Stories and Madness, Poem, Sentence, Silence

[Image: an excerpt from Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz.
See note at the foot of this post for more info.]

From whiskey river:

My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels. A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

(Arthur Rimbaud)

…and (italicized portion, in a different translation):

For the poem does not stand outside time. True, it claims the infinite and tries to reach across time — but across, not above.

A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the — surely not always strong — hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed toward.

Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality.

(Paul Celan [source])

…and:

A Certain Swirl

The classroom was dark, all the desks were empty,
and the sentence on the board was frightened to
find itself alone. The sentence wanted someone to
read it, the sentence thought it was a fine sentence, a
noble, thorough sentence, perhaps a sentence of
some importance, made of chalk dust, yes, but a sen-
tence that contained within itself a certain swirl not
unlike the nebulous heart of the unknown universe,
but if no one read it, how could it be sure? Perhaps it
was a dull sentence and that was why everyone had
left the room and turned out the lights. Night came,
and the moon with it. The sentence sat on the board
and shone. It was beautiful to look at, but no one
read it.

(Mary Ruefle [source])

…and:

The brain is silent, the brain is dark, the brain tastes nothing, the brain hears nothing. All it receives are electrical impulses — not the sumptuous chocolate melting sweetly, not the oboe solo like the flight of a bird, not the tingling caress, not the pastels of peach and lavender at sunset over a coral reef — just impulses.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

Not from whiskey river (excerpt):

His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,
Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.
The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,
So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands — my God! but that man
could play.

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? —
Then you’ve a haunch what the music meant… hunger and night and the stars.

(Robert W. Service [source])

…and (excerpt):

What are the facts of consciousness? They’re all analogies and metaphors, a feeling of existence but without reality’s defining contours, like a sense of something hesitating on the brink of being said, or hiding in the shadows of an inner room. They’re all appearances, but appearances of what? Something that wanders up your limbs and nerves and blossoms in your brain? They’re all just figments of perspective, of a point of view from which the time is always now, the place is always here, and the thought of something hiding underneath the surface a seductive spell. The harder I try to pin them down the more elusive they become, as gradually the shadows disappear, the words turn into syllables, the face becomes anonymous and leaves me staring at a silver sheet of glass. What starts out as self-scrutiny becomes a study in self-pity, and instead of something tangible and true one winds up chasing the chimeras of Book X: the fruitless quarrel between philosophy and poetry, reason and unreason, and that tedious myth about the soul, of what becomes of it at death, then of its journey and rebirth. I’m tired, I’m far from home, I’m waiting in a chamber in a castle on a mountaintop in Umbria (poets get to do this), seven hundred miles from Athens as the crow flies, where perhaps “the sun still shines upon the hills and has not yet set.” I write the way I do because I want it to exist, but then the spell breaks and it dries up like a dream, leaving me with just this smooth, unvariegated surface, which remains.

(John Koethe [source])

…and:

What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. first there’s the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, “Well, that’s not very interesting, is it?” And there’s the emaciated German male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And there are your parents, agonizing over your lack of loyalty and discretion; and there’s William Burroughs, dozing off or shooting up because he finds you as bold and articulate as a houseplant; and so on. And there are also the dogs: let’s not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained.

(Anne Lamott [source])

_____________________

About the image: For Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2011 novel, Tree of Codes, he began with an existing novel by Bruno Schulz, called Street of Crocodiles… and then physically cut holes in Schulz’s prose, turning it into something entirely different (still prose, but just, well, different). I found this image in a review at The Coffin Factory; as the reviewer there notes, when you strike out the words as Foer did (and as shown in the image), the text you end up with is:

The silence talked, the bright silence argued, time filled the room, the bright silence rising from the clock.

For what it’s worth, here’s how a random page — not the page with the above text — of Foer’s book looks when opened:

By the way, you “get” the title of Foer’s book now, right?