Speech and Silence
*
Spent the night listening to mp3 recordings of interviews of Paul Auster. He was reading from Invention of Solitude. And although he was talking about the transparency of words, a mythic no-language of the effective piece of art, i think auster (paul? hehe) was all too aware of his language's opacity when he, in the end, admits to a kind of rhythm that he attempts to create in his fiction. A form of body speech, which I like to think is music (although he never uses the word).
*
Names. First ones. To think, when we read a good book, we are privy enough to its author to call him/her by her first name. I think this the first possible sign that a possible conversation actually transpired in the reading of the text. One is deluded to a certain degree of intimacy. A faux dialogue of one-speech that is sometimes, more dialogical (diabolical?) than any of the "real" conversations that we have in the world, meaning outside(?) the page(?).
*
How does one escape it? That temptation to read. People. That almost inevitable way in which we approach (and assess?) other people as if they were books themselves. Anthologies of, if not poems, then stories. Mostly poems. Even if everyone thinks they have a story inside of themselves. Huge laughable delusion of a story!! When perhaps what we most have are really snatches of dialogue, phrases. I cannot tell a story for the life of me.
*
Once upon a time, I believed in the devil. I believed in evil. To structure one's days in the shape of an evasion, a strict surveillance of temptation. St. Benedict jumping into a bush of thorns (a thorn of bushes? a burning bush?) to dispel the vision of a beautiful woman. No, not beautiful. Sexy is what I remember. The ability to be gifted with that. That sense of being able to elicit evil. To necessitate someone else to decide on one's sense of the good, one's sense of being what one wished to be: In heaven, a choir of angels were singing already one's welcome: It will take a camel. It will take a camel to enter the eye of the needle to enter the kingdom of God. Who wanted to watch this beautiful woman? Sexy.
*
Here's the latest essay that I wrote for my column:
http://sunstar.com.ph/weekend/09-23-2006/dog%20ears.html
posted by slowmotion @ 9:51 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
"But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first life of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that preceded it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest- for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both- must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, inturn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story...And you, too, O Reader, are meanwhile an object of such reading..."
-If on a winter's night a traveler, Italo Calvino.
Hullo Larry,
You invited me to your blog from my multiply site (http://francescabahug.multiply.com/),
and then I remembered that I had a blogger account from long ago.=S
Cheers,
Frances
i liked the column.
and it was a bush of thorns for st. benedict. though i have a feeling that you were just being ironic when you were "asking." i remember that he jumped in naked.
so you don't believe in evil anymore?
I liked your column! Made me remember a time I was eating alone in the caf at the uni in Japan, and I couldn't even eavesdrop for my horrible nihongo. Loneliness redefined. How are you?
frances!: hay, calvino. a co-teacher was just talking about him the past week. Seems like maybe I SHOULD finally read a novel of his. (Difficult loves lang ang akong nabasa. And really only because it seemed like a potentially mushy collection of stories because of its title. hehe) What do you do man? You in NUS right?
ning: More than anything, I think, I believe in evil! Been reading the community tabloids in teh local papers here and I swear if there is anything that is powerful enough to change how one thinks about one's day, it's the tabloids. Two boys here just got tortured by four men. sick. sick. sick. Sorry, biglang serious ba ang reply ko sa yo? hehe
andrea! I'm as provincial as you: back in Cebu: and loving it! very lost in translation and moment mo ha! So what's the plan na nga? Will I be seeing you in november?
Post a Comment
<< Home