First off I am sure that the magic here is in inverse proportion to the noise of its reception. It burns but not in the way that makes one cry back right away.
I am spending some time with the Borges business. I suspect I have some bits of it yet to get through the thick of the skull. In the world of the pearl-diver there is some relation in just how we sound out are favorite finds, those once-were-eyes of our fathers that we love so much we leave them untouched, Word spoken as found but as-if just now born as is but altered as our own. Just this morning I wrote Celan's Isleward exactly as Felstiner gave it. For this game maybe overlook what ever translation might or might not mean.
On the shore of this morning this message in a bottle arrived today, as if for the first time despite other readings, Today I wrote it from scratch--in Menardian ink--maybe...I dunno??? Ideas, Benjamin said are stars, in contrast to the sun of revelation. Is to freshly Quixote out from your middle, long after Cervantes put the pen down, to have an idea in the Night of the Work? Works of art, he also said, are models of nature neither theater of history nor dwelling place of mankind. I think it best if you be harsh here and underline where I seek to slip past the actual Menardian task into my own schtick as I pretend that to read out this piece, in Jackdaw and post-apocalypse, is do write it in the dark of the redeemed Night that waits no day, Judgement or other but creatures out on all fours, eyes on the earth as heaven. I wish I could bring something more in unison that in longing after but this is as close as my mind, a bit light from the bends of my surfacing for air, can come so far. Tell me about Midrash in your camp under the stairs, Biter.
One further thought. If translation is related to the afterlife of a work, is this electric storm of a Quixote after Quixote, with no visible scars one(s) rising edging toward art as resurrection?
I'll have to keep thinking about 'art as resurrection' - the 'no visible scars' is both insightful and puzzling. There are no visible scars because the rewrite is word-for-word, but maybe there are invisible scars in the new authorial meaning? Now I'll probably be circling round theologians wondering if all conceptions of resurrection are scar-less or if some are of scars transfigured into the strange ornamentation of kavodified flesh. Thanks a lot for adding yet more to my research projects! :)
Jul 13·edited Jul 13Liked by Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
We have those tales of messiahs raised but unrecognizable to the familiar eye at first. Is it scarring of this type that make that so? Kavodified. Nice. Funny thing about Kavod is that the etymology of that glory is twined is with weight. It isn't hard to think of the matter increasing in these bottled and rebottled bits. Text or Animal or G-d. To pass through walls we imagine a thinning but maybe it is the opposite. Plenty to think about in your replies here.
Oh...I never caught that bit about glory in that title of that old Lewis bit...weight of glory....til just now. I know I have long wanted to argue out some stuff with that piece of his, his conflation of world and earth for one. Have to go revisit it in light of our chat.
I have always *loved* the weight valence of kavod. I always think of it as *densely* refulgent, almost dripping and oozing with light, if also heavy and solid with extra-worldly gravity. That bright weight is one reason behemoths and leviathans have always struck me as glorious in their excessive bodies. I’ve never felt the monstrous and kavodic were mutually exclusive or antithetical, though they can certainly tussle in the eons-long drama(s), the monsters sometimes completely out-with the sacred in their evilest iterations—but ever arcing back the superdense blackhole of holiness.
Thank you so much for engaging so thoughtfully (and experimentally!) with this post, Andrew. Now I in turn need to sit with this a few days before I add another dash of something to the mix. Let me just ask you though, are you quoting the poem as it was written by Celan (and obviously as then translated into English) or rewriting it in your own words? (I can't find the poem online.) Either way is super interesting. I'm just trying to figure out which you're doing.
I am rewriting it exactly as it was like you and Borges made me do. Though I am sure the way I press it into service in my head at odds with its first origin.
Ok, let me attempt to engage your ultra-dense black object of a comment, Andrew! As far as I can tell, you're 100% playing the Borgesian game as laid out in his story. Your framing it as our 'favorite finds, those once-were-eyes of our fathers that we love so much we leave them untouched, Word spoken as found but as-if just now born as is but altered as our own' develops the game emotionally without changing its physical task-play (literally rewriting the text and observing how it changes in meaning in its new authorial-cultural context). I think we both have moved Borges's project in a more personal (and communal) direction, which is welcome. He was true to his more cerebral style and that very rigour invited our iterations and mutations. He set out the template firmly and asked us to play there in the conclusion of his little philo-fiction.
