Work in Progress

It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work,
but neither are you at liberty to desist from it" (Avot 2:21).

There is a book of poems by the poet Gabriel Levin, born in France, and raised in the US and Israel, called Ostraca (1999). Not so much inspired by a multitude of regions and times, the poems are some versions of Cyprus, Lebanon, Jeruselem and Palestine, even, and perhaps especially, for those most ignorant of the life and people in these places. The kind of real in this poetry book is of the sort of the fakery in my writings about shingles and pieces pulled from bindings. Better than it sounds, even though it doesn’t sound very good, the idea is that “real feeling,” not necessarily actual recuperation of events, texts, and people that did exist, is at the bottom of many philological studies already.

Sometimes it is nice to read badly and out of context. Is it true, or do we do it most of the time? Here it yields a wonderful feeling. In his poem “Medusa,” Levin writes as the second stanza:

And though the Ethics of the Fathers speak
of vestibule and banquet hall, I prefer
your plainspoken, ”room upon room,”
in the great metaphysical house by the sea,
where you wandered, dazed,
as a young man–room upon unearthly room,
in which the venturing mind glanced off the objects
of its quest, and recoiled; for you were quick
to realize, even as you thought to taste such strange,
unrealizable fruit, that the dreams had no core.
So you tossed and woke uncomforted,
restless, driven, you might have said, from pillar
to post, by a desire for wholeness, if not
perfection, and queried by day, by night, the bare
lambent being, washed ashore.

“Medusa,” Ostraca. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1999 (17-18).

The boy who gives up the unearthly rooms only to find himself seeing himself washed ashore on the beach not only luminous, but musical.

Did he eventually find the wide secrets of the sea-rooms, or did he know, even at first glance, that there was no whole in that place? He would have to wash over the rocks, over and up on, maybe in Pepsi cans and the wish bones of plastic thongs, until he glowed. I imagine this man as the poetic voice in the poem “Ostracon 1.” I think it is the shard itself, whom the books tell was born in the 6th century BC, but that was actually made to live on a day between 1932 and 38, having come to light with the debris of a destroyed guardroom. His first words in the whole, and on the first page of his history to be written for good, read: “This very day, this very day...” (16).

Nuestro autor.

The current chapter I am writing started out about two manuscript fragments, two philologists, and a family who seems to be in love with a red tile with an erased verse probably from the Libro de Apolonio, a poem inspired in some version of the Poema de Fernán González, and a series of drawings and symbols, signed Philosopho. My latest assessment of some of the main ideas was:

Vitality in the philologies of Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Paul Zumthor
Perception of whole and part
What hole are the material books of the Middle Ages filling not in literary history, but in daily life? (Or does nobody seem to care?)
What do some philologists, owners of fragments, librarians, and novelists want from what they consider the Middle Ages?
Does anybody want anything from the material objects? What? When?
What sort of texts happen when the object is the research subject?

A text about a certain type of educated human seeking, totally ineffectually, contact with the past and themselves via nebulous categories like Middle Ages, while at the same time, conceiving of the thing they understand as Middle Ages as only a half-good non-thing to begin with, then giving up when these forms of supplement (typologies, the metaphors, nearby historical landmarks and figures) don’t work.

I finally received the other article written in the last decade on the Villamartín tile, “Hispano Diego García en la interpretación del ostrakon de Villamartín sobre el Poema de Fernán González.” Here the author, J. Hernando Pérez, chooses to fill the holes in the tile and its initial and current contexts with the character of Diego García de Campos and his Planeta (1218). Through a complex of symbolism and anagrams directly inspired in the Planeta, Pérez provides a possible author to some of the tile material, the meaning of all of it, and what he sees as the reason for its existance.

This article has proven useful not for the content and the interpretations, but for its repeating the unexceptional phrase of nuestro autor, as well as his sytematic supplement of the tile such that in his view, it makes sense and participates more effectively in fulfilling a determined place in literary history.

But whose literary history? And who and when is nuestro? Philologists? Farmers? Freelance authors? Novelists? Gradeschool kids?

