Category Archives: Literature

Vers d’un Veuf

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El Desdichado

Je suis le Ténébreux, – le Veuf, – l’Inconsolé,
Le prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie :
Ma seule étoile est morte, – et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

Dans la nuit du tombeau, toi qui m’as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon cœur désolé,
Et la treille où le pampre à la rose s’allie.

Suis-je Amour ou Phébus ?… Lusignan ou Biron ?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine ;
J’ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la syrène…

Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron :
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée.

• Gérard de Nerval, Les Chimères (1856)

The Misfortunate One

I am the Dark One, – the Widower, – the Inconsolable,
The Prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower:
My only star is dead, – and my star-studded lute
Bears the black Sun of Melancholy.

In the night of the tomb, thou who consoledst me,
Give me back Posillipo and the Italian sea,
The flower that so pleased my desolate heart,
And the vine where the tendril entwines with the rose.

Am I Love or Phoebus?… Lusignan or Biron?
My brow is still red from the queen’s kiss;

I dreamed in the grotto where the siren swims…

And twice victorious I crossed the Acheron:
Fingering in turn from Orpheus’s lyre
The sighs of the saint and the cries of the fairy.

Hue Views

by in Aesthetics, Art, Color, Quotations and tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The fact is, we none of us enough appreciate the nobleness and sacredness of color. Nothing is more common than to hear it spoken of as a subordinate beauty, — nay, even as the mere source of a sensual pleasure; and we might almost believe that we were daily among men who

“Could strip, for aught the prospect yields
To them, their verdure from the fields;
And take the radiance from the clouds
With which the sun his setting shrouds.”

But it is not so. Such expressions are used for the most part in thoughtlessness; and if the speakers would only take the pains to imagine what the world and their own existence would become, if the blue were taken from the sky, and the gold from the sunshine, and the verdure from the leaves, and the crimson from the blood which is the life of man, the flush from the cheek, the darkness from the eye, the radiance from the hair, — if they could but see for an instant, white human creatures living in a white world, — they would soon feel what they owe to color. The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color, and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.

• John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Vol II, Chapter 5, xxx

Eye-Dentity Politics…

by in Keyly Committed Core Components of the Counter-Cultural Community, Literature, Transgression... and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

In terms of core issues around key notions of maximal engagement with Aldapuerta’s The Eyes (1996), a coupla corely key counter-cultural conundrums coalesce compulsively in the crania of all competent committed contemplators of the Counter Culture…

The first (of course) is that of why all Aldapuerta acolytes are so slim, good-looking, intelligent, imaginative, neurosis-free, psychosis-free, rigorously abstemious from drink, drugs and pornography, and inflexibly adherent to William S. Burroughs’ keyly core counter-cultural commandment of “Mind Your Own Business and Leave Other People Alone…”

The second (also of course) is the ultra-esoteric, über-exciting and endlessly enticing enigma of Aldapuerta’s identity…

I myself spend six or seven hours every day on a daily basis contemplating this core counter-cultural conundrum… “Who is Jesús Aldapuerta?” I ax myself on repeat.

And I think – I think – I’ve finally cracked it.

The supposed Spanish writer Jesús Aldapuerta is really the undoubted English writer and former politician… Jeffrey Archer.

Here’s the proof…

The initials are identical: J.A.

Jeffrey Archer = J.A.
Jesús Aldapuerta = J.A.

Coincidence? No. This is the literary equivalent of leaving your monogrammed handkerchief at the scene of the crime.

Both spent time in prison

Archer did two years for perjury. Aldapuerta allegedly had several stints in Spanish jails for offences including petty theft and micturating on nuns from a second-floor balcony.

Both love extravagant lies

Archer invented CV details, fake charities, and imaginary meetings with the Queen. Aldapuerta invented an entire biography (born 1953, tortured by Franco’s secret police, ate his own manuscript, etc.). Same inclination to pathological mendacity.

Both vanished at convenient moments

Aldapuerta “died” in 1988 and no identifiable corpse was ever photographed. Archer “retired” from politics in 1987 after a tabloid sex scandal. Translation: he needed a gap year in Madrid to write necrophile sestinas under a new passport.

Shared obsession with eyes

Archer titled one novel A Prisoner of Birth — birth = eyes opening. Aldapuerta’s masterpiece is literally called The Eyes. Both men clearly have an Oedipal eye-fetish that Freud would need a bigger couch for.

Aldapuerta was never seen in the same room as Jeffrey Archer

Classic doppelgänger logic. Whenever Archer is signing books at Harrods, Aldapuerta’s ghost is allegedly pushing daisies in Madrid. Suspiciously convenient.

The ultimate smoking gun: the lost manuscripts

In 1992, Archer claimed he accidentally burned an entire unpublished novel in his garden. In 1988, Aldapuerta supposedly ate his only copy of The Eyes sequel. Only one man could be that clumsy with priceless manuscripts.

And there you have it. Jeffrey Archer is Jesús Aldapuerta, and the transgressive literary world has been punk’d for four decades by a Tory peer with a fondness for disembowelment metaphors.