Characterising this game as a message in a bottle that just arrived today despite previous readings is apt and poignant. Maybe it's important to point out that we can only receive that newfound/long-since-read message by going through the actual performance of rewriting ('in Menardian ink' - YES!). It only appears out of the ocean blue onto our shores because we took time to write it and send it. I suppose it's almost like imagining receiving such a missive (from Cervantes, say), copying it out onto a new piece of paper, and casting it back rebottled upon the waves, forgetting about it, and then one day discovering it sticking in the sand all rebarnacled anew. (Though the loops get a little dizzying if you try to expand the metaphors too much, haha! ) In this way, perhaps, the rewrites are indeed sidereal ideas in the Night of Work, nature-models (re)contextualising humanity-in-others (more-than-human others). Again YES to these Benjaminian accretions to the Borgesian project. Your all-fouring out ('eyes on the earth as heaven' - ah!) has brought MUCH to this co-longing and I thank you.
(Importantly, I didn't really get into the story's insistence that this project likely takes a lifetime and will achieve only fragmentary results, as with Menard. I probably didn't play the game quite right with my much more speedy suggestions of Laffertian rewrites. I console myself with the knowledge that I'm far from done performing--or suggesting various performances of--that rewrite. I just shared an early draft here.)
I, of course, welcome comment on this post: arguing with it, building on it, veering from it. All is permissible. I know one thing I'm wondering about is if the 'rewrites' could be done with female authors in mind. Can we imagine an upgrade of Past Master as written by, say, Donna Haraway or Louise Erdrich? (Erdrich has done something not a little Laffertian with her 2017 apocalyptic-evolutionary novel Future Home of the Living God after all.) I'm not sure it would work. The upgraded text would certainly drip with bafflement and deep satire in regard to the largely unmitigated masculinity of the novel, perhaps seeing its sole female character, Evita, as a polymorphic hologram of male gaze and patriarchal pattern-seeking. The novel would be kind of delightful in this way, but perhaps also tedious by the end? (There is at least one other, unnamed, woman who shows up for a moment in a beautiful little sentence of material conditions and this would shine out like a sunblushed thorn in the rewrite.)
The cosmos itself is figured as womb in the novel (as in several of Lafferty's other works). Would this be the patriarchal hologram projected onto the universe or the universe cutting holes in the patriarchy or a bit of both in uncertain distributive balance? (And would any female author have the patience to 'rewrite' a text with only one key female character?) Probably inherited texts can only be upgraded toward certain trajectories, and not others, due to their own limitations. Still, the upgrades contribute to more widespread recontextualisation and justice.
First off I am sure that the magic here is in inverse proportion to the noise of its reception. It burns but not in the way that makes one cry back right away.
I am spending some time with the Borges business. I suspect I have some bits of it yet to get through the thick of the skull. In the world of the pearl-diver there is some relation in just how we sound out are favorite finds, those once-were-eyes of our fathers that we love so much we leave them untouched, Word spoken as found but as-if just now born as is but altered as our own. Just this morning I wrote Celan's Isleward exactly as Felstiner gave it. For this game maybe overlook what ever translation might or might not mean.
Islandward
Islandward, nearby the dead ones
wed to a forest dugout,
their arms bound with skyflown vultures,
their souls with Saturnian rings:
the strange one and the free ones are rowing,
the masters of ice and of stone:
are toled at by foundering buoys,
bayed at by the shark-blue sea.
They're rowing, they're rowing, they're rowing---:
You dead ones, you swimmers, lead on!
These also caged in by the bownet!
Tomorrow our ocean gone dry!
On the shore of this morning this message in a bottle arrived today, as if for the first time despite other readings, Today I wrote it from scratch--in Menardian ink--maybe...I dunno??? Ideas, Benjamin said are stars, in contrast to the sun of revelation. Is to freshly Quixote out from your middle, long after Cervantes put the pen down, to have an idea in the Night of the Work? Works of art, he also said, are models of nature neither theater of history nor dwelling place of mankind. I think it best if you be harsh here and underline where I seek to slip past the actual Menardian task into my own schtick as I pretend that to read out this piece, in Jackdaw and post-apocalypse, is do write it in the dark of the redeemed Night that waits no day, Judgement or other but creatures out on all fours, eyes on the earth as heaven. I wish I could bring something more in unison that in longing after but this is as close as my mind, a bit light from the bends of my surfacing for air, can come so far. Tell me about Midrash in your camp under the stairs, Biter.
One further thought. If translation is related to the afterlife of a work, is this electric storm of a Quixote after Quixote, with no visible scars one(s) rising edging toward art as resurrection?
I'll have to keep thinking about 'art as resurrection' - the 'no visible scars' is both insightful and puzzling. There are no visible scars because the rewrite is word-for-word, but maybe there are invisible scars in the new authorial meaning? Now I'll probably be circling round theologians wondering if all conceptions of resurrection are scar-less or if some are of scars transfigured into the strange ornamentation of kavodified flesh. Thanks a lot for adding yet more to my research projects! :)
We have those tales of messiahs raised but unrecognizable to the familiar eye at first. Is it scarring of this type that make that so? Kavodified. Nice. Funny thing about Kavod is that the etymology of that glory is twined is with weight. It isn't hard to think of the matter increasing in these bottled and rebottled bits. Text or Animal or G-d. To pass through walls we imagine a thinning but maybe it is the opposite. Plenty to think about in your replies here.