These must be some of the questions. The reasons why the blanks are there and with what we think to fill them. What is ours to be had and what has the Medieval done for us lately?

New woods.

Talking Shakespeare as overgrown adolescents educated in American schools in the 1980’s and 1990’s brings about a strange experience–there is groaning over memories of multiple choice quizzes about mood and main parts, the recitation of a pair of lines from a soliloquy once entirely memorized. A nod for plot and theme and a fair glance for days without thoughts of hundreds of pounds of paper and font dedicated to literary criticism. The passages are even better now, though. I read this one in the woods just days ago, and again yesterday wandering back to my ugly car among few, but happy cardinals:

O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars: In one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost, Prospero his dukedom
In a poor isle and all of us ourselves
When no man was his own.

The Tempest (5.1.206-13).

Worried about my project’s reception and other things, and lacking confidence that a peaceful harbor will eventually result from a roof that leaks purple-colored acid (In one voyage...?) I am trying to reclaim a piece of the project’s center:

What role does the idea of incompleteness and the way in which incompleteness is supplemented or left alone play in conceptions of the medieval period?

I arrived to this piece in the last week thinking about constitution and reconstitution and writing yet another description and outline for my project. For Jean Luc Marion, in order for any object to achieve phenomenality, it must be constituted. Yet in this constitution, and in bringing the object together, some or many things are necessarily left at bay, or out, a cloud which he calls invu, that or those things in the object that cannot reach visibility in its appearing:

In effect, the phenomenality accomplished by constitution gives rise, negatively, to a halo of invu around every phenomenon, in proportion to which it renders the phenomenon visible. For when concentrated on the object, constitution must “stick to it.” It can only accede to the lived experiences of consciousness as much as the object manages to assimilate them. Now, the object always imposes two unbreakable limits on phenomenality. First, it imposes the limits of its own finitude, which necessarily excludes the infinity of all the lived experiences, sketches, and points aimed at that consciousness does not nevertheless cease to receive concerning it. Next, it imposes the limit of the finitude of intuition in it, which either stays in the background concerning meaning or, more rarely, equals it (it is then a question of the facts), without our ever envisaging that it can go beyond it and in this way be liberated from the horizon of the object (109).

What it is then, about constitution of manuscript fragments that is unique? I suspect that there is an additional process of putting together in dealing with ripped-up fragments. In addition to the normal constitution that must “stick” to the object, there is a pre-halo of ideas about what constitutes complete and incomplete, whole and part. This pre-halo goes beyond a set of expectations and a habitus for manuscript fragments; less or more, less is more, or more or less, permeates every part of at least some human existences. Now or never mind? Ordered closet, bookshelf by author, or dirty dish shoved under the couch. Sticky Coke allover the car cup holder, smashed crackers, Kleenex, and pen stains at the bottom of a canvas bag? Are third-rotten strawberries OK to eat with those parts pared? 2 days expired milk... throw or keep until it actually tastes rancid? 4 minutes enough to talk or why bother? Is a half-truth worth telling?

Regarding the limits of phenomenality, in terms of fragments, it could be said that intuition not only stays in the background and sometimes equals meaning, but that it is challenged by both the pre-halo of ideas about part and whole and then by the invu that results from the constitution. Maybe this pre is not actually pre, but it is, in any case, another layer of sorts in the air with fragments.

Back to the woods, deep-in, where, just maybe, nobody quite owns themselves. Living in those woods are all the highs of book projects that eventually failed. It is the beautiful writing that never made it into the publication, or that only did. These are wood-neighbors to intuitions that later got stuck in the background of attempts to uncover meaning. And then there are, resting in the boughs, the big questions of Empty or Full. They never go to bed at all.

My Project

Today writing about the stains of reagents on the Roncesvalles fragment in conjunction with the rub marks as a result of its once being used as a bag, a sickening thought emerged. A few weeks back, a friend and I sat in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant and talked for an hour about Ramón Menéndez Pidal. The milkshakes were disgusting, but the worst is that we both thought I was doomed to offend almost everybody, and appear as though I were trashing this great master, in this paper I am writing about a shingle, something once a bag, then bookmark, and a vandalized panegyric.

