Obsolescence

Iannis Xanakis: Metastasis
Order to Complexity to Disorder

Kundera on Xenakis. Xenakis severed relations between himself and music. Music as defined by a certain tradition, a heritage. He was not "new" he was "other." Unlike.

Xenakis "does not stand against some earlier phase of music; he turns away from all of European music, from the whole of it's legacy."

In this turn he locates a new origin for sound, not in the notes of man, but in nature. The sound the world makes, alive with rain, with dry heat and machinery.

Xenakis looks to the world of sound, sound with origins not confined to the heart of one man, or his intellect. In this turn he breaks with the authoritative notion that man is the heart of society, a person elevated above other life forms. In this turn from the lie of sentient beings, he takes his place within nature, where man and woman are small parts that do not define the whole.

Bakhtin also takes a turn from the I of writing to the world of speech. In his turn he locates the world of sound within an utterance— man at once a part of the grand dialogue, no more or less than a speaker.

About Xenakis' legacy: "Will he be remembered by music lovers?"

That is a question of music: what harmonies and scales are being agreed up, what instruments played, what opportunities for vocalizations, what beings expressed and realities explored.

They both fondle the dichotomies that have divided Nations, thoughts and music: man/nature; man/woman; oral/written; civilized/savage.

About Xenakis: "What will remain is the act of enormous rejection: for the first time someone has dared to tell European music that it can be abandoned. Forgotten."

So many parts of life are accepted as inevitable, events that cannot be avoided or evaded, certainties. This may be why some twist themselves around the barbed wire of free will and original sin. They are so certain,—as sure to follow as night follows day— of the story of their life, an appropriate score, an authority to empower their position.

Kundera mentions the circumstance of Xenakis' life: being sentenced to death, civil war, disfigurement. In his mind these circumstances "Led Xenakis to side with the objective sound of the world against the sound of a soul's subjectivity."

Many artists and many children of war (especially survivors of wars of extermination) break open in the attempt to understand. Arahon Appelfeld writes, "The numerous books of testimony that were written about the Holocaust are, if you will, a desperate effort to force the Holocaust into a remote recess of madness, to cut it off from life, and in other cases, to envelop it in a kind of mystical aura, intangible, which must be discussed as a kind of experience that cannot be expressed in words, but rather in a prolonged silence." (Beyond Despair)

The first time I heard Xanakis I thought of Beckett. I also think of Broch, beginning The Death of Virgil while interred by the Gestapo, finishing it in poverty and exile. None of these artists accept the inevitable. They have lost the certainty of day following night. And they respond with compositions: Metastasis. Pas Moi. The Death of Virgil.

Novels

"Certain artists of our time, casting a serious look upon what surrounds them, devote themselves to painting wretchedness, the abjectness of poverty, Lazarus's dung-heap. This may belong to the domain of art and philosophy; but when they paint poverty so hideous and degraded, sometimes so vicious and criminal, do they attain their end, and is the effect wholesome, as they would have it."
(George Sand, The Author to the Reader (I.), The Hunted Pool, translated by Frank Hunter Potter)

The question of content dogs the ethical writer aware that words have power and stories shape reality. There are ethics in storytelling, seasons that define when each story can be told, and societies responsible for certain knowledge. Everything is not everyone's domain.

I was raised with this knowledge: it is a shield I walk behind. I was also raised under the influence (colonialism, alcoholism, mental illness and domestic violence). When I encountered the work of radical women of color feminists I felt like I was given breath and in that breath, life. Audre's writings in Sister Outsider and Dorothy's work in Skin pushed me to confront, publicly, what I was ashamed of, in myself and in my family. I've come to understand that life is not an either or, but a balance between each point on the line that defines what seems extreme to some and normal to others.

"When it comes to wars you can never tell who is going to lose their life."
(José Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon)

Welch's Fools Crow, Beckett's Molloy, Gertrude's Three Lives each speak eloquently to and about poverty, both hideous and degraded, but their purpose is neither vicious or criminal. Their end is not to exploit. They do not raise themselves above the world of their work. They take their place within and set a place for you to join them.

During the siege of Leningrad 750,000 people starved in 900 days. When Anna Reid began her archival project many of the younger generation had a sterile notion of the siege and felt it represented the strength of the people and their survival. They were aware of what they had been told: people came together and made it through, alive, mostly. We should honor their fortitude and forget the rest. The survivors themselves knew more. The siege was a "cold, cruel, time when people lost their personalities, relationships broke down, people broke down, [and] turned into beasts."

"There was nobody who escaped death completely."

"Your world becomes smaller and smaller: the apartment, water source and food shop."

These survivors wanted Reid to comprehend and reveal the scope of the damage and the nastiness of that moment. They wanted her to tell their story so that we could not forget it.

"What determined whether someone lived and died?"

After the siege the survivors knew: " A great work had ended, impossible deeds had been done. We all felt that. . . But we also felt confusion. How should we live now?" (N.B.: the images in this link are formidable and dreadful.)

This question informs my work inside and outside of the archives, among the stories I am a part of, and the stories my stories are related to. Sometimes our worlds feel small: the apartment, water source and food. And sometimes we must remember to step outside of what we know and what we are afraid is true and write.

"Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents the man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels."
(José Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon)

Language

"Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with 'filler,' do away with whatever came from habit, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential (the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say.)" (Kundera, Encounter)

"Metaphysical angst, he had learned, could be profoundly disquieting and depressing but it was seldom life-threatening, except for those few individuals who could not live with their awareness of the void and committed suicide. Many of the features of Beckett's later prose and plays arise directly from his experiences of radical uncertainty, disorientation, exile, hunger and need." (Knowlson, Damned to Fame)

After recovering from surgery to restore his sight Beckett and Suzanne went on a trip to Malta. He saw one thing which made the trip worth the trouble, St. John's Cathedral in Valletta. He wanted to see the famous signed Caravaggio: The Beheading of St. John the Baptist.

He sat in front of the painting for an hour. It was "a great painting, really tremendous." He began Not I shortly later.

Sit in front of the painting for an hour yourself. Make a relationship with it. Don't let me tell you how you connect. Take the opportunity to connect yourself. Ask, what is my relationship to this piece of work? I know the Baptist. I have sat among the words. I have studied the holy cards from my Grandmother's collection so fully I can recall each image instantaneously.

The Beheading of St. John the Baptist is unlike any painting of St. John the Baptist I've seen. When I first read that Not I was begun after the work titled The Beheading of St. John the Baptist I thought, of course, "one of the most strikingly innovative pieces of modern theatre, an illuminated mouth, set high in the darkness to stage left, spews out words at an astonishing pace, telling of a sad, lonely silent life." (Knowlson, Damned to Fame)

I think of this play all the time. The first production nearly destroyed the actress (Billie Whitelaw) who played Mouth. She couldn't withstand the language—the pace of it, the lack of logic, the voice, the inflection (he wanted none, just the words in an ordered but incomprehensible stream), the physical delivery. She almost gave up. After a breakdown she tried again.

What Beckett said about her, Mouth in Pas Moi: "And I heard 'her' saying what I wrote in Not I. I actually heard it."

When asked about the voice, he said to read The Unnamable. The voice is there already. "It issues from me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can't stop it, I can't prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me. It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and must speak, this is all I know." (Beckett, The Unnamable)

When I read his work I am lost in the flood of words. I let go of the shores of reason and give myself over to the current. He is a loving and gentle writer and never holds me under. Something—his cadence, his vision, his compassion—keeps my head above, providing me access to air, and then I lift myself from his world, his vocabulary. I feel soothed. He has, in not answering, answered. Perhaps this is the most you can say to the void, "I have no voice and must speak, this is all I know."

Translation

"I use words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others or let me be silent."
Samuel Beckett, Endgame

". . .with the Holocaust. Everything in it already seems so thoroughly unreal, as if it no longer belongs to the experience of our generation, but to mythology. Thence comes the need to bring it down to the human realm. That is not a mechanical problem, but an essential one. . .I do not mean to simplify, to attenuate, or to sweeten the horror, but to attempt to make the events speak through the individual and his language, to rescue the suffering from huge numbers, from dreadful anonymity and to restore the person's given and family name, to give the tortured person back his human form, which was snatched away from him."
Aharaon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair

Sometimes I sit and read my dictionary. It's a huge Webster's New World dictionary I was given in grammar school. For a long time I hated dictionaries. You had to spell to use them. I was never a good speller. And while I currently spell better, homonyms are my Nemesis.

But I read. And I read the dictionary to find words.

I didn't start this till I took an Anthropology class while an undergraduate at Cal. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe was our teaching assistant. We didn't have sections but she read and commented on our papers. She was eloquent, uncorrupted and uncompromising. I wanted to impress her. She assigned Malcom X's Autobiography. I read how he taught himself to read while in prison by reading the dictionary. He was like the men in my family—but they never made the changes necessary to claim El Hajj. They staid where they stayed.

I always arrived to class early and sat in the front. I was terrified of flunking out. I still lived at home and attended meetings every night in the city. On the weekends I locked myself in my room to read and memorize. During the week I rode BART to campus and squeezed myself into seats and paradigms. I was always mispronouncing. People had no shame in correcting me. I felt stupid—and often still do, when people correct my English, at the store buying groceries.

For our final we were required to write about home, using several of the texts. I only remember Malcom, Jayne's lecture on the Rastafari and Anthony Garcia's lecture on Urban Indians. (This was the only class I took at Cal, outside the Native American Studies department that even mentioned Indians—except for a cultural Anthropology screening of Four Corners: A National Sacrifice Area? I had to leave midway through. I couldn't stand it.)

I'm not sure how I answered the question of home, when my world was bound by the daily journey from house, to work, to class and to meeting, but I know I couldn't speak. I started to go by the tag line: silent. Shaping words was beyond me. I was simply trying to get from one world to another intact. Getting to a meeting at the end of the day was a successful day, getting up in the morning a successful night. The process of translation requires a similar desire: to move from one place to another with something remaining—though it remains changed, it remains nonetheless.

