Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros sits on stage in the Starr Auditorium at Tate Modern, exuding an air of serene consideration. She briefly looks around, while a charged silence builds up. … [continue reading]

Informing Aural Memories. A Diptych

I was invited by or-bits to contribute a text to their current Informal programme. Part 1 is now online, Part 2 will follow later this month.

1. Woman with Chainsaw and Time
Over, she thinks. The sky, slate gray and uniform. Outside, at 7.30am, the man with the chainsaw cutting a tree bears an annoying promise: noise through the day will creep inside the room. The sound of the chainsaw cutting a tree annoys, yet the space cut away from that stubborn, uneven knot of sound is absorbing … [read more]

2. The Next Day
An aural experience past, tangled with the forming and the informing of a memory: what is retained of it in writing? What does writing do to the aural memory?
Today I read a sentence by Paul Klee from 1928: ‘There are some problems to be posed, such as: the construction of the secret’ … [to be continued]

painting, allegory, speech / Salvator Rosa, Dante Alighieri, Pier Paolo Pasolini

Not having much to write around music and sound these days, I turned to painting and poetry, philosophy and allegory. I knew I would found my way back into listening. Here are some initial notes, only a beginning:

 

                                                             Poetry, oil on canvas, c. 1641                                                                      

Philosophy, oil on canvas, 1640

Poetry holds a notebook and a quill. She is just about to write something, but glances backwards, toward me, with brooding eyes. Is that page the space of knowing that some truth somewhere exists? Have I just caught her writing? Is poetry that space caught between my guessing and her glance? Is poetry that woman’s face?

Philosophy is also troubled, his face so dark. He does not write though, his words have been written already – carved, it seems: ‘Aut tace Aut loquere meliora silentio’. ‘Keep silent unless what you are going to say is more important than silence’. Is philosophy this constant oscillation between an absolute silence, and the tension to say something so heavy that is heavier and more loaded than silence?

As it were, the real titles of these paintings are not Poetry and Philosophy, but Lucrezia as Poetry and Self-Portrait as Philosophy. The Italian 17th-century painter Salvator Rosa, author of both paintings, used a portrait of his lover alongside his self-portrait to give shape to his allegorical representations of Poetry and Philosophy. As if the two could not be without a relationship, a tension in between. It is not ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’ as absolute categories that he seems most concerned with, but poetry in the face of Lucrezia, philosophy in the shape of Salvator. Unique human beings, lovers; their glances and their gestures, engaging in a silent dialogue, outlining a changeable territory of seduction, and breakups, and attractions.

Looking for singular faces and catching the singular expressions of my Lucrezia Poetry and of my Salvator Philosophy, I imagine the possible words between them, or between me and each of them. I think of their singular expressions, one by one, I lose myself in a word, or in an inflection of the eye, rather than looking for any universal meaning or lines of demarcation beyond them. I am thrilled when I realise that a certain black in Salvator’s eyes is the same hue as Lucrezia’s. Or that they might share the sky above. Or that he is stuck in the immobility of his frontal posture, while she is all torsion and enclosed dynamism.

Both paintings are known to art historians as allegories. So: allegory. I could start with a Medieval saying:

Littera gesta docet,
Quod credas allegoria
.  .  .  .  .

The literal sense teaches what happened,
The allegorical what you believe
.  .  .  .  .

And with the excuse of being Italian, I would move to one of my favourite writers with no further justification: Dante Alighieri. In the Letter to Can Grande della Scala, he writes of the Divine Comedy: ‘The subject of the whole work, then, taken literally, is the state of souls after death, understood in a simple sense; for the movement of the whole work turns upon this and about this’.

For the movement of the whole work turns upon this and about this: the literal side, understood in a simple sense. What is remarkable is the emphasis on the literal truth as a foundation for any other levels of meaning. So perhaps I should look at these two paintings again in detail, and not think of Poetry and Philosophy at all, but of the faces and the bodies of Lucrezia and Salvator: literally. They seem to be inscribed in the same shade of grey, although more or less abstract in form. What happens when a poem is inscribed within a philosophical text? When thought flows into poetry?

