Certainly reading and writing are key decoder rings. Endless battles, ceasefires, sneak attacks, and truces with the vowel and consonant armies. And maybe the ladder stretches high enough to see above the mist. I think others have ladders high enough, too. If we squint hard enough we can probably see each other, mouths flecked with foam, across the scorched battlefield strewn with bloody words and mangled sentences. Hello there! I do not have rabies. I am merely seeking the sublime. Perhaps you’d care to meet in the mist and discuss for a few moments. I’ll be waiting.

5 Comments

by sean on December 17, 2012 • Permalink

Posted by sean on December 17, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/12/17/digging-in-the-shade-of-the-vowel-tree/

hangman with cold fire

prairie dog towns: a case study

I never knew if the prairie dogs could leave. They lived in a town inside a park inside a town. There was a fence around their town. It was not a high fence but prairie dogs are not tall. They do burrow, though. That’s one thing they’re known for—building tunnels. So the question for me remained: why didn’t the prairie dogs leave? How far underground did that fence go? Had any of them tried to burrow out, only to encounter the fence? To the untrained eye (mine) they looked content. But I didn’t trust my untrained eye. There were young ones and old ones, so clearly they were procreating. But was there a carrying capacity to this confined town within a park within a town? If no prairie dogs left, would the population not eventually reach this capacity, leading to a crash or other dire consequences? Did the Parks & Recreation Department even have a strategic plan?

Meanwhile, in a nearby state there was another prairie dog town inside a park inside a town. But these prairie dogs were free-range, and their town spread out across acres of parkland. It was a decentralized town, difficult at first glance to even conclude that it existed. The prairie dogs themselves were also less obvious to the naked eye, though apparently no less active according to one news source that named them as likely suspects in an electrical cord chewing scheme plaguing this year’s Christmas display. In fairness to the prairie dogs, though, human vandals were accused of playing an even more significant part in this tragedy. The implication in the article was that the humans knew better.

The other town, the one in my town, was quite elaborate, much more concentrated, presumably as a consequence of the prairie dogs’ confinement. They built up instead of out. It was an odd thing, really, with the fence around it being only a few feet high. The lower part of the fence was made of chain link so the prairie dogs could look out and visualize their freedom. I wonder how the jailers knew what height to build the fence. If three prairie dogs stood on each others’ shoulders the top one could easily leap over.

This Just In: Cursory online searching yielded an article from earlier this year that says some of the prairie dogs have begun to escape from the confined town! The Parks & Recreation director said the fencing is original and is believed to extend to a depth of five feet. But the fence is deteriorating and the city doesn’t have the money to replace it. Note: due to the horrid quality of this article I refuse to link to it. In fact, if anything, my recent superficial review of online regional news outlets from this part of the United States has made me thankful for having put such a great distance between it and me. Apparently, in that part of the country one doesn’t need to be literate to find work as a journalist.

What I wonder is how one town in a region decides to confine their park-dwelling prairie dogs while another town does not. To me this indicates a fundamental difference in world view, and yet having visited both places (and lived in one of them), I would never have guessed that the authorities would be at such polar opposites when it comes to dealing with potentially destructive ‘critters,’ as one diligent reporter so endearingly referred to them. In the free-range town, the Parks & Recreation representative displayed a surprisingly blasé, perhaps even a live and let live, attitude toward the prairie dogs. In the other town, however, the parks director made it clear that the animals were there for public display and the popularity of this display would drive the town to secure funds necessary to fix the fence. This, in my opinion, would be the expected point-of-view in that region, a place where most people consider animals to be: (a) something to eat; (b) something to shoot; and/or (c) something to be confined for the amusement of humans. However, I was apparently not thorough enough in my highly amateur and flagrantly qualitative anthropological research. Although I regret the oversight, I still expect this shoddily constructed case study to ensure my continued membership in the esteemed Society for Purveyors of the Unscientific Method.

fragment 4.5 (december dirge)

This block smells like a funeral home,
the next one like a tumble dryer.
Out here at night I feel as though
I’m laundering with the dead,
who are buried in their best
but when walking around
after being underground
might want to freshen up.

s. d. stewart

All posts for the month December, 2012

the tricky truth of time

peering out from dormancy

jakob von gunten [book review]

christmas eve

virginia woolf on words

more on mist

digging in the shade of the vowel tree

hangman with cold fire

prairie dog towns: a case study

fragment 4.5 (december dirge)

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