Literature and Art

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Comment by Nancy Bell Scott on August 12, 2011 at 10:58pm

My Tibetan-Buddhist husband has been trying to get that through my head for 22 years.  Fortunately he has a great sense of humor.

Comment by Nancy Bell Scott on August 12, 2011 at 10:47pm

Sometimes a frightening thought, isn't it:  With each new dawn "you're not the same person you were, either." Of course, in hard times, that's a relief!  It's both.

Don't be too intimidated. After a B.A. in literature, much reading and writing after, and then too many years of copyediting (and then a hiatus from words), I by no means always know what everyone else is talking about either. So many lives between then and now. But I've never stopped believing that literature has many universal qualities and can reveal our own minds to us because it reveals authors' and characters' minds. And in books, thoughts are longer, deeper, and sometimes more complete than in speech and also more so than the lives many people are leading on the computer.

Comment by Nancy Bell Scott on August 12, 2011 at 4:13pm

What you wrote here, superhero, reminds me more of Rilke than Jung, but as you know I lean heavily toward him. Rilke saw life and death as two parts of one whole and believed that they aren't mutually exclusive. I look at self vs collective, aloneness vs connection, in a way similar to Rilke's whole view -- both realities you're looking at are true, and neither can cancel out the other.  It's also true that the only person you can control or depend on is yourself (personal view of mine), though we even disappoint ourselves from time to time. Life is never without even that insecurity.

Comment by De Villo Sloan on August 12, 2011 at 1:25am

I second Guido's praise. These discussions are fascinating. Guido: THANK YOU for this wonderful material you are sharing. I am learning a great deal!

 

Theresa - wow, Amy Lowell. I sort of like some of Amy Lowell. You know Ezra Pound blamed her for ruining Imagism, and he renamed it Amygism in her honor. 

 

In fact, Pound was good with wordplay. He also renamed his publisher, James Laughlin's New Directions, Nude Erections.

 

Anyway, really enjoying the comments here.

Comment by Guido Vermeulen on August 12, 2011 at 1:15am

Ladies, you have an excellent taste in modern poetry (I'm not surprised). Here is the translation of the Dotremont Manifesto as published in XTANT nr 4 and in COBRA zine nr 7 in 1950)

 

SIGNIFICATION & SINIFICATION

 

by Christian Dotremont

 

The train which we think to be Mongolian, which puts us in Mongolia, which ceases being means of transport to become a palace of meeting and discovery, curious corridor opening on itself, snake.

 

What's the appearance of this sentence of the first draft of my text "Mongolian Train" (which still is in development)?

 

I don't know exactly: if there were not so many misunderstandings between you reader and me writer, undoubtedly I would not write. Our misunderstandings link us together, there are misunderstandings between you and me and like one says: there is a corpse...; We can only drown in the "we" and everything becomes a statement of the obvious.

 

And I made some statements of the obvious in the Mongolian train precisely, when I spoke to it, because we were transparent for one another. So there were no misunderstandings and language was a luxury at the same time as it was part of our respiration.

 

For me as a writer this sentence was full of meaning. Due to a technical incident it does not appear in the second draft of the "Mongolian Train". I leave the psychological reasons to those who are interested in this.

 

Full of meaning in its devilish resume we could compare it with the caves of Han. This sentence starts falling from my two manuscripts when I shake them, as if I had written it only for itself and me. So it refuses to appear in the book.

 

But you will see that only a few weeks ago I was still unaware of this sentence.

 

A second technical incident (and again I leave the psychological reasons to those who are interested in this) made that it is published today; put in the spotlight; and even partially stereotyped (because for technical reasons it is not reproduced completely in the Cobra zine).

 

But that does not prevent it from remaining outside the book. In a way it becomes the epigraph, the foreword or the prayer to insert.

 

About this second technical incident: browsing through my first manuscript, I took the sheet with the sentence still laid down and turned it over from recto to verso and then from left to right, and thus I started reading "my sentence" vertically, in all transparency.

 

I realized that without knowing it because I traced it horizontally in the first place, I had written an extremely mysterious sentence. Chinese characters dominated, Mongolian perhaps, Arabic also (if one goes from left to right instead of going from top to bottom), a bit warped, probably because of the extravagant technique I had used.

 

Double meaning really meant something this time! Suddenly I was facing the beyond of my own writing. I had the impression that by tracing some French words, I had become the blind scribbler of an unknown writer, a medium unaware of its own capacities. I remembered the stories of Miss Smith1, who wrote in Martian without knowing it, and of Miss Flash, who saw Atlantis without being there.

 

My case however seemed more complicated. Miss Smith had not been on the planet Mars. Miss Flash had not been in Atlantis. But I had been in Mongolia, i.e. in the "Mongolian Train" (between Paris and Brussels).

 

When reading with the same method all my manuscript or almost, then other of my manuscripts, I realized I wrote always Chinese. Then I remembered another story: that of the decoder, who applied a false grid to a coded text and was able to read perfect coherent sentences, those even he'd expected to read.