I go back to another book by Dante. The Convivio is a treatise dedicated to Lady Philosophy; it is a book on knowledge, and it is full of poems. Furthermore, it is written in volgare, not in Latin: in 14^thcentury Italy, Latin was the language of philosophy and vulgar was the language of the people, of songs, of poems. Philosophy is impersonated as a woman Dante loves; the proximity between philosophy and poetry is resolved by intersecting the argument in the text with a number of poems, and through a metaphor in which knowledge is a banquet, and the food is poetry, and the bread that goes with it is philosophy.
One of the poems in the Convivio, entitled Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, Love that converses with me inside my mind, ends up like this:

My song, it seems you speak contrary to
Words spoken by a sister whom you have;
For this lady, whom you claim to be so humble,
She calls proud and disdainful.
You know the sky is always bright
and clear,
and of itself is never clouded.
And yet our eyes, for many reasons,
Sometimes say a star is dark.
Likewise when she calls her proud,
She views her not according to the truth
But only as what she seems to her.
For my soul was full of fear,
And still is, so much that everything I see
Seems proud, when she casts her gaze on me.
So excuse yourself, should the need arise;
And when you can, present yourself to her
And say: ‘My Lady, if it is your wish,
I will speak of you in every place’.

Canzone, e’ par che tu parli contraro
al dir d’una sorella che tu hai;
che questa donna, che tanto umil fai,
ella la chiama fera e disdegnosa.
Tu sai che ‘l ciel sempr’è lucente e chiaro,
e quanto in sé, non si turba già mai;
ma li nostri occhi, per cagioni assai,
chiaman la stella talor tenebrosa.
Così, quand’ella la chiama orgogliosa,
non considera lei secondo il vero,
ma pur secondo quel ch’a lei parea:
ché l’anima temea,
e teme ancora, sì che mi par fero
quantunqu’io veggio là ‘v’ella mi senta.
Così ti scusa, se ti fa mestero;
e quando poi a lei ti rappresenta,
dirai: ‘Madonna, s’ello v’è a grato,
io parlerò di voi in ciascun lato’.

‘I will speak of you in every place’: could I think of the space opening up between philosophy and poetry as the space of speech? An utterance that is not necessarily delivered to destination, but that resounds nonetheless, and forms a space, makes the form of its understanding?

Now I think of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, near the tombs of Antonio Gramsci and Percy Bysshe Shelley, before he wrote his poem The Ashes of Gramsci. Published in 1952, the poem breathed an elegiac and sensuous feel into the tight structure of a Dantesque terza rima. In these verses, Pasolini appears constantly torn between the moving force of thinking as a changing form and the pressing call of his aesthetic inclinations as the making of a shape.

Like Pasolini sitting in the Protestant cemetery and speaking out the words of Gramsci and the words of Shelley through his own verses, wondering how the words of the two could breathe and exist in the same ancient rhythm, what is spoken out appears as a space of osmotic exchange that brings poetry and philosophy together and makes them alive: resounding.

… – thus lives the I: I
alive, eluding life, while the feeling grows
of a life becoming grieving
violent oblivion … Ah how well
I understand, silent in the wind’s wet
humming, here where Rome is silent,
among wearily agitated cypresses,
next to you, Spirit whose inscription resounds
Shelley …

… vive l’io: io,
vivo, eludendo la vita, con nel petto
il senso di una vita che sia oblio
accorante, violento… Ah come
capisco, muto nel fradicio brusio
del vento, qui dov’è muta Roma,
tra i cipressi stancamente sconvolti,
presso te, l’anima il cui graffito suona
Shelley …

no name / for strangers only, please do not remove the bars

In Whitby, March 2012

questions of travel

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
.   .   .   .   .