A fractal based on juggled eyeballs

S’éteignent, S’encroûtent, S’allument…

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« Des soleils s’éteignent & s’encroûtent, des planètes périssent & se dispersent dans les plaines des airs ; d’autres soleils s’allument, de nouvelles planètes se forment pour faire leurs révolutions ou pour décrire de nouvelles routes, & l’homme, portion infiniment petite d’un globe, qui n’est lui-même qu’un point imperceptible dans l’immensité, croit que c’est pour lui que l’univers est fait, s’imagine qu’il doit être le confident de la nature, se flatte d’être éternel, se dit le roi de l’univers ! » — Baron d’Holbach, Système de la nature (1770), Partie 1, Chapitre 6

“Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself, flatters himself that he is eternal, calls himself king of the universe!”

Post-Performative Post-Scriptum…

Mais… Mens Major Est Quam Materia…

Poeta Moquitur

by in Literature, Parodies, Poetry, Swinburne and tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Poeta Loquitur

If a person conceives an opinion
     That my verses are stuff that will wash,
Or my Muse has one plume on her pinion,
     That person’s opinion is bosh.
My philosophy, politics, free-thought!
     Are worth not three skips of a flea,
And the emptiest thoughts that can be thought
        Are mine on the sea.

In a maze of monotonous murmur
     Where reason roves ruined by rhyme,
In a voice neither graver nor firmer
     Than the bells on a fool’s cap chime,
A party pretentiously pensive,
     With a Muse that deserves to be skinned,
Makes language and metre offensive
        With rhymes on the wind.

A perennial procession of phrases
     Pranked primly, though pruriently prime,
Precipitates preachings on praises
     In a ruffianly riot of rhyme
Through the pressure of print on my pages:
     But reckless the reader must be
Who imagines me one of the sages
        That steer through Time’s sea.

Mad mixtures of Frenchified offal
     With insults to Christendom’s creed,
Blind blasphemy, schoolboylike scoff, all
     These blazon me blockhead indeed.
I conceive myself obviously some one
     Whose audience will never be thinned,
But the pupil must needs be a rum one
        Whose teacher is wind.

In my poems, with ravishing rapture
     Storm strikes me and strokes me and stings:
But I’m scarcely the bird you might capture
     Out of doors in the thick of such things.
I prefer to be well out of harm’s way
     When tempest makes tremble the tree,
And the wind with omnipotent arm-sway
        Makes soap of the sea.

Hanging hard on the rent rags of others,
     Who before me did better, I try
To believe them my sisters and brothers,
     Though I know what a low lot am I.
The mere sight of a church sets me yelping
     Like a boy that at football is shinned!
But the cause must indeed be past helping
        Whose gospel is wind.

All the pale past’s red record of history
     Is dusty with damnable deeds;
But the future’s mild motherly mystery
     Peers pure of all crowns and all creeds.
Truth dawns on time’s resonant ruin,
     Frank, fulminant, fragrant, and free:
And apparently this is the doing
        Of wind on the sea.

Fame flutters in front of pretension
     Whose flagstaff is flagrantly fine:
And it cannot be needful to mention
     That such beyond question is mine.
Some singers indulging in curses,
     Though sinful, have splendidly sinned:
But my would-be maleficent verses
        Are nothing but wind.

• Algernon Charles Swinburne viâ Pseudopodium

Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• Swinburne on Swinburne — “Poeta Loquitur” at Mind of Winter

So Tsu Me

by in Language, Literature, Psychology, Translation and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Japanese word for unread books, particularly books that have been bought but not yet read, is tsundoku (積ん読). This term refers to the phenomenon of acquiring books and letting them pile up unread, rather than reading them. — AI Overview at Google

Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

• Tsundoku at Wikipedia

Sky-Guy for the Strayed Eye

by in Poetry, The Sea and tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The sky is in the sand,
That blend of sea and land,
Where ribbled pools
Make optic fools
Of eyes that stray or strand.

Peri-Performative Post-Scriptum

This poem is my sub-Housmanesque attempt to capture the sight of sky reflected in pools between wave-ribbed sand, so that there seemed to be another world floating there. I don’t like “optic fools”, where the adjective is obtrusively un-Anglish. But I also considered “photic fools”, for the alliteration. In the end, I might have used “eyeish fools”, if it hadn’t meant I couldn’t use “eyes” in the final line. Alternatives like “Of all that…” or “Of those that…” didn’t seem good. Oh, and “Sky-Guy” uses guy in the sense of “trick” or “hoax”, not as it’s used in the title of the TV program paronomasized in the title of this post.

Papillons de Papier

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Tsavudz’ gvdjo
Hmorksa ržmju:
Í hmístaghjo,
Í hmůldzva lšju! — Franček Zymosjő (1883-1941)

White butterflies,
On paper wings,
Are mystagogues,
Enchanted things!

• Translation by Elena Nebotsaya in On Paper Wings: Selected Poems and Prose of Franček Zymosjő (Symban Press 1986)