 

(I want to add here to break the monopoly of my double writing, that the sentence did not lose its own value. The phrase had opened my own eyes. It had been necessary to scribble it down in order to see and read other phrases backwards.)

 

My French sentence appeared to me as the coded cover of an indecipherable poem. All things considered, the code system became reversed: the apparent text was comprehensible, the secret text was not.

 

But what is it the comprehensible one and the incomprehensible one? Why do I look sometimes with leisure on Egyptian, or Chinese texts, whom precisely I "do not understand"? I understand them, in fact. When I read a page of Chinese writing, I am in the streets of Peking. I understand them like I understand a page of Miro's writing, a word of Arp, a sentence of Hartung, a slate of Ubac.

 

On the other hand when I look to certain French texts: I do not understand them at all! I only see small abstract spots. I don't even manage to decipher like Vinci the meaning of certain newspapers and posters! I am elsewhere - maybe in Mongolia, or in the Tibet I spoke about. Yes, I understand better the pages of Miro's writing than many of these newspapers, these books, these letters, that people are sending me, impose on me to narrow me down under the pretext they have been written in my own tongue.

 

It's not my language! It is not, Sirs, because in order to buy matches or to write poems I am constrained to use the pidgin tongue you have imposed on me without my consent. This pidgin is your language. Your pidgin is a form of algebra. My language is a kind of Chinese, a certain Mongolian, and I am not alone in the world to understand it. There are at least two people, including me, who know from which trip they return.

 

Your pidgin is abstract art. The words of our language are bushes where we do without the language; the cat's got it!

 

The huge specialist of forms that is Asger Jorn will not contradict me when he protests unceasingly against the abstract cruelty of the Latin letters. But we've seen that appearances can be untrue. So perhaps inside Mondriaan's paintings are sleeping those of Corneille.

 

Don't we have to rebel especially against the dictatorship of printing and of typewriting? They kill half of the writer, by killing his writing. If the author writes, it is initially in a physical sense: by hand. Afterwards it is in the editorial sense. As jazz is a fusion and reconciliation between creation and interpretation, poetry unites writing and editing.

 

 

The printed sentence is like a city map: the bushes, trees, objects, and myself have disappeared. Even when I copy a phrase I become the counterfeiter of my own writing, it has lost its fluffy brightness. My copy hand becomes something like the arm of a record player: I write that the Mongolian train is a serpent on the same level I write that the train from Copenhagen leaves Amsterdam at 9.30 AM.

 

It is fantastic that graphologists ask their customers for sentences they have "composed" while writing them down or sentences they copied unless it is Victor Hugo.

 

True poetry is the one in which the writing has its piece to say.

 

True poetry is also the one that goes outside me only to return to us. It uses the plane-iron of language to put us to sleep in the light flakes of our common love.

 

 

1 Hélène Smith: Swiss medium who received messages in a unique Martian language & Martian alphabet

 

 

published in Cobra zine issue 7, Autumn 1950

translated by Guido Vermeulen

Comment by Nancy Bell Scott on August 11, 2011 at 6:33pm

Lucebert's poem "Harvest" is beautiful, says so much, rich imagery but with not one extra word -- Guido, how great of you to translate it just for us. His drawing illustrating his book which you posted here is wild. It's not like anything I've seen before, and I love its extreme whimsicality (as least it seems so to me).  So far Michaux has won me over most. Everything you post of his speaks to me, strongly, and sets my imagination off.

Dotremont's manifesto that you translated for publication: can that be found online? I'd love to read it. Or at least try to.

Theresa, the links to your haibun are bookmarked and I'm going to read them. Everyone should take a look at Theresa's link to that page anyhow, because you'll have the treat of beholding one of those old photobooth pictures of Theresa and her husband -- not taken just yesterday, I assume. :--)

Comment by Bifidus Jones on August 11, 2011 at 5:35pm

I thank god, gaia, yahweh, allah, and zelda for this group

Comment by Guido Vermeulen on August 11, 2011 at 4:52pm

Oh yes Theresa, Because you are into "the night", one of the really great poetry books of Michaux is "LA NUIT REMUE". This is an early one, early 1930's (1932 if I remember correctly). Amazing writing if you see the period it was written in. Makes you wonder about writers today, not? I could make a list of Dotremont- Alechinsky books 2 if you like and maybe post other asemic works of Belgian artists that are not that known as the 3 I mentioned (some are friends of mine, great stories to tell 2). In the Cobra zine Dotremont published a manifesto on what now is called visual poetry or asemics sometimes. I made a translation of that difficult text into English; has been published in magazines on Vispo in Australia (Tim Gaze) and the USA (XTant by Jim Leftwich). It was Tim who asked me to do this and because this was such a huge effort XTANT published it also.

Comment by Guido Vermeulen on August 11, 2011 at 4:39pm

Christian Dotremont & Pierre Alechinsky, linolog "par les fenêtres", 1976

Comment by Guido Vermeulen on August 11, 2011 at 4:38pm

Christian Dotremont; logogramme "poudreux patatras de printemps", 1969

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