“That’s no longer intellect,” Ulrich said, explaining the general amazement,” “it is a phenomenon like a rainbow with a foot you can take hold of and actually feel. He talks about love and economics, chemistry and trips in kayaks; he is a scholar, a landowner, and a stockbroker” (203).
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, vol. 1., Sophie Wilkins trans. Vintage, 1996.

I begin by attempting to characterize the vitality of Menéndez Pidal’s writing through long citations of several passages of his prose, evoking Zumthor’s “poetic intelligence.” This sets up a discussion of the things that show how a bracketing of the material object and the scars found on it are no longer viable. Without the opportunity to be the first to publish the fragment, without having had the experience of hearing medieval songs in the voices of beautiful modern women, without, I would say, not only a penchant for invention, but a desperate belief in it as a source of life and a legitimate pedagogical tool, we have to look for another way to bring the Middle Ages to us. This is part of the point of my project, love and economics, chemistry and trips in kayaks. Scholarship, ownership. Money. Resistance to the material object as a result of failed attempts to resolve an apparent conflict between ready and present to hand; between "scientific" philology and the shock of the look of the material object itself.

A rainbow with a foot. In the case of Menéndez Pidal, this is not a gratuitous comparison. I think the problem is that beauty and mystery are only brought back subtly. Reading Nancy, I have had this experience. In the process, I always think of a card game in which I am trying to cheat by modifying my hand from one under the table. I want the answer, a physical answer. But a beautiful man, totally absent from any reality, slaps my hand.

Messages left someplace.

Lately it turns out, learning from messages left on blackboards, that I am not interested in new approaches, whether non-hermeneutic, new-hermeneutic, or not-old. I want to know why, instead, it is more urgent these days, to go to the books or shingles themselves. Why is it no longer enough to resist or to reject the manuscript, to write things about texts separated from the objects on which they’re still found, or to let the manuscript’s contradictions and lacunae, old and 20th century scars, burns from gasoline wash, scissor cuts, missing leaves, and pen marks, send the person in its presence running? Why is it insufficient to define a highly fragmented manuscript’s content so narrowly, which usually consists in transcribing a text and fixing it with others? One good answer to these questions, which sounds terribly simple, is that we want to feel more full, to acquire that 7th sense in relation to an old thing that provides an experience that comes to mean a past. It is a sort of acquisition. This moment-past is so incredibly convincing, no thought of science enters.

It is not just ungrammatical, but some sort of message previously missplaced. A lost gift. Maybe these are ideas that make more sense in lonely times. Either that, or I am just getting old.

A poet in mind.

The other day preparing for a discussion on the translation of Derrida’s Mal d’Archive, I marked this passage from the Postscript. Marking passages in this book, which still seems to me like a fishing net with holes bigger than the fish, is the way to do it.

When he wants to explain the haunting of the archaeologists with a logic of repression, at the very moment in which he specifies that he wants to recognize in it a germ or a parcel of truth, Freud claims again to bring to light a more originary origin than that of the specter. In the outbidding, he wants to be an archivist who is more of an archaeologist than the archaeologist. And, of course, close to the ultimate cause, a better etiologist than his novelist. He wants to exhume a more archaic impression, he wants to exhibit a more archaic imprint that then other archaeologists of all kinds of science, an imprint that is singular each time, an impression that is almost no longer an archive but almost confuses itself with the pressure of the footstep that leaves its still-living mark on a substrate, a surface, a place of origin. When the step is still one with the subjectile. In the instant when the printed archive is yet to be detached from the primary impression in its singular, irreproducible, and archaic origin. In the instant when the imprint is yet to be left, abandoned by the pressure of the impression. In the instant of the pure auto-affection, in the indistinction of the action and the passive, of a touching and the touched...An archive without archive, where, suddenly indiscernible from the impression of its imprint, Gradiva’s footstep speaks by itself! Now this is exactly what Hanold dreamed of in his disenchanted archaeologist’s desire, in the moment when he awaited the coming of the “mid-day ghost” (97-98).
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Eric Prenowitz trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Reading this, I came back to a very small part of Jean-Luc Nancy’s discussion of presence (Birth to Presence), specifically to one idea that presence, in its birth effaces the presence that representation would like to designate as its fundament, subject, or origin. When I myself am talking about presence, this effacement of “representation” of which Nancy speaks actually yields to a realization of all my excuses for reasons why I cannot allow the old books to do the talking.

It is a perverted search in every way, to look for an untouchable phenomenon that engines the soul, that is mourning or ecstasy, by way of competition, such as to be a better ________ or more________.

But the outbidding is the objects telling this, and coming to know that the competition is lost by going for it!. It turns out that my dissertation is even less scholarly and clever that I had previously thought (Thank God!?, Oh no?!). On Friday, I started a new text by citing nearly a page of Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s introduction to his Flor nueva de romances viejos. The mid-day ghost is nearly there doing something with a pile of gleaming jem stones that I imagine for positivist philology, appearing, all the while, and not at all in the background, an even stronger beyond spectre of don Ramón himself.

There is a line in a Julie Miller song that appears on the wonderful Cry, Cry, Cry album (1998) that goes well here. Lucy Kaplansky is the lead vocal and Dar Williams does some of the harmony. It sometimes brings me to Northampton, MA, to some of the Dar concerts we used to attend in the late nineties. We’d sing ourselves hoarse and think of kissing the chelloist, whose name I can’t remember. It goes:

Meant to find you all these years.

Two or three years ago, a poet I think I actually met in 12th century France, told me that it was futile to separate our desires for literature, to know, for sex, art, delicious food, and pleasant company. I would like to think I write only for that.

Monday Indulgence: Ode to cardboard boxes, but mostly to other stuff, unnamed.

There are probably people who still lead personal lives, who say, “We saw the So-and-sos yesterday” or “We’ll do this or that today” and enjoy it without its needing to have any content or significance. They like everything that comes in contact with their fingers, and are purely private persons insofar as this is at all possible. In contact with such people, the world becomes a private world and shines like a rainbow. They may be very happy, but this kind of people usually seems absurd to the others, although it is still not at all clear why (159).
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, vol. 1., Sophie Wilkins trans. Vintage, 1996.

The other day one of my teachers told me:

Look at that box. Look now, what do you see? Quick, now, before it acquires all of what it has come to mean, that I am packing and leaving here.

Look at this room we sit in. How do you describe this thing (pointing to the spaces between the ugly gray Berkeley bookshelves), or that, there (pointing to the spikes of the sprinkler)?

It is with a soft touch, the way of this book. There is not a single appointment in there, no fakery, no joke. Nobody’s planned a thing and everybody is wearing his or her house clothes. I think this book is the realist thing I have ever read. We say we are ugly and mean it. It’s a narration of the cardboard box and the unnamable things (and those before having come to signify) in filthy offices. The lone pink eraser I found one day out in the rain. The smells that bring me to things never stuck in cement, memories of turning on ceiling fans in central Oregon, of lifting the sweaty covers off a lover’s head when I didn't want to. Of veins and avoidance. Of thank God it is not, but oh! I wish it were, more often. And of all those unwritten moments I have had in this town that happened in a time suspended below the line. I love you!

After the box and the space between the shelves, in reading conversations this week between medievalists, bits of “trabajos científicos,” philosophy, and my own ugly notes, I have come to think about how things come alive in conversation. Why does conversation work? Why is there magic, the rainbow shine, the exquisite absurdity in oral exchange of ideas? Is it because in writing that much is hidden, couched in attempts at cleverness, or seated on safe concepts, that are actually impediments? Does the “idea” of literature lose force, or disappear, if only for a moment, such that the book can envelop, lick its reader in complicit handholding? Is it that this type of recall is another, irresistible sense that one casually finds and then consistently hopes to find again? I say, yes, yes, yes.