Oh...I never caught that bit about glory in that title of that old Lewis bit...weight of glory....til just now. I know I have long wanted to argue out some stuff with that piece of his, his conflation of world and earth for one. Have to go revisit it in light of our chat.
I have always *loved* the weight valence of kavod. I always think of it as *densely* refulgent, almost dripping and oozing with light, if also heavy and solid with extra-worldly gravity. That bright weight is one reason behemoths and leviathans have always struck me as glorious in their excessive bodies. I’ve never felt the monstrous and kavodic were mutually exclusive or antithetical, though they can certainly tussle in the eons-long drama(s), the monsters sometimes completely out-with the sacred in their evilest iterations—but ever arcing back the superdense blackhole of holiness.
Thank you so much for engaging so thoughtfully (and experimentally!) with this post, Andrew. Now I in turn need to sit with this a few days before I add another dash of something to the mix. Let me just ask you though, are you quoting the poem as it was written by Celan (and obviously as then translated into English) or rewriting it in your own words? (I can't find the poem online.) Either way is super interesting. I'm just trying to figure out which you're doing.
I am rewriting it exactly as it was like you and Borges made me do. Though I am sure the way I press it into service in my head at odds with its first origin.
I thought so. Thanks for the clarification. Now to ponder!
Ok, let me attempt to engage your ultra-dense black object of a comment, Andrew! As far as I can tell, you're 100% playing the Borgesian game as laid out in his story. Your framing it as our 'favorite finds, those once-were-eyes of our fathers that we love so much we leave them untouched, Word spoken as found but as-if just now born as is but altered as our own' develops the game emotionally without changing its physical task-play (literally rewriting the text and observing how it changes in meaning in its new authorial-cultural context). I think we both have moved Borges's project in a more personal (and communal) direction, which is welcome. He was true to his more cerebral style and that very rigour invited our iterations and mutations. He set out the template firmly and asked us to play there in the conclusion of his little philo-fiction.
Characterising this game as a message in a bottle that just arrived today despite previous readings is apt and poignant. Maybe it's important to point out that we can only receive that newfound/long-since-read message by going through the actual performance of rewriting ('in Menardian ink' - YES!). It only appears out of the ocean blue onto our shores because we took time to write it and send it. I suppose it's almost like imagining receiving such a missive (from Cervantes, say), copying it out onto a new piece of paper, and casting it back rebottled upon the waves, forgetting about it, and then one day discovering it sticking in the sand all rebarnacled anew. (Though the loops get a little dizzying if you try to expand the metaphors too much, haha! ) In this way, perhaps, the rewrites are indeed sidereal ideas in the Night of Work, nature-models (re)contextualising humanity-in-others (more-than-human others). Again YES to these Benjaminian accretions to the Borgesian project. Your all-fouring out ('eyes on the earth as heaven' - ah!) has brought MUCH to this co-longing and I thank you.
(Importantly, I didn't really get into the story's insistence that this project likely takes a lifetime and will achieve only fragmentary results, as with Menard. I probably didn't play the game quite right with my much more speedy suggestions of Laffertian rewrites. I console myself with the knowledge that I'm far from done performing--or suggesting various performances of--that rewrite. I just shared an early draft here.)
I, of course, welcome comment on this post: arguing with it, building on it, veering from it. All is permissible. I know one thing I'm wondering about is if the 'rewrites' could be done with female authors in mind. Can we imagine an upgrade of Past Master as written by, say, Donna Haraway or Louise Erdrich? (Erdrich has done something not a little Laffertian with her 2017 apocalyptic-evolutionary novel Future Home of the Living God after all.) I'm not sure it would work. The upgraded text would certainly drip with bafflement and deep satire in regard to the largely unmitigated masculinity of the novel, perhaps seeing its sole female character, Evita, as a polymorphic hologram of male gaze and patriarchal pattern-seeking. The novel would be kind of delightful in this way, but perhaps also tedious by the end? (There is at least one other, unnamed, woman who shows up for a moment in a beautiful little sentence of material conditions and this would shine out like a sunblushed thorn in the rewrite.)
The cosmos itself is figured as womb in the novel (as in several of Lafferty's other works). Would this be the patriarchal hologram projected onto the universe or the universe cutting holes in the patriarchy or a bit of both in uncertain distributive balance? (And would any female author have the patience to 'rewrite' a text with only one key female character?) Probably inherited texts can only be upgraded toward certain trajectories, and not others, due to their own limitations. Still, the upgrades contribute to more widespread recontextualisation and justice.