I must write something on Questions of Travel (1965) by Elizabeth Bishop. Very soon.

writing, drifting, silencing, choking

Early morning today spent reading The Relationship with Text by Arnold Schönberg, an essay published in Der Blaue Reiter almanac in 1912, advocating the primacy of intuition in musical perception beyond instructions and interpretation. The flow of thoughts and words by Schönberg in these pages is at its most Swedenborgian mixture of rigour and vision. In any point you pin music, he says, it will bleed. However you might want to analyse or dissect it, you will see the same blood. At the time Schönberg was writing against programme music, intended as a faithful, point-by-point correspondence between a prescriptive text and subsequent sounds. In his text he put forward an idea of music as a living entity supported by a singular driving force – hence the blood metaphor. I like to turn the issue upside down and think of the relationship between sound before, and the words that may or may not come after.

So what happens when I write after listening, when I write in a foreign language that I find demanding to articulate clearly, and that often leaves me speechless, helpless? Can I shift the trite question I am often asked, ‘Do you dream in English or in Italian?’ into something a bit more twisted: ‘Do you listen in English or in Italian?’ And then, write.

The fact that I am more willing to write of my listening experiences in English – a language that bears a lot more opacity to my eyes and ears, not being my mother tongue – tempts me to make the opacity between sounds and words even more obvious, without attempting any gentle fade-ins between the two, just considering them as different entities trying to look at each other through a thick fog, half-guessing each other but never clearly. They call for each other but the closest they can get is an unsteady unison, soon to be disrupted. In other words, I’m trying to leave aside the old point, ‘it’s impossible to write about sound’, and to think instead of ‘writing away from sound’. To stop considering writing as derivative of sound, hence constantly frustrated by not being sound, or watered down because it cannot be of the same essence: to consider the writing not as a document, but as a self-standing entity carrying as much presence and possessed by a singular driving force as much as sound does. Like music for Schönberg, if you pin the words they will bleed too.

Words exist in the porous, half-empty space of my listening in a foreign language, and struggle to be anchored to anything definitive or clear: because maybe the only steady anchors belong to another language, to another listening, another thinking – which are gradually drifting away, becoming more and more ambiguous. Can this writing be seen as a silencing – to which extent can these words be soundproofed, half-recalling the inner soundings of references, tradition, history?

After reading Schönberg today I listened to a London morning:

This coming to a foreign place: to be able to say its name correctly, to be at home. Around are plants whose name I do not know, and this broken weather, that I might be listening to with ardent quiet, and void between my listening and my words. See, nothing here is literal. Maybe a snap of thought uncovered something elsewhere: a note. This opacity of words of sounds begins to look like an uneasy special place. Deprived of proper words and of horizon I have no voice here, nor song, but a tongue tied to a thick rope of hemp right in my throat. It chokes me inside the barrel of my every London morning, in sawdust days of tea and tar.
‘Keep the words worn out, listless by this choking, keep the ruptured breathing’.

Pasolini in En abîme

Pier Paolo Pasolini in En abîme is a lyrical presence.

I wasn’t interested in dissecting his oeuvre but in showing how some very specific accents of it modulate my landscape. He is never at the centre of discussion – rather, he is at the edges of a series of scenarios, as a fading-out frame around Gramsci, the Protestant Cemetery, via Appia, Giovanna Marini, Pontormo. Out of this frame his voice appears, either in absentia – disembodied in La ricotta, evoked in Giovanna Marini’s Lament for the Death of Pasolini – or by means of verses, of poems, of rhymes taken from The Ashes of Gramsci and from Poetry in the Shape of a Rose.

 

where? / the foreigners’ dark garden

Walter Crane, The Grave of Keats, 1873

Where?

En abîme, notes / Writing, Baroque and Artifice

Writing En abîme in English also brought about a number of considerations on the construction of the entire project. I thought of my writing method through a few notions related to the Baroque as a technique devoted to making a space. I’m particularly interested in the notion of Baroque artificiality, stemming from the Latin word artificium as skill, technique – hence my references to Italian writer Giorgio Manganelli’s idea of artificium in relation to writing. The very foundation of this book, the English language, appears to be a form of artifice in itself: a construction, an enhanced exercise in a craft, an over-exaggerated mode of expression.