In my experience home is not a place to speak from. Voice originates in the process of transformation and the desire to carry that over—from San Francisco to Cal, from Navajo to English, from here to there and from me to you.

Translation

Mikhail Bakhtin's "works in print can in fact be seen as ripped-out segments of one vast philosophical project. . . on the nature of language, literature and moral responsibility."

My own work, on the page, follows a similar course. My ideas have been shaped by my grandmother's nightly reading of the St. Joseph's Missal and my grandfather's constant songs and stories. I was the bridge between their worlds and the distance was vast, indeed.

"What can be said with certainty is that for Bakhtin, to translate was never to betray; on the contrary translation, broadly conceived, was for him the essence of all human communication."

The essence of all human communication.

Considering translation as the essence of all human communication has forced me to allow considerable space in all my relations, a loving attention to ways we can be in the same place at the same time with no shared experience of that moment at all. How then can we speak? How then can we hear? If we understand translation as the essence of communication we need to lovingly tend those spaces, those gaps between everyone involved. Even the me involved, the me that is at once 4 years old at my grandparents side and the me that is now forty years older and without them.

"Crossing language boundaries was perhaps the most fundamental of human acts."

I see people talking at and around each other, often. With no consideration of the boundaries they drag themselves across carelessly and without the slightest caress.

Molloy is my favorite literary figure. Beckett's work always points to a project of words, even for a self that is always a word behind, a thought ahead. The earth surrounding them in a sea of image, of silence, of sound. I desire to share those images and sounds. The necessity of your understanding—is sometimes life threatening. I have survived several of those moments myself.

"These languages are not just the bluntly distinct national languages. . .that exist as the normative materials of dictionaries and grammars, but also the scores of different 'languages' that exist simultaneously within a single culture and single speaking community."

I write in and about English, Black English, Spanish, Diné Bizaad, and Sahnish. But the linguistic issue is more complex. I want readers to understand those complexities; they shape my understanding and experience of the world. Especially when I am speaking in the same national language of my listener only to have them say they can't understand me (not my content, but my words themselves, claiming I have an accent—my accent is only San Franciscan).

"In fact, Bakhtin viewed the boundaries between national languages as only one extreme on a continuum; at the other extreme, translation processes were required for one social group to understand another in the same city, for children to understand parents in the same city, for one day to understand the next."

I ask all of us to consider the reality and implications of this continuum. And acknowledge the way this process shapes the kind and character of daily communication. This world requires sympathy, patience and psychological strength. We must speak and listen with these skills, and this knowledge, always in mind.

"These stratifications of language, Bakhtin argued, do not exclude one another; they intersect and overlap, pulling words into various gravitational fields and casting specific light and shadow. Living discourse, unlike a dictionary, is always in flux and in rebellion against its own rules."

These posts already reveal some of these fields. The shadows and light unique to my own rebellion against the rules.

All quotes are from page xxxi of Caryl Emeron's preface to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8)

How It Works

"I think all writers live off of obsessions. Some of these come from history, others are purely individual, and still others belong to the realm of the purely obsessive, which is the most universal thing a writer has in his soul."
the Paris Review: Carlos Fuentes, The Art of Fiction No. 68

When I was five my mother lived next door to Jesus. I lived at home with my grandparents. On certain days my Grandma would let my mother take me for a sleep over. As the year wore on I stayed with her for a few days at a time. I spent these days waiting for Jesus. He'd leave early and come home late. I'd sit by the window and watch for his head. We were on the ground floor on Naples. He lived in the unit around the corner. To get to his door he had to walk down the hill a few feet, so his head would pass by the window and he'd grow miraculously smaller.

Jesus was famous, and he lived next door to me. I wanted to ask him a question. I don't remember what my question was, I only remember that I waited for hours to talk to him. I never did. My mother moved from Naples and on her last day I stayed up till two in the morning waiting for nothing. I went back home where all we read was St. Joseph's Missal and True Crime Magazines.

the Axe: Language, Translation, Novels and Obsolescence

We didn't have books. We had music. Every room had at least one stereo (my Uncle specialized in hot ones). My mother had a hi-fi console and when she moved in with me she brought her records: Neil Diamond, Johnny Mathis, Janis Joplin and Barbara Streisand. I was nine. My world was Fosse and Dolly Parton. My Grandmother and I watched Lawrence Welk every weekend and my Uncle kept me up with him to watch Creature Features. I was used to spending my days with my Grandfather walking through Dogpatch. He was in for wine from the corner store. I was in for toys at the junkyard. Chances are things were gonna be different.

I didn't understand that Indians could write until I went to college and found Custer Died For Your Sins on the shelf at Cody's.

"If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? We need books to affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, Franz Kafka

(Chapter 5) How it works:
1. the Axe will post five days a week.
2. Monday through Thursday I will post once a day. Each statement will be titled: Language, Translation, Novels or Obsolescence.
3. On Fridays I will answer three Letters to the Editor. To send me a question simply send me an email (the address is in my blogger profile). I will select three questions a week and answer them in a post titled: Letters to the Editor.

"Samuel Beckett has obtained the most extraordinary results by reducing visual and linguistic elements to a minimum, as if in a world after the end of the world."
Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino