"The situation [K. looking for the crime himself—in his actions and history] is not at all unreal: this is actually the way some simple women hounded by misfortune will wonder: what have I done wrong? And begin to comb her past, examining not only her actions but her words and her secret thoughts in an effort to comprehend God's anger." (Kundera, Testaments Betrayed)
I recommend Breon Mitchell's translation of The Trial released as The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text, Cornell University Edition, ©1998 Schocken Books Inc.
Just as Beckett sat with Caravaggio's The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, I invite you to sit with The Trial yourself. Read it—not what other people say about it (practicing this week's theme, making a relationship to original art yourself).
I believe it is necessary to experience the novel—for the first or for the 100th time. Give yourself over to the world of it. Do not let go of your own world (you have the responsibility to know that world, reside in it, and participate in it). Be able to hold in place, across time, both worlds simultaneously, the world of the self and the world of the text. Bring them together without losing the integrity of either. From there we can discuss. This is not a forum for me to tell you what to think about a particular piece of art, but to encourage you to read specific pieces (novels in this case) that have changed me.
Calvino devotes the entire chapter (11) of If On A Winter's Night A Traveler to describing readers. [The whole book can be said to be a description of reading, but chapter 11 is particularly pointed.]
Last week's novel entry also discussed being a competent reader.
link: http://jaatarats.blogspot.com/2012/07/novels_11.html
"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." I accept a world where this is true. I seek it out.
Hearing Radmilla: http://vimeo.com/13113380
"The creation of an integral self is the work of a lifetime, and although that work can never be completed. It is nonetheless an ethical responsibility." (Morson & Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
Ms. Radmilla Cody and Ms. Angela Webb, do not believe in simple women. Many of us comb our pasts, sifting through actions, words, and secret thoughts in an effort to comprehend God's anger. Many of us know the Gods are not angry—in this sense, seeking personal retribution, and exacting daily punishments for our existence. We are not simple women. We have stood before life and made a statement—some times lacking in eloquence, but statements nonetheless.
Showing posts with label Calvino. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Calvino. Show all posts
18 July 2012
12 July 2012
Obsolescence
"Here we see that what is terrifying and inconceivable is not the infinite void, but existence." (Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium)
It's difficult to avoid the dead in Prague.
Every place remembers: Slaves were sold at the Týn Courtyard.
There are people who cannot recall their origins.
The Nazis closed the Prague Jewish Museum (established in 1906 to preserve holy objects from Synagogues demolished during Josefov' slum clearances of the turn of the century) on March 15, 1939. Their plan: Create a Central Jewish Museum for the documentation of an extinct race. Their method: Collect objects from Jewish communities from Bohemia and Moravia, catalogue and store them. Exterminate the people. What they accomplished: The world's largest collection of sacred Jewish objects, simultaneously serving as a memorial to seven centuries of oppression.
Every place remembers: Yad Vashem is a memorial for the anti-Jewish Holocaust in Jerusalem.
There are people who cannot recognize their relations.
Yad Vashem memorial has a library (with an online searchable database) that catalogues the names of the more than six million victims from the Shoah period. The library keeps the names of these people, and information about where they lived, where they were born, anything that could be known or remembered about them. The point is to state definitively that they existed, they had lives and they mattered. Those who died were not without names or bodies. They were not a mass to be buried; they were human beings.
Every place remembers: Hwééldih: (Bosque Redondo Reservation) Place created at Fort Sumner, New Mexico to incarcerate the Navajo and Mescalero Apache from 1864-1868.
They say those bought and sold on the Long Walk to Hwééldih leave no trace. Their survival transformed them into shapes left outside of documents and collections. When baptized they were truly born again, outside k'éí. They ceased to be relevant as they lost their name, their origin, and their means of locating themselves among their relations. They exist only in the space between enslavement and extermination, a vestigial organ, a biological degenerate, something or someone that once was but has disappeared, passed away, without a mark or sign. A creature that functioned, once, at an earlier stage in the development of this, our species.
02 July 2012
Language
Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium were written in anticipation of his delivery of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-1986.
In his memo on exactitude he wrote:
"It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty—that is, the use of words."
Twenty six years later my own use of English is strained in conversation—I take a slow pace, meticulous and careful, thoughtful about what I say, and the exact language I use to say it. I am not surrounded by listeners. Certainly not in my public existence: at the market, post office, or among neighbors. Yet I expect more. I've been told these expectations are my downfall.
"It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances."
I am not looking for a common language. I am looking for the deep translation required by life. This translation requires a search for meaning, most relevantly, the meaning of particular words for particular moments. A diminished vocabulary results in a diminished existence.
On my first day in High School I walked into Western Civilizations for my final period. Sr. Damien handed out an assignment sheet with the course textbook listed along with Funk & Wagnalls' A Standard Dictionary of the English Language (1st ed. 1894). Our assignment: read ten pages, look up every word we did not know, and write down the definition. We should be prepared to discuss the readings. I was twelve. I already knew all there was to know and reading comprehension was my strength. I had the test scores to prove it. So I read away and didn't crack the spine on my Funk & Wagnalls. I only purchased the book because you had to show it to her the next day before you were allowed to take a seat in the classroom. On Friday we sat down and were told to take out a piece of paper and write the definitions of the words listed on the chalkboard. They were all in the reading. If we had done the assignment, we should know every word. If we didn't at first, we should have looked them up. I failed.