Reinassance and Baroque by Heinrich Wölfflin was instrumental to analyse the relationship between Kunstwollen (a notion defined by Alois Riegl, where art is the expression of a historically determined, constructed reality) and an idea of meaning which is not a value related to truth, but a skill: a creative production, building a history of vision and of visual strata. Very detailed and convoluted descriptions do not function as superfluous ornaments, but as consistent and necessary in the foundation of an autonomous linguistic and creative territory. I think for example of the elaborate, extravagant visions painted on the domes of the Chiesa del Gesù by Baciccio and of the Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio by Andrea Pozzo, both in Rome – both overwhelming with details and decorations, yet functional to the fictional expansion of the churches’ architectural frames. And indeed the scope of Baroque vision was a spatial one, like the Italian art historian Giulio Carlo Argan showed on many occasions, in particular with relation to Baroque and rhetoric.

In a note to Acquainted with Grief, Carlo Emilio Gadda addressed directly the notion of Baroque in relation to his writing, and spoke of the Baroque as an attempt to construct. He wrote at length on the subject as a technique of building the grounds for the self-contained truth within language.

Argan, Giulio Carlo. (1986). Immagine e persuasione. Saggi sul Barocco. Milan: Feltrinelli, pp. 19-24.

Argan, Giulio Carlo. (1957). L’architettura barocca in Italia. Milan: Garzanti.

Argan, Giulio Carlo. (1955). La Retorica e l’arte barocca. In: AA.VV. Retorica e Barocco, Atti del III Convegno Internazionale di Studi Umanistici Venezia 1954. Rome:, pp.167-76.

Argan, Giulio Carlo. (1988). Storia dell’arte italiana, vol. III. Florence: Sansoni. First published in 1968.

Gadda, Carlo Emilio. (1987). Quer pasticciaccio brutto di via Merulana. Milan: Garzanti. First published in 1957.

Gadda, Carlo Emilio. (1997). La cognizione del dolore. Milan: Garzanti, pp. 197-199.

Manganelli, Giorgio. (1994). Il rumore sottile della prosa. Milan: Adelphi. A collection of articles published between 1966 and 1990.

Manganelli, Giorgio. (1985). La letteratura come menzogna. Milan: Adelphi. First published in 1967.

Manganelli, Giorgio. (1997). Le interviste impossibili. Milan: Adelphi. First published as A e B in 1975.

Riegl, Alois. (2010). The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome. Translated from German by Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. First published in 1908.

Wölfflin, Heinrich. (1967). Renaissance and Baroque. Translated from German by Kathrin Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. First published in 1888.

En abîme, notes / writing in English as a foreign language

Writing in English as a foreign language is a necessary tool allowing me to enact distance in language and to work with form in an exaggerated manner. Often words in the text appear as signposts pointing elsewhere, rather than as signs capable of resolving the narrative tension per se. This is another reason why I often choose to use repetition: I choose to make the most of the vagueness and of the sense of direction – in some cases, of exhaustion – inherent in my signpost-words as they appear on the pages; to leave them hover mid-air as signifiers but to let them move the narration as vectors; to uncover such tension by means of recurring patterns of clichés, while their meaning is disclosed by movement, by accumulation, by a time-based process, rather than by a fixed form or textual sign. If I think of my work in En abîme as a trace of the experience that made it, then the idea of word patterns constantly crashing into the now is one of its tropes, and the choice of repeating those patterns to the point of exhaustion further supports the experiential mode disclosed by the project.
A certain idea of abandon to English as a foreign language was also consolidated by a number of reflections on Walter Benjamin’s The Translator’s Task (1923)  – although I was not thinking of translating a language, but of translating the foreign background that informs my writing in English – in particular with regards to notions of translation as afterimage, as a mode of intention aiming for an ever-changing harmony, and as a receptacle of other languages and cultures.