"It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably."
Sr. Damien's philosophy: if we didn't understand the word we could never understand the reading. The words were assigned, someone had chosen them for us. She would guide us, however twisted the path, through them, page by page. Life does not assign everyone a Sr. Damien. I couldn't wait to get rid of her myself. But there is power in demanding exactness in thought. Everyone deserves to be asked to understand clearly and to express themselves clearly. Access to language is not a privilege. Language is a responsibility we share.
"At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of the epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of the mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language."
Whose responsibility is it to reverse the language shift?
In Narratives of Navajo-ness, Deborah House writes about the language shift among speakers of Navajo. She illuminates the solution very astutely, writing: "Reversing Navajo Language shift is the responsibility of those persons who need the language in their lives, and their children's lives and reversing Navajo Language shift can only be done when those individuals who can speak the Navajo language do speak the Navajo language at every opportunity; when those who can't speak the Navajo language, start taking advantage of every opportunity to learn to speak it; when those who can model benefits of speaking the Navajo Language get out there and do model it. It doesn't have to cost a dime."
How it works: speak. (The Oral Tradition)
How it works: read. (The Written Tradition)
House continues: "It's the easiest thing in the world to tell people how to reverse Navajo Language shift, but actually doing it is going to be hard; it's going to be an everyday, day after day, year after year, commitment—at home, in the community, in the Chapter House, at the Trading Post, at school, at work, at prayer, at the polls and wherever else a person happens to be. And just talking about it won't make it happen."
Every day, year after year, a commitment to language, memory, exactness of expression is what carries the people and their knowledge forward. Every day, year after year, we can manifest this commitment in our own speech, in the stories we tell, and those we read. Calvino's belief that literature, maybe even literature alone, can protect us from this plague holds within it the knowledge of a certain attention to language made by writers and readers. We can share this in our speech and in our reading—if we tenaciously endeavor to.
In his memo on exactitude he wrote:
"It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty—that is, the use of words."
Twenty six years later my own use of English is strained in conversation—I take a slow pace, meticulous and careful, thoughtful about what I say, and the exact language I use to say it. I am not surrounded by listeners. Certainly not in my public existence: at the market, post office, or among neighbors. Yet I expect more. I've been told these expectations are my downfall.
"It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances."
I am not looking for a common language. I am looking for the deep translation required by life. This translation requires a search for meaning, most relevantly, the meaning of particular words for particular moments. A diminished vocabulary results in a diminished existence.
On my first day in High School I walked into Western Civilizations for my final period. Sr. Damien handed out an assignment sheet with the course textbook listed along with Funk & Wagnalls' A Standard Dictionary of the English Language (1st ed. 1894). Our assignment: read ten pages, look up every word we did not know, and write down the definition. We should be prepared to discuss the readings. I was twelve. I already knew all there was to know and reading comprehension was my strength. I had the test scores to prove it. So I read away and didn't crack the spine on my Funk & Wagnalls. I only purchased the book because you had to show it to her the next day before you were allowed to take a seat in the classroom. On Friday we sat down and were told to take out a piece of paper and write the definitions of the words listed on the chalkboard. They were all in the reading. If we had done the assignment, we should know every word. If we didn't at first, we should have looked them up. I failed.
"It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably."
Sr. Damien's philosophy: if we didn't understand the word we could never understand the reading. The words were assigned, someone had chosen them for us. She would guide us, however twisted the path, through them, page by page. Life does not assign everyone a Sr. Damien. I couldn't wait to get rid of her myself. But there is power in demanding exactness in thought. Everyone deserves to be asked to understand clearly and to express themselves clearly. Access to language is not a privilege. Language is a responsibility we share.
"At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of the epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of the mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language."
Whose responsibility is it to reverse the language shift?
In Narratives of Navajo-ness, Deborah House writes about the language shift among speakers of Navajo. She illuminates the solution very astutely, writing: "Reversing Navajo Language shift is the responsibility of those persons who need the language in their lives, and their children's lives and reversing Navajo Language shift can only be done when those individuals who can speak the Navajo language do speak the Navajo language at every opportunity; when those who can't speak the Navajo language, start taking advantage of every opportunity to learn to speak it; when those who can model benefits of speaking the Navajo Language get out there and do model it. It doesn't have to cost a dime."
How it works: speak. (The Oral Tradition)
How it works: read. (The Written Tradition)
House continues: "It's the easiest thing in the world to tell people how to reverse Navajo Language shift, but actually doing it is going to be hard; it's going to be an everyday, day after day, year after year, commitment—at home, in the community, in the Chapter House, at the Trading Post, at school, at work, at prayer, at the polls and wherever else a person happens to be. And just talking about it won't make it happen."
Every day, year after year, a commitment to language, memory, exactness of expression is what carries the people and their knowledge forward. Every day, year after year, we can manifest this commitment in our own speech, in the stories we tell, and those we read. Calvino's belief that literature, maybe even literature alone, can protect us from this plague holds within it the knowledge of a certain attention to language made by writers and readers. We can share this in our speech and in our reading—if we tenaciously endeavor to.
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